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The Road to Coreboot, Part the First: Introduction

Coreboot Logo

So as part of my IAESTE placement with PC Engines, I’m investigating the possibility of them making a new board based around the AMD Fusion series of APU’s  (CPU+(something else, usually GPU) on single die) and for that board to work with the Open Source Coreboot BIOS. This is my story.

Disclaimer

I am not a hardware guy, and have never done any pre-OS x86 hardware programming. This will bore
the pants of anyone who is an x86 expert, but hopefully some will find it useful and will contribute to the Coreboot project. Continue reading ›

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2011 07 28 Bolster Instructional Comments (1) Permalink

Stuff I’ve found interesting in the past month – 23/07/2011

2011 07 23 Bolster Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

GalepX Language settings in Linux

Galep-5 Universal ProgrammerAs part of my placement in Zurich, I’ve been doing some BIOS level development around the Coreboot project, working with Flashrom and other tools, but with a particular AMD Fusion (MSI E350IA-E45) Mobo, there was no sensible way to flash the BIOS or to add a ‘vestigial’ BIOS.

So, the solution arrived at was to ‘acquire’ a Galep-5 Universal Programmer (Not a cheap piece of kit, but apparently that’s the kind of stuff they have lying around in Zurich). Anyway, long story short, went to the Galep website, downloaded the .run file, installed, all perfect and happy days. Except it was in German. (Even though it says its ‘English only’)

My German is only slightly better than my Martian, so I had no idea what was going on, but a quick look in the /opt/galepx directory showed a mdma.settings file. In there there’s an XML section like this


res/tr/de.tr
false

Simple enough, change the de to en and welcome back to the anglophile world!

2011 07 19 Bolster Instructional Comments (0) Permalink

Replace Unity with AWN and Gnome-Do

Unity Sucks, and I don’t like it. I prefer a combination of Avant Window Navigator, tilda, and Gnome-Do, to go from this

Unity, kinda, screen shots don't really work for launchers

Unity, kinda, screen shots don't really work for launchers

to this

My Avant Setup

My Avant Setup

Now, I haven’t kept track of all of the changes I’ve made to my configuration files, so YMMV, but gnome-do and Avant have remarkably good GUI configuration tools, so customise to your hearts content!

Get rid of Unity

sudo apt-get remove unity unity-asset-pool unity-place-applications unity-place-applications

Install the fun-stuff

sudo apt-get install gnome-do gnome-do-plugins avant-window-navigator awn-settings tilda

(I personally prefer to get all the plugins aswell, but thats personal choice; just add in awn-applets-all to the above command)

At this point, it’ll look like nothing has changed; just log out or log back in (Or reboot), and then unity will be gone (Woohoo!). The Gnome-Do Launcher should have come up, and if you’ve clicked out of it, it will come back to the foreground with a [windows\command]+Space press.

If everything has gone well, you can type ‘Avant’ in this launcher, and boom, there should be a window at the bottom. This is the avant launcher.

Default Avant Window Navigator

Default Avant Window Navigator

Now for some fun stuff.

Use gnome-do to start tilda. This is a quake-style terminal that pops down from the top of the screen with a quick [F1] click. Much better than the standard [alt+F2] command launcher.

As for the preferences, hack away at the Avant settings until you’re happy. The screenshot above is how I like it (this time).

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2011 06 28 Bolster Instructional Comments (4) Permalink

Removing BIOS RAID Metadata

Had an issue with Fedora 15 not liking my harddrives that used to be RAIDed. Noting for future reference.

“Disk contains BIOS metadata, but is not part of any recognized BIOS RAID sets.”

Solution:
dmraid -r -E /dev/????

Stolen from Kezhong

2011 06 25 Bolster Instructional Comments (0) Permalink

Stuff I’ve found interesting in the past month – 23/06/2011

2011 06 23 Bolster Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Change Kindle Network Provider

More a note for myself than anyone else. Stolen shamelessly from Marc Fletcher.

In Settings, alt+e,alt+q, alt+q.

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2011 06 09 Bolster Instructional
Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Accidentally Proper Kindle PDF Document Conversion

Example of standard PDF 'conversion' I’ve discovered a strange undocumented* ‘feature’ of the Amazon Kindle document Delivery system. As it stands, if you send a document to username@free.kindle.com or @kindle.com, the document is sent onto your device at its convenience. Generally this is fine, but for most documents that people actually use (PDFs) this can be a pain as the service says it does not support PDF reflow, and on a smaller than A4/Letter screen, lovely documents end up looking like this…
Continue reading ›

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2011 05 23 Bolster Instructional Comments (7) Permalink

Stuff I’ve found interesting in the past month – 23/05/2011

2011 05 23 Bolster Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Stuff I’ve found interesting in the past month – 23/04/2011

2011 04 23 Bolster Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink