Place
motivation
meh
graser
wanted
pulled
drawn
missed
missing
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Ubuntu 11.04: Whaaaaat?
Stupid cousin.
Most of those reading won't find this useful. I do like feeding Google, though, so here goes...
I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 from 10.10.
I am presently engaged in hating it.
Unity was a giant WTFreak era during my adoption, but a few minutes from a friend who 'gets' it helped loads. Now it's just three (big) complaints:
1: Meta-T used to be user-defined by me to open a new terminal. It now brings up the Trash Can. Seriously?!?!?! The Trash Can? Who hotkeys that, and THEN ignores the user-defined overrides?!
1.5: Why do I want a touch-capable interface with my touchpad and mouse? If my touchpad acts like a one-button mouse, how do I do anything? Hobbling along under Gnome is much more feasible.
2: Multiple Desktops. One X session over multiple displays has dead space that makes me nervous, so I use the ATI Catalyst configuration tool to set up multiple X sessions. My initial survey of all my options indicates that Unity has No Concept of this. I have no UI (aside from limited desktop-right-click-menu access) on my second monitor. Anyone with this issue may be interested in running "metacity --replace &" as a functional hack under Ubuntu Classic.
3: Widgets. I want a live CPU usage, temperature, and clockspeed display on my screen. No, pinning apps to the dock WILL NOT WORK. I tried. It doesn't do dynamic icons. Also, I already have my favorite Gnome apps. (Ubuntu 11.04 already killed my temp monitor app.)
Firefox 4.
Why did they rename "Organize Bookmarks" to "Show all bookmarks"??? Really?
New UI? Getting used to it. It is enough like the last one to struggle through it. (Stop Now! If I Wanted Chrome, I Would GET Chrome!!!)
I just spent an hour fighting with it. There is no clear winner. Am I frustrated? A little bit. I'm sure you can't tell.
Most of those reading won't find this useful. I do like feeding Google, though, so here goes...
I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 from 10.10.
I am presently engaged in hating it.
Unity was a giant WTFreak era during my adoption, but a few minutes from a friend who 'gets' it helped loads. Now it's just three (big) complaints:
1: Meta-T used to be user-defined by me to open a new terminal. It now brings up the Trash Can. Seriously?!?!?! The Trash Can? Who hotkeys that, and THEN ignores the user-defined overrides?!
1.5: Why do I want a touch-capable interface with my touchpad and mouse? If my touchpad acts like a one-button mouse, how do I do anything? Hobbling along under Gnome is much more feasible.
2: Multiple Desktops. One X session over multiple displays has dead space that makes me nervous, so I use the ATI Catalyst configuration tool to set up multiple X sessions. My initial survey of all my options indicates that Unity has No Concept of this. I have no UI (aside from limited desktop-right-click-menu access) on my second monitor. Anyone with this issue may be interested in running "metacity --replace &" as a functional hack under Ubuntu Classic.
3: Widgets. I want a live CPU usage, temperature, and clockspeed display on my screen. No, pinning apps to the dock WILL NOT WORK. I tried. It doesn't do dynamic icons. Also, I already have my favorite Gnome apps. (Ubuntu 11.04 already killed my temp monitor app.)
Firefox 4.
Why did they rename "Organize Bookmarks" to "Show all bookmarks"??? Really?
New UI? Getting used to it. It is enough like the last one to struggle through it. (Stop Now! If I Wanted Chrome, I Would GET Chrome!!!)
I just spent an hour fighting with it. There is no clear winner. Am I frustrated? A little bit. I'm sure you can't tell.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
He paced down the long shaft of structural duralloy that bore the weight of the starboard side of the ship. It shuddered occasionally, as the warp drive compensated for some ripple or wrinkle in spacetime. This corridor was one of the dimly lit service passageways, and he was wearing one of the frameworker's light pressure suits should one of the strained structural projectors give way.
They'd come a long way. Eta Centauri was many months behind them now, and most ships of this class needed drydock and overhaul once every six months. He wasn't sure how they'd kept it running, or how they'd keep it running for the remaining months of the journey.
He'd taken astrogation during pilot's training. He knew the hazards that Schwarzchild discontinuities posed, and he knew that even suns were hard to approach. The charts had shown several systems along the way, with warm main sequence stars shepherding known habitable planets along their narrow little Goldilocks belts. A few even had developed respectable civilizations...he often walked through the ship like this, and wondered if he were wise in putting off planetfall for so so long. It was dark out here. Super-relativistic travel did strange things to one's mind. The world outside raced along, with occasional messages drifting out from either endpoint offering a light at the end of the tunnel. Once in a while both would cease to exist, while other times the airwaves were packed with burst-encoded datagrams (not all of which came in chronological order). He could hardly believe the journey was nearly half way over, yet each second seemed to stretch out into weeks and years.
He'd wondered about the shipping lane he'd chosen. Every ship had a different fundamental phasing frequency, so there'd been many local-space neighbors traveling similar routes for stretches of time. Chat's with their systems engineers had saved him quite a bit of trouble before.
They were coming up on space that hadn't been charted recently. He knew the engine's control foils were growing thin and that the structural fields had to work harder every day, yet some days the velvety black seemed to waft them along of its own accord while the ship relaxed its panicked grasp on structural integrity.
He knew, somehow, that even when the ether seemed most opposed to their passage and the ship shuddered hardest, they could just slip the control rods a little further out and just shoulder through it. The old techneer wondered about that. Increasing the forward gravitic pressure while working through tight knots of entwined tesseracts could be just enough to fully collapse a primary vectoring projector...that wouldn't be good.
He'd ask a neighbor for advice. It always seemed to help.
They'd come a long way. Eta Centauri was many months behind them now, and most ships of this class needed drydock and overhaul once every six months. He wasn't sure how they'd kept it running, or how they'd keep it running for the remaining months of the journey.
He'd taken astrogation during pilot's training. He knew the hazards that Schwarzchild discontinuities posed, and he knew that even suns were hard to approach. The charts had shown several systems along the way, with warm main sequence stars shepherding known habitable planets along their narrow little Goldilocks belts. A few even had developed respectable civilizations...he often walked through the ship like this, and wondered if he were wise in putting off planetfall for so so long. It was dark out here. Super-relativistic travel did strange things to one's mind. The world outside raced along, with occasional messages drifting out from either endpoint offering a light at the end of the tunnel. Once in a while both would cease to exist, while other times the airwaves were packed with burst-encoded datagrams (not all of which came in chronological order). He could hardly believe the journey was nearly half way over, yet each second seemed to stretch out into weeks and years.
He'd wondered about the shipping lane he'd chosen. Every ship had a different fundamental phasing frequency, so there'd been many local-space neighbors traveling similar routes for stretches of time. Chat's with their systems engineers had saved him quite a bit of trouble before.
They were coming up on space that hadn't been charted recently. He knew the engine's control foils were growing thin and that the structural fields had to work harder every day, yet some days the velvety black seemed to waft them along of its own accord while the ship relaxed its panicked grasp on structural integrity.
He knew, somehow, that even when the ether seemed most opposed to their passage and the ship shuddered hardest, they could just slip the control rods a little further out and just shoulder through it. The old techneer wondered about that. Increasing the forward gravitic pressure while working through tight knots of entwined tesseracts could be just enough to fully collapse a primary vectoring projector...that wouldn't be good.
He'd ask a neighbor for advice. It always seemed to help.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Computer Engineering
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of hardware,
I shall fear no kernel.
And, y'know, I'll pwn the invading recognizers in hardware.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Linaro Start Line
So, for work I've been asked to get a hang of the Linaro (www.linaro.org) toolchain.
What the heck does that mean?
More importantly, how can they reorganize their website so one can rapidly get started?
Well, first off, Understand who they are. Get on their IRC channel and ask questions--especially about where to find information.
See, I'm to do some kernel work, so I need to cross compile things. I need a full operating system to drop them in. Every time I try to Google or navigate their pages to find the processes I just read about so clearly, I get confused.
Thus I'm posting a tentative index to the learning curve pages.
Linaro is a set of programs that make it easy to build a ground-up ARM-based system. Presently Angstrom and Ubuntu (and one other?) have prebuilt images made with the toolchain.
I found that the best place to start is an impossible-to-find wiki page that links to several of the many HowTo articles available elsewhere on the site:
https://wiki.linaro.org/Mentoring/HowTo
Process to install an image:
Get an OS-specific image (a pain, more on this later)
Get a hardware-specific "hardware pack" (Not so hard...I think)
Run "linaro-image-create" with a slew of (well documented) arguments (more on linaro-image-create in a moment)
Plug in card
Boot
This "linaro-image-create" tool has a forest of voodoo behind it, most of which is designed to be hidden. This, of course, means it has some dependencies. If you're running any of the supported boards (run it with only certain arguments and it'll dump a list), it's a matter of enabling the PPAs (more on that later) and installing two packages, gcc-gnueabi-*? and linaro-image-tools. I think. I'm doing this on my machine as we speak.
OK. So I need to find the images. This has been a pain. The "Images" link on the page above isn't helpful.
AHA!
So, from Mentoring/HowTo, go to "Booting Hardware with Linaro Tools." I have a Gumstix Overo board, so that's what I followed from there. (Note the link down below to generic instructions for linaro-media-create.)
Here is where we install linaro-image-create. Follow the instructions at "https://wiki.linaro.org/Boards/Overo/Setup". (This page is rendered partially redundant by this wiki page, but valuable things are said here if you're running any Ubuntu 10.10 or earlier.)
This next part takes a touch of magic for me, as I'm running Ubuntu 10.10. See, the linaro-image-create that is in the PPA is too old to support Overo boards. (This won't be the case in Ubuntu 11.04 come April or May.) This means I need the bleeding edge build of linaro-media-create. (4.3 worked fine for me.)
Bleeding edge comes with a price: Dependency Hell. No matter what we do to shrink it, this special place will forever haunt those who strive to wander far from the well-trodden paths of software usage. I kinda like it sometimes--it's a big puzzle game.
In our case, the README that comes with linaro-media-create specifies two dependencies that can't be satisfied by Ubuntu 10.10:
python-debian >= 0.1.16ubuntu1
qemu-kvm-extras-static >= 0.13.0
I found it trivial to find the prerelease package of python-debian of a high enough version and get it installed. (http://launchpadlibrarian.net/49675715/python-debian_0.1.16ubuntu1_all.deb) (note that I did this AFTER installing linaro-image-tools the ordinary way, thus establishing its dependencies.)
qemu-kvm-extras-static is another ball game. See, it doesn't actually exist in 11.04. The tinyurl addresses provided give you small 7kB packages that install seamlessly but do nothing. (They are meta packages that will make the upgrade smooth, but this idea breaks when we pull single .deb's at a time.) At the time of this writing, the package you need is actually qemu-user-static, 0.14 or newer. Without this step it will crash saying that certain instructions are not understood by the emulator.
Once you find THAT (wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/65940960/qemu-user-static_0.14.50-2011.03-1-0ubuntu1_i386.deb), however, invoking linaro-media-create from the place it was untarred to should work.
You'll notice that the syntax of linaro-media-create is fairly straightforward, yet fairly involved. (I used "sudo ./linaro-image-tools-0.4.3/linaro-media-create --mmc /dev/sdf --hwpack hwpack_linaro-overo_20110202-0_armel_supported.tar.gz --dev overo --binary linaro-natty-headless-tar-20110203-1.tar.gz") It requires two files be handy: the system image and the hardware pack. The Overo/Setup page hard-codes some possibly outdated images into their command lines. Here is how to find your image:
Go to https://wiki.linaro.org/Releases#Obtaining%2520and%2520Testing%2520Linaro%2520Images
Scroll down. Some structural details are located here that are nice to read, but we're looking for the headers "Evaluation Builds" and "Developer Builds." (Here GUI/no GUI and system size are required decisions.)
Aw Crapola. It seems at the time of this writing that these links link fine...but the pages they link to are blank. Lovely.
I pulled mine from
http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-m/hwpacks/final/hwpack_linaro-omap3_20101109-1_armel_supported
and
http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-n/headless/alpha-2/linaro-natty-headless-tar-20110203-1.tar.gz
per my decisions earlier. (Use the root URLs to find the latest and greatest of these.)
I'm not sure why mine worked with the hwpack a different version from the build.
Plug in the card you just made and try to boot.
I have yet to need the "sleep hack" or to encounter the bug listed here: "https://bugs.launchpad.net/linaro/+bug/728734?comments=all".
TODO: prettify and integrate with wiki.
What the heck does that mean?
More importantly, how can they reorganize their website so one can rapidly get started?
Well, first off, Understand who they are. Get on their IRC channel and ask questions--especially about where to find information.
See, I'm to do some kernel work, so I need to cross compile things. I need a full operating system to drop them in. Every time I try to Google or navigate their pages to find the processes I just read about so clearly, I get confused.
Thus I'm posting a tentative index to the learning curve pages.
Linaro is a set of programs that make it easy to build a ground-up ARM-based system. Presently Angstrom and Ubuntu (and one other?) have prebuilt images made with the toolchain.
I found that the best place to start is an impossible-to-find wiki page that links to several of the many HowTo articles available elsewhere on the site:
https://wiki.linaro.org/Mentoring/HowTo
Process to install an image:
Get an OS-specific image (a pain, more on this later)
Get a hardware-specific "hardware pack" (Not so hard...I think)
Run "linaro-image-create" with a slew of (well documented) arguments (more on linaro-image-create in a moment)
Plug in card
Boot
This "linaro-image-create" tool has a forest of voodoo behind it, most of which is designed to be hidden. This, of course, means it has some dependencies. If you're running any of the supported boards (run it with only certain arguments and it'll dump a list), it's a matter of enabling the PPAs (more on that later) and installing two packages, gcc-gnueabi-*? and linaro-image-tools. I think. I'm doing this on my machine as we speak.
OK. So I need to find the images. This has been a pain. The "Images" link on the page above isn't helpful.
AHA!
So, from Mentoring/HowTo, go to "Booting Hardware with Linaro Tools." I have a Gumstix Overo board, so that's what I followed from there. (Note the link down below to generic instructions for linaro-media-create.)
Here is where we install linaro-image-create. Follow the instructions at "https://wiki.linaro.org/Boards/Overo/Setup". (This page is rendered partially redundant by this wiki page, but valuable things are said here if you're running any Ubuntu 10.10 or earlier.)
This next part takes a touch of magic for me, as I'm running Ubuntu 10.10. See, the linaro-image-create that is in the PPA is too old to support Overo boards. (This won't be the case in Ubuntu 11.04 come April or May.) This means I need the bleeding edge build of linaro-media-create. (4.3 worked fine for me.)
Bleeding edge comes with a price: Dependency Hell. No matter what we do to shrink it, this special place will forever haunt those who strive to wander far from the well-trodden paths of software usage. I kinda like it sometimes--it's a big puzzle game.
In our case, the README that comes with linaro-media-create specifies two dependencies that can't be satisfied by Ubuntu 10.10:
python-debian >= 0.1.16ubuntu1
qemu-kvm-extras-static >= 0.13.0
I found it trivial to find the prerelease package of python-debian of a high enough version and get it installed. (http://launchpadlibrarian.net/49675715/python-debian_0.1.16ubuntu1_all.deb) (note that I did this AFTER installing linaro-image-tools the ordinary way, thus establishing its dependencies.)
qemu-kvm-extras-static is another ball game. See, it doesn't actually exist in 11.04. The tinyurl addresses provided give you small 7kB packages that install seamlessly but do nothing. (They are meta packages that will make the upgrade smooth, but this idea breaks when we pull single .deb's at a time.) At the time of this writing, the package you need is actually qemu-user-static, 0.14 or newer. Without this step it will crash saying that certain instructions are not understood by the emulator.
Once you find THAT (wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/65940960/qemu-user-static_0.14.50-2011.03-1-0ubuntu1_i386.deb), however, invoking linaro-media-create from the place it was untarred to should work.
You'll notice that the syntax of linaro-media-create is fairly straightforward, yet fairly involved. (I used "sudo ./linaro-image-tools-0.4.3/linaro-media-create --mmc /dev/sdf --hwpack hwpack_linaro-overo_20110202-0_armel_supported.tar.gz --dev overo --binary linaro-natty-headless-tar-20110203-1.tar.gz") It requires two files be handy: the system image and the hardware pack. The Overo/Setup page hard-codes some possibly outdated images into their command lines. Here is how to find your image:
Go to https://wiki.linaro.org/Releases#Obtaining%2520and%2520Testing%2520Linaro%2520Images
Scroll down. Some structural details are located here that are nice to read, but we're looking for the headers "Evaluation Builds" and "Developer Builds." (Here GUI/no GUI and system size are required decisions.)
Aw Crapola. It seems at the time of this writing that these links link fine...but the pages they link to are blank. Lovely.
I pulled mine from
http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-m/hwpacks/final/hwpack_linaro-omap3_20101109-1_armel_supported
and
http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-n/headless/alpha-2/linaro-natty-headless-tar-20110203-1.tar.gz
per my decisions earlier. (Use the root URLs to find the latest and greatest of these.)
I'm not sure why mine worked with the hwpack a different version from the build.
Plug in the card you just made and try to boot.
I have yet to need the "sleep hack" or to encounter the bug listed here: "https://bugs.launchpad.net/linaro/+bug/728734?comments=all".
TODO: prettify and integrate with wiki.
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