Well, I now have my Didj, a Serial->USB breakoutboard, and a DJHI v2.0 prototype board. With these I’m able to get serial access to the Didj. I’ve flashed a new version of the Lightning Boot bootloader which jburks has been hard at work on. It adds a boot menu which is very useful for booting new kernels off of an SD card. jburks also has a preliminary kernel driver to access the SD card from within Linux.

Yesterday I went ahead and bought a Fuzebox which is an open source 8-bit console that is compatible with the Uzebox. Sadly, it won’t be here till next month (most likely.) It’s currently back ordered (which I knew while ordering it) but is expected to be back in stock the 29th. So hopefully early next month it’ll be here. Of course, it’s probably better that it’ll be a couple weeks it gets here.

I’ve been sort of obsessing over Uzebox lately. Even without purchasing the hardware yet, I’m getting a pretty excited about the possibilities of this small little console. Not just from the programming aspect, but also because Fuzebox looks like a great exercise in assembling/soldering. I’ve also been considering how/where I should cut the case that Fuzebox provides in their “Starter Kit.” For instance, the one of the things I imagine I’ll be using often is the FTDI to upload code to test and play with.

I decided it was time to have some form of backups in place. Currently all I’m really (automatically) backing up is the WordPress MySQL table since it’s the thing to changes on a regular basis. Everything else on this server can be backed up by hand when/if I make changes. It would be faster if/when something does fail (hard drive most likely) to have a recent full backup image to restore from, but really, a good backup of the MySQL table(s), a backup of important configuration files (since they rarely change, I back them up manually after change(s)), and a backup up various directories that’d be nice to restore quickly (most of which change infrequently.

I have to say, my server is performing beyond my initial expectations! I think I have everything tweaked to not use massive amounts of RAM (coughMySQLcough.) Here’s how the free -m currently looks: $ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 121 90 31 0 2 46 -/+ buffers/cache: 41 80 Swap: 1121 14 1107 As you can see, it’s doing pretty good. I’ve even upped the maximum simultaneous Apache connections since it seems to be able to handle that a better now (rather then bringing the server to its knees when something like 10-15 people tried to access it at once.

Because of my renewed interest in Z80 and wanting to better learn assembly programming, I ultimately want to do a bit with Game Gear/SMS coding. For this though, an emulator with at least some basic debugging facilities would be useful. After searching Linux Game Gear emulators, none really had what I was looking for. On my first attempt, I decided Dega looked interesting, it has source available. The two major turn offs of Dega was the Z80 core which is x86 assembly, which is obviously not portable and it’s license which basically says, do what you want to the source, as long as it’s not sold.

I’m currently learning Z80 assembly (I’ve read the book once, but now I’m actually working through the exercises.) I have to say, it’s fun and a bit challenging at times. The challenge is partly learning the tools. I’m currently using z80pack. From that I’m using z80asm and z80sim. I’ve played a bit with the cpm2&3sim emulator that comes with it, but I currently only really need z80sim. z80asm can be a bit strange at time (or perhaps just more strict then the book.

So, while I’ve been trying to get kdelibs 4.3.2 built on Arch Linux PPC. I decided since Arch PPC hasn’t had any packages updated in about six months that I should probably do something crazy like grab the official Arch’s ABS to build all the packages from. Now, 130 built packages later I’m close. Perhaps I should put into perspective what was needed to be updated. The packages ranged from GCC, Binutils, & Glibc, to xulrunner, to hal, to mysql, to pygtk, to gnome-vfs.

Update Sept 04, 2011 As this still gets comments occasionally, I should clearly note that this is (and has been for some time) an accepted issue on Arch’s bug tracker. There is a basic accepted game plan for how it will be implemented, but is currently marked as low-priority. If you’re interested in the details look at: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16702#comment80122. Also, please do not comment on that bug report because it’s very close to being closed just to keep people from further commenting “new ‘solutions’ that we simply won’t implement.