Instructional

Afternoon folks, I’m supposed to be studying but dont have the heart to, so I’m documenting a recent project from Uni. The remit was to be able to parse RS232 data coming in from a GPS unit and reformat it for a LCD display. I dont have the part numbers handy but I was programming on a 18F series PIC that supported C. Most of the ancillary code is more platform dependant, such as working with the PIC interrupts etc, so for the purposes of this code snippit, assumme that a NMEA sentence (I used RMC and some RMB, but never really finished that bit) stored as a character buffer, and a structure, as defined, to store relevent data in. ...

So, to do most of this playing about, I need a virtualisation environment, and VMware is the easiest, simplest and, at the moment, cheapest. VMWare released their server virtualisation tool to “free"dom recently, and the newest version (2.0) is currently sitting in beta. I have tried it out before but it didnt feel as solid as the older versions so I’m sticking with the oldskool 1.0.3 The Setup itself is just a simple “next, next, finish” with a free registration key provided. I recommend also downloading and installing the client console package; this is handy both for administring and viewing the VM’s in situ, but also to administer remote installations. ...