Nishanth' tech rambles

What exactly is a kernel? at the end of the day, just a collection of patches :).. So yeah, I have a "unique" collection of patches for PandaBoard that I requested MeeGo kernel maintainers to pick up yesterday. Now to wait and see if they actually get accepted. Next steps would be tough: DSS - omapfb enablement EHCI - keyboard and mouse As usual, the patches to provide the basic functionality does'nt seem to have made it upstream yet.. I sometimes wonder - Is it really so hard to push patches upstream?? Then I realize, I push patches in my spare time :) Which basically means that I am not driven by the chruning winds of business forces within the work environment dictating when and what patches I should be posting upstream :). Glad I still retain that flexibility. and probably the reason I do move seemingly faster - I always have the luxury to maintain focus on upstreaming my patchset.. it is all that hard when one writes in BOLD on one's office white board: DID YOU...

My Odyssey into MeeGo packaging continues today with U-boot packaging. Decision on the source First of all for U-boot package I needed to decide which source to use. Since I am no big fan of private repositories (even the ones hosted publicly!), the mainline u-boot was an obvious choice. Thankfully sakoman and rest of the u-boot community have done a great job in making omap3 and omap4 support available in Mainline u-boot . And yep, it does have PandaBoard and obviously beagleboard support as well. RPM saga Since the rule of a lazy programmer is not to invent something someone already has done, spend some time with google searching for readily available RPM packages for u-boot. One of the first things I hit was that our friends at Freescale had done a nify spec packaging for imx processors for packaging u-boot . But, looking closely I was not too impressed, searching a bit more, hit on the openmamba project and the excellent packaging that Silvan Calarco has done for u-boot. Though ...

Got myself a build.meego.com account and am attempting to start a new package around meego for pandaboard - an OMAP4 based platform. This series of blog posts will hopefully contain my day to day notes for a better lack of word all under the label of MeeGo ;).. Note: the good folks at DeviceVM had already done a MeeGo port to OMAP4 Blaze platform sometime back, my approach is a bit different in getting MeeGo port available in main MeeGo repository itself. Different challenge - mostly of the packaging kind as I am starting to realize ;) I've started my first experience with packaging for MeeGo with trying to put together a package for U-Boot. my lack of previous experience with rpm packaging has me stumped so far :(. On the base level, MeeGo uses rpm packaging - essentially what folks call a spec file . MeeGo folks have added one layering on top with yaml file which is translated by a set of tools called spectacle to translate the yaml to rpm spec file. Spectacle Since I like to...