Sponsored By
Efika 5200B Project
Development and courses for schools, students and local institutesin category Applications & Software
proposed by devon on 10th October 2006 (accepted on 19th October 2006)
Project Summary
As a student I\'m involved in the creation of a local community of young developers and Free Software proponents. Our goal will be to collaborate with the local middle and high schools and institutes to create a common open framework, made up of open hardware and free software. The local public administration has been interested too in the making of courses about the open innovation and the adoption of free software.I have no big past experiences, but I\'m willing to learn, and I already started a nice movement here in our city.
The Efika and in future the integration of an Open Server Workstation would be a solid, power efficient base upon which the different solutions could be constructed.
The project would see the use of:
- an Efika board for the different steps of evaluation, development and testing upon PowerPC architecture (are you going to add a standard case with future mass-production Efika boards? Would be useful for all-ready solutions.)
- AGP riser slot, to be able to re-use old AGP cards from schools, offices, ...
- we\'ll learn how to build a custom uclibc Linux based operating system to take full advantage of the hardware
- Debian-based systems for fast deployment, and easy customization of reliable and manageable systems
All the software eventually developed will be released as Free Software, to the community.
The different steps of the project would include:
- the introduction of both teachers and students to the open innovation model
- writing with both students and teachers of the current didactic activities
- discussion about the feats, the faults and the possible improvements of those activities
- development of the new solution and its integration in the school
- courses about the new possibilities offered by the platform
- sharing the solution with others
While the cooperation with the local administration will involve:
- speeches above the new means of innovation, the community and open hardware and software
- creation of courses cycles on different levels and with different aims
- pushing the administration into adopting more and more an entirely open infrastructure
...but perhaps I\'m running too much :)
We\'re young, but we\'re willing to learn and help others learn.
Project Blog Entries
Hi, this is the first post for this project's blog, and the first ever for me in a web log, so... I hope to learn how to write a proper post in a try or two. :)
First of all, I'd like to thank Genesi and all the people behind it, for making all these projects possible, and obviously Freescale, for sponsoring the developer projects.
The Efika arrived before the holidays, so I had time to investigate the nice hardware before actually putting it under development activity. The day it arrived I was stunned by the size of this little gem. Really, I couldn't imagine a processor core, ATA, Ethernet, USB, sound and other controllers and peripherals all in such a little space. And so little power consumption.
My first thoughts was to list and find the peripherals I needed to work. I was eager to try it, but at the time I didn't have anything but the board. Then I was successful at finding an old ATX PSU that still worked good. I'd assembled a serial cable too, so I was all happy about starting hacking on the Efika.
The first thing I had to learn was the simple and intuitive Open Firmware syntax, and all the configurations and parameters it supports. I was really amazed at seeing all that, as it was the first Open Firmware implementation I was using. It's really powerful, and I imagine it to be easily expandable in possibilities.
The one other thing I was VERY eager to try out was the HAL part of the SmartFirmware, the BIOS emulation/abstraction layer that helps using standard x86 PCs hardware. But I didn't have any PCI nor AGP boards to try out, so, once again I had to wait.
Next, I started preparing a Linux kernel on an USB flash key, and plugged it into one of the Efika's slots.
I powered on the board, the Smart Firmware printed the device's string on the serial terminal while the USB key started flashing. Then... nothing. The poor thing didn't flash a second time, like I was expecting. I tried listing hd0's partitions but nothing, the storage with its partitions simply is under the second wrapping of the USB device. But this is only exposed by USB implementations of full-running kernels or operating systems, not simple implementations like firmwares (PC BIOS, Open Firmware, etc...)...
I was MAD as I didn't have a 2,5 inches hard drive... So I took that as an opportunity to learn booting off a DHCP/TFTP served kernel with a root over NFS. That wasn't hard as I was worried just days before, and worked like a charm!
The Efika was running a Linux kernel with a simple GNU system, and it was really fast. I didn't expect it to be that responsive, I was waiting for some lag or something that would discourage the use of a full-blown GNU/Linux system, but all the applications worked, and very well.
Remember that booting off the network is a choice to take into account for our project, as it helps managing software updates and different configurations testing during the development process.
Then I had to spend my full time in a project for my Computer Science course, so I had to put the Efika project on hold for some days.
After being successful at the project I could return on the Efika, and my quest for the necessary hardware. Really, the old ATI Radeons have disappeared, and the little there is, are selling at really high prices... They must have heard of all the FLOSS people and open drivers support for those boards...
And old 2,5 inches hard drive from an ancient notebook has been put to work on the Efika, despite its little capacity, slowness and absence of reliability... But at least its 2,5 MB/s of maximum throughput and 3 Gigabytes of space did let me start my development. (But still, the absence of a video board forbid me to test the video support for the machine, which really pissed me off...)
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It's quite late now, so I have to close this first post here.
In the next post I'll describe the process of setting up a Debian GNU/Linux system on the Efika, the first attempts with a newly arrived video board and decent hard disk, and the first development activities.
...I have to say that I'm starting to like this project log, thanks Genesi. :)
ps. I'm eager to hear for news about about a subversion repository on Powerdeveloper.org, that would be great for many developer projects!
-- Loris Cuoghi
/log out