Marcin Juszkiewicz

During building my current home PC I decided to get rid of FDD and disabled it in BIOS, did not connect cable and power into drive (which is still in computer case due my laziness). But how to upgrade BIOS without floppy?

There are some solutions:

1. Create floppy image and burn it to CD

2. Create floppy image and use MEMDISK

Where to get floppy image? Good one is FreeDOS fdboot.img — mount it via loop, remove directories, put flasher and bios image, umount. Then time for another step.

If you want to go CD way, you need to start CD writing program (I used K3b) and use you floppy image as bootable image. No need for any other files — you only flash 1.4M. Then boot computer from CD, select ‘Safe Mode’ in FreeDOS and run flasher.

Memdisk way is a bit simpler. You need to download syslinux package from your distro or built it (I used Debian package). Then you have to find memdisk binary (/usr/share/syslinux/ in Debian) and copy it to /boot/. Then copy floppy image into same directory. Next step is configuration of boot loader (I use GRUB). Add new entry with memdisk as kernel and floppy image as initrd. Then reboot, selecting proper entry from list and select ‘Safe Mode’ in FreeDOS and run flasher.

Small modification of second step can be skip of configuration editing and usage of GRUB shell to do same.

I hope that someone will find that howto useful.

UPDATE: in some places I found informations that memdisk is not good way to reflash BIOS — some flashers refuse to work or breaks.

In last Friday I made architecture change — sold AthlonXP 2200+ which I used during last 3 years and bought Athlon64 3200+ with DFI RS482 Infinity mainboard. This is 3rd such change for me. First it was from 6502 (Atari 65XE) to m68k (Amiga), then to x86.

Most of time which I spent with computer during weekend was fighting with machine. I made backup of my previous Debian installation and decided to install Debian ‘sid’ from scratch — of course for AMD64. Then I spend few hours to get fglrx driver working (will write more about it later). Now two problems left to resolve:

• get sound working (I have atiixp: codec read timeout messages which are known bug related to ACPI probably)
• get KDE working properly (Control Center list only one module but I have all of them installed)

But even with those problems I’m satisfied. Machine is fast (can be overclocked by ~25% if needed), I have faster gfx card then before (had Matrox G400 and Nvidia GeForce 4 MX440).

And now I have OE build running — building my own umbaumba distro for spitz.

During discussion with some users on #openzaurus channel I discovered that about 30 months passed since I’m using OpenEmbedded for building software.

First attempts were used to build extra packages for my SL-5500 running OpenZaurus 3.3.6-pre1, then I built OZ “3.5.0” for it and worked on getting OPIE working correctly when compiled with gcc 3.4.x (loading 40MiB large libqte2/libqpe1 inside of gdb to get backtraces). Time passed, new machines appeared: first Zaurus C760, then Linksys WRT54GS.

My wrt54 runs under OpenWRT distribution so I’m able to build additional packages for it with OpenEmbedded (MACHINE=”wrt54” DISTRO=”wrt54oe” combo) and they works. Of course they are unofficial because OpenWRT team use own buildsystem.

One of my common targets is MACHINE=”native” which I used for OPIE development or building needed tools on remote machines where it was easier then pestering administrators to install ‘mc’ or ‘git’.

Recently I used OE to build system for omap5912osk developer board used by CELF in their testlab. Creating new distribution was interesting because I learnt lot about how ‘task-base’ works and why it is good solution for our targets.

Soon I will have new target — this time it will be x86 based webpad. But I will write more about it when it arrive and start working.

During my work on OpenEmbedded project I have access to misc computers used for builds. Mostly they are AMD64 or Intel Pentium D ones running in 32 mode.

One day I got access to build machine inside of company intranet. To get to it I have to login on ‘router’ one which only work is serving few pages and giving access to intranet ones. And man.. its also speed daemon…

Sometimes I feel that my home machine is from other era..

After one month I can write something more about my phone.

Bad things:

• It can not be in one pocket with keys — case is scratched and display got some scratches too.
• FM radio sometimes mute for few seconds — not good when you go to work and there is nice song played.
• Opensync can duplicate addressbook with ‘UnNamed’ entries.
• No possibility to turn off sound on making photos.

Good things:

• When I want to send SMS/MMS I can select from list of last recipients, select from contacts or enter number. None of my previous phones had list of last recipients.
• All those animations on sending, calling are not annoying — they are simple and give proper info.
• Delivery reports are linked to SMS/MMS like it should be done. When I had Nokia phone I had to think to which message I got report.
• Recurrent alarm — I set it to working days at 08:00 so I do not have to use my wrist watch as alarm clock.
• FM radio — it was usefull when I was on OEDEM (do you know that Berlin has 29 FM stations?)

One day I will have to check how newer version of opensync works with this phone.

IN Tuesday Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 2.0 version. Many websites wrote about it so I will not list what is new. There is one more reason to not do it — for me most of those new features are not new — during last 2 years I mostly use nightly builds of Firefox^W Bon Echo — first it was 1.5 nightly when other people used 1.0.x line, then I used 2.0 nightly during 1.5.0.x times.

Many extensions needed a bit of hacking (mostly bumping of MaxVersion), I had to edit my favorite theme (LittleFox) to get proper displaying but it was easy. Some authors were releasing updated (mostly ‘developers’) versions for 2.0-pre/rc versions.

Yesterday I tried Firefox^W Minefield 3.0 and now I have to decide will I use 2.0 or move to 3.0 version. One of nice things is plugin for del.icio.us bookmarks integration, which replace normal bookmarks. But installing it also means user cannot create non-del.icio.us bookmarks so I will rather remove it..

Anyway with release of Firefox 2.0 it is time to switch — from 1.5.0.x to 2.0 for ones and 2.0 -> 3.0 for me.

Wczoraj prowadziłem wykład o OpenEmbedded w ramach cyklu wykładów organizowanych przez PLUG Poznań. Miałem zacząć o 18:00 ale uznaliśmy z organizatorem, że zaczekamy z 10 minut (na sali było 8-10 osób). Ostatecznie było około 20 osób.

Mówiłem około godziny, po czym padło kilka pytań — ogólnie miałem wrażenie, że wiele osób nie wiedziało zbytnio o czym mówię. Nie wiem czy było to spowodowane moim wystąpieniem czy faktem, że projekt OpenEmbedded jest mało znany w Polsce.

Po wykładzie przy kawce kolega z pracy zaskoczył mnie najbardziej mówiąc

Nie miałem pojęcia, że OpenEmbedded jest tak dużym projektem. Myślałem, że to coś do palmtopów…

I created openembedded-essential package for Debian derived distributions which depend on all packages required by OpenEmbedded. It took me about 5 minutes to get first version working and 15 to get it polished. Resulting package depends on needed stuff and contain only own changelog.

Then I tried to create RPM version for all those Red Hat/Fedora/Mandriva derived distros… RPM HowTo is from 1999 year and RPM 4.4.1 refuse to work with spec from this HowTo. So I started to dig for other manuals — found one from 2002, then some others. But still no idea how to build RPM package which DOES NOT have sources and/or patches — just pure dependencies and own changelog.

How does RPM based maintainers do their job? Thats probably a good question…