Status update

Hi all,

This is a short one, as it’s way past my bedtime as I write this. I’ve been quiet lately; non-existent on IRC and IM channels, and not a lot of activity.

I’ve been doing a lot of work out at Laidley earning an income, and thus Gentoo has taken a bit of a back seat. Particularly with stagebuilds, which I’ve been meaning to get back onto for a long time. Some of the things I’ve been chasing in the background include:

• Chasing some odd Qt-related bugs that cause an in-house developed app to crash (one bug is a Bus error when calling QPointF::setX on a valid QPointF object, another crashes Qwt)
• Some issues with KDE 4.3, particularly libkjs which appears broken
• Mozilla products; and their severe instability
• GNU Insight. 6.8 doesn’t work with present X, 6.8-1 lacks an ebuild, and doesn’t respect make install DESTDIR=/foo (Lord knows how binary packages are made of it?!)
• GNU Toolchain and dev tools for Luminary Micro Stellaris LM3S8962 and friends… we use this controller at work, CodeSourcery’s toolchain was fun-and-games to compile on mipsel, as was figuring out openocd, but my Yeeloong is now my primary workstation for this development.
• Chasing up packages needed to build newer stages

In the midst of this, a recent storm blew up some equipment in our house, namely a D-Link DSL-504 ADSL router (shall be missed; was a good router but now Ethernet on it is cooked), one 10/100Mbps ethernet switch (cheap 8-port Netgear), and worst of all… a Yaesu FT-897D transceiver (cooked 3 diodes in the power circuits, the microphone preamp and a DDS chip… a write-off). The latter I had hoped to hook up to some of the MIPS boxes, and get hamlib going. The SGI O2 has working sound on Linux these days, and would possibly make a decent PSK31 station.

Luckily, the Lemote Fulong that resides in my room, got spared from that storm. Both Fulongs are capable of running from 12V… and I suspect the ground-strike came up through the mains. Thus, I’ve already purchased a solar panel & regulator, and have two ex-Telstra 6V 110Ah batteries to power the radios with — they can also theoretically power the Fulongs and an Ethernet switch if I expand the panels up a bit in the future. So hopefully no further issues, not sure how many Gentoo dev boxes are solar-powered at present, but this is an option I’m considering.

I’m unlikely to be back on IRC, as I don’t have the time to check it these days with my long commutes. That said, there is email; and I will see emails sent directly to me… I don’t always get a chance to delve into the mail folders that hold list messages.

Tags: amateur-radiogentoolinux