The embedded Linux project came back to life this week when the manufacturer sent us some new video driver source for the SiS 550 on the Vortex86-6071LV. At present the new driver seems to work as well as the old one; i.e. not very well at all... Anyway, whilst adjusting the BIOS settings for the LCD panel I managed to set them to something which meant that neither the LCD panel nor the external VGA would display anything. Since both displays were dead during boot up and since I hadn't made a note of the key presses required to navigate…
My client has decided that we should ignore the video driver problem and press on with the proof of concept using the external VGA screen as a display. So this week was spent learning about building software for a machine running a minimal Linux installation using libc 2.3.2 on a machine running a proper distro using libc something else...…
Software development is hard. Lots of details that are hard to get your head around and harder to simplify. CodeProject is a wonderful resource for Windows programmers where programmers try and make the complicated more simple for others; I view it as giving something back. If I've spent several weeks fighting to understand a problem and now I do it's nice to write up and article and post it, either here, or on CodeProject, so that others don't have to fight so hard. Where's the similar resource for Unix?…
Today was "get the Vortex86's SiS 550 graphics card working in graphics mode" day. In summary, I didn't and it's because the LCD is a DSTN one and the current Linux SiS drivers don't support it yet...…
This afternoon has been "one of those" afternoons. It started innocently enough when I checked my mail and my cables had arrived. I plugged a floppy drive into the Vortex86 and checked that I could boot off of it into DOS. All was well, if you ignore the fact that the only way I could get a) a floppy drive and b) a power supply to power it was to take the cover off of a 1U server box that I had laying around and use the PSU and floppy drive from that. What makes that even worse is the…
As I mentioned yesterday I'm currently playing around with Linux on an embedded PC. Stage 0: was to get a build environmet set up. That's complete now and I have a build of the 2.4.31 kernel running whilst I type this.…
One of my clients has asked me to do some investigative work for them in relation to Linux running on a Vortex86-6071LV (a PC/104 format PC which is 386 PC on a board that's around 6" x 4" x 1/2"). Should be fun.…
