The default install of netbeans 6.7 is not compatible with the version of the debugger provided in the karmic repositories and errors when debugging is attempted, this can rectified by adding the previous version of gdb which is supported by netbeans 6.7
After having build chromeos I shall now give a few thoughts on it, based on what I’ve seen and experienced rather than what a press release says as most of the media will.
If you followed my instructions in the last post about building then you can log in with the local username you provided and a blank password.
Here I shall be providing screenshots from virtualbox but this has also been tested on my eeepc 901. Currently the OS has very little support for wifi and initially at least needs a dchp assigned wired ethernet connection, which shouldn’t be a problem for most people.
After a quick ~10s boot you will be met with a login screen:
Once you have logged in then the experience is very similar to being trapped in google chrome, it appears to be very similar to the browser with slightly more functionalty:
Just a slight colour scheme change but one could be in chrome browser if it wasn’t for the addition of three icons and a clock in the top right hand corner signifying battery life, network and options. As far as options go it’s pretty limited, any advanced options I suspect can be controlled via the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) the terminal layout seems very much debian like and does most things a terminal should vi is included but not nano sadly!
Mass storage devices also have support using a pop up persistent window to allow browsing, with files opening in the browser.
As chromeos was only released to the community a few hours ago I haven’t had much more chance to play but it seems like it could grow into a workable system, no doubt the news will be filled with how it will kill Microsoft and change the world, it may, however I feel the approach of everything in the cloud will take a long while for people, including me, to become comfortable with. I would suggest that what we will see is more integration between the web and operating systems and the increase in services which seamlessly sync data between computers like Ubuntu one does. I feel the Moblin approach is more realistic this integrates web services such as twitter into the desktop but still allows easy storage of local data and applications thus requiring much less dependence on the web and cloud storage.
After watching the webcast of the google chromeos announcements today I felt I should probably see what all the fuss was about and get the source code and have a go at building it and as lots of people may be a little daunted by this I thought I’d add a guide, although it is pretty well documented by google.
Some time ago I came across a post in the EeeUser forum alerting me to a cheap (£7.50) unit which was aimed at alerting drivers to speed cameras, however it also happens to provide a stream of standard NMEA data on a serial line. If you wish to obtain these units now they are readily available from ebay for under £10 .
Having followed the instructions that came with the unit (including no mention of direct GPS functionality) and installed the provided software in windows xp I got nowhere, so I tried it on linux. The device is actually a serial device and the cable which is included is in fact not a conventional USB, cable despite having a USB-A and USB-B plug at either end, it is an FTDI usb-serial adaptor which has linux kernel support. I then found it was possible to connect to it at 4800 baud using putty or cutecom or whatever your favorite terminal happens to be and standard NMEA data is displayed.
On closer examination of the cable the USB-A end can be split apart to reveal a simple Serial to TTL converter based in the PL2302 chip, this allowed me to find drivers (available here http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?ID=24) for all versions of windows and receive GPS data over serial in the same method as with Linux.
This means that the cable could easily be used for any 5V TTL applications required and also that the GPS unit would be ideal for interfacing with an arduino or similar system as the points for connection can be easily seen on the circuit board:
I’ve finally got together all the pieces together to transform the mess of wires from my breadboard version of my twitterpop project into a nice reusable shield for my arduino. It’s only basic containing two 595 shift registers, and 8×8 common anode LED matrix and a few resistors but it does an admirable job. PCB designs and eagle files can be found on the twitterpop page. Thanks to the people at BatchPCB for doing a nice job on my PCB.
I’ve been waiting for a week or so to assemble this as I decided to order a fancy new Weller WS81 soldering iron to use rather than my aging 12W Weller 2012 which I’ve had for about 10 years, never has soldering been such a pleasure!
And in action (note the fancy base provided by oomlout):
At present serial communication from the Arduino IDE will not work with the default installation as the IDE is supplied with a 32 bit version of the serial communication library rxtx and as yet the version in the repos doesn’t work either.
A full distribution of the arduino-0017 ide can be downloaded here with the correct files included.
If you haven’t used arduino before you’ll need to install its dependencies by running
sudo apt-get install avr-libc gcc-avr avrdude
To fix an existing installation – a working version of rxtx (rxtx-2.2pre2-bins.zip) can be downloaded from http://rxtx.qbang.org/ however at the time of writing the site had been down for a while so I’ve provided a mirror of the file (here).
To install:
Extract /RXTXcomm.jar and /x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/librxtxSerial.xo into the ardunio/lib directory overwriting the previous versions.
Arduino serial communication should now work as normal.
For people having more general problems with any application using librxtx-java on 64 bit ubuntu I have created an updated .deb file – available here. This can be also used to fix arduino if the librxtxSerial.so file is removed from the arduino/lib directory.
