Blogs

Back again, and this time with an agreement from Freescale to donate a few M5484LITE development boards to our community. I’ll be using one, and I’m going to try to get some other guys to take some but there’ll be one or two left. The key things we’ll need from someone who takes the boards are getting the USB and a PCI video card working on the device. Which means the freemint kernel will need the integrated PCI bios, and USB 2.

It’s been a little while since I really updated anyone on anything. I have so many projects, so many things going on so what have I been working on? Well besides a super huge project at work ;), what I’ve been doing. Well GIM is fairly stable and has had no complaints (and perhaps no users ;) ). The new sparemint site seems to have a lot more interest and that’s been consuming my time.

A Christmas release of GEM Instant Messenger has arrived. GEM Instant Messenger is an AOL instant messenger compatible IM client for Atari systems running MiNT. This version has fixes of iconification, font selection issues fixed, it’s built with Windom 2.0, buddylist size/position is saved in the configuration file, debug text has been isolated and removed, bug causing buddylist to redraw over everything fixed, and restructuring and beautification of all dialogs.

Sparemint Dev Site: I suppose some people around here really don’t know me. There’s not too much to me really. I suppose there’s one thing that can really sum up my complete lack of professional programming skills - poor planning. The sparemint site was pretty decent but due to some serious errors in the database schema things were pretty limited. An RPM package consists of the following parts. A source rpm, which when built generates one or more binary rpms.

I managed to pry myself away from Anarchy Online tonight to work on GEM. I’ve been getting somewhat obsessed with this online game which is probably a bad thing ;) Anyway, tonight I did 99% of the code for updating via the GUI interface. This puts the sparemint updater ready for a 0.1 release, and it’ll make it functional and ready to switch the dev website to live. Pretty cool.

Maybe my life is boring, but I encountered what I feel to be a major problem. The new sparemint site is designed to be 100% community controlled, perhaps with a web administrator to handle db emergencies and such, but it’s designed such that so long as a few people are around, sparemint can progress. Not to say Frank Naumann will disappear at any point in time, but I firmly believe bringing the community into the process will help to germinate a growth in MiNT.

Well today I worked a lot on SUM and during the last few days I’ve been attempting to get GCC compiled. Now a lot of people have succeeded in “compiling” the gcc 3.3x branch but as far as I know, nobody has produced a working g++ compiler. Now, we can’t move on in sparemint without it in my opinion because there’s almost certainly a few package in our current repository that are C++ or have C++ in them.

Well, since SQLite3 is now compiled I started building support for it into SUM. Then I started moving some old data storage to sqlite and this started happening at a blinding pace. Before the end of the night I had client side update resolution and information displays complete. A few more days work is all it will take. Once completed, all that will really be necessary is conflict/dependency resolution but such things are not currently important to sparemint users.

Well now that the CVS Server is up, I was able to put in the new updates, which includes the port to Windom 2.x which now allows Gim to be compatible with XaAES and N.AES (for sure). I also realized I was talking to an offline nothingness the other day so I added the type of notifications that Gaim has to make sure that such a thing doesn’t happen anymore. I also put in some updates for Sparemint Update Manager which includes Windom 2.

Today I worked on gnu gettext a bit and decided that we need the latest version of rpm and apt-rpm. With such a thing we would be able to create different sparemint repositories say for the 68060 user who wants the absolute maximum tested optimizations compiled in with gcc 3.3.3. This allows us to still maintain a sparemint archive for gcc 2.95.3 for the users with lesser systems. An interesting idea but will require some work.