World of XorA

December 9, 2009

OMAP3 Card Formatter

Filed under: Geek,Work — XorA @ 9:47 pm

Has been moved into OE where it is better placed.

OMAP3 Card Formatter

And it turns out that some of the code was based on the work of Denys Dmytriyenko so give him your thanks as well!

October 2, 2009

Linux Community

Filed under: Geek — XorA @ 11:05 am

Interesting things I notice about Linux and its community and not all of them are good.

It seems Microsoft have one crazy guy called Steve Ballmer. As Linux users and developers though we have to suffer a whole army of guys just as crazy. We don’t even get the option of keeping them safely in Seattle.

One thing I noticed at Edlug talks last night is people are still venomously bashing Microsoft just because its Microsoft. For example, MS Office is a perfectly viable office suite. Open Office is not magically better because it is free or has a different menu layout. I can probably give you hundreds of cases where OO fails and MS Office gets it right (especially reqgards to speadsheets). Also downright lies about MS Office really don’t help, if your going to compare two products, please at least have used them both.

Linux advocates keep bashing on about “Freedom” well one of the freedoms I still enjoy is the ability to select an application that suits my needs. Sometimes these applications cost money, sometimes they even come from a company called Microsoft.

September 6, 2009

Improved OMAP3 Card Formatter

Filed under: Geek,Work — XorA @ 6:40 pm

There is an updated and bugfixed version of this script now added to the OE git repository where all updates from now will be done.
Latest Version

Got some feedback from people on IRC so added some checks so people with builtin card readers can run the script without having to edit it.

Download
#! /bin/sh
# mkcard.sh v0.2
# (c) Copyright 2009 Graeme Gregory 
# Licensed under terms of GPLv3

DRIVE=$1

dd if=/dev/zero of=$DRIVE bs=1024 count=1024

SIZE=`fdisk -l $DRIVE | grep Disk | awk '{print $5}'`

echo DISK SIZE - $SIZE bytes

CYLINDERS=`echo $SIZE/255/63/512 | bc`

echo CYLINDERS - $CYLINDERS

{
echo ,9,0x0C,*
echo ,,,-
} | sfdisk -D -H 255 -S 63 -C $CYLINDERS $DRIVE

if [ -b ${DRIVE}1 ]; then
	mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${DRIVE}1
else
	if [ -b ${DRIVE}p1 ]; then
		mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${DRIVE}p1
	else
		echo "Cant find boot partition in /dev"
	fi
fi

if [ -b ${DRIVE}2 ]; then
	mke2fs -j -L "rootfs" ${DRIVE}2
else
	if [ -b ${DRIVE}p2 ]; then
		mke2fs -j -L "rootfs" ${DRIVE}p2
	else
		echo "Cant find rootfs partition in /dev"
	fi
fi

OpenVPN Hiding in HTTPS

Filed under: Geek,Work — XorA @ 5:33 pm

So it took me a little while to gather the right set of docs to get this working but I find it useful when in places where you can get http/https connections but nothing else.

This is using tun network interface so make sure that is available on your server.

I also created a dummy0 with a random ip 192.168.123.1 so I could connect to services on my server without bypassing the VPN tunnel. The dns server running on 192.168.123.1 redirects server.external to that ip address.

Anyway here is my server config.

Download

As you can see OpenVPN binds to the external port 443 and forwards non VPN traffic to localhost:443 where the webserver is listening.

August 14, 2009

OMAP3 SD Booting

Filed under: Geek,Work — XorA @ 12:18 pm

There is an updated and bugfixed version of this script now added to the OE git repository where all updates from now will be done.
Latest Version

Since the instructions to format an SD card for booting with beagle/zoom2/other omap boards seems to be so complex I decided to write a script that was nice and simple to accomplish the same task.

Here is my tested and working script.

Download
#! /bin/sh

DRIVE=$1

dd if=/dev/zero of=$DRIVE bs=1024 count=1024

SIZE=`fdisk -l $DRIVE | grep Disk | awk '{print $5}'`

echo DISK SIZE - $SIZE bytes

CYLINDERS=`echo $SIZE/255/63/512 | bc`

echo CYLINDERS - $CYLINDERS

{
echo ,9,0x0C,*
echo ,,,-
} | sfdisk -D -H 255 -S 63 -C $CYLINDERS $DRIVE

mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${DRIVE}1
mke2fs -j -L "rootfs" ${DRIVE}2

To run this script you will require to run it as root. On Ubuntu or other linux with sudo setup run the script as

sudo sh mkcard.sh /dev/sdX

replacing sdX with the base device name of your SD card device.

If your running a distribution without sudo setup then become root then run the script as

su -
sh mkcard.sh /dev/sdX

July 27, 2009

OMAP Zoom2 Day 4

Filed under: Geek,Work — XorA @ 11:52 am

Ok, as the kernel and rootfs are working to some degree and the autobuilders are making omapzoom2 packages and narcissus is generating zoom2 image I made it official today. Ångström supports the zoom2 officially now!

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/omap-zoom2-support

July 14, 2009

OMAP Zoom2 Day 3

Filed under: Geek,Work — XorA @ 10:32 am

Fixed/discovered why I was having touchscreen issues, now touchscreen is working.

Found out why gpe-login was dieing, Xorg uses neon via pixman but the default andoid config doesn’t enable neon in kernel so fixed that.

This means that the zoom2 can now boot x11-image fully. I guess this means Angstrom supports OMAP Zoom2 I shall have to update the Angstrom website later/tomorrow to reflect this status.

Only bit of work I would like to finish now before calling it totally complete is to work out why mainstream u-boot cannot boot kernels. It would be nice to use that as its defineately got some bugs fixed with FAT mmc cards.

July 10, 2009

OMAP Zoom2 Day 2

Filed under: Geek,Work — XorA @ 10:21 pm

Well more progress today on Ångström support for the Zoom2.

After trying different kernels I found the android/omap 2.6.29 kernel would compile and successfully boot on the Zoom2. This is also the first kernel I have found where fbdev works.

Xorg will now run and is using accellerated omapfb driver and I have had windows working. touchscreen for some reason is broken and gpe-login bails out so we cant yet use Xorg. But this is a massive step forward.

Also needed is to work out why OE built u-boot mainline will not boot kernels. There is some important FAT compatability work that makes mainline u-boot more desirable.

Getting ever closer to full Ångström support though!

OMAP Zoom2 Day 1

Filed under: Geek,Work — XorA @ 9:01 am

[photopress:newtoy.jpg,full,pp_image]

So, thanks to a generous donation from TI I got to start working on Ångström support for the Zoom2 devkit last night.

After some false starts while trying to decode conflicting documents I managed to get it to boot from the SD card with a u-boot that was built from OE.

The mainline linux-omap is currently broken for omap2/3 so I resorted to the TI kernel from omapzoom.org which I managed to get to compile in OE fairly easilly. I also generated an x11-image.

The kernel seems to boot but when it gets to starting init strange things happen. It looks almost as if it slows the clock down to something silly like 10Mhz as it takes 3-4 minutes just to get to the udev 141 starting message. Then after about 20 mins doesnt apear to have done much else.

More work to do on this tonight!

May 28, 2009

Servers

Filed under: Geek,Work — XorA @ 3:57 pm

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 :-)

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