Playing with Open Firmware

Made a couple of small improvements in Open Firmware and sent the patches to Mitch Bradley. One fix is probably not relevant for the most of users: it has to do with handling fdisk/MBR partitions on CDs. Another one may be more interesting for those who use CD/DVD drives on OLPC.
I was hoping to do something useful, but it turned out OLPC don't have a built-in cdrom drive. Still there can be one or two users who have external drives and would like to boot from them.

I didn't realize till recent times that as a part of his work on the OLPC Project, Mitch released the original Open Firmware base for ARM, MIPS, PPC and x86 machines. It has some advantages over OpenBIOS: Forth syntax highlighting,  word completion, more comfortable debugging and an emulator of Power CPUs to simplify cross-platform building.

It is distributed  under MIT Open-Source License, which may be more suitable than GPL for some projects.

May the Forth be with you. :-)

The OBP author is here and still cares

Mitch Bradley (OBP author) explained how OBP space* commands are working. While the emulation is meanwhile working properly for this commands, it is nevertheless great to know that the father still cares about his child.

And, speaking of children, Mitch is also the author of OLPC firmware and OLPC Forth tutorial I mentioned before.

May the Forth be with you

Learning Forth. It is actually a very powerful language.

Don't know if the One Laptop Per Child initiative will give something to children, but it certainly brings something to me: very good Forth lessons.

There are also some useful documentation from Sun (meanwhile Oracle).