Random mumblings of ARM developer
When I was checking my mailbox (snail one) I met guy from FedEx who wanted to enter building and called my flat via intercom. I asked him does package is for my fiancee or for me and because it was for me I took it from him. At home I discovered that this unexpected package was from Google with black XL T-Shirt from GSoC program.
US sizes are bigger then Europe ones…
Today was my OpenEmbedded documentation day — I wrote several parts of user-manual:
task-base and how to use itFor 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:
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:
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:
task-base instead of the old one task-bootstrap to get clean images with just needed packagesipaq-pxa270 machines in favour of hx4700, hx2000 machines— 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:
backblocks test on /dev/hda1 — passedmemtest tests to get info how memory behave — passedcpuburn tests gave 63.5°C on CPU — passedcpuburn memory tests — FAILEDAfter 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:
More information about OEDEM.