Embedded Linux Boot Process.

A few days back I came across a really good post that gave me insight into the booting of an  Embedded Linux system. Here goes the booting process. It is divided into 2 parts..

PART-1

(1) Software components Involved in Embedded Linux Boot Process

(a) Bootloader

(b) kernel Image

(c) root file system – either an initrd image or a NFS location

(2) Steps during Booting process of a conventional PC

(a) System Startup – PC-BIOS/BootMonitor

(b) Stage1 bootloader – MBR

(c) stage2 bootloader – LILO,GRUB etc

(d) kernel – Linux

(e) init – The User Space

(3) Booting process for an Emebedded Systems

Its Bullet Proof Loneliness.

Im just a face in the crowd

“I closed my eyes and fired the gun, but I didn’t hit her. So I shot again.  I had to bury her and put dirt on top of her.” The commander said, ” You’ll have to do this many more times, and you’ll have to learn not to cry.”

Tomorrow’s getting harder, make no mistake

Luck ain’t even lucky, gotta make your own

graves, Its MY life….

Ever tried to imagine the life of a child fighter ?

Even I had not.But I read somewhere, that in order to understand the life of a child fighter, this is what you had to imagine.

“Imagine not being able to dream. Imagine that you grew up expecting to die, grew up expecting not to live past 20″

My post starts with the quote of  a small girl, Angela, just 12.

iPhone v Palm Pre v Android G1

How do the new smartphones stack up in terms of features, sticker price and total cost?

BillShrink, a website that offers free personalized analysis of cellphone, credit card and gas costs, has lined the phones up in an easy-to-read chart .It compares …

• Apple’s (AAPL) new iPhone 3G S, which goes on sale next Friday
• Palm (PALM) Pre, which went on sale last Saturday
• HTC’s G1, the first cellphone running on Google’s (GOOG) Android platform

BillShrink’s bottom line properly draws attention to the total cost of ownership over the life of a 2 year contract.

Porting Parcellite

In this post I will describe how I ported Parcellite, a clip board manager to Solaris using IPS.

When I learnt that i could port any application to Solaris, I first visited http://sourceforge.net, where you get thousands of free and open source applications.I chose to start with a lightweight application based on GTK called Parcellite, a clipboard manager.

I downloaded the tar file, and quicky uncompressed it and ran the following commands.

- . /configure.

- make.

- make install.

On running  ./configure, i found out that i had an older version of some GTK libraries,I updated them, and then it ran fine. I specified the install directory and Parcellite was installed.

The Supplementary Story.

Long time since i blogged again! Its happening too often.

>> Rewind. My last post was on June 15th and it is now july 5th. After completing the internship at Sun, I had to study for my supplementary examinations. Yeah. I had a supple in organic chemistry. A long story behind that as well. I always wanted to have a supple, because i firmly believe in experiencing everything the college has to offer and not offer. I always used to see people have so much fun studying for supple…Playing cards, getting stone cold drunk before the exam, studying a bit and managing to pass. I always thought I was missing out on so many “experiences”.So this was always there in the back of my mind.I wanted a supplementary!

IPS Packages For Open Solaris

Immediately after Fosster ‘ 09, ( A free and open source conference we conducted in our college) Avinash got a mail from SUN Microsystems. It was a call for summer internship for those who had contributed to OSUM. I, having contributed to OSUM through bug-fixes in OHAC, got selected. I was delighted at the prospect and we chose to do it online, which meant we could do a good project over summer in college, coupled with this. Killing two birds with one stone!

Promptly on May 17th I got a mail from one Mr. Ajay Kumar from Sun Microsystems.It said we had to work on IPS, which meant we would be porting apps to Open Solaris by creating IPS packages.I found a lot of help in the forums and the opensolaris website and this was what I had to do.

The 4 major steps, broken down are:

1) Build the package using common method like, make, make install and figure out the dependencies.
2) Set up build environment (CBE)
3) Write a spec file.
4) Use pkgtool to generate IPS.