[ Jeffrey Lee Li @ universe ] $ man life

An excellent Indian film recommended by my dear wife. BRAVO.

Remember:

1. Just follow your heart, and
2. Everything will be OK.

It's younger than most of the classic editors like vim and emacs, but it fits my hands well. Even better than vim did. Let alone emacs, which is obviously not on my diet.

Maybe just because of that fact, it can avoid many common problems with no burden when building, similar to second system effect.

It may not stay in your toolbox forever, but it's absolutely worth a try.

The go language from google mainly by Ken and Rob is another thing that makes me feel so lucky that I didn't miss.

There's no word that can express just how much I love it. So go for it for yourself.

I found a word appeared in my reading list more and more frequent last year: Raspberry Pi. Recently someone has managed to compile and run golang programs on it.

I was not concerned at first. Then one of my roommates in graduate institute told me that it's yet another development board based on ARM, and I got start to learn about it.

It's supposed to be a educational tool to re-stimulate the students' insterest in system at lower-level but things go a little differently: many geeks love it and have built dozens of fun machines with it.

The more materials I read about it, the more I wanna it.

It's sold out for now. And I can't wait over thirsty.

Fortunately, a colleage of mine brought her board to me for a hand-on test: Mini2440 from FriendlyARM based on S3C2440A with ARM9 processor.

She showed me how to setup, connect and interact with it, patiently, quite a nice girl. Thanks for that.

In the following advantures in the embeded world, I will use Mini2440 unless explicitly stated. Yet the things are not necessarily limited to this model. The criterion is wet your own hands.

I will have to go beyond software and dive into firmware in future. One part out of requirement of the project I'm busy with, yet a larger part, out of my curiousity, not interest here, just curiousity.

I've been thinking about the answer to the question I came up the first time I had the chance to get my hands on the computer: How did it happen?

I mean: it's only a bunch of metals and stones, how can it do what we ask it to? That's in senior high.

Then I went to college, learning about circuits, electronics and programming. I knew a little more than I was before, but far from enough to make a clear explanation.

What's worse? More questions came up. Take this for example:

If source codes are compiled into exectuables with the compiler, what makes the compiler?

Like the chicken-egg-chicken question, I have not got much clue.

Maybe I will have a different view if I dive deep enough.

Anyway, things might appear on my way:

1. Kernel
2. Cross-compiling
3. Driver

Stay tuned.

After fixing the GRUB menu item, I managed to boot into Archlinux as I have done before it's broken.

The first thing if of course sync everything:

sudo pacman -Syu

And about 1G files needs to be downloaded with a total upgrade size of 6G. Oh my godness.

A lot of things have happened in about half a year: kernel version increased, several packages are replaced. But the biggest change is the switch from initscripts to systemd, togegher with the configuration style.

I was a little nervous at the red console prompt saying things like HOSTNAME in rc.conf are deprecated. In the meanwhile, exicted, 'coz I have the intuation that chanllaging things are coming, again. And I'm gonna face it, saying goodbye to the old-fashioned way.

To be honest, it's really tough for me and things I have to deal with are as followed:

1. GRUB
2. UPGRADE
3. X
4. Yaourt
5. WIFI
6. IME
7. Hardware Clock
8. Pacnew

Among the list above, WIFI is the hardest part, taking the most time and energy googling and trying, and IME works OK but not perfect at the moment, while Hardware Clock is not using UTC as recommended, leaving some pacnew files untouched.

In one word: it's worth and I'm happy.

Details of the fixing process will be covered in upcoming posts.

I've got three OSes installed in my notebook:

1. Archlinux
2. Ubuntu
3. Windows 7

As for boot loading, Ubuntu takes it all with GRUB.

Sad things happen, which is very common for a curious boy like me, when I upgrade Ubuntu to 12.04. Menu entry for Archlinux disappeared in GRUB2. I've tried several times with no success:

sudo update-grub

Yet I'm not gonna give up and I believe there's a simple cut to my Arch way.

Thank Godness I figured it out: Simply mount the Archlinux root partition before updating GRUB.

Also Thank Google helping me find the solution hint.

That's all.

Happy inside.

Very~:-)

Yeah! We survived Dec. 21st, 2012~

So that's my plans for the new year 2013, or rather for a REAL start of my blog life.

Main topic includes but not limits to:

1. Golang
2. Archlinux
3. Ubuntu
4. Utilities

Stay tuned~:-)

Synchronization is made so simple and flexible by archlinux that one can easily be addict to it, like me. It's even more convinent than apt-get which is already trival. Unlike what some OS forces users to do what it should have done like searching the installers, dowloading them, maybe also need extracting them, then "simply double click" them, blablabla. What make things even worse is the incompatibility of various versions of the same program, which is no surprise 'coz the plaza in which these toys play breaks often without a reasonable reason, let alone those poor toys. The result is that every user pays the bill with amount of time, energy and money involved. Realizing that, what will you choose: the dangerous wood house with only windows and gates, or the fabulous solid-based tower.
Ok, enough for joking~:-)
Let's get to the subject of upgrading the entire system with every single tool installed.

sudo pacman -Syu

The -Syu options mean sync with the repo then upgrade everything.
Note that you need network and proper configured repo to achieve the result. And this is the recommended step to take after you've installed the OS and before any other installation happens. As we've said above, we just want to make our home cozy and comfortable.
Also note that pacman itself may be upgraded first, but don't panic, it can sync itself and detect automatically. So most times what we need to do is press enter to the default Y option.
We can run this a couple of times until it says there's nothing to do, indicating that we've been totally synced.
To make sure our operations are in effect, it's recommended to reboot the OS after the sync, especially when it's the initial setup or the kernel upgrades.

Mirrorlist is the repository via which the pacman utility helps us keeping software installed in our system synced with the remote maintained server source.
I choose 163, which is stable and fast for my internet connection.

First, back up it.

sudo cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.bak

Second, edit it.

sudo vim /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Uncomment the line where 163 repo lies around line 51. By uncomment, I mean simply delete the leading # symbol, so the content becomes the following.

Server = http://mirrors.163.com/archlinux/$repo/os/x86_64

Last but not least, back up it again.

sudo cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.cur