Woof

Well my beagleboards arrived. And i've spent the last couple of days getting them going. Ugh. Actually it arrived about midday yesterday - but it seems like a couple of days already.

I got the serial console going pretty easily and after a bit of a false start with a dodgy SD card I got it booting reliably. But I couldn't for the life of me get the damn video working all day yesterday and most of today. The problem is the video format option has changed every kernel revision, so it took me some time to track down the right one. It didn't help that I only had cables to hook it up to my TV which is a bit pickier about what it will accept. Although I finally got it working - it was off the screen and not very usable though - I went and got a dvi-d cable today so it's now plugged into my old monitor. The computer shop also had a second hand usb 100mbit ethernet adaptor for only $5 which saved a longer trip or unnecessary spending.

Tiny tiny thing, lost in wires and crap on the desk.

I also tried getting the cross development environment up. Sigh. Another stupid build system (it's written in python ...) to deal with, and it builds a whole distribution which isn't really what I wanted at this point. And it failed part way though building it's 3000 'steps'. Well I suppose i'll keep trying but i'm in no rush right now. The angstrom distro seems a bit flakey too - doesn't want to mount any of the usb drives I have. I've had some usb issues - if it gets particularly busy, usb just drops out and needs a reset to fix - appears to be some hardware bug with the OMAP itself :-/ Otherwise it's kind of neat. Not the snappiest thing running X or firefox, but it works - powering off a usb port with no cooling required. Feels similar to ps3-linux, although mplayer is pretty slow (then again, it's using 1/600th the power!).

Had a bit of a turn with my main box too - I had to reboot it since I stole the dvi-d port on my monitor for the bb and it wouldn't turn on the vga without it (or at least, it was the easiest way). After that it wouldn't let me log in - orbit issues. Turned out all the orbit directories in /tmp wouldn't go away, infact the directory wouldn't list properly and only some files would delete. Hrm, I thought jfs would be more reliable than that. A forced fsck fixed it, and it deleted /tmp altogether.

And I hurt my bloody foot last week. Not exactly sure what I did to make it happen but best I can work out is that I ended up with tendinitis. Sore as buggery for a few days - but I had things to do including riding around and walking around shops all day last thursday and I didn't let a little pain stop that. But since after a whole week it wasn't getting better I thought i'd better look up on the internet and find out what I had. After the last couple of days of resting a lot more seriously it seems to have gotten a lot better. I'm still treating it gently but it was ok enough to ride the 300m to the computer shop and back and limp inside.