Thoughts dereferenced from the scratchpad noise.

Improve productivity with Google history using bookmarks and Chrome extensions

Published at July 30, 2013 · Piotr Król · 5 min read

The idea of this post is very simple (as usually) and I wonder why I didn’t thought about it earlier. The point is to use history of your Google queries to improve productivity. Most of things that we google can be replaced for example by browser extensions, bookmarks or rss feeds. That’s how we can gain few additional free seconds on each google-type-click cycle. Statistics Depending on different factors we spend a lot of time in browser....

Categories: miscellaneous

0x6: Root file system for embedded system

Published at June 7, 2013 · Piotr Król · 10 min read

Introduction To make our embedded linux work as virtual development platform we need some environment after booting. There is many approaches to get working root file system but I will use the easiest one as an exercise. I don’t want to create full embedded distribution (this is good plan for future works). Right now I will be happy with simple initramfs based on BusyBox. For all interested in creating own root filesystem there are few places where you can find information:...

Categories: os-dev

0x5: Qemu network configuration and tftp for Virtual Development Board

Published at June 7, 2013 · Piotr Król · 7 min read

Introduction This was not trivial task to me. As usual google is your friend and RTFM works. First we will set tftp which we use to download modified kernel for U-Boot. Second I will show how to setup bridged network for QEMU needs and finally we will perform some basic test of our setup. Let’s go. Setup tftpd First install: 1 sudo apt-get install tftpd tftp Make sure that /srv/tftp is writable for your user....

Categories: app-dev os-dev

0x4: Linux kernel for embedded system

Published at June 7, 2013 · Piotr Król · 3 min read

A little history Thinking about embedded linux probably leads to first try of porting linux to different architecture. I did google research (I know I should probably read mailing list archive) and found that there were few attempt to port linux to different platform. There is no clear information about which port of linux was first. This is probably because many hackers didn’t report their effort. Arguably earliest out-of-tree version was probably for Acron A5000 (arm), Motorola 68000 (m68k) around Spring/Summer of 1994....

Categories: os-dev

0x3: Embedded board bootloader

Published at June 7, 2013 · Piotr Król · 3 min read

What is bootloader ? It is a program written to bring up more complex code (eg. kernel). On very simple system it can even not exist. Bootloader should prepare all required hardware that kernel or different operating software will need at its start point. It is hard to create cross platform bootloader because of variety of system requirements. Why we need bootloader ? The true is that we don’t :) because we can simply pass kernel and initramfs as parameters to QEMU, but it is not common practice for real development environment....

Categories: firmware

0x2: Toolchain for Virtual Development Board

Published at June 7, 2013 · Piotr Król · 4 min read

Introduction This is probably the most complicated topic of all related to embedded development but we need to deal with it at the beginning. I read a lot about toolchains but still don’t know enough to explain details. I think that best answers are in crosstool-ng documentation. What is toolchain ? Toolchain as the name said is a set of tools chained together, so output of one tool is the input for different tool....

Categories: app-dev os-dev

0x1: Qemu as an environment for embedded board emulation

Published at June 7, 2013 · Piotr Król · 2 min read

Table of contents Introduction Compilation Kudos Introduction QEMU is a CPU emulator using dynamic binary translation to convert guest CPU instructions into host CPU instructions[1]. It supports many architectures from x86, through ARM and MIPS, to MicroBlaze. According to compilation configuration target list QEMU targets 26 different softmmu types. Only for ARM it supports 33 machines (like ARM Versatile/PB (ARM926EJ-S) or Samsung NURI board (Exynos4210)) and 28 CPUs (with cortex-a9 and pxa270)....

Categories: app-dev os-dev

0x0: Intro to Virtual Development Board building

Published at June 7, 2013 · Piotr Król · 2 min read

Preface There are many reasons why ambitious programmers should care about huge rush in embedded market. IMO there is great potential in it. I don’t want to go deep into this but take a look at all tablets, phones, smart TVs and other cool stuff like wireless in you washing machine or refrigerator (ok this two are right now only a gadgets :) ). This is all embedded. Another thing is that wages of experienced embedded developers are really high....

Categories: firmware

Workflow improvement with Open Source tools - part 1

Published at May 16, 2013 · Piotr Król · 5 min read

Introduction I want to start a series of articles to describe how I improve my workflow with geeky Open Source applications. I will concentrate on terminal applications that I try to use in my GTD process. Terminal Solarized gnome-terminal If you already don’t know what solarized color scheme is then please take a look at this page. To install solarized colorscheme in gnome-terminal simply follow instruction from this git repository....

Categories: miscellaneous

Thunderbird to Mutt migration - tips & tricks

Published at May 15, 2013 · Piotr Król · 3 min read

Preface I migrate with my working environment to laptop. My workstation going older and I don’t have time to maintain few systems to keep it clean and in sync. I probably have to improve my work flow but right now I have different problems. Few weeks ago after changing environment to mobile and powerful laptop I also changed OS to Ubuntu and mail client to Thunderbird. I have to admit that both choices were mistake and I want to came back to Debian and Mutt....

Categories: miscellaneous

Yet another quick build of arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi

Published at April 3, 2013 · Piotr Król · 3 min read

So I decide to check what is going on with crosstool-ng and refresh my old post about building arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi toolchain. Last post was pretty popular, so definitely this is direction I should follow :). I will not repeat myself, so if you encounter any problems please check last post, section with known problems in crosstool-ng doc/ directory or RTFM. Let’s begin: Get the latest crosstool-ng As usual I’m trying to use latest version possible....

Categories: app-dev os-dev

Music for programming

Published at March 30, 2013 · Piotr Król · 2 min read

Of course this is strongly associated with personal taste but I will write my experience. <www.pandora.com> - really great radio station, choose your genre or artist and it will lead you through all variety of this type. unfortunately if you are fan of Iron Maiden, Blind Guardian, prog rock or irish folk you will be bored after 2 hours or less. Sadly not available in Poland {% emoji disappointed %} maybe some proxy will work but I wasn’t able to find one....

Categories: miscellaneous

Tmux multiplexer and vi-like keys in copy-mode

Published at March 19, 2013 · Piotr Król · 1 min read

So I tried to write second post for my new blog but to effectively work using terminal I need terminal multiplexer. I switched to tmux from screen because I reach point that I can’t do some things in it in easy way and performance was poor. Also activity of tmux developers is better than for gnu screen. I also experienced annoy buffer crashing especially after come back from lock mode or cmatrix much but after reading few articles about alternative for screen I switched to tmux....

Categories: miscellaneous

Short hint for all those who use vim and pathogen

Published at January 15, 2013 · Piotr Król · 1 min read

Today, after updating my workspace to latest version I encounter below error during vim running. Error detected while processing function pathogen#runtime_append_all_bundles: line 1: E121, E116. Quick look on pathogen runtime_append_all_bundles function and I found...

Categories: miscellaneous

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Research of RAM data remanence times

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