Building qfsm on Ubuntu 8.04

I just tried to build qfsm on Ubuntu 8.04. The only dependencies listed by qfsm are CMake and Qt 4.3.x - both of which are available through the Ubuntu packet manager.

However, when I followed the instructions provided along with the qfsm source code, I encountered this error message:

[ 41%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/qfsm.dir/src/ExportAHDLDlgImpl.o
In file included from qfsm-0.51.0-Source/src/ExportAHDLDlgImpl.h:21,
                 from qfsm-0.51.0-Source/src/ExportAHDLDlgImpl.cpp:21:
qfsm-0.51.0-Source/src/ui_ExportAHDLDlg.h:27: error: expected constructor, \
  destructor, or type conversion before ‘class’
make[2]: *** [CMakeFiles/qfsm.dir/src/ExportAHDLDlgImpl.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/qfsm.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2

It turns out that the definition of the QT_BEGIN_NAMESPACE macro was nowhere to be found on my system. Luckily, removing the corresponding lines in the qfsm source code allowed me to build the code just fine. I used this one-liner to remove the offending lines:

$ for file in `grep -R QT_BEGIN_NAMESPACE * | awk -F : '{ print $1; }'` ; \
  do sed -i -e '/QT_.*NAMESPACE/d' $file ; done

Graphics Card

For some reason I have to look up the model of the graphics adapter in my thinkpad everytime I do an update... so here it goes: My T61p has a Quadro FX 570M in it.

Follow-Up

A quick follow-up to "Parallels" for Linux. I've managed to run the Windows XP Partition on my Laptop inside KVM-88 like this:

#!/bin/sh

export SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0
sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -hda /dev/sda -net nic -net user -m 1024 -cdrom fixntldr.iso -boot d -usb -usbdevice tablet -monitor stdio

To send Ctrl+Alt+Del, I needed to enter this at the QEMU shell:

sendkey ctrl-alt-delete

Edit (Jul 30th, 2009): Here is a link to the QEMU console commands.

Flashrom, Alix 1.C and FreeBSD

I'm quite surprised that flashrom works pretty much out of the box on FreeBSD running on my Alix 1.C board. All I needed to do was comment out the code in the enable_flash_cs5536() function part of the chipset_enable.c file. Then, this simple command let me read out the BIOS image:

$ flashrom -f -r -c "SST49LF040" bios.bin

Avnet Spartan-3A Eval Board

So I got this Xilinx Spartan-3A Board by Avnet recently. I bought it because it features a fairly large parallel flash chip (32 MBit) and an even larger SPI flash (128 Mbit).

The board also features three clocks. One 16MHz clock is driven by an on-board oscillator while the other two (12 MHz and 32 kHz) are derived from a small controller.

For the last few evenings, I tried to get the parallel flash to work. Since a single cycle of the slow 32 kHz clock meets the timing requirements of the parallel flash chip, I thought I'd try to use that before enhancing the design to also work w/ the faster clock(s).

Unfortunately, that didn't work. When using the slow clock, mapping a signal directly to an output (LED) worked just fine, but routing the signal through more than few flip-flops didn't work at all. Apparently, the FPGA didn't like the slow clock too much.

Bottom line: Took me three days to figure out that the board doesn't work with the slow 32 kHz clock. Oh well, at least I learned something new...