Something I've wanted to do for a while now, is somehow combine my blog with all of my projects/git repositories, and now I've done it! Welcome to my new site :) So, I got bored a few nights ago, and started trying to find some kind of project management type system to host my git repositories in. After searching for a while I stumbled across Gitorious. I'd heard of Gitorious before, but I'd never really looked at it, nor did I know that it's codebase was infact completely open. So I thought I'd give it a try to see what it was like Now I have to admit, my first impressions of it weren't exactly great. Firstly, it uses Ruby, which I can't say I'm much of a fan of (but that's a different discussion :p), nor am I a fan of installing all of the 'packages' it needed, via gem. Deploying it is an absolute nightmare, it has 4 different daemons, all of which have hideous init scripts that don't really work properly, and low and behold you try and put the git repositories and the site itself under different users, figuring out what needs to run as what and what needs what permissions is very much a game of trial and error. In Gitorious' defence, there /are/ numerous guide lurking around on the internet explaining how to do these things. But once I'd got over these niggles, and had actually deployed it, it worked quite nicely, and really did exactly what I wanted, so I decided to stick with it. It then occurred to me that it probably wouldn't be too hard to stick a blog onto it, after all, it's written using Rails, which is supposed to be easy, right? So with no knowledge of Ruby, let alone Rails, I got stuck in. Fortunately, it turns out Rails is in fact pretty easy to use, (at least once you've got used to it implicitly doing everything behind the scenes..), I'm even starting to think I prefer it to Django... So there we have it, a brand new site, and one that looks considerably better than my old one.. even if it is just Gitorious in disguise _ The only thing I'm disappointed Gitorious doesn't have, is some kind of bug tracker, but then, I'm not sure I'd use one given most of my projects just go through Debian.

So, Debian have kindly funded some new hardware for the AVR32 port, it is the 300 ICnova board, probably one of the best AVR32 boards you can buy to date. The first thing I noticed after finally taking delivery of this a few days ago, it how small it is. I was expecting it to be pretty large, especially seeing as how much stuff it has on it. In fact, it's just smaller than the current NGW100 board I have. So why then new board you ask? Well firstly, I don't own nor have physical access to a board with a display, so this makes testing the all important X server rather difficult [1]. Secondly, the board I currently have is pretty slow due to its lack of RAM, and the fact that it's only 16bit.. This makes using it for porting things rather painful. Finally, the port is getting to the stage where it really needs a porter machine, so that's what this machine will become eventually. Whilst I'm here, I'm going to take this opportunity to prod people about the AVR32 port. ;) The port is currently at a complete standstill since I've run out of buildable packages. This is solely due to the GCC port being buggy (I'm currently fighting with a GCC internal compiler error whilst building Qt4, did I mention that delta is a godsend?) and lots and lots of packages with outdated config. guess,sub files. I currently have around 120 bugs filed for this, so if one of your packages is one of them please fix it. Also, if one of your packages has an Architecture field which avr32 should be in (it should be in most since it's just another linux architecture) please add it. I'd also like to point people at AVR32 dependency status. This is a summary of unbuildable packages and what other packages are stopping them from building (thanks to KiBi for writing this). If you see one of your packages at the bottom of one of the graphs, that means your package is blocking a load of packages from building, and that's bad, m'kay :) I'd very much appreciate help from other people with this, especially for the silly build failures that are trivial to fix. For those who are interested, the port currently stands like this:

• BD-Uninstallable: 2213
• Failed: 495
• Installed: 5336

Now for some useful and interesting AVR32 port related links..

• AVR32 port status
• AVR32 filed bugs
• A pretty graph ;)

Finally, a picture of the new board, and a big thanks to Debian for funding this! [1] Unfortunately X doesn't seem to work at all yet, it just segfaults. :(

The packages is already done, thanks to Bradley Smith for the patch, you can find it here.I'm working right now in the unstable versions but the GCC 4.3 issues remains, in rtorrent there seems the issue isn't solved with the actual patch but libtorrent does, I will ask someone to upload them to experimental as soon as I get something ready.