Porting Linux to LEAF

Did I ever tell you how hard it is to port Linux applications to embedded systems?

Well, apparently to port your application to LEAF (running on WRAP with x86 and all), you still need to repackage all our libraries, binaries, etc into a LRP format (a highly compressed .tar.gz file).

So far, so good, but what happens when you have a ton of libraries to port to the WRAP? Like libxml, swish-e ... tinyHTTP?

And also, the documentation for making LRP packages is not that good, so you mostly have to find your way through it...

More on this to come.

leaf-wisp and 7DS queries

I removed m0n0wall from the WRAP box and "installed" a LEAF distro (branch actually) called "Wisp" which is a small version of LEAF meant for CF cards.

I just downloaded the binary and wrote it to the CF card, and it works perfectly - except for the silly and well-documented "pc_keyb: keyboard jammed" error message. Other than that, it seems to work smoothly - boots properly and gives me a shell prompt when I quit the configuration screen.

The 7DS query page is finished: see it in all its glory in HTML! (Page subject to change.)

Of course, it is far from perfect, and I still need to work more on tying the different pieces together and making them robust.

XML parsing and more on WRAP

I finally managed to get the XML parsing with libxml working to my heart's content. For one, using the -lxml apparently uses the old libxml libraries, so I tried compiling my programs with -lxml2 and that solved a lot of compiler and linker problems.

When I finally got XML working, my GNU time functions stopped working for some odd reason. gdb told me that my program was crashing on the localtime() call - while it had been working perfectly all along! Argh!

As for WRAP box updates - I found out last week that m0n0wall, neat as it is, has no shell and a very limited interface which only allows you to change IP address and a few other elementary settings.

Our idea of installing 7DS on m0n0wall on WRAP goes out the window!

But its sibling m0n0box seems interesting and more fully featured, though I would like to see if we can use Linux on WRAP ...

libxml & sqlite

Well, I finished sorting out sqlite and am able to work with it using C programs quite well. The callback functions are a little tricky, but I am getting the hang of them.

I also started using libxml today to encode and parse all those query and response messages. It's really neat and easy, but the code for parsing something is long and complicated! Despite that, working with XML seems to be fun...

More on sqlite and WRAP

Well, I finally managed to get sqlite working with my C program.

Installation was easy, and I did that last week. The C API was a little harder, but I got it working today.

I got the female-female null modem adapter and am going to use it to play with the m0n0box / WRAP system today.