Re: PIC/Linux

Allan Adler <ara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

As that process can be quite verbose, and not very interesting, I'll stop
reporting on it until I have something more definite to say.

Well, I've been trying and have had some interesting experiences. As I guessed,
what I have, after unpacking all of the tgz files, is a collection of binaries
and some documentation, shell scripts, etc., but nothing that needs to be made.
The binaries work well enough to tell me they can't find things and then give
up. I don't know yet how to tell them where to find the things they say they
can't find (e.g. versions of lib.so.6 or whatever it was) and GLIB3.2, etc.
I tried to download documentation from the sourceforge site but there is not
always documentation available from there. My browser doesn't support whatever
is at some of the sites that sourceforge does link to, i.e. the sites of
whoever wrote the software, so there may very well be some documentation
there that I can't find.

Here is one of the more positive experiences so far: I managed to get
simulavr-ddd to work to some extent, but not really. I ran run-simulavr-ddd
and got a complaint that it couldn't find simulavr. So, I made a back up
copy of run-simulavr-ddd and then edited the original so that it could
find simulavr. That caused a window to open but it couldn't be used for
simulavr because I hadn't told it where to find simulavr-disp. It could,
however, be used as a terminal window, which I closed. I modified it again
to tell it where simulavr-disp is and this time the window opened and closed
very quickly. Apparently, whatever port or device or socket it was trying to
access was busy.


Anyway, I decided it would be helpful to look at the source code for the
various packages, which has to be completely accurate about what the program
is supposed to do and under what conditions, unlike the more optimistic
opinions often expressed in documentation. I returned to sourceforge and
downloaded the base-0.5 rpm. I don't like rpm files since they don't give
me enough control over where the files wind up and because I don't like to
do things as root unless I know exactly what I am doing and why. So, I used
rpm2cpio to convert the rpm file to a cpio file and then tried to use
cpio --extract to extract the contents of the cpio file. Unfortunately,
cpio just hung and I don't know why. It would be much better if there were
also a tgz file that contained the source code, instead of a dreimal
verdammt rpm file. I didn't see one listed at sourceforge. If there is
one available, I'd like to know about it.

It is probably not a good sign that I am now thinking of reading the source
code to these dozens of programs in order to find out how to use them. As I
mentioned in my original posting and in at least one follow up posting, I
tend to be easily thrown by little details and wind up in very strange places,
and this is a good example of how that happens. The way I read source code,
since I'm not very good at it, is to try to convert the source code (if it's
in C) to a literate document written in CWEB. I've done this with a Go
playing program and am now revising the CWEB file. It took quite a long time
but I now understand thoroughly how the program works. Unfortunately, I have
several programs I am already trying to study by this extremely labor
intensive method and they have much higher priority than AVR, which I
was hoping would not be very distracting from my research and other projects.

If I have to work this hard at it, it probably isn't going to happen.
--
Ignorantly,
Allan Adler <ara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and
* comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.
.

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