Well, that didn't last very long

Back From Typepad. I just couldn't bring myself to pay for something I wasn't using all that much!

Moving -- Going to Typepad.com

Since my wife and I have both decided to start contributing to a joint blog, we've moved over to

http://trotters4eva.typepad.com and

http://trotters4eva.typepad.com/papa_geek

Push Gmail For Windows Mobile

For the past month, since getting my Windows Mobile PocketPC, I've been having the hardest time finding an easy and FREE way to get my GMail pushed to my phone.

Well, I've finally found it. It goes by the name emoze. This is a native Windows mobile app that synchs your GMail inbox with your phone. However, messages deleted from the phone are not deleted from GMail. Also, it will download all your GMail contacts into your phone... This can be turned off, but usually, you'll have almost all of them before you can.

The nice thing is that once you have it all set up, it works like a dream pushing emails almost instantaneously.

Go to http://www.emoze.com For more info, and for direct install for the supported phones http://mobile.emoze.com

Mobile Blogger.com

Ohhhh yeah, I'm waaaaaay behind the time as this is my first official
mobile blog post. As I am doing this as a test of not only
blogger.com, but also of my new phone, I'm including a picture of
something on my desk for the fun of it.

Hope to be posting more often now.

I have returned

Sorry for the long delay, but I'm back to trying to update this blog... at least occasionally.

I've been running my tail off at work since we just released our new firmware for our switches, and I'm helping to track down a possibly bad Xorg driver (how I've come to loath silicon motion's linux drivers).

But on the positive side, I have started really porting linux 2.6.19.7 to our board that uses a Freescale MPC8272. I tell you what, we use every damn one of our SCCs and SMCs, plus the FECs as well.

Good news is I've got all those interfaces mostly working and can boot Linux very easily over NFS. (Yes, this just a debug step). I've even had fairly good success porting over our custom modules to the 2.6 way of "thinking".

I have a new appreciation of JTAG, I'll tell you that much!

Sorry for the Delays in Posting

I have recently been tasked with an interesting assignment that is driving me a bit batty and is consuming a lot of my mental effort during the day.

I'm in the process of porting an MPC8274-based 10Gb ATCA switch to work with the 2.6 series linux kernel. I'm having a hell of a time even getting the serial port to work (as in I haven't been successful even after a week of work).

So.... not much for updates other than informational today. Although, what I learn will be placed here as I can't find a damn thing on google to really help me with this....

THLinux Update

I know that this will sound crazy, but I'm radically changing my approach to THLinux and may shelve it completely. After tinkering around for a bit, I realized that I am basically trying to recreate Buildroot from scratch. Which is stupid because the developers of both busybox and uClibc maintain the Buildroot scripts.

So, what I am looking to do is use the buildroot to construct a basic, static bootable core environment. Then I will look into adding in debian-like support so that you can build up your own debian-derived system (as the basic dpkg is supported by busybox... as is).

So, as I said earlier about THLinux, it's extremely alpha and subject to my whims.... neither of which can be considered stable. ;-)

THLinux and Gumstick Gentoo Updates

As per my THLinux announcement, I have created a homepage for it. Now, don't laugh at the formatting of the page please. Remember, I'm an engineer... not a graphic design artist! But there are some basic gotchas and download link. Right now, the safest thing to do if you want to just try it out is to execute "#./build_thlinux; ./install_thlinux /dev/sd{a,b,c,d}1 {-g}"

sd{a,b,c,d}1 is your thumb drive device that you'd like the rootfs directory dumped into, and the {-g} will install and setup grub on the thumb drive(provided you have grub-install on your host computer).


THLinux TO DO:
---------------

• Add build/install support for "nslookup" as it is broken in my busybox build (will come from bind 9.4.0)
• Add elinks/lynx for web browsing
• Look at adding TinyX and Matchbox for GUI support
• Investigate Cross-Compiled installs... (this could get very interesting... )

Gumstick Gentoo TO DO:
-----------------------

• Create THLinux-like build scripts to construct Gumstick Gentoo with a simple build script
• Investigate the experimental uclibc-based Gentoo for shrinking image even more.