Wow... November... Gotta do better on posting updates to this thing. Well, I've got good reasons...
Ballistics
What can I say? It's taken about 1-1.5 years longer that it ought to have. Part of that is due to my not being quite available because of details of trying to keep a roof over my head, etc. Part of it was due to the same things bedeviling my teammates. In the end, though, I guess one could say it was worth it- at least as a learning experience. Anyhow, barring any other nasty surprises (like this last-minute one that has delayed us another 3-4 months on release...), we should be going gold with it in another couple of days now. I just zoomed the last lingering bug, something that was objectionable to us, but didn't really prevent us from shipping. Something that would have raised the minimum system requirements at least a little bit. When I say just zoomed, I mean that I've just now did the version control check-in, having verified the program working cleanly on NVidia cards, working "well" enough on ATI cards to claim that the issues are more driver ones with a plan to work the issues out with ATI shortly. It feels GOOD.
Open Embedded
Well, I'm still keen on using this, but I've yet to get a clean build out of the full Monotone checkout. So, I guess I need to spend some time trying to figure out what I need to winnow out the stuff that's causing problems and come up with a clean build set for my purposes.
Laptop
Just bought an AMD64 laptop with an ATI adapter (HP Pavilion zv6000)- it was entertaining trying to get a Linux distribution onto this thing. Only distributions I know of that go on without much of a hitch is Gentoo, Slamd, and Mandriva. Of those, I've only experience with Mandriva (but suspect that Gentoo would end up working fine...)- and it's got some small issues with it's use. Every other distribution will invariably choke somewhere in the middle of the install. Mandriva has a slight problem in that there is a bug with PCMCIA support on this laptop that expresses itself with the AMD64 architechture that is fixed in version 2.6.14 of the kernel, but Mandriva ships with the 2.6.12 version. Can't fault them for that one, per se, but I wish they'd make all the little tweaks they apply a little easier to apply for oneself so that someone could do what I'm needing to do- grab the latest and greatest and fix their machine. Anyhow, I've got that mostly done and working, with me needing to sort out the Radeon setup and coming up with an RPM set (as promised) for people with this situation. Decent enough laptop for the price I paid for it (~$1000 over at Fry's...); while I would rather have had a more aggressive AMD64 laptop, $3-4k is a bit outside the budget (The budget was stretched a little bit to accomplish my current purchase...). I just wish that Broadcom would follow in the footsteps of Intersil and do the right thing with their 54g chipset- there's nothing to be gained by continuing to keep it all a secret and it's QUITE obvious that there's nothing special about the software radio stuff that merits what Broadcom's telling us (Otherwise, Intersil wouldn't have open sourced the Prism 2 stuff...).