This is part two of my adventures in low level programming series. In part one we got our computer to boot and then just sit there spinning it’s wheels. It doesn’t feel like much of an achievement at the moment, but in this installment we’ll start to see something a little more exciting. Before we get stuck in, we’ll need a little more background though (boo! I know). Obviously at this stage we don’t want to be writing the text rendering code ourselves, nor do we want to be worrying about placement of the characters.

Ohh, this is going to be a fun one! And one I’ve played with in the past to varying degrees of success. What I’m trying to achieve here is simple, I want to boot a computer from nothing to running some C code which prints “Hello, World!” to the screen. The C code will be sitting on a FAT32 drive attached to the computer. Getting an environment setup First things first, we’re going to need to get a development environment up and running.

Despite having a big warning at the bottom of the docroot/sites/default/settings.php file telling you not to add additional settings to that file. The BLT documentation does little do say what the recommended way of conditionally including *.settings.php files depending on environment variables or some other decider. Normally, you would do it by adding code to the effect of the below to docroot/sites/default/settings.php but since there is such a direct warning not to in the BLT version, I needed to find a better way: