For a long time I really wanted to study Assembly, just because I like to be close to metal. While some think that abstraction is the key, I perceive things a bit differently. I like abstraction but with atomic understanding about what is being abstracted. Like how we study about atoms but we abstract it away when we speak about logic gates.

Like atoms, I really wanted to understand how raw instructions are written and linked.

So for the basics I bought "Step by Step Assembly" by Jeff Duntemann from Amazon. The book arrived soon enough for me to get started.

I was already a decent software engineer(I hope). So the book was not that hard for me. For the first week I was just reading everything, I was not really trying anything out, Because I'm really lazy.

So one fine day I thought I would give a try on the exercises to test my understanding on the study. As the book stated, it requested me to install Ubuntu and then install the packages Kate and Insight GDB Debugger.

I was using Arch linux with KDE Plasma back then(still I'm using the same distro and DE). So Kate was already installed. As for Insight, I searched the Arch linux official repo and with no avail I did not find anything about it. This was not something I've never experienced since Arch linux is kind of make it work yourself. So I tried to compile Insight from source but the problem is that it depends on very old software that is only available in old ubuntu releases.

So the first thing I thought was compiling this from Travis-CI. If you are not familiar with Travis-CI, it is a continuous integration SaaS(Software as a Service) that is free for open source projects. Travis-CI has support for multiple distros and even the old ubuntu stable releases.

My choice was to use Ubuntu Trusty Thar in Travis-CI.

Now comes the packaging for the compiled binaries, My first choice is of course AppImages. AppImage is perfect for this use case because we need to support execution of this binary on most linux distros.

The hard part was trianging the dependencies of the binaries that was not caught by the ldd command.

Learning Tcl/Tk

If you are not familiar with it, it's a programming language used to describe graphical user interface for the Tkinter library. Tkinter library is really good(and really old), I've used in the past, like 5 years ago.

I needed to learn some Tcl to search for Insight's(TCL/Tk) libraries dynamically at runtime. My main patch is only a few lines which fixes this issue. Without this fix you will not be able to run Insight even if you compile it yourself(unless you put the required tcl files at a static location).

Victory after a lot of spam mails from Travis-CI

Finally I was able to download the AppImage from my github releases and try it out. It ran without any trouble this time. But I have to admit, It was more fun doing this project than reading the book itself. Because the time spent on this will benefit someone atleast.

You can checkout the project at https://github.com/antony-jr/insight

Reaching out to the Author

I tweeted my AppImage to the Author(Jeff Duntemann) as he gave a post on his official website on some hard workarounds for the insight problem. What is the point in solving a problem if no one is going to use it?

He replied very soon indeed, and he even tweeted about that to some.

Conclusion

In the end it was fun learning Assembly. I think everyone should learn Assembly before calling themselves a computer wiz.