What's going on

2000-12-10

chmod 666 /dev/tty

2000-11-22

Made "untic" an alias for "infocmp" (AIX-ism).

Installed several Japanese fonts to get around the kterm problem.

2000-11-15

Compiled jvim and wipjvim and wipe. wipe requires a small patch to compile.

2000-11-05

Compiled w3m, which seems to work correctly with my Big5 patch (as "correctly" as a beta-quality program works). Running it configured in Japanese mode shows that kterm is hosed (because the X library is hosed... sigh).

Recompiled kterm with the usual double-byte hacks so that w3m can actually work.

1999-09-15

Upgraded autoconf to 2.13; rm -fr /usr/lib/autoconf as a result. This is for tinkering with the configure.in in lynx 2.8.3 (developer's version); but upgrading in fact didn't help.

1999-07-30

Compiled and installed Roxen Challenger 1.3.111; it seems to work basically "right out of the box". It requires a small patch. (Roxen bug; not a Netwinder problem. It seems to require different such small patches for different combinations of libc and kernel versions; this patch only works with my set-up, i.e., glibc2 + 2.0 kernel.)

1999-07-24

Compiled OpenSSL and installed it in the default place. It requires a small patch. (Made the system type "linux-elf-arm"; it's just "linux-elf" minus the i486 stuff.) Passes the test suite. Compiled lynx 2.8.2 with SSL support and installed it in the usual xhier place; SSL support is working according to the SSL test page. My configure command line is available if you want to look at it.

crxvt basically works right out of the box except of the cli_xcin.c patching (which means it will have a big problem when Netwinder's X library is fixed :P). Only thing is my patch was not correct; the xcin client code (cli_xcin.c) is now really fixed now; the new correct patch is here. (It's a string termination problem. I wonder why it didn't affect tgif.)

1999-07-13

The xcin client code (cli_xcin.c) is also fixed now; the patch is here.

tgif 4.1.16 is now also coerced into working now; the patch is here. The cli_xcin.c patch is identical to the cli_xcin.c patch referred to above; the text.c patch applies to all platforms (fixes a backspacing problem) and is already submitted to the author of tgif; the font.c patch is completely Netwinder DM12-specific and involves hideous code to work around the XDrawString16 weirdness. (Sorry, I haven't tried the newer images; I know.)

1999-07-11

Fixed xcin 2.3.04; the char signedness problem was fixed in June (I think), now the struct alignment stuff is fixed, I think. There are only two or three places where it needs to be fixed: actually two, maybe three, as the third place (a char* cast into an int*) perhaps doesn't need fixing and I haven't fixed the rest of the same kind of problems. Anyway, the patch for xcin 2.3.04 is here. You may also want to grab my cj.tab patch if you use the CangJie input method to input a lot of stuff with punctuation.

Note that the fixed xcin still has some cosmetic problems (not related to the Netwinder); it's probably not worthwhile to fix that, though, as this version of xcin is already considered deprecated.

(As to why I am not working on the current, recommended version: I don't have anything working to test against, as my i486 box is still running libc5. The new version of xcin requires glibc2 to work.)

1999-07-10

Took up xcin (2.3.04 -- a deprecated version, unfortunately) again. I got xcin+crxvt working on the i486, so I now actually have something to test xcin against. Turns out that xcin running on a direct X connection behaves differently than one running through an ssh tunnel (the latter behaves a bit better); very strange.

1999-07-09

The Netwinder's keyboard mysteriously locked up (without an apparent reason) while I was in X, and the syslog logged a lot of IDE errors; it was still accessible via console. After a while, the i486 box went down too (without anything in the syslog), shortly after I logged onto the i486 to reboot the Netwinder. This whole thing feels really weird.

1999-06-17

tgif 4.1.16 in fact does not work correctly; basically it's the CJK stuff again, so I don't expect it to ever work. At least not until I upgrade my disk image and see if anything got/can be fixed.

Got xcin compiled, but it doesn't work; instant segfault when I click inside the window, though the characters miraculously do display correctly.

Ralph Siemsen (ralphs) asked me about the version of my C library because the rc5 client actually runs on my system. Unfortunately, I haven't upgraded them, and probably won't for a long while until I can clear some space and make my Netwinder dual-boot. Perhaps now I will have more incentive to do just that...

Or perhaps getting a second Netwinder ($) will be faster than this procrastination. Hmm...

1999-06-12

mysql didn't get built; gcc died on a signal 11. I guess I'll give up.

Getting kaffe to compile is trickier than expected. You need to touch kaffe/kaffevm/jit/icode.h; it thinks it needs this jit file, but the JIT compiler is nonfunctional on ARM. Creating the empty jit/icode.h seems to solve this dilemma, since the regression tests ("make check") actually pass. However, the GUI stuff does not seem to work. For example, ICQ generates no output; the included demos also generates incorrect output.

Downloaded the distributed.net rc5des client, and got it running.

1999-06-11

Trying to compile mysql (only the libraries, really) and kaffe.

To get mysql to configure, you need to replace config.guess and config.sub.

Getting kaffe to configure is a weeny bit tricky. You need to cd config; ln -s arm armv4l. Otherwise kaffe will say the system is unsupported, which is obviously false because the docs explicitly say that ARM (and in fact explictely say that the Netwinder) is supported.

Compiled tgif 4.1.16 and installed in the default locations. It actually seems to work correctly.

1999-06-09

Upgraded the firmware to the unofficial 2.0.8g. This made my system unbootable because my kernel was too old. So I actually got to figure out how to set up tftp, to avoid shipping the unit back again.

1999-06-02

Got Mozilla M6 compiled. It dumps core nicely, with or without gdb. Perhaps I should just try compiling tgif.

1999-05-13

Got TiMidity compiled after replacing (not patching) config.guess and config.sub. The thing basically works, but only to a point: when a MIDI file is played, after about 2 seconds of normal sound, the quality of the sound will suddenly deteriorate to very, very bad (very, very slow). This only affects realtime playback; batch conversions (e.g., MIDI to WAV) are not affected. Very strange.

1999-05-02

Put /software/x11_windowmaker/lib into /etc/ld.so.conf and reran ldconfig. Otherwise changing the background won't work.

Tried again to compile Mozilla. The make finished without producing any executable. Very strange.

Picked up cxterm again. Got the screwed-up bold hanzi problem narrowed down to the HZ_XDrawString16 function (screen.c). Either my patch to HZ_XDrawString16 is not working (unlikely, since it's essentially the same patch as the one for HZ_XDrawImString16), or the X server or library is screwed: the latter isn't really that unlikely, since even xfd doesn't work for multibyte fonts.

1999-05-01

Got WindowMaker 0.53 compiled and installed. The configure script for both libPropList and WindowMaker is here.

1999-04-29

Got libPropList compiled and installed. WindowMaker 0.53 requires the patch to config.guess and config.sub in order to configure, and requires the removal of /usr/lib/gcc-lib/arm-linuxelf/2.8.1/include/zlib.h to compile.

1999-04-24

Got libIDL compiled, after installing Scott Bambrough's patch to config.guess and config.sub, and installed libIDL under /software/mozilla_dev.

1999-04-23

Got glib-1.2 and gtk+-1.2 compiled and installed. Got libIDL so that mozilla can (hopefully) be compiled.

Haven't done anything on the Netwinder (in fact on anything basically) for a long time -- long work hours, other stuff to do, plus am still quite sick after more than a month :(

1999-03-31 Took the Netwinder to work for a demonstration to a reporter colleague. (Ok, I work for a daily newspaper.) Took me more than two hours to make the network settings correct; hmm, this should have been a trivial thing for an NC, but not.

So what happened was xdm and ssh were segfaulting for no reason. After I changed /etc/nsswitch.conf to have nis consulted before other things, the machine worked flawlessly. So they stopped segfaulting for no apparent reason either.

Haven't done anything on the Netwinder (in fact on anything basically) for a long time -- long work hours, plus turns out that I have been quite sick for more than a week.

1999-03-02 The cxterm "missing characters" problem is not solved after all; Joshua Lamorie notices that bold characters are not handled properly and is creating a mess when they appear. Too tired to really look into the problem, but I glanced over the code and noticed no obvious errors.
1999-03-01 The cxterm "missing characters" problem is solved. The X server and the X headers don't agree to the alignment of the XChar2b structure, so it is impossible to fix the cxterm code. I have hacked a workaround which introduces more invalid assumptions (but which make the cxterm binary actually display correctly).

Now that cxterm proper is cleared (sort of), I am looking into the tit2cit segfault problem. No results yet.

1999-02-28 Continued to debug the cxterm "missing characters" problem. The supposedly (so I believe) version produces some other strange results.
1999-02-27 Started working with cxterm. I notice the "missing characters" problem mentioned by Joshua Lamorie in the list. However, the problem only seems to affect GB2312 and not Big5. (I haven't tried building the auxiliary programs.) There is no patch yet because I haven't finished building the whole thing. (Yes, it requires patches to a few files.)
1999-02-26 Wrong symlink in stock build 10. /usr/tmp symlinked to var/tmp (which is wrong; should be either /var/tmp or ../var/tmp).

Built and installed the MFCF "users" package (msg, msgd, mesg). The sources has one minor bug, and one place which can be tweaked (so that it knows /var/run/utmp); the patch is here. Note that this follows the MFCF xhier instead of Linux FHS or classic Unix hier(7) even in the stock package (obviously).

1999-02-25 The Netwinder froze while I took my i486 box down for Linux 2.2 testing. The Netwinder functioned properly for a while, but not long enough before I gave up on routing by source on 2.2 and brought my i486 box back into 2.0.
1999-02-24 Compiled jikes, but didn't do anything with it.
1999-02-02 The Netwinder crashed again today. While it is known that xfs is incredibly fragile and the X servers accessing xfs are also as fragile, I didn't know that xfs dying will cause the Netwinder to freeze hard. Had to reboot.
1999-01-28 Installed the JRE and JavaICQ. Someone said that JavaICQ works strange; it does work very strangely. For one, some dialog boxes (the "Send message" dialog, for example) are missing some critical widgets such as the "Ok" button. Also, it takes forever for JavaICQ to shut down itself (much slower than my 66 Mhz i486).

Somehow, LD_LIBRARY_PATH isn't enough for the JRE; I have to put the JRE into /etc/ld.so.conf.

1999-01-27 The Netwinder crashed without any reason while WindowMaker was starting. Had to reboot.
1999-01-19 I still can't Mozilla to compile; it failed on non-existent files like nsIURL.h.

Meanwhile, sshd is still giving me problems. Despite the application of Russell King's gpm patch, sshd is still failing intermittently due to a "Corrupted check bytes on input" error.

1999-01-13 Installed GTK/Glib 1.1.6, for the attempt to compile Mozilla. The configure script for Mozilla is here.
1999-01-09

Got the xaudio MP3 player and searched for some MP3 files to play. (This is my first try at MP3.)

Recompiled ssh 1.2.26 with Russel King's patch in addition to my own trivial patch. Hopefully Russel's patch will get rid of the annoying intermittent "bad checksum on input" problem.

1998-12-30

Compiled and installed the 2.0.35 (981211) kernel. Sound does not work; I don't know why.

Actually it turns out that sound works, but I need to insmod sound with reverse=1, even though my board is Rev5; I don't know why. As well, xterm's bell is now just a very faint, subtle beep, and the volume control knob doesn't do anything any more.

1998-12-23

Compiled and installed the GIMP. The configure script is here.

1998-12-09

The Netwinder has returned, after only a day. Aside from fixing massive filesystem errors and recompiling ZMailer, the box arrived intact. The fan has been fixed.

1998-12-07

The Netwinder has been shipped back. I miss my Netwinder... Accelerated X (on my i486 box) works with xli and tgif really poorly, and I am depending on tgif for some important graphs. I guess I'll have to switch back to XFree86 with only 256 colours...

1998-11-29

Nothing happened these days, because the Netwinder will be shipped back to Corel shortly.

1998-11-28

Long day at work.

ZMailer 2.99.50s11 compiles; Matti has put in some code to handle the new kind of Berkeley DB. The router seems to function correctly. The thing even seems to deliver mail. Good...

1998-11-26

Nothing happened today.

Well, the Netwinder's temperature drops to around 45°C. This is crazy, it didn't drop this low even when the fan was working; I guess I'll keep this arrangement and let the PC fan keep the Netwinder cool...

This page will from now on be automatically mirrored by the sitecopy command.

1998-11-25

If you look at my temperature graph, you will notice that the temperature dropped a bit (about 3°C lower). Well, it's not the Netwinder's fan working; I rearranged my machines so that the PC fan blows directly at the Netwinder. I will have to ship the Netwinder back for another repair.

1998-11-24 Used the opportunity of upgrading the 486's kernel to 2.0.36 to figure out whether the fan is in fact spinning or not. I don't think it is spinning. D'oh.

chgrp wheel /var/log/message; chmod g+r /var/spool/messages

1998-11-23 Fixed /etc/snmpd.conf. The "rest" community only shows the contact name, which is rather useless. Also, I made separate entries for eth0 and eth1; knowing that this is a Netwinder also implies that we know the speeds of eth0 and eth1.

Turns out that I already have bzip2 in /usr/bin. Oh well, wasted effort, but not much.

vi /etc/printcap; mknod -m 666 /dev/null0 c 1 3; mkdir /var/run/lp; chown lp /var/run/lp; chmod g+w /var/run/lp. Copies the print filters from ada. Unfortunately, after fiddling with the lpd subsystem for more than half an hour, I still can't figure out how to make any print filter work. Giving up on this for the day.

Kanji fonts work correctly after all. It was my own config problem.

1998-11-22
(PM)
After turning on the machine for compiling stuff and re-creating scripts, it seems to have stabilized at around 50°C, so there's a chance the fan is working (but in low setting only) after all. I guess I'll leave it on for the night and examine the MRTG graphs next morning.

Like my previous attempts, neither ZMailer nor Roxen Challenger compiles. I guess I'll tackle this later, like a week later...

  • Compiled libdes and installed it into the normal place (/usr/local) because of laziness. This (libdes) is for netatalk.
  • Compiled netatalk-1.4b2+asun (with libdes support), with some minor patches. Installed mostly into /software/atalk-1.4b2, though "make install" did create a Red Hat style boottime script. Seems to work, but the installed /etc/rc.d/init.d/atalk is a bit weird, which I patched somewhat and sent the patches back to asun.
  • Downloaded the kernel sources and compiled it (+transparent proxy, -allow large windows, +ppp/slip module).
  • vi /etc/vi.exrc. Added "print" line (containing all the non-ASCII ISO-8859-1 characters) and "octal" line.
  • While the cable modem drops dead again, everything just screws up. The Netwinder is stuck in a very weird state. Finally got to it via ssh, manually killed some processes (e.g., gpm can't be killed by gpm -k, weird), then rebooted it.
1998-11-22
(AM)
I suppose the fan really is not working. I am now turning the Netwinder off after use.
1998-11-21 Temporarily renamed /usr/include/utmpx.h so that ssh and screen can be compiled; glibc2 doesn't seem to fully implement the utmpx functions.
  • Compiled ssh-1.2.26 and installed it into /software/ssh-1.2.26.
  • Recompiled screen-3.7.4 and installed it into /software/screen-3.7.4. (Manually copied screencap and screeninfo.src to /software/screen-3.7.4/data.) The stock screen will be removed shortly (since it segfaults), but not yet.
  • Compiled xlock (xlockmore-4.11) and installed it into /software/x11,contrib. (Manually copied XLock.ad to /software/x11,contrib/data.) Somehow, its configure script failed to detect ELF. I modified config.h manually (#define HAVE_SHADOW), but configure.in should need to be fixed.
  • chmod a+rwxt /var/tmp /var/preserve. nvi as root to create /var/tmp/vi.recover. Hmm...
Display of kanji fonts fetched from xfs doesn't work at all; PostScript fonts fetched from xfs work though. I don't know why. I'll see some time if locally stored Chinese fonts work; they probably will, as locally stored Japanese and Korean fonts do.

Actually it seems that locally stored kanji fonts don't work either, or perhaps they sometimes don't work. They definitely work in Netscape, but they don't work when I use xfd. Strange.

Turns out that the mv/cp problem has been mentioned on the list. Recompiled fileutils-3.16 with patched config.h (#undef HAS_LCHOWN) and reinstalled chown, chgrp, cp, install, and mv.

The fan control on Build 10 doesn't seem to be working. I think my Netwinder is running on low setting, though the kernel thinks it is running on high, and the Netwinder is getting very hot (53°C). I'm going to reboot the machine and see if it helps. If not, I'll turn off the machine for the night.

Actually I think the fan is not running at all. I guess I'll try flashing the NeTTrom again. I hope I will be lucky this time. It's 3am now. So I guess I'll do this tomorrow.

rm /bin/vi /usr/bin/vi; ln -s nvi /usr/bin/vi. I can't stand vim any more; it is making me make too many errors.

1998-11-20
(PM)
Updated this page.
  • Compiled bzip2 and installed it into the normal place (/usr/local).
  • Fixed showpath to do the right thing when we showpath x11. Ok, this is not a Netwinder thing, but it affects the way WindowMaker is going to be used on my Netwinder.
  • Compiled libpng and libjpeg (from ftp.windowmaker.org) and installed into the normal place (/usr/local). Compiled zlib so that libpng can be compiled, but did not install zlib.
  • Compiled WindowMaker and installed into /software/x11_windowmaker.
  • Compiled asclock, wmload, wmmail, and installed into /software/x11_windowmaker_contrib. ln -s /software/x11_windowmaker_contrib/data/pixmaps/*/* /usr/include/X11/pixmaps/
mv /foo/bar /baz, where /foo is ext2 and /baz is nfs, gives "Function not implemented".
1998-11-20
(AM)
A bit disappointed that the utmp mismatch problem is still on the new build. Also, pasting text within screen(1) still causes screen to dump core. Will have a lot of stuff to recompile :-(
  • (Check in each system file into RCS as they are configured.)
  • vi /etc/XF86Config. Added monitor spec for my monitor. Nice change from Metro-X, which doesn't do anything special for my PC's clgd5428, and from Accelerated X, which does wonders given the clgd5428, but doesn't quite work (xli does nothing at random times).
  • vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifconfig-eth1
  • vi /etc/sysconfig/network. Add an NISDOMAIN line.
  • vi /etc/hosts. ypserv needs it.
  • Tried to vi /etc/named.boot, but doesn't figure out how to make it work. Eventually avoided the problem with vi /etc/resolv.conf and made the Netwinder ignore the local named for now.
  • ln -s ../init.d/ypbind.init /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S51ypbind. Ditto for rc5.d. vi /etc/yp.conf (added ypserver line).
  • vi /etc/passwd /etc/group (added + line at end to enable NIS). passwd root
  • vi /etc/nsswitch.conf. passwd and group lines need compat.
  • mkdir /u; vi /etc/fstab to make sure /u can be NFS-mounted.
  • mkdir -p /home/software/{arch,local,share}; ln -s /home/software /.software; ln -s .software/share /software
  • compile showpath and lc, and install them in the correct places (/software/mfcf-basics/bin/showpath and /software/mfcf-misc/bin/lc). cp -a /software/mfcf-basics/bin/lc /bin
  • vi /etc/bashrc to change PS1. Ok, this one is cosmetic.
1998-11-19 Got the NetWinder back from CCC, freshly reflashed and the disk remastered.
1998-10-22 I hosed my NetWinder again. After upgrading my NetTrom, the machine doesn't boot any more. Yes, the flash-burning screwed up without me noticing. Moral: bad idea to flash a ROM 3am in the morning.

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