Cross Compiler Foo

August 20, 2008 - 2 mins read

There is a certain magic surrounding cross compilers and the people that know how to build one. Not unlike that of (Linux/BSD) kernel developers. At work we today support two embedded Linux targets, both are ARM based, and in neither of the two have we built the cross compiler ourselves. The first was ye’ old 2.95 based from uClinux.org and the second we had a consultant build for us. Lame!

Moving to ISC

July 30, 2008 - 1 min read

I hereby announce that all of the code I produce from now on will use the ISC license. Previously I’ve used the MIT license and the GNU GPL, or LGPL where applicable. The reason for changing this is two-fold. First, I like to be able to reuse much of what I do in proprietary settings. Yes, I’m one of those people who look upon the world with “grey” eyes rather than black & white.

Link Collection w31 2008

July 30, 2008 - 2 mins read

George Dyson, son of legendary Freeman Dyson, talks about the first computer, the first software bugs (both physical and logical) and the initial struggles of hackers. Fun history lesson for computer engineers and programmers alike. (Now, go crawl the web for “Dyson Sphere” and “Star Trek”! :-) Is Ubuntu 8.04 really that buggy as everyone suggest? My guess is that we’ve reached a breaking point where beginner users (< 1 year) are starting to outnumber the older “hard core” users.

HowTo: Build GNU Emacs from CVS

July 28, 2008 - 1 min read

Why would you want to do this? Well, considering all the neat new things that have been added lately it should be tempting for any old Emacs fan. The Emacs Wiki has all the info you need, but here is a quick run-down of the bare necessities. Start by checking out your working copy: cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs co emacs cd emacs/ ./configure make bootstrap Start with ./src/emacs or symlink the binary to your ~/bin/ directory.

More Emacs Progress!

July 22, 2008 - 1 min read

Wow, I’m almost starting to feel like a Windows user. The latest CVS builds of GNU Emacs has a lot of new features: XFT Support (font anti-aliasing) Better GTK integration (desktop) A font selector! I use the CVS version now as my daily driver in Ubuntu 8.10. It’s really useful, and I love the improved support for debugging programs inside Emacs! I think it is quite impressive how far this little editor has come.

No Wireless LED on ThinkPad T61

July 19, 2008 - 1 min read

ThinkPad
T61

I’ve got a ThinkPad T61 with Intel iwl3945 wireless chipset that I installed fresh with Ubuntu 8.04. Everything worked flawlessly out-of-the-box, except for the useless fingerprint scanner and the wireless LED. Don’t get me wrong, the wireless network worked fine, but the LED wasn’t on. At first I thought there was something wrong with the LED itself, but a couple of searches later I found that it was a known limitation of the 2.

Suddenly Compiz is not Working Anymore ...

July 17, 2008 - 1 min read

So weird. I usually rearrange my desktop every two weeks, often when I am bored. Sometimes I want a quick lean, smallish desktop and other times I want the whole shebang, all possible animations, SVG icons, mouse gestures — you name it and I will already have tons of it! Today I wanted to enable Compiz again and it just wouldn’t start. After a couple of tries that turned out to be dead ends I finally got this:

Missing Sound in Firefox?

July 14, 2008 - 1 min read

In Ubuntu 8.04 I recently discovered that you need to install the libflashsupport package if you get no sound in Firefox while running flash application/video. Oddly enough this is not a “required” or “supported” package in Ubuntu proper.

Regexp replace in many files

July 13, 2008 - 1 min read

I just have to blog about this exceptional tool I just found. It is called regexxer and is a tool in the true UNIX spirit — it does one job only, and does it well.

Minix editline v0.2.1

June 9, 2008 - 1 min read

The v0.2.0 release included some Debian patches, tcgetattr() and a batch mode (when reading from file) line reader. This release fixes a bug in the Debian patch that caused the batch mode version of readline() to actually truncate lines longer than 64 chars. Get it from the usual FTP location: http://ftp.vmlinux.org/pub/People/jocke/minix-editline/