Redhatter’s Web Blog

Last Friday (23rd), was the night of the Brisbane Amateur Radio Club Annual General Meeting. Anyone who has been involved in a small club or community group, knows how dangerous it can be to attend these meetings — if you don’t intend to stand for a position, especially when most of the people holding executive positions are stepping down.

Well, needless to stay, the vast majority of the membership was away… leaving about 8~9 of us in the room. One of the newer members wound up with job of President, along with myself scoring the job of editor for QSP, the club newsletter. There will be more on this in the next issue of QSP. I’m still toying with ways I can produce that newsletter efficiently — the three options I’m looking at are (in order of preference): LaTeX, OpenOffice.org and Scribus. I put Scribus last as I’m not familiar with it, and at last check, didn’t easily run on Win32. LaTeX is available for Win32 as part of Cygwin amongst other sources, as is OpenOffice.org.

In any case, this is a new role for me, and I look forward to the challenge.

News items for QSP can be sent directly to the new email alias I have for this: qspnews@longQlanRdcMlan.yi.org (remove the interference). Preferred formats for text are plain ASCII text (just put it in the body of the email), OpenDocument Text (as produced by OpenOffice.org), HTML, LyX and LaTeX. Preferred formats for diagrams are PDF, SVG, EPS, PNG or JPEG (the last one is best reserved for photos) — just indicate in the text roughly where you want these diagrams put, and I’ll try to fit them in as best I can.

In other news, I now have some HF kit. BARCfest saw me acquiring a second hand transceiver, a Kenwood TS-120S. Presently I’ve just got it hooked to a simple 40m dipole, and I mainly hover around the WICEN frequency on 40m (7.075MHz LSB). The eventual plan is to set up a full-wavelength 40m loop in the ceiling space of the house (we have a tiled roof) and hook that up to an ATU. I have purchased an ATU, and hope that will arrive some time this week, so before long, I should be contactable on HF. I’m permitted 10W PEP on 80m, 40m, 15m and 10m, and am able to transmit USB, LSB and (once I learn morse), CW.

Hi All…

Just figured I’d bring you all up to date on how the new release is coming along. At this time, all little-endian MIPS builds are complete… and the big-endian builds are nearing their completion, with the MIPS3 BE build expected to be completed in a few hours. Only MIPS4 BE remains.

A number of users have had issues with the beta stages that I released earlier, in particular, there are known oddities with rsync and rm. These oddities arise when an old kernel (<2.6.19) is used. You’ll want at least kernel 2.6.20, preferably 2.6.22 or 2.6.23 running on the machine to use these stages.

Using the existing netboot images, you should still be able to at least set the disk up, extract the contents, then boot a precompiled kernel that’s sufficiently recent. How do you get the kernel? Well, for an up-to-date kernel, your easiest bet is to cross-compile. On a fast box (x86, AMD64… whatever), install genkernel, then use the command genkernel -t mips64-unknown-linux-gnu -S1 (or mips64el, or use mips/mipsel for a 32-bit compiler) to generate the cross compiler. Then use ebuild /path/to/mips-sources-VERSION.ebuild unpack to unpack a copy of the sources to your PORTAGE_TMPDIR (/var/tmp/portage by default). Then follow the instructions in the handbook as per normal, specifying CROSS_COMPILE=mips64-unknown-linux-gnu- (or mips64el…) when running make.

To get the kernel modules onto the machine, run make modules_install INSTALL_MOD_PATH=/somewhere, then tar these up. Then from the SGI box, use scp inside the chroot to download them, and unpack into /. Use the same procedure to fetch the vmlinux (or vmlinux.32) binary from your build host.

I’ve put up a new netboot image for Cobalt, although I’ve noticed 2.6.23 mips-sources has some stability issues with Cobalt, so I may yet put up another netboot image. Lemote users should find the existing images are sufficiently recent to run these stages, so I haven’t worried about putting newer images up for that platform. I’m not sure how the big-endian netboot images are constructed, so at this time, I’m not able to provide images for these platforms. (Plus, I can only test R4k IP22, IP28 or RM5k2 IP32… my Octane is dead for now.)

I hope to be uploading some material in a fortnight’s time for you to all try out.