Sunday, June 15, 2008

Fedora 9 Installed

I always want to try out both ubuntu and Fedora since both are among
the 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 8.04
even though I kept 6.06 and 7.10 as well. I've used Fedora since
Core 3 (Core 4, Core 5, Core 6, Fedora 7) but Fedora 8 failed to boot
in my system due to the conflict with FreeBSD last time
(http://mcuee.blogspot.com/2007/11/new-fc8-install-hangs-at-message.html).
So I have not used Fedora for a while except an old Fedora Core 6
installation used for occasional testing purpose.

Today I installed Fedora 9 (after removing the dormant PCLinux 2007
partition). Initially I did not install grub since I always used my trusted
Ubuntu 6.06 to handle grub stuff and it works for all other Linux distros
I am using and it works for FreeBSD 7.0 and NetBSD 4.0 as well.

But this proved to be not a good idea for Fedora 9, which is always
on the cutting edge side. The grub from Ubuntu can not handle
Fedora 9 due to some changes. Google shows that there are many
users having similar problems.

Problems:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/fedora-35/fedora-9-and-grub-error-2-problems-642487/

I tried to use the chainloading method in the thread but it did not work.
I was thinking of giving up but I decided to try it again. I chose to "Upgrade"
the new installation and surprisingly it gave me the chance to install the
bootloader and did not mess up the existing installation. The grub
bootloader did not recognize the other operating systems (not even
Windows XP) but I knew this from past experiences.

After this, Fedora 9 can boot properly. I modified the menu.lst file from
the Ubuntu 6.06 menu.lst file so that I could boot the other operating
systems.

So this time it is better than last time.

The normal operation of Fedora is quite ok just like my past
experiences with Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7. There are
some new things like PolicyKit/ConsoleKit to set up permissions
for usb device which I am now learning. Other than that,
it is quite easy to get my usual programs (gputils, sdcc,
libusb, openusb, pk2cmd, etc) to work.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Simple libusb 1.0 and OpenUSB example

http://forum.microchip.com/tm.aspx?m=340892

I have created some simple host programs using the latest
libusb-1.0 and OpenUSB to test Jan Axelson's generic
WinUSB firmware under Linux.

As you can see from the examples, it is not that difficult
to port existing libusb-0.1 based program to the new
libusb-1.0 and OpenUSB.

However the main thing may be how to better use the
new features of libusb-1.0 and OpenUSB to have better
performance than the old libusb-0.1.