The options for getting software onto the ts7250 are unappetising;
either hand-compiling everything or running the risk of someone else
miscompiling something. I'm sick of the former so I thought I'd try
the latter, in the form of Debian's armel port. Martin Guy's
recipe makes this straightfoward. Andrew T gave me a little
script that copies binaries and just the libraries they depend on, but
what I really want is an easy way to recompile programs and their
dependencies. I've used apt-get source blah in
the past and been happy.
Bogosity: dpkg does not like running on NFS exported
through nfs-user-server. It seems that lockd
has been on their TODO list for approximately the last twelve
years. Sanity and serenity is provided by
nfs-kernel-server.
I sorted out the remaining issues on the nixie board, viz making the anode resistors uniformly 11kΩ. The display is bright but some PWM will cure that. So it was time to fit the whole show together, and just as I gave up on one of Andrew T's power supplies I managed to release some magic smoke from the nixie board by forgetting how parlous the power arrangement was when reaching over the board. I'd switched everything else off but not my power supply, which the cockroaches will be getting when the time comes. The ts7250 survived unscathed, and a ginger replugging of it all revealed that I'd only managed to toast at most two of the anode switching transistors, and their failure mode is to go short-circuit. Phew. Relief. The Russian K155ИД1 is still going like a champ, and John Taylor's power supply didn't notice a thing.
More RoHS-non-compliant repair tomorrow.