1. Two 800k Mac floppy disks from 1990

2. One QIC-24 tape, also from 1990, from my tenure at a Santa Cruz-based computer company which shall remain nameless

3. One 4mm DAT tape, 2GB (DDS1) from 1995 which contains my backups from my tenure at Cygnus Support, which became Cygnus Solutions and was then purchased by Red Hat in 1999

First, the Mac floppies. They contain some, though sadly not all, of my (UUCP!) email from UCSC in the late 1980s as well as college papers, Usenet memes, and burp sounds that my roommate added to my collection of data when I wasn’t looking. I had a Mac Classic for which I believe I paid over $1400.

I have now discovered that the “classic” Macintosh could read and write single-sided double-density (400k), double-side double-density (800k), and high-density (1.4mb) floppy disks. It was able to write 800k to DSDD floppies in a time when most were 720k by using variable motor speeds in its floppy drives, thereby rendering those floppies unreadable by any machines other than Macs. Unthinkingly, I stored my precious backups on 800k disks and have thus been searching for a working 16+ year old Mac to read them, with the help of my son’s electronics lab teacher, my good friend and ex-college roommate who works at Apple (and who I think wants his burp noises back), and the random local community. I now have three non-working older Macs partially disassembled in my office.

The latest score is interesting, though – I have discovered a cache of old backups on ZIP 100 disks which contain most, but tantalizingly not quite all, of the information on those Mac disks! Now I simply need to figure out if the remaining miscellaneous data is worth the effort. As a bonus, if I do get an old Mac working, I will be able to play Dark Castle again, a game which I humbly refer to as “Freshman Year”.

Next up, the QIC-24 tape. For those who are not familiar, QIC stands for “quarter-inch cassette”, meaning a cassette with 1/4″ magnetic tape. This is a similar tape to that found in standard audio cassettes, but in a very sturdy aluminum-and-plastic cassette that you could use to ward off intruders.  These same tapes are still being used for backups worldwide. I have no doubt that the data is safe there – but QIC-24 is very ancient format and modern drives cannot read it. I discovered this by attempting to read the tape in the one drive that exists in my local area, which happens to belong to my one local client. Unfortunately, their tape drive is new enough that it no longer reads QIC-24.

The DAT tape is more interesting, as I purchased an older DAT drive on eBay at one point but never got it working. Two days ago I was able to source a SCSI card and managed to get the drive up and working on a Linux PC, and “mt status” returns information about the drive, but “tar” or “dd” on the tape only returns “Input/Output Error”, indicating that the drive is bad or dirty… or the tape is no longer recognizable. My next step is to clean the drive, and if that doesn’t work I will take my friend Beth’s offer up on a working DAT drive and give that a shot.

So… if you have any advice on where to find a QIC-24 drive, or how to get an old, dirty DAT drive working, I would be most grateful.

There have been a lot of changes this year, most notably the Embedded Linux Conference moving from April up to February and also moving location from San Francisco to Redwood Shores, CA, USA. This is a premier annual meeting of embedded Linux engineers, and I am pleased to announce an addition this year. On Tuesday, February 14, the Yocto Project presents a Developer Day, a full day of embedded Linux training, free of charge. Seating is limited, so register early and get more information on the Yocto Project Developer Day page at the Linux Foundation.

I will be attending and speaking at several of these conferences. If you see me, say hi!

Now the summer conference season is upon us, despite the odd weather. Summer brings my three favorite events – CLS, OSCON, and LinuxCon – as well as Linux Plumbers Conference, and it forecasts the busy fall season as well. Here are some details on the big ones for embedded Linux.

OSCON

For open source junkies, the Mecca of open source conferences is O’Reilly Media‘s OSCON which is held in Portland every summer, this year July 25-29. OSCON draws thousands of people every year, and with good reason – it is the largest annual mixture of industry and “pure” open source ventures to talk specifically about open source. You will find everything here, from expo hall to half-day tutorials, presentations to BoFs, lightning talks to after-parties, and never a dull moment. This year, O’Reilly is also co-locating two new conferences, OSCON Data and OSCON Java, which cover (naturally) open data and the Java language. This makes the week intensely busy, so keep a close eye on the schedule.

I’ll be at OSCON all week, talking about the Yocto Project as an opener for our premier build engineer Beth Flanagan talking about the Yocto Project Autobuilder, as well as at a (planned) evening BoF. It is also my intention to reprise the popular Hallway Hoedown afternoon jam session from last year, and possibly a music BoF, so bring an instrument! (Day & time TBA.)

I will also be attending the Community Leadership Summit during the weekend prior to OSCON. This is a free conference where community leaders can come together and share best practices, swap stories of good and bad experiences, and network with each other. The crowd is always very vibrant, and it isn’t just technical communities – we have had participants from all walks of life. If you manage a community, please check it out or write to me for more information. It is a free event, but please be sure to register.

The one thing about OSCON is that it is somewhat expensive, but I can help with that. Contact me by email or in the comments below for a registration code worth 20% off.

Also, join the social networks surrounding OSCON if you enjoy couch surfing or linking up with friendly, like-minded strangers to share housing, as that is quite common with this event. And for food, the Portland food carts are legendary, mystical places where everything is tasty, healthy, and cheap. Be sure to follow @oscon on twitter, and watch #oscon for late-breaking information.

LinuxCon North America, Vancouver, BC

LinuxCon is the premier general Linux event of the year, and this year is a doozy. As most (probably all) of the readers of this blog already know, this year is the 20th anniversary of the Linux operating system, and while Linus himself is celebrating with a no-stress major revision, the Linux Foundation has taken it upon themselves to throw a huge party in Canada.

LinuxCon starts off with a grand educational event – the “Linux Learners” Student Day – put together by the very good folks at Oregon State’s Open Source Lab. Then the conference itself begins, featuring keynotes from several Linux luminaries, a Q&A with Linus and Greg Kroah-Hartmann, a panel called “20 Years of Linux” with Eben Moglen (Software Freedom Law Center), Jim Zemlin (Executive Director, Linux Foundation), and Jon “Maddog” Hall, and several tracks of presentations.

Oh, and in case that wasn’t fun enough, don’t just fly to Vancouver – go to Portland instead and take the LinuxCon or Bust Bus for several hours of fun through the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Then on Wednesday night, the event of the year is the Linux “Roaring 20′s” 20th Anniversary Gala at the Commodore Ballroom, with a full dinner buffet, open bar, live jazz, and casino – you can event rent 1920s attire to complete the picture.

I’ll be participating in a 2-hour hands-on Yocto Project presentation with Saul Wold, one of the project’s lead engineers. There will also be a Yocto Project Community BoF, and several Yocto Project folks available during the event for one-on-one discussions.

Fall 2011

Some fantastic conferences are coming up in the fall: Linux Plumber’s Conference, Open Hardware Summit in New York (CFP is open through July 1!), ARM TechCon, Open World Forum in Paris, and the big Linux Foundation events in Prague: Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC-E), LinuxCon Europe, and the Kernel Summit, plus LinuxCon Brazil in November, to name just a few. Watch this space for more information in an upcoming post.

Also keep in mind that you can follow all of these conferences from my open source conferences page, which contains a link to a Google Calendar that tracks them as well.

Ain’t it fun being social?

Regular readers know that I am now working with the Yocto Project, an open-source project under the Linux Foundation‘s banner. The Yocto Project aims to bring some sanity to the embedded Linux development process, in terms of industry-quality tooling as well as collaboration with established projects like OpenEmbedded and consortiums like Linaro. The Yocto Project issued its 1.0 release at the Linux Collaboration Summit earlier this month, and we had a large presence both at that summit and at the Embedded Linux Conference the following week, both at the beautiful Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco.

Visit the Yocto Project website to find out more about it, and feel free to join us on the mailing lists, IRC channels, Twitter, and now YouTube.

There was much more going on at these conferences than the Yocto Project, of course. The BeagleBoard team was there, and Jason gave an excellent hands-on class to over 30 people. The PandaBoard team was also there from TI, as well as Sony‘s digital & internet-enabled TV crew (Hi Tim & Frank!) and many other projects using embedded Linux. The presentations were of particularly high quality this year, and I saw our friends from Free-Electrons videotaping as they normally do.

Speaking of conferences, I have updated the Open Source Conferences page with a ton of new events, and updated the dates on those that have been announced in the past couple of months, as well as updating the Google Calendar companion. If you see anything missing on that page or any mistaken data, please let me know and I’ll fix it.

Along with some free resources, like this white paper on getting started with embedded Linux and this short video of Jerry Cooperstein introducing embedded Linux, the Linux Foundation has announced three paid embedded Linux training opportunities:

• LF411 Embedded Linux Development, the granddaddy course, is 5 days of hands-on training with a premier embedded Linux educator.
• LF410 Embedded Linux Development: A Crash Course is a 2-day version of LF411. Look for it at a conference near you (in this case, LinuxCon 2011 in Vancouver this August)
• LF405 Embedded Linux Development with Yocto Project/OpenEmbedded is a 5-day course with a strong emphasis on using the Yocto Project for embedded development.

Back on the free-as-in-beer side, Michael Opdenacker and the other fantastic folks at Free Electrons just announced the availability of three sets of videos from the Embedded Linux Conference 2010 and Gstreamer Conference 2010 last fall in Cambridge, UK. This is an excellent way to participate and learn without actually needing to travel to the events:

• ELC-E 2010 presentations
• Android and Embedded Linux tutorials by Chris Simmonds
• Gstreamer Conference 2010 presentations

For more free education opportunities, check out this page on free embedded Linux training resources (and please suggest more!).

First, the Yocto Project is aligning with the OpenEmbedded project – future releases of the Yocto Project will contain the new OpenEmbedded oe-core set of recipes as a base. You can read more about this on the OpenEmbedded Core page. 

Second, in addition to OpenEmbedded, over a dozen organizations have chosen to publicly announce their participation in the Yocto Project, including semiconductor manufacturers, embedded Linux providers, and professional organizations, and several of these have also joined the Yocto steering group. 

For more information, see the press release from the Linux Foundation. Also makre sure to visit the Yocto project site and join the community.

Yocto is a Linux Foundation project that aims to provide a full build environment for embedded Linux distributions. Yocto supports builds for several architectures, including Atom, ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC, with a full build ecosystem. Poky provides the build tools based on the BitBake build tool and OpenEmbedded metadata set, while Yocto adds tools for building and testing, an Eclipse plug-in, and some very nifty features like pseudo and swabber, as well as lots of good documentation and other resources. One of those resources is a vibrant community that includes mailing lists and IRC channels as well as an active blog, and that’s where I come in – I get to help manage and monitor those resources, measure their effectiveness, and make sure that people are finding the information and contacts they need.

So if you are hanging out on the #yocto or #poky IRC channels or in the mailing lists, or on Twitter (@yoctoproject), ping me and let me know how you think Yocto is doing, and what you wish it would do. I’m here to help!

• Texas Instruments BeagleBoard (OMAP3530)
• Texas Instruments AM1808
• Intel Atom
• Freescale i.MX51
• MIPS Malta

These SDKs are available for download now to Meld members (registration is free).

Today, check developerWorks for a new article titled
Booting Linux on the BeagleBoard xM. This new article describes how to get Angstrom, Ubuntu, and Android running on the xM. I’m thankful for any comments.