I said I'd never blog

Yeah, it's late again, but I'm addicted to the stuff. Today was frustrating again for a number of reasons:

• grub doesn't load 64-bit NetBSD kernels
• worse, it doesn't load the Xen hypervisor kernel correctly on « big » FFSv1 partitions (mine is 4GB)
• all NetBSD/i386 kernels suddenly panic on my T60's PCMCIA controller (I found an INSTALL-FLOPPY kernel without the issue when breaking my bootloader though)
• you're gonna say NetBSD sucks, but booting my freshly updated Debian Lenny backup USB drive, it refused to recognize my Ethernet card *and* my Wireless card refused to associate anywhere
• as if this wasn't enough, my Intel gigabit card forgot its own MAC address for a while (and then it fixed itself...)
• RunningBear is giving me a hard time with crashes that I cannot explain so far
• gdm (or Xorg) lost my keyboard during three subsequent reboots (it fixed itself again)
• wpi(4) panic'd when it couldn't read its firmware
• and again, there are so many things to do and fix only for work that I hate losing time on meaningless problems like these ones :(

Therefore, I needed to get something to work right. After re-writing half of hackable:1's image generation script (the dependency resolving process), I knew I must have broken the daily builds. I figured a couple days ago that I was sadly right, and I still haven't fixed the key generation with dropbear :(

Anyway, I think I managed to fix crashes with phone-kit and neod in the daily build (permissions to the audio subsystem). I restored the installation of tangogps on the system, and added -n to gpsd's options, which should help with the first fix without exhausting the battery much (tests required). Finally, I got GPS to work on my laptop, using the Openmoko Freerunner over USB. Now I can sleep...

Update: regarding the keyboard problem, I think it's a bug in the modular-xorg-server port for NetBSD, which was starting on top of an existing text console.