Category archives: Young Coders

Latest build as of 2007.08.25.19.47 works under VirtualBox with both sound (as seen in EToys) and Networking. This is seen on an AMD64 box with alsa sound driver. TamTam's sound (CSound) is producing clicking sounds as soon as you open the application, but that seems to be common issue at this point.

Networking works in ...

Two requests for presentations today. One is for an academic conference on education, one for a DemoCamp night (local hip-tech crowd). Should wind up with two very different presentations. I'm hoping to be able to set up a video camera to be able to record the presentations for redistribution. Maybe just record practice runs?

I ...

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 ...

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 . ...

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 ...

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 ...

Have pushed updates that let the turtle's graphics get animated via the GUI. Code doing that is still pretty simple, but it seems to work reasonably well in terms of animating what was done to draw the graphics. Uses the whole command-set (at least, what's been drawn to date) to determine scale/transform, so that the ...