AFter a very long delay, I've finally rebooted beaglebox to the point of having wireless networking enabled.  I'm using a TP-Link usb-attached wireless adapter via the carl9170 driver with the 3.2.22 kernel.  It works, but the driver seems to generate a lot of messages.  I'm not sure if they're errors or not, and the network does drop out periodically.  However, I'm not sure if the drop outs are the driver or the TP-Link router it's trying to connect to.  The latter seems to drop out a lot lately too.   Anyway, networking is working enough for me to use scp in and out of it.  I use a screen session attached to the serial port for bringing the board up and down.

While working to get networking up, I added connman.  Connman is an embedded alternative to networkmanager.  To get this running I had to switch to a glibc based cross toolchain from uclibc to get past issues with linking the NSS library.  However, to get glibc working I had to fall back to glibc 2.13 due to the issues with later releases having pulled rpc headers out (apparently addressed in 2.16, but crosstool-ng 1.15 doesn't support that).  It took quite a while to find a combination of toolchain (gcc and glibc), kernel (3.22, in the end), and buildroot (2012.05).  Eventually, I got them all in line and was able to add a variety of networking tools like scp. 

After I got networking running (with connman configuration still to be addressed) I went back to make sure X was running.  Fortunately, it worked fine once I added the xorg driver package into Buildroot.  This was is done as part of the BeagleBox setup prior to running Buildroot but was not being done for Buildroot 2012.05.  Once I added it back in, it just works.  I even added an init script to bring X up on boot up.  I still need to add a default session configuration if X.org has not been run yet but that's pretty straight forward to do.

So now I can call 0.7 as released.  I'm not making a tarball release but I should tag the tree.  Then I can start in on the sgx/dsp release, port over bui packages to gitorious and update their buildroot packages accordingly and then try to run some video. 

That only took a year to get done.  At least the book that cause the delay is finally out of the way.