The IT department written file watching daemons and embedded to their systems, allowing them to create many many 'wire traps' inside system to detect when something went wrong. In 8th day, the tool was a daemon waiting for messages via a specified port in a specified format. With the knowledge I had, I found how to talk with that phone over C (Thanks Beej, and his guides).

Next day I managed to connect it via minicom, talk with it and send a couple of SMS messages to myself.

I also found the AT reference guide for the phone the same day IIRC. Next, I managed to found the user manual of the phone to find out that it has a serial modem on it. Then, I learnt how to install and manage packages on it via 'dselect'. My first target was to get Debian run on that system, then make it connect to the network. I said OK, and he asked: You know Linux, right? I truthfully said 'Installed a couple of times, spent time with it.' He produced a Debian 3.0 CD from a drawer, and said 'Let's see whether you can install this' (Debian was hard, then). Catch: The PC had no OS, and the software he wanted was nonexistent. He continued: 'We need this phone to send SMS messages, via an application on this PC'. Then produced a Nokia 7110 and a serial cable for said phone. In my second internship, my mentor shown me a PC, and said 'This is yours'. The author has some prior experience, probably, but let me try to outline something from my own journey.Īs you take small steps, you need to start with small targets. There's of course also the factor of having lots of free time - I did my port when I was still a student with not very many responsibilities, so I could afford to spend entire evenings and weekends poring through mountains of C code.

on an MP3 player?), all while 2) learning deeply about software close to the bare metal, which is fairly hard to do early in one's career. What made me do it was 1) the satisfaction I got from seeing my work produce something which, at first glance, shouldn't exist (Quake. 'scour the entire source code for unaligned memory accesses, and manually rewrite all of them'), but also gives a chance to do some very clever things (like, 'use the piezo speaker to beep out the address of a fault, because nothing else works on the device after a crash'). The actual process of porting anything is sometimes incredibly tedious (e.g. The whole world of software ports basically boils down to 'anything is possible, given enough memory, pixels, and time'. I once ported Quake 1 to the Rockbox operating system for MP3 players, which enabled it to run on the Apple iPod:

Quake download the last version for ios