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Laboratory Instructions

There are a number of exercises/laboratories that the student will be responsible for over the course of the semester in CSCI 4956. Some of them are graded and some of them are not; some of them will be done during class and some of them will be assigned as homework, this all depends on the material. Regardless, the directions for completing the exercise will be found here.

All of these documents are in either HTML or PDF format. If you do not have a copy of the Adobe Acrobat Viewer for the PDF files, download the free copy from their web site.

Date Assignment Notes
2-June-03 We will be putting together our development system today. For those of you who've had CSCI 2150 at ETSU, the process will be very similar to the Linux install lab that you've already done. The textbook also goes through the process on pages 4 through 14.
3-June-03

This lab will be our first attempt at making a small kernel to run an embedded system from. For our purposes, we will be using two floppy diskettes, one to boot from and one to contain our Linux file system. The lab will use a number of files including:

  • Boot disk development:
  • Root disk development:
    • makeRootDisk - a script used to create the root disk;
    • rc - a reduced rc script;
    • inittab - reduced parameters for init process;
    • fstab - reduced file systems table;
    • pam.conf - a simple PAM configuration disabling security;
    • termcap - a reduced terminal capability database used only to reduce file size;
    • functions - a functions script compatible with ash; and
    • hello - a "Hello, World!" program to test root file system.
9-June-03 For those of you with little or no experience with electronics, we will be doing a basic electronics lab.
10-June-03 We will be using the Linux I/O Port Programming mini-HOWTO to write code to communicate with the parallel ports of our machines. If you want the HTML format of this mini HOWTO, click here.
16-June-03 We will be doing each of the exercises from chapter 3 of the textbook with slight modifications to eliminate bugs. One of the bugs we have is that our boot disks support parallel ports which prohibit us from writing new device drivers and our root disks don't have insmod, lsmod, and rmmod. Therefore, I've created new scripts with these and other modifications. Be sure to bring diskettes and the CDROM from your textbook!
23-June-03

As announced in class, we will be using a serial mouse to create a simple position encoder input to the embedded system. I've put together a short set of lab notes to guide you through the process. In addition, you should look at the serial interface programming instructions found in Michael Sweet's article, "Serial Programming Guide for POSIX Operating Systems". It will also be helpful to have the binary editor shed (simple hex editor) which you can find at the URL http://sourceforge.net/projects/shed.

Also, we will be doing a lab that will provide us with some experience with a dial-up server. I have compiled some notes that might help us install the necessary software.

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