DebCamp 9: stuff

This has, by far, been the most productive DebConf ever, for me.

Not that this means all that much—mostly that previous DebCamps haven't been productive at all—but I still got a few things done.

There've basically been three things that I worked on: d-i support for the Intel SS4000-E; a belpic/beid upstream update; and a minor incremental NBD update.

The latter was simple, and was basically the first thing I did. I had a chat with Vagrant Cascadian, who does a lot of LTSP stuff in Debian, and added some stuff to the package that would make his life a bit easier. Not a lot of work; as I'm also upstream for NBD, and as it's been one of those packages that I've maintained since an eternity, I know the code pretty well. Half a day later, all the code was there.

D-i support for the SS4000-E wasn't that hard (most of the hard parts had already been done by Martin Michlmayr), but unfortunately some bits are not yet completely in order—mostly having to do with the fact that the original firmware has a kernel command line embedded in the kernel. As such, for now, you'll have to connect to the serial line in order to fix the redboot config; maybe we'll come up with a sane way to fix that in the future, but as long as we don't, that does mean you need a serial null modem cable.

Not that you need to solder anything (the main board has a connector for a regular serial port; you just need to plug the right cable to the right connector, so it's not that bad.

The final thing was horrible. A piece of software that presumably works well, but initially wouldn't even compile on my laptop because of pointer/int confusion; a build system made on shell scripts and qmake; and other similar things.

Eventually, I just gave up and uploaded what I had to experimental. It works, to some extent, but should be improved over the next few weeks. That's not for today, however.