Author archives: Mike

Looks like the kernel drivers for the virtualbox/vmware virtual devices have been added to the devel builds. Couldn't get past activation with the images from today, however, so haven't been able to confirm that they work. Still, yay.

Didn't figure I could get to sleep this evening, so did some playing with the Cairo-backed turtle graphics. Got quite a few little nits worked out, but the big performance bottleneck still remains, namely we still have to render the whole of the drawing on every frame of the animation. All of my attempts to ...

Regular PyGTA meeting is tonight @ Linux Caffe. Topic is ctypes. Speaker is Peter Hansen (one of the original founders of PyGTA).

Have the converted official 542 image running under vmware with networking now. For those playing along at home it's the same process as for VirtualBox: download the compiled pcnet32 stuff for the 542 kernel into the image and unpack into the /lib/modules/${kernel}/drivers/net/ directory. Run /sbin/depmod as root, and switch on-boot to true in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 . ...

Peter Hansen, one of the original founders of PyGTA will be discussing, among other things, Engenuity's use of ctypes. Normal place and time (7pm, Third Tuesday of the Month).

Unable to get VirtualBox-hosted machines onto the net yesterday. Seems the NAT network inside VB just gave up trying to route information out. Kinda killed my plans for trying to build the kernel inside a snapshot of 542 (instead of spending days getting Fedora installed). I don't recall having to do anything other than reboot ...

Spent a few hours discussing developer (content and software) relations issues with Mel this afternoon. While doing that (and before) I've been handling various other odds and ends. One of them was getting the pcnet32.ko driver built for the olpc kernel.

Did manage to get that done (eventually). It loads and I can ping the ...

Picked up a VoIP router for my sister today. Chap at Canada Computers assured me it was an unlocked router, despite the "Earthlink" branding. Got home, installed it, and it's locked. Now I need to trek all the way back down there to return it. Bah.

Here's an idea for Linksys: have a way to ...

Ported one of the samples from TurtleArt over to the Cairo-based test. OMG it is slow. TurtleArt is bitmap-based, so once it's drawn something it's just blitting up the bitmap next time and then continuing to render. The Cairo renderer is doing the whole rendering process every frame. Some of these samples are rendering radial ...

Looking at what to recommend for developers wanting to get started this evening.

Xen doesn't seem like a readily deployed solution: manually rework your whole boot system, build multiple kernels, edit configuration files, hope it works. Fine for sysadmins building computers every day, but not a programmer's favourite way to deal with their primary development ...