Recent blog entries for beppu

Rather than maintain 2 different bios (one on c2.com and one here at advogato), I decided to use the same one on both sites.

I'm currently working on a long-term project to write replacements for some of the proprietary tools sold by Lineo. I think it's a shame that few people outside of Lineo know what the Embedix Linux distribution is all about.

Here's the basic idea: unlike normal distros, Embedix ships all its packages in source form. To create an instance of the Embedix distro, Lineo provides a tool called Target Wizard which allows one to:

• pick which packages to install
• configure how the package is compiled
• configure what parts of the package to leave out
• compile everything when you're done configuring

It does a little more, but these are the fundamentals. This really allows one to size optimize a linux installation to the very bare minimum you need.

<rant>

I'm not usually one to cheerlead, but I think this is a pretty good idea. That's why it pains me that much more that hardly anyone in the community knows about this stuff, because it's proprietary, and not easy for people to get ahold of and play with.

Anyway, I'm writing a Free version of Target Wizard. I'm doing this mostly by myself, and management doesn't really know about it. I feel indebted to the Free Software community, and I feel it's about time I give back something significant.

I'm also trying to test my programming skills.... to see if I can pull this stunt off. This is the biggest project I've personally undertaken, and I'd be really happy if I succeeded. It's also a lot more interesting than the normal work I've been assigned to do.

</rant>

Yesterday, I made good progress on Embedix::DB::Pg. It's a perl module that is going to be able to do dependency handling and conflict resolution for while configuring an Embedix distributions.

I haven't done this for a while, but I thought I should mention that I got my PAUSE id on December 6th (which was my birthday). What awesome timing. Now I have the privelege of contributing to CPAN. I am honoured.

I think I should start visiting advogato more often. I keep a few different diaries but they're all on different machines and none of them are public.

I need to update my contributions to the Free Software community by making note of DBIx::Hotel and the JavaScript ATM. Ironically, these are going to be used to demo a proprietary web browser.

More to come in a bit...