The Lost World.. Experiments to survive…

Today wa s a little bit lazy , wondered what to do, then i thought that i d give a try on my Linux Kernel.I’d previously tried to compile a kernel myself but with no success..except when i tried to program the NGW100.That time i had compiled a prepatched kernel obtained fro m Atmel.

I googled ‘compiling kernel’ and found some interesting tutorials..Though my efforts werent fully successful, im putting up the steps i followed.

1.First downloaded the latest version of kernel from www.kernel.org

I downloaded version 2.6.24.3

2.Moved it to /usr/src

# cp linux-2.6.24.3.tar.bz2 /usr/src

3 Unzip it

# tar -xjvf linux-2.6.24.3.tar.bz2

You ll get a directory named linux-2.6.24.3 in the /usr/src folder

Im using Debian Etch system, there need to create a link (like a windows shortcut) from the original linux source folder to the newly created one

#ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.6.24.3/ /usr/src/linux

copying the current cofiguration to the newly formed directory

#cp /boot/config-2.6.18 /usr/src/linux 2.6.24.3/.config

#make xconfig or make menuconfig

#make

# make modules

#make modules_install

finally

#make install

now intrid image is created.its not necessary for all systems.This image has some device drivers and is used to load the rest of the operating system.I dunno what this really is..but to make it i downloaded mkinitrd fro m rpseek http://rpmseek.com/rpm/mkinitrd-5.1.19-1.i386.html?hl=com&cs=modutils:PN:0:0:0:0:3151117

and converted it using alien

#alien ‘package name’

then installed it using

#dpkg -i ‘package name’

now moved on to /boot/ directory

# cd /boot/

run

mkinitramfs -o initrd.img-2.6.24.3 2.6.24.3

update-grub

your are done

..

Thank God, our image processing team has got a cmucamv1 from our college itself.Our senior Mr.Soby had done a robotic project using the same.But after that the thing was virtually unknown and nobody knew where it was…after a long search and a lot of phone calls to other seniors who were said to have used it ..we finally found the cam safe inside a white card board box inside the CAD lab..Hope Sreejith C could do  some wonders with it….

The dates for the final submission of our main project announced ..its on 25th of March.We ve barely 15 days left and we ve vitually not started anything.,after the first failure..

Now im trying to learn NGW100 programming..I love Linux but its not that easy when we want to do linux some work for us…We are seriously doubting whether we could make it up by 25th of this month..Everybody is loosing heart..I ve to do something ,something really special to get everyone into work ,n work that really needs to be focussed coz we dont have any more time to waste any more

We’d bought an atmel 32 bit processor board ATNGW100 for our project.The main idea behind choosing this procesor board is Mr.Pramode C E from Thrissur(www.pramode.net).  The board has general purpose input output pins ,serial port,32 mb SD RAM,8 mb flash and more over a preinstalled version of  Linux  2.6.18 kernel.It looks beautiful and exciting for a newbie with its low cost $ 89 price.Indians still face a problem since if you order it via Fedex (reliable) it would cost around Rs 8000/- at home.Luckily we bought it via our friend Sujith’s cousin ,who came fro mUS ,thus escaping from the transportation fee and it cost around Rs 5000/- The board has gor a good reputation and easy interface and a lot of help from www.avrfreaks.com. Some clever guys at model engineering college Ernakulam is also doing an Internet Radio Receiver Project With this board.I ve got a contact from Kurien Polachen and he is also very helping ,to make the hardware work for us.