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Over the weekend I decided to take a little look at one of the latest incarnations of OSX to see what all the fuss was about. One of the real problems with OSX is that under normal circumstances you have to shell out at least 399 GBP before you even get to try it out. If you don’t like it or can’t get on with it you’re out nearly 400 big ones and who wants to risk that?

There are of course ways around this and I took the plunge with a Kalyway 10.5.2 iso. My laptop is an Acer Aspire 3692 WLMI which originally came with an 80GB hard drive which I have already upgraded to a 160GB drive. Since I was only going to be testing this out I wasn’t about to erase my current linux install. I dusted off the the old 80GB drive and swapped it out with the 160GB drive and kicked off the install. I actually did the install a couple of times to get used to how Mac people do stuff.
Read more…

Tagged with: hardware • linux • Mac • OSX • software
June 17, 2008 20:06

I’ve made quite a few changes and a couple of additions to my images of late. You may have noticed the new boot logo, the new startup sound and the new theme now there are a couple more goodies. First of all the two new applications, well one application and one script. The Bluetooth Keyboard application (really the script) is a simple shell script that hunts for bluetooth keyboards and connects to the first one it finds. If bluetooth is off it turns it on. If I can get zenity to compile properly this will be a much better script. The next item is the Twitter client, GtkTwitter, It’s very basic but it works pretty well. I had to make a couple of modifications to the icons so you could actually poke them with your fingers.

Next up we have a little script that starts on boot, checks to see if you have the gllin ipk ( gllin_1.0+r350-r0_fic-gta01.ipk ) in the root of your sd card. If it’s there it will automatically get installed for you – Very useful post-flash. The script will also replace the standard gllin script with the one from the tangogps site. Why? Well, because tangogps and gpsd are in the image too! Shortly, I’m hoping to provide a pre-downloaded series of tiles for download too. The good news is now you can have gps and a gps application ready for you immediately. Oh one last thing. If you create a directory on your sd card called local you can create bin and/or sbin directories and have applications run straight from there – all those little utils you need to install again after each flash now have a permanent home.

All of these are part of the image, you do not need to install anything extra, unless you want to 😀

Update: The bluetooth keyboard script is much more wizzy now that I’ve added Zenity to the image and use that so you can now pick the keyboard you want to connect to from the list of devices. I’ve also added some notify calls so that you can see what is going on during the script.

Tagged with: image • linux • neo 1973 • openmoko • opensource • software
April 22, 2008 20:36

It’s not that exciting really but everyone else is at it. Using,

history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

I get:

312 ls
216 cd
108 vi
44 bitbake
24 ssh
23 cp
20 make
17 mv
17 mkdir
17 find

Tagged with: linux • software
April 18, 2008 12:23

Some of you may have noticed that that Neo1973 device names have changed from fic-gta01 and fic-gta02 to om-gta01 and om-gta02 in openembedded. Some of you may have missed this and its implications. Essentially all references to fic-gta* have been changed so your old images will try, for example, to grab updates from the fic-gta folders of buildhosts and will probaly fail. While this might be a little annoying now, changing the device names in the future would have probably been much more of a nightmare.

I have decided to move my original OM-2007.2 directory to OLD-OM2007.2-FIC so that you can still get old files if you run older images. The OM-2007.2 directory on my buildhost will now be for om-gta0* images and packages.

Tagged with: image builds • neo 1973 • openmoko • opensource • software
March 29, 2008 10:29

I recently came across a little project which would turn on an LED box when there was mail your gmail account. I thought it was quite interesting and, since I’d had an Arduino Diecimila in my laptop bag for about 6 months and not touched it, I decided to replicate it. The idea was simply to get used to how the Arduino board worked, the project in itself isn’t exactly going to push anyone to their limit. I was right, the code was basically in the examples there was nothing to do. Since we’re selling our house lots of my electronics development stuff has ended up in the loft. I went for a rummage and found some little RGB light globes that a local garden centre had been trying to sell off cheaply at a couple of Euros each. Undoing the screws on the base of the globe revealed a very simple

design, I’d just need to tap into the LEDs and disconnect the chip they used. Before any of this was going to happen I needed to build some sort of prototype to at least be sure that the concept was going to work. Since I didn’t have any RGB LEDs or even one of each red, green and blue I had to settle for a small LED board that had come from an old piece of equipment that I’d bought, literally, just for the parts. There was a slight problem. The led board was red, green and errm… orange. It didn’t really matter at this stage, I was only proving the code and making sure that I could get the whole idea to work before destroying the perfectly useless light globes.

The software side was also fairly straight forward too. In the end I used the SimpleMessageSystem library to handle the serial data since I kept running into issues with the standard serial I/O routines. The SimpleMessageSystem routines basically use white space as variable separators and a <CR> to signify the end of input.

Each of the colour channels can have a value between 0 (zero) and 255 which gives a lot of variation. There’s also the option to pulse the mixed colours.

Initially I was just going to have the 3 LEDs change to their relative brightness but then I hit on the idea of having them fade up and down to the correct value. I have to say it looks much better with the gradual change, although I might just add the option of selecting either gradual or instant to the parameter list.

Now, with a simple command, I can set the RGB value of my light globe.

./rgb-globe -l -b 9600 -p/dev/ttyUSB0 -s “1 255 50 0”

The original code for the command line application came from Tod Kurt and was written to be able to send serial data to the Arduino. I did make some modifications, including a couple of virtual slappings of Tod for using strcpy – I still don’t understand why people don’t pretend that function just does not exist.

I’m considering writing a small GTK application that just has a colour picker to select colours, but that would be in addition to the command line application since this is designed to be used from things like scripts or mail and IM notifications or, as I suspect mine will, build status information for my Openmoko buildhost. The only real issue at the moment is that it’s really not bright enough, I think I need to rethink the orb – maybe it’ll be better at night…

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Tagged with: arduino • hardware • linux • software
February 18, 2008 16:46