7/21/2007

lazy with linux

I had big plans this weekend to go down to Fresno State for the Summer Arts program for a day or two, then come back up to have a tour of Pixar. All this was abandoned upon hearing from Johnny that the Pixar trip was canceled for one reason or another. The bear of it is that I had already taken Friday off of work. I was left with a free day to do whatever I wanted! So naturally I went to Linux. I have gotten the cross-compiling toolchain working on my Macbook Pro to get my own code on the gumstix board I've been working on - but there's a snag. The version I'm using is too new for the OS that came pre-installed on the Gumstix, so I had to upgrade it. After practicing flashing the file-system image on the gumstix with some pre-built images from Dave Hylands, I was finally confident enough to use my own home-compiled image, but the OSX version of Buildroot for the gumstix doesn't support the Verdex motherboard that I have. Long story short, I was in a major bind. Linux to save the day! I went to the Apple store (where I find myself at least once a week these days - even if I'm not buying anything) and picked up a LaCie pocket external hard drive. Using rEFIt which is an amazing EFI replacement for OSX, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn (who comes up with these names?) to the hard drive, and left a partition of free space to allow a future installation of another OS should I need to later. I can triple boot with no need to partition my meager 100 gig MBP hard drive! Plus I found that I don't even have to kill my uptime! I now have the current version of Buildroot - which does support the verdex motherboard that I have - up and compiling on Ubuntu. I just finished flashing the file-system image and kernel with my own build... I don't think I've ever been so happy to see "Hello World!" in my life! And mad props to Michael for letting me take over his kitchen table this weekend ;)

Labels: autonomouscar, geek