I haven't had much luck in finding options for recovery. Ideally I'd like something like the dual switched bios in the old wiki but toggle-able electronically ie. gpio pin from spare router w/ Openwrt.
That's the product BIOS Savior RD1 from Taiwanese IOSS, switched by a jumper which could be replaced by e.g. a 2N7000 FET driven by a GPIO.
https://www.coreboot.org/Developer_Manual/Tools#BIOS_Savior https://www.overclockers.com/bios-savior/
There were a few different versions, IIRC one being for parallel 5V.
They seem no longer available, but you could add a watch on ebay or such.
I was thinking specifically of the "dual flash 'pie'" on that page, though really anything would be nice, even just the dip32 risers would probably come in handy.
VultureProg was mentioned - even a DIY emulator would be fairly straightforward; that's a nice microcontroller project.
That seems a bit overkill, but then again flash chips seem to be more expensive then microcontrollers these days. I don't think I'm up to working on something like that right now though.
Where are you located?
I'm in southern Manitoba, Canada.
I had been interested in checking out the hackerspace (skullspace) in Winnipeg sometime and seeing if anybody could help me with out with anything but never got around to it. It isn't really local to me though (~2hr drive), and isn't really an option right now for obvious reasons.
That's great to hear. I hope you didn't need to build crossgcc-i386 on the P2B, though! :P
Well, it's got a gentoo install that has to build it's own updates, including the system compiler, as well as crossgcc-i386.
..
It would probably be a lot faster if I could get a better cpu
You can use Gentoo releng's catalyst tool to build an i686 stage4 on any x86_64 build machine in half an hour or so, you'll just need to use a profile with i686 (17.0 should work) and possibly an older snapshot.
If you're interested in trying that I could help with a spec file, catalyst isn't very well documented.
I'm not sure that catalyst is really what I want, though it did occur to me now that you mentioned that I could probably use it for a different project.
It would be nice if you could just have portage/emerge on the client system request the build server to just make and send binary packages it wants to update - either everything or just whatever has a history of taking more then a certain amount of time on the client - even if it needed to cross compile and/or use qemu. I've seen at least one project that attempted this, but it was abandoned. Even on binary distros it's not that clear how autobuilding/crossbuilding can be done locally with minimal effort.
So far I've gotten by just by leaving it running to finish whatever it is working on,.
//Peter
Hopefully that didn't end up getting too off topic.
PS. I hope the quoting turns out alright, I really need to get a proper email client setup yet. I had to do it all manually, since it wouldn't pull from the digest properly for some reason.
Branden