I was recently asked to prepare a blog post (sort of like my post on the Gdium on the wiki) about the Yeeloong. The Yeeloong is Lemote's netbook, based around the same CPU as the Gdium. Naturally, being a MIPS guy, I'm interested in both, and a very strong community is building up surrounding the Yeeloong within the gNewSense community. Of course, as with any tutorial posted on a blog, I am not guaranteeing you won't completely destroy your laptop in the process. So if it goes wrong, it's your own fault and you probably shouldn't have attempted this!

I just finished my talk at Summercamp 2009 on the Gdium. I would say it was a relative success -- a bit over a dozen people showed up, and there was significant interest from people in acquiring a Gdium.

I suppose I should have announced this on my blog sooner (unfortunately, business has been crazy so I've been a bit incommunicado!) but I will be doing a talk this Friday, May 15th at 10:00 AM EST on the Gdium.

After speaking with Fred with regards to the new release of PMON (available on the wiki, for those who want it), he had mentioned that one of the new features provided by PMON is the ability to flash from the running OS. I'm not sure what specific support was added for this, however, in a moment of inspiration, I decided to see if I could write a utility for updating PMON.

Hooray! As of yesterday, I have the Gdium booting Kernel 2.6.29, stably -- there's definitely still quirks, but I've been cleaning up the configuration options and the various drivers that go with the Gdium gradually, so these quirks are starting to smooth out.

Deciding to procrastinate on a few things, I spent the afternoon continuing to forward port the Gdium kernel patches to 2.6.29.

Unfortunately, life is crazy right now -- work is keeping me very busy, so my hacking time has been minimal. Nonetheless, this past weekend I got a good amount of hacking in -- so much so that I managed to even get some wiki tutorials on what I did written up...

I was speaking with the Summercamp 2009 coordinator this past week, and after showing him the Gdium, he encouraged me to think up a talk to do on it. Being mostly a hardware guy, I know what I would want to present -- the details of the hardware, the benefits, the catches, perhaps give people an idea of the state of various functionality; perhaps show off a few of the projects I'm working on with it. Does anybody else have any suggestions?

After a slightly crazy week at work, I decided on this beautiful Saturday morning to sit down and take some time to try to resurrect the Gdium motherboard that Lemote sent me.

In support of my efforts to implement suspend to RAM and suspend to disk, Emtec has very kindly provided me with a development kit, which is a Gdium motherboard with the required components for a usable serial port soldered on. Thank you very much guys (especially Fred); I'll make good use of it.<!--break-->