Tollef Fog Heen's blog

We arrived at the FOSDEM campus after a public transport switch from the subway to a tram. The whole trip took about thirty minutes. Met a bunch of people I already knew, which was nice, as always. I talked a bit with Paul Sladen and a sales representative from a company doing Linux-based access points. Very nice hardware, based off an ARM system mostly everything on a chip: five-port switch (with two MACs), flash (4MB) and RAM (32MB) controllers. Also, it had a PCI bridge which meant a bunch of other useful stuff could be hooked up. On the version I looked at, there was a USB controller and two Mini-PCI slots. Very nice, and it wasn't too expensive either.

Later in the day, I listened to a "how to release Debian" talk by Andreas Barth and an emDebian talk by Wookey. Walked around a bit more and talked with some debian-uk people, including Matthew Garret who wanted me to read through his platform. Interesting stuff.

The wireless network was really sucky, so talking with Karianne on IRC wasn't too easy. We chatted for a bit and though we both miss each other, we're having fun.

In the evening, we got out and ate dinner with (again) some debian-uk people. Very nice meal, good disussions and wine. Ended up on a pub which closed sillily early (midnight). Walked a bit more around, got into a few places which were just noisy and so headed home.

In total, it was a nice day with some silly walking around and waiting, but I didn't mind.

I was in Oslo this weekend, working on Hardware.no stuff. When I got mail, I had an unusual amount of mail in the mailbox: Four letters adressed to me. One from KLM, one from the bank where I had my mortage, one from my bank and one from TNT. KLM was plane tickets for Australia, as I suspected. The mortage bank was the papers saying my loan was paid back, yay! My own bank was a letter to sign for opening a savings account. The letter from TNT wasn't a bill. I was very surprised over this, as I paid a few hundred kroner in customs for my Ubuntu CDs last time, but this time the total value of the shipment was EUR 0.23. Yes, 34 kg CDs worth about a quarter of an Euro.

As most mornings lately, this morning was fairly slow. Got up, had breakfast and spent some time cleaning up the house. I decided to get my bike fixed as I left the house -- the brakes have been terrible lately, the grips are falling apart and the seat has seen better days. In addition, the front gear shifter is really broken. I dropped by the bike shop and told them what needed to be fixed. The guy asked me when I needed it by and I said I wasn't really in a hurry, but how long would it take? "Just drop by before 16:30 and it'll be done." Whow!

I had forgotten my USB keychain at home, so I decided to go to Samfundet and see if I was able to work from there. I wasn't really and ended up trying to trace down some weird bugs in Evolution where it breaks royally on AMD64. I still need to work more on it, but I've gotten it down to just three version shifts now, at least.

Karianne and I were at the Nerd pizza, which was fairly quiet for once, then we went to Samfundet for a concert. It was good -- surprisingly good. I also played a fair bit with my camera and did both some shots and videos. Hoping to blog a bit about that tomorrow or so, including som samples.

We ended up spending a few more hours at Samfundet before heading home and going to bed.

I got my money from the sale of a part of Hardware.no today. First thing I did was to call the bank get my mortage loan done. Yay!

Life has been busy lately. Lots of time goes into getting my thesis started. I now have a build daemon working, so I can build packages a bit more automatically. I'm a bit behind schedule, but I have put in some extra allowance for that, so it should be ok.

Last Saturday, Karianne and I were at Magni's and Anders' where we had some excellent lasagne for dinner. Sat around until about midnight before we walked home. A nice and quiet evening. Karianne was quite tired when we got home and we argued a bit, which was silly of both of us.

Yesterday and today has been spent hacking on the build daemon, and I think I have everything working properly now, and I'll get going with building a small-scale test implementation of the multiarch system.

The jigsaw Karianne and I are laying is coming closer to an end, and I think we have about 60% of the pieces laid in the right places. That means a lot more than 60% of the work is done, though. I'll put up lots of pictures once we're done.

After about a week of gcc compiles, I have multiarch working now. Mostly, at least:

(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp# cat hello.c
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  fprintf(stderr, "hello multiarched world\n");
}
(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp#

A trivial hello.c. Then, we have a multiarched libc6 and libc6-dev:

(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp# ls /usr/include/stdio.h
ls: /usr/include/stdio.h: No such file or directory
(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp# ls /usr/include/i386-linux/stdio.h
/usr/include/i386-linux/stdio.h
(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp#

Matching libraries:

(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp# ls /usr/lib/libc.so /lib/libc.so.6
ls: /usr/lib/libc.so: No such file or directory
ls: /lib/libc.so.6: No such file or directory
(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp# ls -1 /usr/lib/i386-linux/libc.so /lib/i386-linux/libc.so.6
/lib/i386-linux/libc.so.6
/usr/lib/i386-linux/libc.so
(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp#

Then, compile, check, run:

(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp# gcc-3.4 hello.c -o hello
(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp# file hello
hello: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for
GNU/Linux 2.2.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp# ldd hello
                libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux/libc.so.6 (0xb7eb1000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fea000)
(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp#
(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp# ./hello
hello multiarched world
(hoary-clean)root@shonap:/tmp#

Yay!

Of course, there are minor problems left, like gcc thinking that it installs the 64 bit libraries into /usr/lib/i486-linux/x86_64-linux, that it currently can't compile for 64 bit due to the symlink from libgcc_s_64.so being missing and other minor stuff like that. It seems glibc also needs a minor adjustment (just a missing symlink from i486-linux to i386-linux in /usr/include).

As a final test, I scp-ed the 64 bit binary I built (after having created the libgcc_s_64 symlink by hand) to an AMD64, and it works beautifully there.

The last week was spent hacking on gcc and binutils. Binutils was the simple one, it only took a couple of hours. Gcc has been less cooperative. I'm getting it beaten into shape, but it will probably take a few more days to actually work the right way. Which technically means I'm a bit late, but I'm not going to start worrying too much about that yet.

The weekend was relaxing, played a bit of games and read a bit. In addition, Karianne and I started on a 3000-piece jigsaw, which will take a little while to complete. It's fun, though, and requires a lot more discipline than a 500-piece one. One actually has to sort the different pieces and assemble the picture bit by bit.

Today, I was at Samfundet, as usual. The network there has had hiccups for a long time, which is then fairly annoying. I researched a bit, talking to Stein, Jorunn, Tormod, Anders and Stein-Magnus. We are going to rework the network a bit, moving a switch from the southern part of the building to the network closet together with the other switches. This will hopefully mean the network will become more stable, as we will have a star of switches rather than a daisy-chain (and we will get rid of some old 3com switches which seem to be a bit unstable). We started working on that today, joining old and some new wires. It took a lot longer than I expected, but we're almost there now, we just have a few more pairs to put up. I think we didn't break much of the network either. Hopefully at least.

I'm getting loads of work done while still keeping my energy. It's so good, even though being full of energy at past 0400 in the morning isn't the best time of the day.