Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon
Saturday, 20. October 2007 16:31 - daniel - Linux - 0 Comments
I'm finally running Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop. But getting there was a pain in the ass. My first try was a simple upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10. My previous upgrade from 6.10 to 7.04 was pretty easy and basically everything worked after some tuning. But this time everything gone wrong. The update manager hand multiple times during downloading the updates (blame my network connection) and after I finally got all the necessary files to upgrade and had them installed, 3D support wasn't working. No idea why, even a driver reinstall hasn't worked.
At this point i decided to reinstall Ubuntu instead of fixing the installation. Well, easier than it sounds. I downloaded a 7.10 alternate CD and burned it, but the disk check failed and installing ubuntu failed. I have no idea it's because of my CD drive, my burner or whatever. The iso was ok thought.
Since I couldn't install Ubuntu from my CD I just installed a command line system and installed the ubuntu-desktop package from the internet. Getting compiz running and installing all the programms and tools I normally use took some time too, but it running nicely now. And it looks a lot better the Ubuntu 7.04.
Not much to see
Tuesday, 16. October 2007 5:19 - daniel - Other - 0 Comments
...here at the moment. I have found some interesting things I would like to write about, but currently I have no time. Stay tuned ;).
mp3player prototype
Tuesday, 25. September 2007 6:23 - daniel - Other - 0 Comments
We got a (kinda) working prototype of our mp3player. The CF card socket is bugged and we have to search for a different DC-DC converter. But everything else is working. The VS1011e MP3 decoder chip is not visible here. You can see the STK500 board we use in system programming (ISP).
Howto: Update gcc-avr and binutils-avr
Tuesday, 18. September 2007 16:13 - daniel - Linux - 1 Comment
Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty comes with gcc-avr version 4.1.0 and binutils-avr version 2.16.1. I wanted to update the compiler to support the dwarf2 debug format. Since avr-gcc < 4.1.2 has a bug that makes it impossible to compile with dwarf2, I couldn't just recompile the ubuntu package with dwarf2 enabled. This howto is loosely based on this howto by coldtobi and this article (German) by Sven Rudolph and Heiko Schlittermann. The coldtobi's howto doesn't work at the moment, because the links for his patches are broken.
This Howto isn't for beginners, so if you miss something, ask. The lines that start with a $ sign are for a normal terminal and lines with a # in front are for a root terminal (or write sudo in front of the command).
It's alive
Sunday, 16. September 2007 17:57 - daniel - Other - 0 Comments
This is ATmega16 mp3player compiled on Sep 15 2007 22:56:16.
Initalizing CF Card...
CF Card init failed!
Well, it runs. Sort of ;). ATA driver for the Compact flash card should work too, but I can't test it 'cos I don't have the prototype board here :(. And it should be able to read the MBR and BPB for information about the file system and stuff.