One of the weak points of OpenEmbedded is the documentation, or to be accurate the lack of any documentation. OpenEmbedded is by the far the most flexible system out there but documentation has really suffered. This means you can use OpenEmbedded for many many days but are still unaware of certain features. To overcome this situation Koen and me have started creating a documentation. This documentation is written using DocBook and will be task orientated. It will illustrate how to achieve the common use-cases easily. Typical for OpenEmbedded everything is already available in our SCM system, once it features some more text I will point you to the xhtml,pdf and html versions of it.

Part of the documentation is also to provide some kind of tutorials. These tutorial are getting more and more popular. After having looked at istanbul, I have decided to give wink a try. Wink features editing capabilities, this means I can show and hide balloons with some information, and make the user interact with the demonstration. The only issue with wink is, it is a memory hog and I made it go Out Of Memory twice already. This means after you have recorded your screencast and hit the Finish button it will just freeze your machine and you will have to start over again. Obviously this pretty much sucks. As a workaround you can record steps of your tutorial seperately and copy them into one big tutorial afterwards, I hope this approach will work out right.

To use wink I have used Xephyr to start on DISPLAY=:1 in 800×640 and started a gnome session in there. This is quite nice but I have already fallen victim of Xephyr. First it has issues with my keymap, I’m unable to use curly braces in Xephyr and the second issue was hitting CapsLock and it didn’t go away… pretty bad.

Hacking the Gnu Compiler Collection. I have hacked cpp to error out when including host includes from. This can hopefully uncover certain issues in the future. While hacking gcc I’m in between wow that is neat and the feeling that gcc is really really old software. I think I like it though, well it is using a sort of lambda calculus which makes it sexy.