Hunter Davis has open sourced QuickGrapher
Hunter Davis, no relation (AFAWK) has made QuickGrapher, an HTML5 Equation Solver & Grapher Open Source. He's placed the source on github and in less than a week someone has ported it to Android. I messed around with the beta about a year ago and was really impressed.
Hunter has also Open Sourced another of his projects as well. Source Tree Visualizer which basically turns your source code tree into a real tree in a pretty landscape 
You can find Hunter's post about QuickGrapher here
and his post on SOurce Tree Visualizer here
Even if these two things don't appeal to you Hunter's blog is always a pretty good read.
Setting up a VM for Raspberry Pi development using Virtualbox, Scratchbox2 & qemu (Part 3)
I don't claim that the following is the best way to install scratchbox2, qemu and a seed rootfs and configure them to produce binaries that will run on the real Raspberry Pi hardware. I don't even claim it is the correct way but it works for me and I can almost do it in my sleep by now. The way I do things will probably seem a bit inefficient and in some cases just plain wrong but it's how I work and hopefully they are easy to follow and adapt to your style of working. I also make no guarantees that it will actually work for you at all. Hopefully it will but if it doesn't sorry but oh well. I made the decision when I first started building the development vm that I would place all the required software under the users home directory rather than installing it globally as
- Installing in subdirectories in the user's home directory makes it easy to keep things organised.
- It makes things almost idiotproof when you want to upgrade the ARM toolchain, scratchbox2, qemu or change the seed rootfs etc. as it's pretty much just rename the old directory, create a new directory and if neccessary rerun sb2-init.
Setting up a VM for Raspberry Pi development using Virtualbox, Scratchbox2 & qemu (Part 2)
If you decided to use a Debian or Ubuntu based distro then when you booted the Raspberry Pi Development VM that you just created you will have probably noticed an error message flash on the screen saying
piix4_smbus 0000.00.07.0: SMBus base address uninitialized - upgrade bios or use force_addr=0xaddr
and you'll want to fix that before doing anything else. The Fedora16 VM doesn't produce this error so Fedora users can skip straight to the guest addition installation instructions. I wrote a short post about this error last year but to save you having to go there to read that post the fix [Credit for that fix goes to http://finster.co.uk & Karl Foley] is:
- Start a terminal
- sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
- Add the line blacklist i2c_piix4 to the end of the file and save
- sudo update-initramfs -u -k all
- sudo reboot
Setting up a VM for Raspberry Pi development using Virtualbox, Scratchbox2 & qemu (Part 1)
Last week I released version 0.2 of the Raspberry Pi development VM and I thought that I could safely call it a day because in a few weeks the Raspberry Pi hardware will be available and therefore we will no longer need the VM for software development. So yesterday I announced on this blog and the Raspberry Pi forums that I had decided to EOL the VM and would no longer be updating it as I didn't see the need and i'm not going to have the time to maintain it for the next few months as it takes about 12 to 14 hours to create, configure and upload, 8 to 10 hours of that is uploading using all my upstream bandwidth which is no longer feasible for me to do again until after June.
However, almost immediately after posting that I started to receive tweets and PM's asking me not to stop working on the VM or to at least write detailed instructions on how to create your own VM for Raspberry Pi (or other ARM based devices) from scratch. Yesterday I also finally managed to get SDL programs working correctly, not that I had actually tried that hard previously as the majority of software I was personally interested in building and porting to the Raspberry Pi are text based and at most use ncurses. So although I really won't have time to work on upgrading, tweaking and maintaining the VM personally I have decided that it should continue to live in the form of detailed instructions on how to create your own Raspberry Pi development VM, which is almost mostly transferable to other ARM based devices as well, it's actually pretty much transferable to any device that qemu will emulate but that is beyond the scope of this how-to.
Fate of the Raspberry Pi Development VM
[update: looks like i EOL'ed the VM a day or so too soon seeing as I now have SDL working correctly (mostly) in it now. I'll either do one more release or roll a script and detailed instructions on how to install and configure scratchbox2, qemu and a rootfs (and sbrsh/sbrshd for using the real raspberry pi hardware with scratchbox2) before I do actually EOL it. It might take me a day or so to get to it though.]
In a few weeks we'll have our sticky paws on the real Raspberry Pi hardware which on the whole will obsolete the current VM. I could build sbrsh/sbrshd (mount nfs on the real hardware and use that for cpu transparancy, currently using qemu) which might be useful and there are a couple of tiny buglets and uglyness that I could fix but as it takes about 4 hours to create and clone the vm and configure everything and about 8 to 10 hours to upload somewhere using ALL my upstream bandwidth is it worth it?
I don't mind continuing with the VM if anyone else really wants/needs it but if it's only me that is using it then i'll probably not bother as the VM is good enough for a few more weeks until i/we have the real hardware and i'm kind of running short of tuits for anything that isn't related to a couple of projects i'm currently working on at the moment that will enable me to afford the odd raspi, one, three, fifteen...., but I don't want to leave anyone in the lurch if they really use the VM and would prefer not to have to set it up themselves or don't know how to do it.
So can i have a show of hands in the comments of who would like me to do another release of the VM and/or add sbrsh/sbrshd.
The Raspberry Pi (part three)
[Disclaimer: All opinions in this post are mine and mine alone. Although I am a moderator on the forums on http://raspberrypi.org I don't speak for the foundation and any factual errors, upset I may cause or spelling mistakes are completely my responsibility]
I took a bit of a break from writing this series of posts while I did some work on the development vm which I could do lying down using my eCafe Slim ARM based netbook (ta muchly Obarthelemy) as i'm still in a bit of pain from various aches and pains that being an old fogie seem to bring so sitting down typing for long periods is a right PITB. Now get off my lawn you darn kids. I also wanted to spend some time doing some research for a non-Raspberry Pi related project (although I might try to bring the Raspberry Pi into it if I can at some stage if I can).
So where were we upto at the end of part two? Ah yes The logo competition and MakerFaire NY 2011. i did mention MakerFaire and post a video of Eben's presentation a MakerFaire but I'll expand on that a bit for this post.
Building newLISP for the Raspberry Pi using the development VM
I just put together another quick screencast of the development vm in action. A tiny bit more complicated than tiny basic for curses this time as i had to install a library and edit the makefile a tad and i also ran the test suite inside sb2 as well.
ok enough messing around with the vm for the time being. it's time to start writing the raspberry pi (part three) blog post.
Video of the Development VM in action
I just did a quick screen capture video of the Raspberry Pi development VM in action and have uploaded it to youtube. I'm not very good with making screencasts so please forgive how rubbish it looks.
Dropbox+Bittorrent trick
I don't particularly like cloud type things, it's my data and i want it completely under my control and I don't particularly like dropbox as I don't think I actually trust them. However, I do have a dropbox account because they were offering extra storage from the default for doing a quiz and we all know I like quizzes. When I finished building the new VM I suddenly remembered that my upstream bandwdth is kind of yukky even on my remote server, which had problems with hits last week anyway and although it seems to be coping now after a couple of tweeks, a few hundred attempts to download the VM might make it melt or at least go on strike for better working conditions so I decided that i'd actually use my dropbox account and publish the public url. i was about 25% of the way through uploading it and I suddenly had a horrible thought dropbox probably has a GB/Day limit and that publishing the public url might not be a good idea. So what to do? I could just give the public link to a couple of people and hope that it doesn't escape or I could see if it was possible to use dropbox as a seedbox for a public file.
After a bit of googling I found the following webpage describing exactly how to do it using uTorrent.
https://sites.google.com/site/torrenttricks/use-dropbox-as-a-free-webseed-for-your-torrents
It's actually pretty good however I think it works better with smaller than 2GB files as i still got an automated suspension email about 10 minutes ago but it looks like it was up long enough for a few people to be able to start seeding it. Once my account suspension is over i'll take a look at the process and limits more closely.
New Raspberry Pi development vm version 0.2
[update: There is a tiny little buglet in the vm that slipped passed me as it didn't crop up when I was testing that yum worked as I didn't install a library that needed to go in the top level of the rootfs. If you get a lot of errors about unpacking or mkdir... when trying to install something using yum then you'll need to do the following
cd $HOME/raspberry_pi_development/f13arm_rootfs
sudo chmod -R 777 *
and that should fix it. sorry about that.
the torrent is now available.]
I have put together a new VM for developing software for the Raspberry Pi. I've made a few tweaks and cleaned up a lot of stuff and it's a much more pleasant setup and easier to use and update without making a whole new VM. I also used fedora13 for ARM as the seed rootfs so it should be possible to just swap files from/to a real Raspberry Pi and it should just run and you can update the seed rootfs as well (hopefully I guessed Raspberry Pi standardized educational disto correctly). I was planning to use fedora16 as the guest OS in the VM but after struggling with some of it's foibles for several hours and having to rebuild it a few times i gave up and reverted back to a ubuntu based release. it's currently compressing and uploading and with my upstream speed being so rubbish it'll take about 8 to 18 hours to finish but once it is finished i'll post a link to it and hopefully someone will make a torrent of it.
http://russelldavis.org/RaspberryPi/raspberrypi_dev_vm_02.torrent
Below is the README that is included with the exported appliance.
-------
RaspberryPi Development Virtual Machine 0.2
This is an exported virtualbox virtual machine for developing software for
the RaspberryPi. It is setup using the git versions of scratcbox2 & qemu (19/01/12), the fedora 13 for ARM as rootfs seed & arm-2011.03 codesourcery toolchain.
The root password is toor and the username and password for the normal user
is raspberry/password
To compile software for the raspberrypi as you would normally on an x86 machine
prefixing sb2 to any command. e.g. instead of gcc hello.c -o hello you would type sb2 gcc hello.c -o hello
To update, install or remove libraries and software in the seed rootfs use the command sb2 -eR yum ... where update, install, remove etc.
If you want to build and install libraries to use when building other software
that are not availble via fedora yum then rather than prefixing with sb2 prefix the command with sb2 -eR e.g. sb2 -eR make && make install
You can upgrade scratchbox2, qemu, the rootfs or toolchain quite easily as they are all in seperate dirs inside the raspberry_pi_development directory. it shoudl be possible to just swap them out when/if you need/want.
I have installed apache2 adn linked the $HOME/build directory so you can download anything you build to another system. You will probably want to change the network settings for the VM from NAT to Bridged though.
An ssh server is also installed so you can ssh in to the vm if you want as well (same proviso as above though. You'll need to change from NAT to Bridged to get it working).
If you have any other questions about the VM then you can send them via my blog (http://russelldavis.org) or post on the raspberry pi forum. (http://raspberrypi.org)
I have added one of my favourite bash aliases to the .bashrc doch is very handy in case you forget to use the sudo prefix to a command. just type doch and it'll redo the command but with sudo added.
Russell Davis (ukscone) 20/01/12