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Latest Project Blogs
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 CRUX PPC 2.6 released!
Project: Port CRUX PPC (Operating Systems)
posted by acrux on 19th January 2010
CRUX PPC 2.6 is now available. CRUX PPC is a port of CRUX for the Power Architecture® platform. It’s a GNU system with a Linux kernel and runs on Apple NewWorld (both 32 and 64bit) PowerPC, YDL Powerstation, Genesi PegasosII and EFIKA, ACube Sam440ep, IBM RS/6000 CHRP and pSeries servers. CRUX PPC includes support for laptop-specific features, extended hardware support and server tools.
CRUX PPC is a volunteer driven no-profit project based on the releases of CRUX for x86. It contains software written by a lot of different people, each software comes with its own license, chosen by its author. Parts written by CRUX PPC Team are to intend as free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Unlike other distributions, the primary goal of CRUX is not to be the most popular (read: biggest number of users) or to put as many features as possible into the system. The idea is rather to build a streamlined distribution, targetted at a specific audience which in turn gets a system without compromises. The result may not be the best distribution for everybody, but as mentioned above, that’s not the goal. If you’re part of the target audience however, you might enjoy running CRUX just as much as we do.
CRUX PPC 2.6 is, as usual, released via two different installation ISO: 32bit and 64bit. The 32bit version is based on a single lib toolchain instead the 64bit one comes with a multilib toolchain. These two versions share the same ports tree.
See the download page!
CRUX PPC GNU/Linux Project - http://cruxppc.org/
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CRUX PPC 2.6RC2 is now available
Project: Port CRUX PPC (Operating Systems)
posted by acrux on 17th December 2009
CRUX PPC 2.6 32bit and 64bit includes glibc 2.11, gcc 4.4.2 and binutils 2.20
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Reggae is still alive
Project: Reggae on Efika (Multimedia)
posted by Grzegorz Kraszewski on 21st November 2009
While most of my time is now occupied with DigiBooster 3, Reggae is still developed. I plan to release a "big pack" with all the newest classes, documentation and examples. In the meantime I've started a series of tutorials for programmers using Reggae in their applications. Reggae itself has got some new clases as well, for example MPEG-I audio demuxer and decoder, and demuxer for ID3 tags. Another new thing in Reggae is support framework for extracting metadata from files (id3tag.demuxer is the first class to use it). I will write more about it in my following blogs here. By the way, you can trace my daily programming activity on Twitter.
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The Eframe does well on daily work
Project: Low cost, low energy digital picture frame (Applications & Software)
posted by Ulrich Beckers on 23rd September 2009
In the meantime the Eframe has got a new housing and got several software updates. The system is running MorphOS V2.3 now and it works like a charm. I use the device on a daily basis as juke box, picture viewer, webterminal and mailer.
The new housing solved thermal issues of the first version, where the gfx processor and the inverter produced some serious heat that lead to some unstability of the system. But now everything works pretty nice and the system can run for hours and days without any problems.
This project is now rather finished (am working on some software though), and with the retreat of the announced 8610 and 5121 boards I guess the initial idea is no longer to pursue directly.
But the experince and evaluation I yielded with this project will help me with my future plans to develop multimedea display / POI systems.
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Capek resurrected - with SUSE/Efika plus usb/i2c
Project: Capek Robot (Robotics)
posted by Kevin Nickels on 8th July 2009
OK, after a lot of time trying to teach myself to write device drivers in QNX, I'm jumping back into the Linux world.
I've stripped the bot down to the aluminium, and am building it back up one part at a time.
Hardware setup - EFIKA running openSUSE10.3 (thanks Matt!), with devantech usbi2c dongle. Connected to the i2c bus is a devantech md23 motor driver with two MEB30 drive motors. I've got eight srf02 sonars waiting in line, as well as a usb camera.
Software setup - one nice thing about this, from a practical point of view, is that it's all user-space. The FTDI FT232R USB chip in the USBI2C has a linux kernel driver, so it's just a serial port interface.
Linux has a pretty nice high-resolution timer interface, new since I've delved very deeply into system-level programming with it. So I've got three threads, with shared memory spaces for inter-thread coms. The executive thread is a command processor, and (of course) spends most of it's time blocked waiting for user i/o. I've currently got a 10Hz process and a 1Hz process. Each process runs a set of FSMs (Finite State Machines). Each FSM is responsible for handling one task or piece of hardware. The FSM-based approach to robotics software is a bit hard to get used to, but is very powerful and expandable - I learned about it while on sabattical at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Hi, Hrand!)
The software is a classic three-layer (plus system support) architecture. A device-driver level implements low-level interface algorithms and being largely independent from other modules (e.g. a set of md23 read/write routines). A device-layer level abstracts and utilizes these low-level routines into a FSM architecture that is called repeatedly. For example, one FSM monitors each motor, and utilizes md23 routines to start/stop/change speed for the motors. Finally, an application layer will coordinate these independent FSMs to perform useful work.
Current status
- System support for 10Hz, 1Hz, shm, signal handling, timestruct, and command processing working. Monitoring and alarming of system overload on 1/10Hz command queues.
- DDs working for md23 and srf02
- DL FSM working for MotorControl, written for SonarCtrl
- No APL layer yet (unless you count command processing)
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CRUX PPC 2.5 released!
Project: Port CRUX PPC (Operating Systems)
posted by acrux on 4th June 2009
CRUX PPC 2.5 released!
CRUX PPC 2.5 is now available. Supports Apple 32bit "NewWorld" G3/G4 and Apple 64bit G5, Genesi PegasosII and Efika, Acube Sam440ep, IBM RS/6000 CHRP32 (604e), YDL Powerstation, IBM Intellistation POWER, and IBM pSeries RS64/POWERn.
CRUX PPC 2.5 is released as two different installation ISO: 32bit and 64bit. The 32bit version is based on a single lib toolchain instead the 64bit one comes with a multilib toolchain. These two versions share the same ports tree.
To increase CRUX PPC usability on pSeries, starting from 2.5 we do provide ports for some IBM utils.
See the download page!
http://www.cruxppc.org/
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Improvements in multimedia.class
Project: Reggae on Efika (Multimedia)
posted by Grzegorz Kraszewski on 28th May 2009
In any object oriented framework there are some routine tasks performed inside methods. These include argument verification, object locking, generating log messages and so on. If possible, these tasks should be performed by the master class, so subclasses implementors are not bothered with them. Reggae is no exception and I decided to move the boring parts of MMM_Pull() method to multimedia.class. I've added two new methods: MMM_PrePull() and MMM_PostPull(), which rather obvious names. Using these methods a subclass implementor (it may be any subclass using MMM_Pull, so a demultiplexer, decoder or filter) may concentrate on data processing and leave bookkeeping for multimedia.class. Advantages of this approach are: avoiding code duplication, standarization of logging and avoiding trivial bugs in subclasses (like locking object with no matching unlock). It is worth noting, the technique is fully backward compatible, all old classes continue to work. The first class adapted to the new style is new zxscreen.decoder. Updated multimedia.class 52.13 will be released soon, classes will adopt this new technique incrementally. I also plan to implement similar wrappers to MMM_Seek() and other methods, which may be simplified this way.
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A new audio demultiplexer
Project: Reggae on Efika (Multimedia)
posted by Grzegorz Kraszewski on 25th May 2009
AMOS was a very popular programming language for Amiga. Inheriting BASIC syntax, it had a lot of multimedia extensions allowing to gather all Amiga powers in easy way. Multimedia data used by AMOS programs were stored with special files called AMOS banks. There was of course AMOS bank subformat for sounds. Sounds were stored as 8-bit PCM. Why not write a Reggae demultiplexer for it? Because samples are stored as PCM, there is no need for a decoder, audiopcm.decoder can handle the stream. What is interesting, such a sound bank can (and usually does) contain many sounds. Reggae handles it with its normal way - creating multiple outputs in a demuxer object, one for each sound. It is the first audio demultiplexer handling multiple sounds in a stream. It raises some problems, for example handling random play and seek in multiple sounds. I've implemented it with seeking the source stream, or (if the source is not seekable) just buffering data in memory. Released just today on MorphOS Files.
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Back after long break
Project: Reggae on Efika (Multimedia)
posted by Grzegorz Kraszewski on 24th May 2009
It looks like my work on Reggae is not systematical but happens in "bursts" of activity, with long breaks between them. The latest burst happened this month. I've fixed a long standing bug in audio.output. It has been a bug in initialization code, causing the class to crash if audio hardware couldn't be allocated. I also have extended an ezoteric zxscreen.demuxer with some even more ezoteric formats. The last achievement is localization of MediaLogger. Not very much of it, but I'm also busy learning Blender, writing DigiBooster 3 and programming and maintaining MorphOS Files. Of course I could blog about these activities too, but do not want to make offtopic posts.
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CRUX PPC Project current status
Project: Port CRUX PPC (Operating Systems)
posted by acrux on 31st March 2009
Our own new server obtained housing from “Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica” of the University “Federico II” of Naples, Italy and at the moment we are only waiting for a public IP. This server will host all CRUX PPC services and cruxcial developmnet and documentation tools. Here they will find a safe home new tools for intelligent automated multiarch testing, ports/packages management and web based project scheduling and management tool.
We obtained full housing from University “Parthenope” of Naples for our 64bit PowerPC workstation (that IBM Linux Technology Center provided us) to achieve a better team cooperation over time. At the moment our 64bit PowerPC workstation is broken and we are waiting to resolve any warrantable issues because we must return it to Fixstars USA in Colorado, USA. We hope to resolve in short period because we really need this nice pice of hardware.
We recently bought with our own money a second hand IBM Intellistation 2-way POWER4+ workstation to go forward with our work.
If You have unused 64bit Power Architecture workstations, please, consider donating them to CRUX PPC. Thanks!
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