tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64315715523935942132012-01-30T22:14:52.258+08:00Blog on IT and Electronics and more, especially Linux and microcontroller related issuesXiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.comBlogger1471100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-7905472319241500832011-08-13T08:02:00.002+08:002011-08-13T08:09:03.623+08:00

http://fossforce.com/2011/08/top-10-things-linux-users-dont-understand/ The post itself is not that interesting and kind of dumb. But the comments sections are much more interesting. The best comment is from "linuxlover" on August 12th, 2011 at 11:05 am. I use both Windows and Linux and kind of neutral. Windows has many problems. Linux has many problems as well. Linux has many advantages.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-65617053575600779322011-08-13T07:37:00.007+08:002011-08-13T07:51:01.897+08:00

OpenOCD 0.5.0 has been released. Here is the News. Source zip archive or tar ball can be downloaded from SourceForge. Windows binaries (32bit and 64bit, cross build under Linux with MinGW-w64 project's compiler) can be downloaded from Freddie Chopin's website. You can also use my test build which is native Windows build using 32bit MinGW.org toolchain. Take note due to GPL licensing reasons,

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-13266931044793897172011-08-02T10:30:00.003+08:002011-08-02T10:35:30.520+08:00

Many users use USB CDC-ACM for virtual com port usage. Itis supported under Windows by the usbser.sys driver andalso works under Linux and Mac OS X and probably other OS as well.In reality, CDC-ACM is really meant for modems.http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/usbcdc11.pdf"3.6.2 Abstract Control ModelWith an Abstract Control Model, the USB device understands standardV.25ter (AT) commands.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-78052763663879842262011-07-24T20:27:00.002+08:002011-07-24T20:31:02.431+08:00

Here are the unofficial libftdi-0.19 and libftdi-1.0 binaries download.http://code.google.com/p/picusb/downloads/listThey are cross-built under Linux with MinGW and MinGW-w64. So if you have some difficulties getting them to be built under Windows, you may want to try out the binaries I built.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-57837107791970726822011-07-10T09:10:00.009+08:002011-07-21T18:35:05.256+08:00

I have some problems with Gnome 3 (Gnome Shell) with the Nvidia 3. The main thing is that sometimes texts will get corrupted when you scroll down a website under Firefox. It can take some efforts to to click some links in Firefox for some websites (like the links below any LinuxToday articles). The first link is there, but when you scroll down and try to click it, it disappeas and the text below

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-18922635875155238862011-05-01T09:51:00.004+08:002011-07-17T17:46:34.418+08:00

I just updated my Arch Linux installation and it has Gnome 3 by default. I followed the Arch Wiki about Gnome 3 for the installation and it went smooth.As for the first impression, it is at least much better than Ubuntu Unity interface. For one thing, it does not have the annoying Global Menu. However, I still prefer the old Gnome 2 interface. Anyway, the new interface is at least tolerable, not

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-73413977824981641072011-04-29T18:25:00.007+08:002011-07-17T17:49:06.424+08:00

I have just updated my Ubuntu 10.10 installation to 11.04. To be honest, I do not like the new Unity interface. I would say the old Gnome interface is much easier to use. Windows 7 is also way better. I might be able to get used to it in the future, but for now I will go back to the classic desktop and wait for Ubuntu to fix the Unity interface.Major problems:1) The launcher is basically useless,

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-26235648623136568952011-04-28T18:22:00.003+08:002011-04-28T18:29:26.742+08:00

After a long gap, Michael Lewis just announced the releaseof OpenUSB 1.1.1.Website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openusb.Highlights of the release:1) Removed the HAL/DBUS dependency for hotplug events.2) Improved kernel version checking for the bulk continuation flag.3) Improved support for zero byte transfers4) Changed the maximum control transfer size to 4096According to Michale, these

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-84018225417319846052011-04-27T21:47:00.000+08:002011-04-27T21:48:54.187+08:00

(This is my post to pyusb mailing list on 27-April-2011)Just a summary for the situation.Firstly you may want to see if you really want to usea generic HID device, in most cases, you can usea custom device and then use libusb0.sys or winusb.sysas the driver under Windows and then use pyusb with it.Using a custom device will also make it possible to usepyusb under Mac OS X. Recent Mac OS X makes

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-16190284858919247412011-04-16T10:12:00.001+08:002011-04-16T10:14:20.693+08:00

libftdi-0.18 and libftdi-1.0 binaries and OpenOCD git binaries downloadhttp://code.google.com/p/picusb/downloads/listI have uploaded some Windows (32bit and 64bit) binary of libftdi and OpenOCD to my Google Code picusb page. Most of them are cross-built under Linux with MinGW and MinGW-w64. So if you have some difficulties getting them to be built under Windows, you may want to try out the

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-8908688404790519942011-04-16T10:09:00.001+08:002011-04-16T10:11:49.931+08:00

PIC USB related web sites http://www.microchip.com/forums/m123533.aspxPIC USB Firmware Framework Confirmed and Potential Anomalies http://www.microchip.com/forums/m275422.aspxThe above links should help the users of Microchip USB PICs.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-20228360413967692542010-10-16T18:44:00.003+08:002010-10-16T19:18:58.447+08:00

Today I bought the Acer Aspire One AOD255 netbook. This is my first netbook. It has the new Atom N550 dual core processor, 1GB of DDR3 RAM (wish it has 2GB), 250GB HDD and integrated graphics. The interesting thing is that it has dual boot options (Windows 7 starter and Android). It cost me SGD519, they throw in 3 freebies, a headphone, a cheap cooling stand with two USB powered fans and a free

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-30854331222866078392010-10-11T21:35:00.002+08:002010-10-11T21:42:28.734+08:00

Ubuntu 10.10 installation on my Acer desktop is rather smooth. I was using upgrade install for the 10.04 LTS release. Since there is an empty partition this time (giving up FreeBSD), I am using fresh install this time. Firstly I downloaded the ISO, installed it to an 8GB USB Flash Disk, boot the USB drive, played a bit with the live session. Then I installed it to the empty partition. It was a

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-18548867112672532372010-09-10T16:32:00.002+08:002010-09-10T16:37:57.488+08:00

I was trying to find a good distribution of MinGW-w64 under Windows (32bit and 64bit). I think TDM64 seems to be quite good now.Website and download: http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/Special features:1) It runs under 32bit (x86) and 64bit Windows (x64)2) It is multilib enabled, which means that it can produce both 32bit and 64bit binary. The default is 64bit. 3) It is a native 64bit compiler, at least

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-48838877732912515032010-08-29T12:06:00.004+08:002010-09-10T16:38:38.942+08:00

libusb-1.0 Windows backend currently supports Cygwin, MinGW and MinGW-w64, MSVC and WDK as the building tool. Cygwin, MSVC and WDK are more straightforward to install under Windows. But MinGW and MinGW-w64 are less straightforward.One way to solve this issue is to use cross-compile under Linux. Leading Linux distros have MinGW and even MinGW-w64 packages. And the auto-tools (automake, autoconf,

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-88411705152085078912010-08-06T19:58:00.006+08:002010-08-06T20:04:58.659+08:00

http://code.google.com/p/picusb/downloads/listI have uploaded some Windows (32bit and 64bit) binary of libftdi and libftdi-1.0 to my Google Code picusb page. Most of them are cross-built under Linux with MinGW and MinGW-w64. So if you have some difficulties getting libftdi or libftdi-1.0 to be built under Windows, you may want to try out the binaries I built.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-60011512557408418962010-08-06T19:27:00.003+08:002010-08-06T19:56:20.674+08:00

Last week I installed Windows 7 32bit Ultimate on my two-year old Acer M1641 desktop, it was a smooth process. The only unrecognized device of the original PC after the Win7 installation was a mysterious "co-processor" device. After installation of the Nvidia NForce chipset driver everything on the original PC was recognized. The added old Compro X50 PCI TV/FM card was also not recognized.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-85544621713186523342010-05-03T21:14:00.000+08:002010-05-03T21:24:18.218+08:00

Today I upgraded one of my desktop partition from Ubuntu 9.10 64bit to 10.04 64bit. The upgrade process is relatively smooth. Download from local Singapore mirror is quite fast. Installation is not that fast (more than 2 hours for 2700 packages, no KDE, just Gnome). But all in all the process is quite ok. Just a minor glitch -- I was not using Network Manager but wicd. Prior to the upgrade, I

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-38351221353787807942010-04-22T21:46:00.003+08:002010-04-22T21:53:43.183+08:00

Stephan Meyer has kindly added Travis and I to the project admin team of libusb-win32 project.https://sourceforge.net/projects/libusb-win32/Travis is the developer of libusbdotnet, a great project which should be of interests to the users of libusb-win32.https://sourceforge.net/projects/libusbdotnet/Travis will mainly handle the code development and I will mainly handle the support/testing

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-4404605878840752822010-04-11T18:29:00.004+08:002010-04-11T18:38:15.420+08:00

Today I installed Ubuntu 9.10 64bit for the new Asus K40ID notebook. It was relatively a smooth process with only one problem related to X.Firstly I shrunk the Windows 7 data partition (Asus keeps OS in C and others in D, with another hidden Fat32 recovery partition) with Windows 7's built-in disk manager. It was a nice add-on since Vista. Then I boot the install CD (cum Live CD), check

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-18290929077212074882010-04-03T20:47:00.005+08:002010-08-06T19:57:38.879+08:00

Today I bought a low/medium-end notebook: Asus K40ID series, Core 2 Duo 6750 CPU (2.1GHz), Nvidia Geforce GT320M graphics card (VRAM 1GB), 14" HD LED Backlight (1366x768), 320GB HDD, 2GB RAM, 8x DVD RW, 802.11n Wifi and Bluetooth. The OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. I hope this 64bit thingy will not cause big problem for me due to the potential driver issues. The good thing about Asus is the

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-59947369117107511122010-03-30T19:38:00.002+08:002010-04-07T09:42:34.935+08:00

WinUSB related resources:Microsoft resource:http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/connect/usb/winusb_howto.mspxhttp://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa476426.aspxJan Axelson's websitehttp://www.lvr.com/winusb.htmlibusb-1.0 Windows backendhttp://www.libusb.org/wiki/windows_backendlibusbdotnet supports WinUSB, libusb-1.0 and libusb-win32 0.1http://libusbdotnet.sourceforge.net/WinUSB componenthttp://

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-62726032300984964232010-03-06T09:33:00.002+08:002010-03-06T09:36:24.969+08:00

http://code.google.com/p/picusb/I have created this page quite some time ago. But I did not put anything inside. Now I will start to put some contents inside, mainly related to some open source codes related to USB PIC MCUs.Some files for download:http://code.google.com/p/picusb/downloads/list

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-86493885827399069772010-02-21T11:09:00.003+08:002010-02-27T10:14:03.397+08:00

http://old.nabble.com/Announcing-code-freeze---pre-release-mode-for-the-Windows-backend-td27657981.htmlPete Batard announced the news and Pete Stuge has come out a good integration plan. Hopefully the Windows backend will sooon be integrated into the main tree.At the same time, I think if you are interested in the Windows backend, you can already try it. It mostly works for me. The only issue I

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-88025916146476105412010-02-21T10:43:00.004+08:002010-02-21T11:08:08.359+08:00

Now I used FreeBSD 8.0-Release (updated to 8.0-RELEASE-p2) and it seems to be much better than last time, especially in the USB front. I also like the freebsd-update capability. It seems to be faster than last time.What I like compare to Linux: maybe the BSD license itself. But now I feel GPL/LGPL are not bad either. What is not working: my SATA DVD-RW is not recognized at all. This is an Acer

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-65607448152954649432010-02-15T11:35:00.005+08:002010-02-15T11:55:33.390+08:00

After about 1.5 years gap with FreeBSDs, yesterday I finally got FreeBSD 8.0 Release version installed. My main interests are to get some libusb based programs to work under FreeBSD, including the USB demos from Microchip, pk2cmd for PICkit 2. The installation itself is not flawless. Initially I tried with ACPI disabled (last time it helped) but this resulted in General Protection Fault on this

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-56812661439774589502010-02-12T10:34:00.006+08:002010-02-12T21:14:42.469+08:00

Happy Chinese New Year! Wish you a very prosperous year of Tiger!

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-87301650865358910402010-01-14T19:39:00.004+08:002010-01-14T19:48:46.489+08:00

Here is a new development on the libusb 1.0 for Windows front now that libusb 1.0 already works under Linux and Mac OS X. Now the libusb-winusb branch (using WinUSB backend, good for XP, Vista and Windows 7, 32bit or 64bit) reached beta status. This may be a good alternative to the libusb-win32 project.The benefits of this WinUSB backend is that it will work for 64bit Windows like Vista and

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-1959295774382995452010-01-11T19:23:00.003+08:002010-01-11T19:36:15.898+08:00

Over the Christmas and New Year holiday period, I bought quite some Wii related things.Wii Fit Plus with the Wii balance board is one major item. At SGD159, it is quite a good investment. Now I use it everyday for 30minutes to burn some calories. Wii Sports Resort (table tennis is the most popular for us) and Wii Fit Plus are now the two most played games for us.The Wii Classics Controller is

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-11129515765326725382010-01-11T19:08:00.002+08:002010-01-11T19:20:59.309+08:00

Quirky Linux (http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewCat=Quirky) and Debian Lenny based Puppy dpup (http://www.dpup.org) seem to be actively developed and based on the Puppy Linux philosophy. Both are based on Woof but are based on T2 and Debian Lenny respectively. There are other Woof Puppy based on Slackware and Ubuntu but none of them seems to be as mature as Quirky and dpup.I tried Quirky 0.02 and now I

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-60247081934434371262009-12-23T16:37:00.002+08:002009-12-23T17:00:32.265+08:00

This website (Home of Chinese Puppy Linux Developer) has a nice Chinese support package for Puppy Linux. Maybe it is more meant for the users in mainland China since it makes all the menu items in Chinese.http://puppy.cnbits.com/

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-3409883733431617692009-12-23T16:29:00.000+08:002009-12-23T16:30:11.079+08:00

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-31732195480062326042009-12-20T22:39:00.005+08:002009-12-23T17:01:22.881+08:00

Recently I was reading some positive review of veket Linux in some Chinese forums. veket Linux is mainly distributed P2P network and supported by the forum. It is based on Puppy Linux. Today I tried veket 2.39 and 3.11. veket 2.39 is more stable and included the development tools. V3.11 seems to be more similar to Puppy Linux 4.3.1 which I also installed.Puppy Linux seems to be a good

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-39365519913913829332009-11-08T19:46:00.003+08:002009-11-08T20:51:15.755+08:00

I have not really tried to use 64bit Linux with the exception of an short and aborted experiment with Ubuntu 6.06 64bit. Now that 64bit OS becomes more popular and I think I will give it a try. Ubuntu 9.10 64bit is the nature choice since I am at home with Ubuntu after using it since 5.04.The fresh installation (using ext4) was a very smooth process. The installation cd is also a live cd. So I

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-38824140499580129292009-11-03T19:40:00.003+08:002009-11-03T19:48:00.038+08:00

Yesterday evening I tried to upgrade Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. It was a very smooth process, 1700+ packages were upgraded, some obsolete packages were removed, and after a reboot, Ubuntu 9.10 was installed without an issue. It runs smooth and all the common applications run well (Firefox, media players, OpenOffice, wine, common development tools, Samba client, etc). iBus is now included and I like it

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-21199838099121048922009-10-04T09:38:00.003+08:002009-10-04T09:51:30.690+08:00

Yesterday I was trying Ubuntu Netbook Remix under Ubuntu 9.04 for my desktop. It somehow crashed quite often and not usable at all. I used the desktop-switcher (which comes with the ubuntu-netbook-remix packages) to set it back to the normal Ubuntu Gnome Desktop. It did not work well. The Gnome panel was in a strange state. Then I uninstalled Ubuntu Netbook Remix related packages. Things became

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-15042418893734025752009-09-11T21:01:00.005+08:002009-09-11T21:10:32.180+08:00

This is an interesting blog.http://taxidiary.blogspot.com/2009/04/preface.htmlIt was even on the Straits Times Breaking News web site.http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_418626.htmlThis has been a hot topic recently and today I got the time to read this blog. It is an interesting read and the comments are also interesting. Is it really that unique in Singapore? I

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-15006385461079622002009-07-31T22:08:00.008+08:002009-09-08T22:42:14.366+08:00

The following content was originally from Piklab Wiki page. But Sourceforge has retired the Wiki.The URL was: http://piklab.wiki.sourceforge.net/USB+Port+ProblemsThe following is the text version.You need to have read and write access to the port (serial, parallel or USB).Some distributions do not grant read/write access to regular users by default.Some additional information written by Linus

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-22761655327363970192009-07-31T22:00:00.002+08:002009-07-31T22:03:14.085+08:00

http://libusb.org/Announcement from Daniel Drake, the current lead developer of libusb project.On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:27 AM, Daniel Drake wrote:> Hi,>> Peter Stuge (our git host) kindly purchased www.libusb.org and set up a> trac instance there for us. It is even nicely linked to git :)>> I just moved the wiki and open bugs over to there, and disabled the> corresponding features on

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-46270361590267058202009-07-05T21:09:00.005+08:002009-07-05T21:36:23.163+08:00

Project website:http://openocd.berlios.de/web/http://developer.berlios.de/projects/openocdMailing list archivehttps://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/openocd-development/Forumhttp://forum.sparkfun.com/viewforum.php?f=18I started to really trying it out (with J-Link) this May. It has really progressed very fast. Before that, it did not work at all with J-Link V3. Now I can use J-Link (V3, V6 and V7)

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-13081482776959265682009-06-14T00:20:00.002+08:002009-06-14T00:22:51.598+08:00

Just installed Vista SP2 but I did not notice any differences yet.You can either use Windows updates or use the download here.http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd262148.aspx

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-40142666833535303962009-05-16T23:26:00.003+08:002009-05-16T23:37:25.107+08:00

Today I read an interesting article from Linux Journal.http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10421In the article, there is an interesting example of Isochrouns USB Transfer example based on lpcusb. So I use lpc21isp and download the code to my Olimex LPC-P2148 board which the developers are also using. They have also the Linux host example based on usbfs which seems to work right out of the box.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-19763109844089366472009-05-03T09:01:00.007+08:002009-05-03T09:20:37.011+08:00

Most of the following libusb wrapper/binding work with both libusb and libusb-win32 0.1 version. As far as I know, there are no libusb wrapper/bindings yet for the new libusb-1.0 (currently only Linux and Mac OS X) or Openusb (currently only Linux and Solaris).Python -- pyusbhttp://pyusb.berlios.de/Python -- bitpim libusb wrapper with swighttp://bitpim.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bitpim/trunk/

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-65704985691396888192009-05-02T11:33:00.002+08:002009-05-02T11:38:01.621+08:00

Here are some forums related to Linux in China. It is useful to search for tips related to Chinese font, input method and other things related to use Chinese under Linux.LinuxSirhttp://www.linuxsir.org/bbs/forum39.htmlChinaUnixhttp://linux.chinaunix.net/bbs/Ubuntu Chinahttp://forum.ubuntu.org.cn/Fedora Chinese User Grouphttp://bbs.fedora-zh.org/index.phpLinuxEDENhttp://bbs.linuxeden.com/

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-71628397946694628042009-05-02T11:01:00.002+08:002009-05-02T11:21:55.889+08:00

Control Engineering http://www.controleng.com/Automation Worldhttp://www.automationworld.com/Industrial Design Linehttp://www.industrialcontroldesignline.com/Control.com Forumhttp://www.control.com/plcs.nethttp://www.plcs.net/MrPLC.comhttp://www.mrplc.com/IEC 61499 related informationhttp://www.holobloc.com/More links to follow.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-65445993120043262642009-04-27T20:01:00.004+08:002009-04-27T20:13:36.715+08:00

From EETIMSIt is sad to see that quite some of them are struggling. Renesas and NEC Electronics are struggling and may combine force. Freescale and NXP are also not in good shape. Atmel and Infineon are not really much better either.Here are some articles from EETIMES.NEC Electronics, Renesas target next April for merger Can Freescale beat the odds?Will KKR inject more funds into NXP?

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-64172930189020715022009-04-26T16:24:00.004+08:002009-04-27T10:52:36.601+08:00

LXDE is a light weight desktop environment. It is not as full-feature as XFCE and some say it is just a bunch of program around Openbox and PCManfm. But actually there are more and more programs for LXDE and I think it has its place for light weight desktop environment.LXDE under Ubuntu 9.04 is really very fast. If you are a minimalist and tired of Gnome and KDE and if even XFCE is too big for

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-86906816828873866362009-04-26T15:59:00.004+08:002009-04-27T20:01:03.593+08:00

I already ran XFCE 4.6 in Ubuntu 8.10. So I installed XFCE under Ubuntu 9.04 and it was quite smooth. Personally I am more at home with Gnome but XFCE seems to be quite functional and responsive.There is a Chinese Live CD distro based on Xubuntu (along with LXDE) : Hiweed Linux. The 2.0RC version is based on Xubuntu 8.10. Maybe it should instead be based on 9.04. Hiweed added ibus and ibus-pinyin

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-19672466841703014752009-04-26T09:20:00.006+08:002009-04-26T11:23:11.047+08:00

I had not found any really good impressions about KDE for Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) ever since I used 5.04. I have better impressions about KDE since running KDE 4.2.2 under Ubuntu 8.10. But the startup time and logout time are both a bit slow there.Apparently Kubuntu 9.04 is better. It is noticeably faster than KDE 4.2 under Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10 during login/logout and normal operation. So that

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-47021822111796036192009-04-25T13:01:00.006+08:002009-04-26T11:38:11.596+08:00

Ubuntu 9.04 has just been released. I tested the live session and I was happy with it. So I decided to install it to the harddisk. The installation was very smooth on my Acer M1641 desktop, just like the 8.10 version. The only thing I needed to do was to use the Nvidia proprietary driver instead of the open-source Xorg driver in order to get the full resolution since the open source driver does

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-91076853222876074592009-04-23T20:47:00.002+08:002009-04-23T20:50:26.526+08:00

Today I got the latest updates for Fedora for KDE 4.2.2 (was 4.2.1) and it solved my problem with console-helper. Originally, running "yumex" or other programs which need root privileges will hang during start up. I was using "kdesu" to run "yumex" but it would not exit properly. This makes me feel better. But KDE 4.2.2 under Fedora 10 is still relatively slow compared to Arch.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-28645745483883803692009-04-20T20:25:00.003+08:002009-04-26T11:42:01.931+08:00

After some good impressions with the new Arch Linux installation (with LXDE and XFCE and also Gnome), I decided to give KDE 4.2 a try on Arch Linux. The installation with pacman is easy. The result seems to be better than both Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10. Now I have a problem with KDE 4.2 under Fedora 10 that console-helper will hang during startup with a dialogbox titled "Query" when I tried to

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-18795751232416453602009-04-17T21:39:00.002+08:002009-04-17T21:50:32.355+08:00

Now that Microchip released pk2cmd source codes for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, things become very easy to get PICkit 2 to work under Linux. I just tried it under Arch Linux and it works very well.Source code download: http://www.microchip.com/pickit2 (now it is of version V1.20)It is recommended that you build the binary by yourself since the released binary may not work for certain Linux

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-43545113561810755762009-04-17T19:44:00.002+08:002009-04-17T19:58:50.032+08:00

I've been using IE8 under Windows Vista for a while and until recently I have not seen any major compatibility issues with websites other than Sourceforge. There are warnings from Sourceforge that it is better to upgraded to newer version of IE or Firefox. But my version of IE 8 is the latest.Today, I happened to read Linux Today and it has a link to Earthweb (part of internet.com) and IE8 is the

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-69576020410479300042009-04-14T21:38:00.003+08:002009-04-26T11:42:56.058+08:00

The English version is listed at US$29.95 (US$14.95 if upgrading from other vendors).http://www.evermoresw.com/If you can understand Chinese like I do, the Chinese version is actually free.http://www.evermoresw.com.cn/webch/product/personal.jspIt is based on Java but it is really very fast under Linux, much faster than OpenOffice. The compability with Office 2007 under Linux does not seems as

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-659703557432171962009-04-14T21:31:00.001+08:002009-04-14T21:34:21.892+08:00

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporebusinessnews/view/422164/1/.html"The Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) said gross domestic product (GDP) would fall by 6.0 to 9.0 per cent this year, a stunning downgrade from the previous official estimate of a decline of 2.0 to 5.0 per cent". This is quite bad. Hopefully things will get better in the 4th quarter.Singapore retrench blog tracks

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-89909252339357020042009-04-14T20:39:00.010+08:002009-04-26T11:41:49.007+08:00

I tried to use Arch Linux back in 2007 (0.8 through 2007.08). Somehow I did not use it often and then a system update (pacman -Syu) would ask for large amount of updates and the mirror is not that fast (no Singapore mirror). So I did not tried it with the current Acer desktop.I am trying out some small installations using LXDE and XFCE (4.60 was just out). I tried them on a minimum Ubuntu 8.10

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-30618800041412208452009-04-12T10:53:00.003+08:002009-04-12T10:56:26.949+08:00

http://jeromeg.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2009/03/04/Installing-Xfce-4.6-on-Ubuntu-8.04-and-Ubuntu-8.10This works nicely for me. I was originally trying to use the binary installed but it asked for too many dependencies (development packages).XFCE 4.60 seems to be much nicer than the previous 4.4.x series which comes with Ubuntu 8.10 and 8.04. On the other hand, I am also trying LXDE, LXDE seems

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-85313746205231485592009-04-10T12:06:00.002+08:002009-04-10T12:10:01.219+08:00

Nice tips:1) Print to PDF:http://ubuntu-snippets.blogspot.com/2009/02/enable-print-to-pdf.html2) UUIDhttp://ubuntu-snippets.blogspot.com/2009/03/uuid-and-partitions.htmlThere are quite some good tips from this blog. So I will follow it.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-42913990909777350242009-04-10T11:44:00.002+08:002009-04-10T11:56:03.368+08:00

Notify-OSD (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD) is a nice new feature of the up-coming Ubuntu 9.04.Launchpad site: https://launchpad.net/notify-osdInstallation instruction for Ubuntu 8.10. Both are okay for me under Ubuntu 8.10.1. From Alex Rybicki: http://blog.alexrybicki.com/2009/02/how-to-install-notify-osd-in-intrepid.html2. From Softpedia:http://news.softpedia.com/news/Installing-Ubuntu-9-04-

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-75248977579043500552009-04-09T16:46:00.003+08:002009-04-10T11:56:37.367+08:00

I was having problems with compiz-fusion under Fedora 10 using the Nvidia 180.19 driver. However compiz-fusion works right out of the box under Ubuntu 8.10 with the restricted driver (177.82) provided by Ubuntu. Even though I do not really care about compiz-fusion effects (usually I tested it and then turned it off), I'd like to troubleshoot the problem.compiz-check reveals the problem.http://

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-15707995869251479502009-04-09T15:37:00.004+08:002009-04-10T11:57:06.785+08:00

Recently I got this annoying message under Ubuntu 8.04 in the login screen.Just error message pop-up suggested to "chmod 644 ~/.dmrc" but that does not work. Google shows that others are having the same problem and the solution is the following. This is quite strange. https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/41142chmod 700 /home/chmod 644 /home//.dmrc

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-38588295222143464172009-04-07T20:18:00.002+08:002009-04-07T20:26:24.772+08:00

Today I met one problem when trying to install Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 under Vista SP1 32bit. Luckily Google told me the answer again.http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/12/27/install-microsoft-net-framework-11-on-windows-vista-fix-regsvcsexe-fails-error/We need to slipstream .NET 1.1 SP1 into .NET Framework setup package to have a integrated .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 installer.From the link:

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-38151037785425155582009-04-05T16:13:00.001+08:002009-04-10T12:02:27.029+08:00

Today I tried to use the open source driver with the SCX-4200 under Fedora 10 and it works! Nice. I do not need to use the closed driver from Samsung.Website:http://splix.ap2c.org/

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-6064379955851392772009-04-02T06:43:00.004+08:002009-04-17T20:01:33.142+08:00

I briefly ran Fedora 9 on my last desktop for three month and it was okay. Then it died and I got the new Acer M1641 desktop and was only running Ubuntu (8.04 and 8.10) along with Windows Vista.I do not quite like the KDE 4.1 under Ubuntu 8.10 and I saw that Fedora 10 comes with KDE 4.2 now. So I decided to give it a try last week. I happened to find a book in the library with Fedora 10 KDE live

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-22388517068608324692009-01-27T22:30:00.001+08:002009-01-27T22:33:30.979+08:00

Happy Chinese New Year! Wish you a prosperous year 2009, the year of OX.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-30169969374479768802008-12-22T21:30:00.000+08:002008-12-22T21:58:27.231+08:00

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-27265683247928669142008-12-22T21:21:00.003+08:002008-12-22T21:29:31.926+08:00

Daniel Drake announced the release of libusb-1.0.0 on 9-Dec-2008.Website: http://libusb.wiki.sourceforge.net/Libusb1.0Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1674API documentation: http://libusb.sourceforge.net/api-1.0/Caveats:http://libusb.sourceforge.net/api-1.0/caveats.html

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-57310577343640156452008-11-24T09:37:00.004+08:002009-04-26T11:43:42.597+08:00

Yesterday I went to Sim Lim square for the monthly (or bi-monthly) IT refreshment trip. My intention was mainly to check out network based media player. But interestingly I found out that there are shops selling PCI based serial/parallel port card. You get real serial port and real parallel port from the card. Typically USB to serial port cable can do most of the job. But typical USB to parallel

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-21713903834645820702008-11-14T08:54:00.002+08:002008-11-14T09:59:24.195+08:00

http://forum.microchip.com/tm.aspx?m=382036

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-28058219267961498722008-11-11T22:33:00.005+08:002008-11-14T09:59:44.408+08:00

http://forum.microchip.com/tm.aspx?m=381449There are many interesting discussions in the Microchip Forumabout RTOS. There are also more and more RTOS produced forMicrochip MCUs, especially after the introduction of biggerPICs like dsPIC30, PIC24, dsPIC33 and PIC32.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-34769622836494383462008-11-03T22:28:00.003+08:002008-11-14T08:57:18.769+08:00

Ubuntu 8.10 has been released and I installed it last Saturday on my Acer M1641 desktop. It is really very smooth. The only thing I need to do is to use the Nvidia proprietary X driver to get 1280x1024 resolution. I did not encounter problems I met with Ubuntu 8.04 (http://mcuee.blogspot.com/search/label/Ubuntu).Good job, the Ubuntu team!

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-72533436453310033742008-10-05T11:32:00.007+08:002009-04-26T09:09:34.279+08:00

Now my wife has the E71. So I took over Nokia 6280 and I'd like to use it to replace my old Samsung SGH-E388 phone and the old MP3 player. I think I would keep my Sony portable FM radio but just in case I could use 6280 as well. However now I got a problem. My Starhub Green Prepaid SIM card does not work with the phone. The same SIM card works on my old Nokia phones and even the new E71 but just

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-50378131636258370442008-10-05T11:14:00.005+08:002009-04-26T09:09:49.398+08:00

My wife would like to combine the functionality of her current three device into one. Her brother would recontract his Singtel mobile contract so this was just nice. He would buy the phone as a gift.But it turns out that here requirement is actually high even on surface the high end requirements (Wifi, GPS) are not there.1) Nokia 6280 Phone for voice/sms, MP3, FM radio. This was bought in the

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-40029803798553022462008-10-05T11:04:00.004+08:002010-01-11T19:36:36.324+08:00

I was thinking of buying a Wii for physical exercises for sometime.After doing some research, I bought an authorized set this Wednesday(public holiday in Singapore). I paid SGD710 (after comparing 7 shopsin Funan IT Mall) for the following.1) Wii Sports Official Singapore version with 3 months warrantyby Maxsoft. Listed price is SGD499 but many shops sell for SGD519.The so called official

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-34963880065192514982008-09-26T13:07:00.006+08:002009-04-26T11:41:07.644+08:00

http://help.wugnet.com/office/Modify-equations-Word-2007-ftopict1094894.htmlI was facing similar problems with Office 2000/XP under Windows XP and Vista 32bit. Now I understand the problems. That is because I have set up System Local to use Simplified Chines to be able to display Chinese for some non-Unicode programs. After setting back the System Locale to English (Singapore or USA), equation

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-46948489252069529572008-09-26T12:31:00.006+08:002008-11-19T09:38:23.246+08:00

There are many articles on installing XP on the HP/Compaq laptops. The major problem seems to be the chipset, graphics and sound card driver. Here are some good links which works for our Presario V3619AU. YMMV.General overview and dual boot.http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/558994-how-install-xp-after-vista.htmlhttp://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-1414719029308255702008-09-22T20:59:00.005+08:002009-04-10T12:04:00.822+08:00

I could not find any BIOS updates to Acer M1641. Therefore I have to use "acpi=off pnpbios=off" option. There was still a problem. Reboot works. Shutdown does not work as it hangs.Similar bugs were reported for Ubuntu 8.04.1) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/193125 2) http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=6995063) http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=698972The solution in the

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-76091958606594020342008-09-12T20:02:00.003+08:002008-09-12T20:20:43.693+08:00

It turns out that the USB cable is to blame. Changing to a better USB cable solved the Scanner I/O Hardware Error problem. Now I do not need to use the USB 1.1 Hub to force the scanner to work in the USB Full Speed mode. This also solved the CUPS problem when use the Western Digital Mybook World as the printer server. We are using an image from a Chinese website (http://bbs.qzxx.com/thread-294-1-

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-81174758775812878092008-09-06T23:36:00.004+08:002008-09-12T20:22:01.288+08:00

The installation of Ubuntu 8.04 on the Vista based M1641 proved to be a bit harder than I would like.Problem 1: need to disable acpi (boot the kernel with acpi=off option). Ubuntu 8.04 will hang during bootup after "Starting Bluetooth Services...". Actually I knew this problem when my bother-in-law tried to boot up a Gentoo based live cd for hacking the Mybook World. Still I expected Ubuntu 8.04

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-46474773990858646012008-09-06T23:24:00.004+08:002008-09-07T10:37:21.513+08:00

My old desktop suddenly went south. So I have to buy another PC. I was eying the Asus EeeBox (XP Home, Atom CPU, very cute). but later decided to buy a cheap Acer Aspire M1641 (47M32) instead. Its cost is SGD640 (no monitor) with upgraded DDR2 RAM to 2GB since I know Vista will be happy with 2GB RAM. The 47M32 model is the 47MR32 model without the Nvidia 9300 graphics card. Since I do not really

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-71267238386191717362008-09-06T23:17:00.003+08:002008-09-06T23:20:40.215+08:00

We also want to try out to use the Samsung SCX-4200 printer with a hacked Western Digital Mybook World Edition 500GB device. The simple NAS runs Linux and we can use the USB host to connect to the printer and use CUPS to share the printing function. However, it seems that sometimes the printer will stop functioning. My brother-in-law bought this Mybook World in the Comex show recently held in

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-52153114863683062482008-09-06T23:01:00.004+08:002008-09-06T23:16:53.217+08:00

I bought this Samsung SCX-4200 printer/copier/scanner early this year. The printing and copying function work fine. At its price, it seems to be a good investment. Since we have another old Acer S2W 3300U and it works very well so we have not used the scanning function. But the first time we tried to use it, it gave us "Hardware I/O error". I have tried it under three different PCs, under Windows

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-20658379937814566682008-08-01T21:49:00.004+08:002009-05-03T23:23:48.969+08:00

I am not a Linux kernel hacker, actually I am not even a programmer.But I've got two trivial patches about USB PICs in Linux kernel 2.6.26.So it seems we can help the open source community no matter how minorthe contributions are.http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.26********************************************************commit 5fc89390f74ac42165db477793fb30f6a200e79cAuthor

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-44724310886130058702008-07-02T18:57:00.003+08:002008-07-02T19:02:38.511+08:00

Microchip has released a cross-platform version of pk2cmdV1.10. It works under Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It isalso partially working under FreeBSD. I am proud to have contributed the development by providing some ideas and carry out quite some testing under Linux and FreeBSD.Announcement:http://forum.microchip.com/tm.aspx?m=349078Download:http://www.microchip.com/pickit2My blog has quite some

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-16404346223638432772008-06-15T18:22:00.002+08:002008-06-15T18:26:19.987+08:00

I always want to try out both ubuntu and Fedora since both are amongthe most popular Linux distros. I've used Ubuntu since 5.04 (5.10,6.06, 6.10, 7.04,7.10 and 8.04) and now I am mainly using 8.04even though I kept 6.06 and 7.10 as well. I've used Fedora sinceCore 3 (Core 4, Core 5, Core 6, Fedora 7) but Fedora 8 failed to bootin my system due to the conflict with FreeBSD last time(http://

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-18645237201920802972008-06-01T20:37:00.003+08:002008-11-14T10:03:26.618+08:00

http://forum.microchip.com/tm.aspx?m=340892I have created some simple host programs using the latestlibusb-1.0 and OpenUSB to test Jan Axelson's genericWinUSB firmware under Linux.As you can see from the examples, it is not that difficultto port existing libusb-0.1 based program to the newlibusb-1.0 and OpenUSB.However the main thing may be how to better use thenew features of libusb-1.0 and

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-778634228964329772008-05-18T10:17:00.003+08:002008-05-18T10:34:02.337+08:00

Microchip is now offering a free Graphics LCD library for usewith PIC24/dsPIC/PIC32. It also has support from 3rd partieslike Segger and Ramtex.http://www.microchip.com/graphicsSegger has emWin which is very powerful but not cheap.http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?products_id=640http://www.segger.com/emwin.htmlRamtex has the Font Editor and Graphic libraries for popular LCDs.They

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-78022572014487675882008-05-15T22:19:00.003+08:002008-05-15T22:25:26.588+08:00

I am basically a non-programmer. However I am interested in learningUSB and I like to support Open Source software and spend myspare time doing testing or helping with the documentationsfor some projects (piklab, pk2, pk2cmdLinux, libusb, openusb,libusb-win32, pyusb, HPS USB stack for FreeBSD, etc).I just submitted two trivial patches to the Linux kernel. They bothgot accepted.1) USB HID Quirk

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-52274787883061333482008-05-11T23:01:00.002+08:002008-05-11T23:29:29.335+08:00

Thanks to Daniel Drake's hard work, now libusb-1.0 and libusb-compact-0.1 seem to work well enough for many applications now.Website:http://libusb.wiki.sourceforge.net/Libusb1.0Git: (use "git clone" to get the initial clone and then use "git pull" to update)git://projects.reactivated.net/~dsd/libusb.gitgit://projects.reactivated.net/~dsd/libusb-compat-0.1.gitYou need to use the latest version of

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-40768040490688487922008-05-08T21:07:00.003+08:002008-05-08T21:12:26.121+08:00

I spent some time to find the links from Microsoft website but to no avail (I found onechecked build version but that is not what I want).Google found this one.http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/07/standalone-windows-xp-sp3-download-list/Downloading the 316MB Windows XP SP3 is pretty fast here from my Starhub8Mbps cable online service.Its installation is faster (on this slower desktop) compared to

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-40710481949673522322008-05-03T09:08:00.004+08:002008-05-03T09:15:35.410+08:00

I've been a happy Ubuntu user since Ubuntu 5.04. Now I am running Ubuntu 8.04 along with 6.06 and 7.10.Today I created my Launchpad account to report that an existing bug with 7.10 still exists in 8.04.https://bugs.launchpad.net/~xiaofanc/https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usbutils/+bug/159189I am not a software developer but I think I can be of some help when it comes to testing.

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-8216822227559751882008-05-03T08:25:00.002+08:002008-05-03T08:33:30.886+08:00

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 last week. The first impression was not good since it hangs after initial bootup. This reminds me of OpenSuse 10.3 after enabling compiz. So I boot into Gnome Fail Safe Session and disabled Visual Effects (and actually removed compiz) and then reboot. This solved the problem.Other than this initial glitch, it seems to be quite smooth and solid, not like the initial bump

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-8304093994814444552008-05-02T21:36:00.002+08:002008-05-02T21:41:47.563+08:00

I tried to update the Vista installation using Windows updates but it was not there. Therefore I just downloaded the stand-alone x86 installation. It was quite fast to download the 400M+ file from my 8Mbps Starhub Cable Online (I believe Starhub is Microsoft Singapore's ISP). The installation took quite a while (about 50minutes) and finally it was finished without incident.I will still need to

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-74100227728114054312008-05-02T19:54:00.006+08:002009-04-26T11:41:23.876+08:00

My wife now has more and more complains about the Vista notebook we bought on Christmas day of 2007 (http://mcuee.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-vista-notebook.html).The biggest complain is that often Excel will often say that it has stopped working if she double-clicks an Excel file to open it. She has to open Excel and then open the file from within Excel.Google found the solution.http://

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-90063218618163240092008-05-01T09:21:00.004+08:002009-09-08T22:39:15.421+08:00

Here is a mini-howto to get pk2cmd Linux port to work under PCLinuxOS 2007.1) Download pk2cmdLinux from Jeff Post's website.Download link: http://home.pacbell.net/theposts/picmicro/Edit in 09/2009: new download linkhttp://www.microchip.com/pickit2As of this writing, the version is 0.8.2) Preparation to get pk2cmd working is easy under PCLinuxOS 2007.You need to have g++ (provided by package gcc-c

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-83569971923994649282008-04-27T18:49:00.005+08:002009-09-08T22:39:43.394+08:00

Here is a mini-howto to get pk2cmd Linux port to work under Fedora Core 6. It should work for Fedora Core 5 and Fedora 7 as well. Hopefully it also works for Fedora 8. I have never used Fedora 8 since it failed to boot on my machine because of the conflict with FreeBSD.http://mcuee.blogspot.com/2007/11/new-fc8-install-hangs-at-message.html1) Download pk2cmdLinux from Jeff Post's website.Download

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-37061182009138418312008-04-24T21:04:00.006+08:002009-09-08T22:40:21.939+08:00

Edit in 09/2009: new download linkhttp://www.microchip.com/pickit2Download link:http://home.pacbell.net/theposts/picmicro/As of this writing, the version is 0.8. I've tested the following under Ubuntu 6.06 and 7.10. It should work for 7.04 as well. For Ubuntu 5.04 and maybe 5.10, you should use hotplug rules instead of udev rules. But I no longer use these older versions.How to build it from the

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-8286308530724128902008-04-24T21:01:00.001+08:002010-03-14T09:47:48.822+08:00

Updates to be found in Microchip Forum:http://www.microchip.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=2354271. PUF using sdcc : http://vasco.gforge.enseeiht.fr/ "PUF is a USB application framework dedicated to Linux (on the host side) and to the PIC 18F4550 family of microcontrollers (on the device side). PUF includes: a bootloader that can flash the PIC application through the USB, a PIC demo and its corresponding

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6431571552393594213.post-4602291911406171192008-04-24T20:50:00.003+08:002009-04-26T09:05:59.868+08:00

I have tried to build javaxusb from the CVS source under Ubuntu 7.10. I canbuild javax-usb and java-usb-ri without a problem with the Java 6.0 packageincluded in Ubuntu. But I could not build the package javax-usb-ri-linux.mcuee@ubuntu710:~/Desktop/build/javaxusb/javax-usb-ri-linux$ ant jarsBuildfile: build.xml compile: [echo] Compiling class files. [echo] Compiling JNI library. [

Xiaofanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03066298450495260203noreply@blogger.com4