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 and lots and lots of packages with outdated config.{guess,sub} files.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..
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. :(
So I've decided to join the django train, and redo my website in django. As you can probably see it's basically the same as it was before, apart from the obvious addition of a blog, mainly motived by Sledge wanting a blog post about the AVR32 hardware Debian are going to fund for me, and me hating wordpress^Wphp... ;)
I should probably thank lamby somewhat at this point since the code for the blog part of this was mainly stolen^Wborrowed from him ¬_¬