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Messages - minou

#1
Andi,

As soon as I have a fully functional RPM development I will move to create the AVR32 port. I could easily add the latest AVR8 stuff if someone needs it.
I had started with the AVR32 on my Linux systems in order to learn it as I needed a new and fantastic processor for our instrument cluster. We picked the UC3C devices. I was lucky enough to have great support from Atmel, I even had meeting with the head of the company in Detroit. We were in a list of limited number of users. (I think GM was the one getting most of the devices) We were under an NDA for a couple of years. Now it is released and I think it is one of the best processors on the market. It has hard float for single precision and a DSP core.
At work I use IAR which we paid closed to $5500. At home I am doing some work on an evaluation board that I got from a vendor and use a JTAGICE mkII which I paid half price at a sale at Arrow ($150). I was not willing to pay $5500 so I am using GCC. Windows is not something allowed on my computer except under VirtualBox. I only use windows when I have to which is usually for work related stuff.
Until not long ago it was working fine under Linux. When the kernel got updated it no longer work on gentoo or Fedora 15. Atmel tells me that it is related to the kernel. They refuse to release the source code to avr32proxy despite the fact that they have discontinued work on AVR32 Studio for Linux and it seems the command line stuff. The latest release of the command line still includes the non functionning programmer.
I had to install Scientific Linux which is a mix of Fedora 12 and Fedora 13. By installing the programmer for Fedora 12 (no longer available thru Atmel) it now works.
I haven't used the PIC devices since they jacked up the prices on us and we moved to Atmel. When looking for a new processor for our gauges and cluster I looked at the PIC32. They lost because I needed enough PWM to run 7 steppers, which they didn't have. I found it to be a terrific processor though and bought a small board from Olimex. I do have the source code for the programmer which I intend to port to OS/2. For debugging I am debating on whether OpenOCD is the way to go or a custom gdbproxy version.

As for debugger my first attempt will be with setedit which uses turbo vision. I have so far been successfull in porting the turbo vision library to OS/2 using the Open Watcom. I have setedit compiled with Borland 2.0, I will make makefiles so it will compile with Open Watcom which is probably newer than my old Borland 2.0. The installation of Borland was problematic. The installer gave me a path error message. The solution was to zip the directory from my OS/2 Warp 4 installation in VirtualBox and using ftp. I then copied it on the OS/2 partition from Scientific Linux.
Once I have setedit and turbo vision working I will release them on SourceForge where I have released the SuSE, Fedora and Mandriva versions.
Eventually I want to make a graphic version that is as nice to use as IAR and use my GCC port of AVR32. I am looking at possibly using Kate for that.

I love Linux but love OS/2 more. I have been a Team OS/2 member for many years. I was forced to stop using it when it would not install on my PC anymore.
When I found out that someone had revived it under eComStation I checked it. It would not install until the latest one 2.1 which I bought.
My gripes right now at eComStation are
1-Sound, shitty support. With the stereo full blast the sound is very low. Sound control in mixer seemed to be don't care and sound control in sound is set to 100%
2-Flash doesn't display any video on the onion and crashes Firefox.
3-Flash plays ok on my favorite FM Station from Montréal but very low, and since I am hearing impaired this is not good. I hangs Firefox most of the time when I try to close Firefox.
4-The RPM install of perl is a file named perl with one line comment. I need a true perl to compile setedit with gcc. Salvador likes perl and that is what he uses to do his configurations. From what I found out last night that may be irrelevant here since it compiles with Borland but I still need perl for other stuff.
5-eComStation cannot read my 16G, 8G, 2G and 1G devices. It has no problem with my useles 128M jump drives.
The solution is not to update with the latest USB driver as when I do that it no longer boots. I then have to have it do chkdisk on all 4 500G partitions and give the ctrl alt del salute to keep it from crashing again and boot in Scientific Linux so I can put the old driver back.
#2
Setup & Installation / Re: RPM packager
2011.09.16, 03:09:53
A comment about windows which miturbide mentioned. Actually Microsoft is looking into implementing something like RPM for windows. It will be a Microsoft rewrite so they say.
They found out that RPM is the best packaging system so far. Debian users will get upset when they read that but this is life.
One serious issue I had with a customer with windows what that our parent company who makes the CAN device used had a different dll with the same name, the installer didn't complain and nothing worked.
With a RPM style installer the customer would have been made aware that the version was older than the one he needed. If I know that a program will not run with an older library I like the fact that I can have the installer flag that stuff. In this particular case that could have saved us thousands of dollars.
One great advantage of RPM is the ease to recreate the packages. Right now I have on my system Scientific Linux, Centos, Gentoo, Fedora 15. I used to have Fedora 13 and 14, Mandriva 2009, Mandriva 210 plus SuSE but that hard disk died. When I wanted to port a program to another system I just had to recomplile in most cases using rpmbuild -ba xxxx.spec. In a few cases I had to do some changes in the spec files, Mandriva has the nasty habit of using Mandriva only macros. That is not a problem once you are familiar with those macros.
If all you do on your OS/2 system is use binaries, any packaging system used should be irrelevant as long as the program runs fine.
To the question about the graphic interface, yumex which I use on all my Redhat style Linux is simple and all click click like most of you are used to. Yumex is just a graphic wrapper for the command line Yum.
It works very well and should be simple to port to OS/2.

Atmel has decided to go Windows only for the AVR32. This pissed me off greatly. So far I found some way around. I have not documented it yet, it involves using some older version of the programmer. I got it to work on Scientific Linux. I have a feeling that sooner or later no one will be able to use the programmer as there is no plan to update the linux version for now if I am to believe the message from my contact at Atmel.
The new programmer doesn't work if your system is new. Despite the good contacts I have with Atmel I was not able to get source code for gdbproxy so I will have to find a way to program by writing my own once I get the documentation on JTAGICE mkII debugging interface. One way would be to get the driver from Windows to work on OS/2, is that possible? or is Odin only for regular binaries.
I was able to recompile all the develeopment package for the AVR32 UC3 series. I did the same with the PIC32 by the way.
My goal in the next few months is to port the AVR32 stuff first to OS/2 (Actually eComStation 2.1). When I get my debugger working I will do the PIC32.
Once that is done ARM Cortex M3 is next ...

#3
Setup & Installation / Re: RPM packager
2011.08.28, 21:16:32
yum is not understood, yum is only some wrapper for RPM. RPM is the package manager. yum just makes life easier for people not familiar with RPM. yum is not the package manager.
As for RPM, actually you can install programs anywhere you please, even without using the program manager. The problem when you do is that when you install a RPM package that needs a library that has not been installed with the RPM manager, you need to override this with --deps. I do that often on gentoo because sometimes the program will not compile with the gentoo packaging, gentoo is more restrictive with all these use flags. It makes a system more robust but hard to add stuff that is considered "unstable". On OS/2 you can do pretty much the same. I found warpin not appropriate for I like to do and RPM more robust if done correctly. My point is that it is ridiculous to go beserk because someone decided that RPM was very good and superior to warpin, a decision which I actually agree with.
When you make a mix of different packaging ways you risk having issues, yum or RPM for that matter doesn't force you to put stuff where you don't want to. All RPM does is keep track of what is installed and what is not installed. If you wanted you could have different places to install stuff, all very well supported by the spec files. You just have to do a few overrides. All that is needed is to make sure that the path is updated. Having binaries in a structured way makes it easier to maintain a system, that is why most server maintainers will always prefer some sort of UNIX platform.
This doesn't mean that you are restricted to that. The one who forces installation in certain places is not yum or RPM but whoever builds the package.
If the command line is a problem for people there is a way around that. yumex or some other program could easily be ported to OS/2.
I am not buying eComStation because of the RPM packaging use but that helped me make the decision. I have been doing embedded design and programming since the mid 70s and really disliked having to switch to windows. I had no problem with CPM, DOS and OS/2 and even windows 3.1 but with Win 95 and up and Microsoft destroying OS/2 that took the cake.
Lately the gnome group has decided to destroy our good gnome with their gnome 3.0 crap, that didn't go very well with me considering that I find KDE such a bloat that I can't stand how slow it is compare to my good old gnome 2.xx
My alternative is OS/2 or create my own fork of gnome.
I have tried going back to OS/2 4.52 but too many things just don't work as nicely as on my Linux installations (gentoo, fedora 15, SuSE 11.3, Centos and Scientific Linux). I have a lot of code on Linux which I want to port to OS/2. I do mostly embedded programming (AVR32, PIC32, ARM) and had been stuck with windows until both Atmel and Microchip came out with some support for Linux. I think that the support for AVR8 and AVR32 should be easily portable to OS/2. For the PIC32 it will probably will take a bit more work.
eComStation 2.1 with tons of bug fixed and support for RPM will make my life a lot easier. If any of you do that kind of development and have some ideas how you would prefer the directories setup for that project just let me know.
Things don't have to be installed on /usr,  /usr/local or /opt.
#4
Setup & Installation / RPM packager
2011.08.28, 07:35:09
A few months ago several people show a lot of anger toward the shift to rpm packager and yum. I was quite surprised to the reaction because this very fact is the reason that I am spending the money to buy eComStation. You have to understand that the only way that OS/2 will survive is to have more developers and more applications. At the time that IBM dumped OS/2 and gave us the finger I considered myself a proud member of Team OS/2 USA. It soon became impossible to have system at a decent price that was stable. Linux quickly became my preferred system, somehow I could never accept to switch to windows at home even though this is what I have to use at work.
When I learned that eComStation was using yum and rpm I didn't hesitate to get the money necessary to paypal so wednesday I should be getting my copy of eComStation 2.1.
I have been creating packages under slackware, redhat rpm packages (as well as SuSE, Centos, Scientific Linux and Mandriva), gentoo packages and ubuntu (debian) packages for many years.
The easiest ones to create are the rpm and gentoo packages. The advantage of gentoo is that it can use packages from everybody but it is a lot more complicated than rpm. The ones who are a real pain are the debian packages. The parser barfs when you put tabs in the scripts. When I first started to create packages for ubuntu it took me hours to figure out that all the errors messages were bogus and related to the fact that the parser didn't like tabs. Using joe or vi editors were the solution as files edited with gedit would make the parser of the debian packager generate tons of error messages. rpm packages are very easy to create and very portable. Some sites have their own scripts to annoy us but once you get their macros you're ok. All that is needed to learn how to use rpm is the good old RTFM.
Watch in the next few months for ports of gcc for the PIC 32 and AVR32 as well as the debuggers for those.
I intend to get setedit to work with ARM, PIC32 and AVR32 boards on OS/2. Kate is also on my list when QT4.7 will be available for OS/2. They will be in RPM packages of course.

There is a good reason for the structure used in Linux, FreeBSD, the MAC or unix, it is so you can have a more stable system without crashes because of conflicting files. A good packager like RPM which has been proven over the years greatly help. Why recreate something that is working very well? they could have picked different ones but rpm is actually the best in the industry. urpmi or yum are popular tools that make rpm easier for those who are not familiar or do not want to familiarize themselves with rpm. If you want to give applications to install on a jump drive it is very simple as you can create a repository on any disk directory.
All the complaints I have seen on rpm were people who most likely shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a computer.
If you install rpm packages with the "--no deps" argument, do not complain for messed up data base. rpm packagers warns you that stuff is missing and if you insist it will let you screw things up with "--no deps" because sometimes you do have the files installed directly but if you do this without those files don't blame rpm for trusting your good judgement.

If you really dislike it just use unrpm and do as you please. Personnally I see the change as a brillant move that could help OS/2 get back to life. What we need now is more people willing to spend some time porting stuff. Having a similar structure as on Linux will greatly help. If you are not sure about this just check mingw. We could eventually even create binaries for OS/2 that can be created under Linux or MAC. An OS is dead without applications and there are a lot of good applications on Linux that are just waiting for people wanting to port them.