Picked up the Lego™ Mindstorms I ordered from Dick Smith Electronics from the post office yesterday. (This courier company thoughtfully leaves one's package at the post office if they can't deliver it.)
The first step, beyond opening the box and aahing over all the bits in the kit, is to get a decent development environment working on Mac OS X - and that means GCC, of course. I tried 4.0.2 with little joy, and from a fair bit of googling I got the impression that 3.3.x is a goer.
Some details: we need a cross-compiler to GCC-target
h8300-hitachi-hms. The Mac OS X internationalisation appears
to cause GCC some grief, so I'm just going to have to read American
English for a while (shock horror). Using the various Fink and DarwinPorts tools lying about, and after a painless binutils v2.16.1
installation, the following worked for me:
% tar xfj gcc-3.3.6.tar.bz2
% mkdir build-gcc
% cd build-gcc
% ../gcc-3.3.6/configure --target=h8300-hitachi-hms
--prefix=/opt/local/crossgcc
--exec-prefix=/opt/local/crossgcc/h8300-hitachi-hms --enable-target-optspace
--enable-languages="c" --disable-nls
% make
You can change that to --enable-languages="c c++" if you like
that sort of thing.
My choice of putting everything in /opt/local rather than
/usr/local confuses brickOS's (ad-hoc, not autoconfiscated) configure script. The obvious change in that
script makes it work.
Next step: build brickOS.
I was quite impressed by Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and he's also excellent in this one. It's somewhat eery to watch this old classic in the pall of the Howard Government's proposed anti-terrorism legislation.
