Marcin Juszkiewicz

Today was my OpenEmbedded documentation day — I wrote several parts of user-manual:

• what is task-base and how to use it
• how to create own distribution
• how to add own machine into OE
• how to create own image

For me part about task-base is most important because most of changes related to it was made by me so more and more people are asking what is it and how to use it. Now I can point them into OpenEmbedded documentation.

But what is this task-base at all and why we force everyone using it in OE? Let me start from beginning.

First we had task-bootstrap and BOOTSTRAP_ variables which listed needed tools, kernel modules and other packages. We used those in machine configs and distro configs. Some of distros got them better, some not so for example distro TGB told ‘we support WPA out-of-box’ but users started to report that they have problems with WPA-TKIP when WPA-PSK works. Adding one kernel module solved it. But then other distro maintainer had to make this list again (or copy from TGB config). Now each distro which has ‘wifi’ in DISTRO_FEATURES* will get proper list of kernel modules and helper utils by default.

As a bonus we are able to cleanup machine and distro configs from all those BOOTSTRAP_* things so now we can have something like this:

TARGET_ARCH = "i686"
IPKG_EXTRA_ARCHS = "x86 i386 i486 i586"

PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel = "linux-x86"

MACHINE_FEATURES = "kernel26 pci alsa usbhost"

require conf/machine/include/tune-athlonmp.conf

Paypal now officially supports Poland in both ways (previously it only allowed to send cash from Poland). So I decided to create account. From now I can accept donations via:

• Moneybookers
• Paypal

I did not yet tested Paypal one.

During “weekend” (Thursday — Sunday) I was in Berlin, Germany where OEDEM took place. It was nice to finally meet people whom I know via Internet for years.

From left to right:

• Richard `RP’ Purdie from OpenedHand
• Tomas Frydrych from OpenedHand
• I
• Michael `Mickey’ Lauer
• Koen Kooi
• Florian Boor from Kernel concepts
• Holger `Zecke’ Freyther

We had many discussions about important OpenEmbedded things like problems, policies, creating some kind of OpenEmbedded Foundation for managing domains, trademarks, donations etc. Some of results are already happening:

• removal of MAINTAINER fields (which we are going to replace with /MAINTAINERS file)
• switching to task-base instead of the old one task-bootstrap to get clean images with just needed packages
• removal of ipaq-pxa270 machines in favour of hx4700, hx2000 machines
• new mailing lists got created:

— openembedded-issues with information from bugtracker — openembedded-users for all normal users which are not ready yet for openembedded-devel list — openembedded-announce for announcing

More stuff will follow soon. I’m going to write documentation about task-base stuff, how to switch distro/machine to use it etc.

Today I looked for some tools for Microsoft Windows platform. Got some results marked as freeware so I looked deeply at them (why to pay if can get tool for free). And what did I saw? Definition of ‘freeware’ has been changed during last years… Now it means:

Freeware: software which you can try for free but any usage need you to register and pay $$$.

For me it is just ‘demo’, ‘trial’ version but not freeware.

Some time ago my home machine started to be very unstable. I was getting random rootfs corruptions ('awk: file not found' on start for example), sometimes reboot during work…

I treid to test all components:

• S.M.A.R.T. tests to get info about HDD health — passed
• backblocks test on /dev/hda1 — passed
• memtest tests to get info how memory behave — passed
• cpuburn tests gave 63.5°C on CPU — passed
• cpuburn memory tests — FAILED

After switching memory sticks in slots all memory tests were passed again. But system still kept failing ;(

I’m lost of ideas how to fix it and more and more think about upgrading it to amd64 platform.

Today I again had to work on getting customer server working for website which we did at work. Since my last visit machine was replaced from crappy Celeron 333MHz with 128M ram and 2G SCSI harddrive — all under 5 years old Red Hat with 2.4.2 kernel — to dual p3/700 with 1G ram and much larger harddrive. It also got updated distribution but something a bit newer — Aurox 10.1 with 2.6.9 kernel.

Remote logged as root looks weird.. all shells with # — but if admin is lazy or do not know how to create user accounts…

The worst thing was that I had to be an admin there to get all LAMP components working in required versions. Now machine is building newer PHP from source because finding something on Aurox website is like looking into /dev/null ;( No informations for older releases, no public bugtracker, two misc forums (newer one treat my Firefox as WAP browser) — nightmare…

But it is nice to find that RPM based distros got some tools to fetch packages from network other then wget ;)

Train tickets bought. I will arrive in Berlin at 13:05 in Thursday 2006-10-05 and will leave on 12:40 on Sunday.

I plan to look around (never was in Berlin before), then meet Holger and then OEDEM evening meeting…

UPDATE: Some people asked me what is OEDEM. Let quote Michael ‘Mickeyl’ Lauer post:

OEDEM’06 (Open Embedded Developers European Meeting) in Berlin — it’s the first (of hopefully an annual series) conference about the BitBake Task Executor and the OpenEmbedded MetaData Repository, both in combination enabling to build Embedded Linux Distributions from scratch.

I will host two sessions there:

• OE Survey Discussion
• OE PR Launch for 2007 (with Mickeyl)

More information about OEDEM.

Yesterday I signed papers to extend my current mobile contract and bought Sony Ericsson k750i phone to replace my 4-years old Nokia 6310i.

Phone is nice and packed of features:

• connectivity: irda, bluetooth, usb
• 2Mpx camera with flash leds
• FM radio
• media (music, video) player
• java
• memorystick duo slot (64M card by default)

I’m in process of moving all data from my old phone to new one — tried OpenSync today and with help of pmarat from #opensync I got Kitchensync working and transferred my KDE addressbook into phone. Later I will work on sending datas from 6310i -> home computer -> k750i, then will have to work on synchronizing 6210 with something as I have to move whole content of 6210 to 6310i (with syncing with Thunderbird in between).

And now I know that Bluetooth is nice technology — few clicks in Konqueror and I have access to all files inside of phone.