therning.org/ magnus

Since I’m now working a bit with embedded systems I thought I’d take a look at compiling for one of the ARM-based machines that QEMU supports. I settled for VersatilePB after finding this old-ish article. Rather optimistically I thought that maybe, just maybe things had change in a year and that the limitation of flash was removed. How wrong I was.

I did find an easier way to get it working, though with the limitation that Linux has to be started via tftpboot or some other network-based fashion. The patch looks like this:

--- u-boot.orig/src/u-boot-2011.12/include/configs/versatile.h
+++ u-boot/src/u-boot-2011.12/include/configs/versatile.h
@@ -31,6 +31,8 @@
 #ifndef __CONFIG_H
 #define __CONFIG_H

+#define CONFIG_ARCH_VERSATILE_QEMU
+
 /*
  * High Level Configuration Options
  * (easy to change)

Then just go ahead and modify the default boot argument (CONFIG_BOOTARGS in the same file) to your hearts content to minimise the amount of manual work for booting.

I received an email saying that epilicious didn’t work very well in epiphany 1.9.x. Since Debian isn’t packaging pre-releases of GNOME 2.14 I decided to try to get Ubuntu Dapper installed in a qemu image. I tried using the age-tested method of installing a stable version first (Breezy), and then upgrading to the unstable, not-yet-released version (Dapper).

It literally took hours to get Breezy installed. A small change of /etc/apt/sources.list later I was ready to move on to Dapper. More than 500 packages were needed to be downloaded for the upgrade. During the upgrade there was a conflict due to a file that had been moved from one package to another. There seemed to be no easy way out of the situation as the proposed solution (apt-get -f install) would remove the kernel itself. I gave up and I’ll be looking elsewhere to find a way to check out the GNOME pre-releases.

I’ve never had any problems at all taking a Debian system from stable to unstable. It has required a few steps sometimes, but I’ve always been able to rely on the packaging tools to take me from point A to point B. This really goes to show that Ubuntu, despite it’s origins, isn’t Debian.

I’m gaining more and more confidence that my decision to move back to Debian was the correct decision.