In July 2007 I graduated in Hardware Software Systems Engineering studies course. Starting with October, my studies course in Embedded Systems Design starts, so I will study on for another two years.
I have several goals I want to achieve:
- Good marks
- Use mainly free software: I think I was already quite good in this one. On my desktop pc and my laptop, I had only free software installed except cadsoft eagle and the binary blob nvidia driver. At least for the laptop the nvidia problem is gone now because my previous one died, so I bought a new one with an Intel graphics card. Let’s look forward to what nvidia will respond to amd’s recent actions. For specialized software (ModelSim for VHDL simulation, Quartus for VHDL synthesis), our university has a RHEL server to which we get NoMachine and ssh access. That way, I can work from my home, although sometimes the connection is slow. Software I used (among others):
- vim (my most important and most-used piece of software)
- bazaar for versioning
- pdftex for all my written homework and my term paper as well as presentations using latex-beamer
- gcc and make for software development
- firefox for research
- thunderbird for e-mails
- python for scripting small helper programs
- pidgin (formerly called gaim) for keeping contact with my collegues
- rhythmbox supporting me with good music from jamendo for keeping up my motivation during the long nights while writing my homework
- Work on a university project connected to free software: The bachelor’s project had to do with the LEON3 CPU and Snapgear Linux distribution. I wrote the Linux drivers for our self-designed hardware components, and I really enjoyed the work with my collegues. I hope the upcoming master studies give me the opportunity to work on an open-source related project again.
- Write an open master thesis: For my bachelor’s term paper I had to sign an NDA which was horrible for me because I could not simply tell others about the results of my work. On the other hand I got my practical work because of writing this term paper, and I really loved what I could do there, although I only had a Windows laptop available.
