Random mumblings of ARM developer
During last weeks there was so many things to do, few places to visit so I forgot to write about anniversary…
It was 2004-03-20 when I sent first contribution to OpenEmbedded mailing list. So I’m using OE for more then three years now :D
For over year I am making money on it and for last two months I work only on OpenEmbedded related things.
I wrote some about my work with OE in past:
As you see I moved my website to blog.haerwu.biz domain. Why? That’s good question.
In September 2006 I created my own company for my OpenEmbedded commercial work. I named it HaeRWu as this is how my nickname Hrw sounds in Polish. Did not wanted to use name such like ‘Hrw consulting’ as this will get too many false hits for people wanting to find Human Rights Watch organization. As result I have name which is probably hard to pronounce for English speakers (and most other).
I will leave old domain running for few months as redirect to new one. Also need to start moving my mail to haerwu.biz domain.
Interested what is under haerwu.biz address? It is website of my company where I plan to post more technical stuff such like OpenEmbedded or Linux related articles. My blog will became more private and I plan to write more often.
FIC Neo1973 phone is more or less ready for developers. GTA01Bv4 will be shipped soon but it will not have WiFi. The reason is simple — creators did not found chip which will:
If everything will go OK then during Summer there will be hardware update which will add WiFi (they are meeting with Taiwan companies to discuss availability of good chipsets) and maybe faster CPU or more flash…
I have to admit that I did not understand why people want WiFi in phone so much… But this is because I mostly use wireless when I am at home so I can use my desktop machine. But when I had to spent two hours on Munich airport during way to FOSDEM (Thx goes to Secunet company which sponsored my plane tickets) I had an option to use WiFi (not free iirc) so with proper hardware… RSS, Emails..
But time will show what will be in GTA01Bv5 (if it will exist at all). Now we have to get used to current hardware and write software for it.
In February I was at FOSDEM. As OpenEmbedded project had a booth there I took ProGear machine to show x86 machine running Ångström distribution. When I returned to home I had over 400 mails in inbox (result of few days without reading mail).
Week ago I was at Pingwinaria. This time I took laptop from Ania. It was Toshiba with 15.4” screen and MS Windows installed… So big, heavy and without Linux. But I was able to read mails so only ~200 mails was left to read after conference.
After that I decided that this is a time to buy laptop for own usage. It will be used only for conferences or other trips so it does not have to be powerful but small and light. Few guys from #oe, #openmoko suggested IBM ThinkPad X31/X32, one suggested PowerBook with G4 cpu. So now I am looking for cheap, used X31 or X32 (with WiFi, Bluetooth not required but would be nice). Contact me if you have one to sell for good price.
Why not something faster? I was thinking about buying AMD Turion X2 or Intel Core2 Duo to have machine powerful enough to do OpenEmbedded builds but I have quite fast 64bit desktop now which also work as build box so no need for fast portable machine. And such beast would not be small…
Yesterday I first time tried avahi on my Linux systems. And I have to tell that it looks interesting. All my machines provide informations about running services, I can connect to my phone via simple ssh neo.local instead of remembering which IP it has etc.
And all services can be checked from any host with one simple avahi-browse -a command:
Server version: avahi 0.6.16; Host name: home.local
E Ifce Prot Name Type Domain
+ usb0 IPv4 Remote Terminal on neo SSH Remote Terminal local
+ eth0 IPv4 Remote Terminal on c7x0 SSH Remote Terminal local
+ usb0 IPv4 SFTP File Transfer on neo SFTP File Transfer local
+ eth0 IPv4 SFTP File Transfer on c7x0 SFTP File Transfer local
+ usb0 IPv4 home [3a:c2:64:5e:7b:1f] Workstation local
+ usb0 IPv4 neo [92:5a:40:01:4a:77] Workstation local
+ eth0 IPv4 c7x0 [00:10:7a:11:11:11] Workstation local
+ eth0 IPv4 home [00:50:da:11:11:11] Workstation local
UPDATE: Ångström will have avahi in default system ;)
Today I finished storage upgrade of my box. Before I had only PATA devices. Recently I bought Serial ATA II hard drive so my config was (2.6.21-rc3 kernel with libata for all SATA/PATA devices):
ata1.00: ATA-6: ST3120026A, 3.06, max UDMA/100
ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA ST3120026A 3.06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)
scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-M1212 1R22 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 32x/32x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
scsi 1:0:1:0: CD-ROM TEAC CD-W516EB 1.0K PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
ata5.00: ATA-7: ST3320620NS, 3.AEG, max UDMA/133
ata5.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
ata5.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA ST3320620NS 3.AE PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sdb: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB)
PATA bus contain: Seagate 120GB hdd which I bought in 2003, then 9 years old Toshiba DVD drive and 6 years old Teac CD writer. Then SATA Seagate 320GB hdd which I bought one week ago and configured as LVM (some parts of 120GB will be added into it).
Today I took out old PATA optical drives and replaced them with Samsung SH-S183A DVD writer (Serial ATA). Now bus look a bit different:
ata1.00: ATA-6: ST3120026A, 3.06, max UDMA/100
ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA ST3120026A 3.06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)
ata5.00: ATA-7: ST3320620NS, 3.AEG, max UDMA/133
ata5.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
ata5.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA ST3320620NS 3.AE PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sdb: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB)
scsi 6:0:0:0: CD-ROM TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-S183A SB02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 94x/94x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
That “94x writer” looks funny as this is 18xDVD writer. And I must say that due to switch to libata in Linux there are no problems with handling Serial ATA devices (nevermind hdd or atapi ones).
USB Networking is not my preferred way of networking but it is quite usable with palmtops or Neo1973 phone (which spend most of time connected to USB due to charging problems in GTA01Bv3). But this also has some problems due to fat that this is hotplugable:
Today I moved my Zaurus c7x0 back to using WiFi so second problem disappeared for me (now only Neo1973 is connected over USB) but first problem was still present. I was tired to having to write sudo ifdown usb0;sudo ifup usb0 each time when I reconnected phone so after reading some man pages I updated my /etc/network/interfaces with this:
allow-hotplug usb0
iface usb0 inet static
address 192.168.0.200
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.0.0
post-up iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE -s 192.168.0.0/24
post-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
post-up iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
And now when I connect phone (which has 192.168.0.202 IP) it gets connection to world automatically.
During first days of playing with Neo1973 I got a problem with connecting to GSM modem. It just does not worked at all. It was reported in OpenMoko bugzilla so I added comment.
Today I tried to enable hardware flow control by hand after starting ‘cu’ and it works!
Time to go somewhere and buy cheap prepaid card for testing.