Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Remember my first OpenSource project

Today I'm in a melancholic mod. And i started to think about my collaborations to the OpenSource world. I did a lot of experiments at home, but i didn't made it public available, because i wasn't so proud of my code, and I feel scared that someone laughs about my style or my syntax.

I remember my first public project: RTL-EtherBootD is an Open Source project which consists of porting the Ethernet card drivers provided in the Etherboot project to RTLinux. It was my graduate work at University. Since that project, i didn't publish any OpenSource code. I worked in some different environments, but unluckily at my country (Spain) they didn't work a lot with Linux.

I started my actual job very enthusiastic, i was going to work developing Linux in Embedded Systems, but it's not what i'm doing right now :( I'm sad about that, i hope to work in Embedded Linux environments one day, but for now i've to work on this at home.

At work, i started my small patches to u-boot project here. Not really big, but a small step to start doing it more frequently (i've code to submit, but i didn't find it good enough to send it).

Personally, with the OpenMoko project, i started to hack the IDA Systems project, and the build system Openembedded. I found some problems with my working environment at home (Ubuntu 8.10 with a Core2Duo MacBookPro), but i'm solving the environment problems sending some patches to OpenEmbedded.

What i'd like to do is have a day to day work with Linux in Embedded environments, but actually i'm frustrated with a 8-bit PIC micro that i've to develop in Linux environments. Some time before, i was working with 16-bit Motorola uC, at R&D department devolping embedded systems from scratch, for ships. A lot of restrictions: hard-real time, fast response, 3 redundancy communication channels, .... I miss the hardware hacks that i've to do with our prototypes, the evaluation boards and all the stuff. It was funny and i miss the friends that still are there.

For now, i've to see to the future and look for another comfortable environment, Linux, and OpenSource development. I like to don't have to wait too much to find that change.

In my most important project, at the moment (the collaboration with IDA Systems), i suffer from the combination of OpenEmbedded and my environment. I hope to solve this soon. I'm going step by step :)

Now that i wrote some words about my senses, i start to feel better and i can afford my day-to-day job.

See you soon.

-- Edited --
My u-boot patch (the first): http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.boot-loaders.u-boot/44824/focus=45183
My OpenEmbedded patch: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openembedded/21425

4 comments:

Rakshat said...

Can we help in some way with upgrading your Mac book? I can contribute some money towards it.

Anonymous said...

Hi Rafael,

I think we will see more Linux Embedded companies in few years.

Just still coding ;-)

Regards,

Alan

serpeal said...

Un saludo de tu director de proyecto de RTL-EtherbootD.

Saludos desde Gandia.

Sergio.

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