GilesBathgate

This is a quick guide to creating a ‘Hello World’ Operating system that can be booted by Grub First of all you will need to create the assembly file the contains the entry point for grub. Call this ‘start.S‘

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I am now trying to run Mplayer on Tom Tom so that I can watch videos and drive anyone reading this to drink. I found however that Mplayer requires a lot of system resources that are being used by the Navigation application (ttn) So I needed a way to free up the memory and resources being used by the application. This should be as simple as just killing the application using

killall ttn

But the problem is that the ttn application is responsible for petting the dog. That is to say that there is a WatchDog Timer which resets the device after 15 seconds unless something continuously resets the timer.
All that was needed was a script to reset the timer instead, So here is my solution:

#!/bin/sh
killall ttn &&
while(true) do
echo '\0' > /dev/watchdog
sleep 10
done

The trick is to kill the ttn but also keep the Watchdog from reseting the device. The script also has to be invoked as a background job, so I used an ‘&’ after the command.

./free.sh &

This morning one of my colleague’s phoned me telling me that he had forgotten his password. I advised him to download and use the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor I recalled the last time I used it being incredibly non user friendly and also because of the bad NTFS write support. The experience of having to run chkdsk on reboot made me feel very uneasy. When I get time I would like to make a Slax based LiveCD that uses the new NTFS user mode mount tool which has better write support, and perhaps a nice curses based menu system that steps you through the process.