Thoughts dereferenced from the scratchpad noise.

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Mutt tutorial part 2 - secure login

Published at May 13, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

This is second post of mutt tutorial series. As in the previous post for below information I need to thank Kousik for posts about gpg and using it with mutt. But probably the most important to simplify this method was Fau comment here. So going to the point of secure login for mutt we need gpg. First of all we need to install it by simply: 1 sudo apt-get install gpg After that we generate our keys by:...

Categories: miscellaneous

Mutt tutorial part 1 - setup IMAP account

Published at May 13, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  3 min read

Mutt is one of those programs that make people call you a linux geek, nerd or a snob. This is because using TUI or command line tools in world of fancy GUI for most people is weird. What’s so great about mutt? I probably still have not found much of its advantages, but at first glance we can notice a few things. First, it keeps Unix convention of small programs for specific task “Make each program to one thing well” or KISS....

Categories: miscellaneous

Vim as a Blogger editor

Published at April 21, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

Blogger.vim is a vim plugin for interfacing with Google’s Blogger. Below I will use my workspace git repository. To use this plugin we need pretty new ruby >= 1.9.2 and gems nokogiri and net-https-wrapper. Let’s install latest possible ruby for Debian, before that make sure you have latest updates: 1 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get dist-upgrade And ruby: 1 sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.3 Before we install gems , we need to resolve some dependencies:...

Categories: miscellaneous

Debugging coreboot in qemu environment - part 2

Published at April 18, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

In previous post coreboot was configured and installed. Here we try to establish good debugging environment for it. To create a good emulated environment to debug, research and learn coreboot few tricks are required. First of all we need to know how to run our emulated environment (qemu). What I mean by that?...

Categories: firmware

Building ARM toolchain? part 2: gcc and eglibc

Published at April 12, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  4 min read

Unfortunately after few tries of cross compiling eglibc using different source for instructions I always end with hard to solve issues. Luckily, in the sources of eglibc I noticed instructions for cross-compiling written long time ago by Jim Blandy(I know i should start here). Lot of thanks to him for it. Below I describe my experience which I gained during eglibc cross compilation for arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi and procedure that I used. Commands below contain some constants that I used in previous works....

Categories: app-dev os-dev

How to download videos from videos.linux.com

Published at April 6, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

Therefore, I’m leaving for the Easter holidays I wanted to download some lecture on embedded systems, which was presented at the 2012 Embedded Linux Conference. Although I regret I found that I could not find as good quality copy in the network as on the Linux Foundation page. It is unfortunate that linux.com site does not have the possibility of direct downloading video files. But there is a workaround. Follow below tutorial:...

Categories: miscellaneous

Building ARM toolchain - part 1: libs and binutils

Published at March 20, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  3 min read

Searching the Internet for information on how to build arm toolchain from scratch I realize that it is very hard to find information about this matter (and recent one even harder). I will try to fill this lack of information and try to build toolchain. My main goal is to use a component based on the GNU public license, and using them in as the newest version as it is possible....

Categories: app-dev os-dev

Quick build of arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi with crosstool-ng

Published at March 14, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

You might be surprised at how much you have to make to correctly build arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi config based toolchain with crosstool-ng. As you can see examples of many open source projects, the man’s work is a rare resource. The result of this economic fact is that the attempt to build configuration arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi is not a simple task and during an operation you can come across many problems. Although I am not afraid of problems and effectively try to fight them and of course sharing the results of my work....

Categories: app-dev os-dev

Splitting my personal repository

Published at March 14, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

After writing a few posts in which my workspace scripts could be useful, I realized that I should split blog works from the scripts that can be useful to others. From now materials related to the blog I will track in a separate repository and I’ll add them as submodule into my environment. This implies that if we intend to deliver something to a broader audience this should include only those things which the recipient is expected and which we say that we provide....

Categories: miscellaneous

Debugging coreboot in qemu environment - part 1

Published at March 12, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

First of all I use testing version of Debian - wheezy. Clone coreboot repository: 1 2 git clone http://review.coreboot.org/p/coreboot cd coreboot; make menuconfig Configure FILO as apayload and use its latest version: 1 Payload -> Add a payload -> FILO Payload -> FILO version -> HEAD Add verbose debugging messages: 1 2 3 Debugging -> Check PIRQ table consistency Debugging -> Output verbose malloc debug messages Debugging -> Output verbose ACPI debug messages Debugging -> Enable debug messages for option ROM execution Debugging -> Built-in low-level shell Debugging -> Trace function calls Try to build:...

Categories: firmware