World of XorA

Well on Weds I visited the zoo with Jen, haven’t been for ages and there have been a lot of changes and new buildings. Was also the day the were moving Mercedes to new home. Big huge crate and some burly guys reading to pack it. Got to see the penguin parade which is always fun. Zoo did seem to be stuck in some inbetween season, they hadn’t decided to be properly open for summer which meant I had to make do with some really bad burger for lunch

Friday was Gigantor with Jen, I remember liking Gigantor but I must say thats two I’ve been to I’ve not really enjoyed, just can’t get into the music they play! So as I was feeling too hot and it was nice outside we left early and wandered home.

Saturday I spent the day at Unique Beats which was a festival of electronic music in the Roxy Arthouse. I must say I really love the Roxy Arthouse, it’s an amazing venue, an old converted church. Afternoon had companies advertising their software and doing workshops along with some people playing all day. Evening it changed to full on gig with some amazing people doing their music. Saw some really great and unusual sets, almost all of them involving real instruments as well as computers and gadgets. And Frog Pocket is amazing, go see if you ever get the chance. Wore my boots of doom and got lots of compliments For the last set of the day I got to hang around behind the no!input desk watching how they did the visuals which was interesting. Then off to the Brass Monkey for a few pints.

Today I caught tried to catch up on TNA and WWE, 7 hours in total, but still more to watch!

Well second server is hear with drives now so its getting really loud in the office

rsyncing the data from the old server to the new, going pretty damn quick!!!!

In the last few days I have also enhanced my Wordpress theme editing skills and played around with remembering how to write sh scripts. Ill have to put this to use on my own Wordpress to make a better theme for me. Quite a difficult task as I lack most artistic talents

OK RAID cards confuse me with their undocumented errors. Why don’t you just say some idiot set you in JBOD mode so you can’t create Raid Sets. Then I would have hunted through the menus to find the well hidden JBOD setting and disabled it.

Worse this is the error didn’t even produce any sensible google hits either.

Have even managed to redirect the old RSS URL to the wordpress feed, so xorasfeed on LJ works again!

So thanks to a kind OE developer I got a Sheevaplug at cost. If you haven’t heard of the Sheeva before its a Linux device with 512M flash and ram, based on the Marvell Kirkwood CPU. All fitting inside a wall wart.

So I with some cursing removed the default Ubuntu and installed Ångström using UBIFS. Some cursing was caused by the Sheeva failing to work with my usb stick or with my SD cards.

I am impressed with UBIFS it totally blows jffs2 out of the water. Mounts in seconds instead of minutes and doesn’t irreparably break when disk space runs low.

So with some fixes in OE my sheeva is now plugged into a USB hard drive and happilly running Transmission to download torrents. The 1.2GHz processor is easily fast enough for a headless box. The enormous RAM is a dream to work with on an embedded device. I still have some more improvements to test and move into OE so Ångström can benefit from them. But all is good so far!

Ahah it was about time I upgraded the wordpress version I was using and re-enabling it.

As people who own zaurus machines will have already seen but just in case OpenZaurus is Dead.

Its been a fun few years since I first bought a 5500 collie and found that the Sharp rom was so limited, found the fledgeling OE project that could barely build stuff and started building my own packages one by one (as we had to in the old days). Since then I have upgraded the Zaurus twice, C860 and 3200. And OZ progressed into a fully functional system with thousands of packages.

But its now really dead, we have just moved onto Angstrom, this is a massive leap forward as its using the latest gcc, glibc and EABI. Making our systems smaller faster and even giving us debian compatability (well when they catch up anyway). So OpenZaurus is not really dead, its just grown up a little.

Well I spent the train journey to work this morning watching TNA on my c7×0 using Xv under X11.

This is due to “sirfred” and his amazing new xserver for the imageon chips,  http://www.openembedded.org/filebrowser/org.openembedded.dev/packages/xorg-xserver

I think this makes the c7×0 currently the coolest zaurus about.

My wonderful wife Bobster made me a super dalek cake.