[avr-chat] UISP / AVRDude : what to choose ?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Hello everybody,

After learning the 8051 and its assembly at school, then a  year of C on
a 'PIC', then not touching a uC for 5 years, I have decided to get back
in the game with the AVR, as it seems to be very popular and quite
powerful (machine-cycle-wise ie) compared to the good old 8051, and even
compared to PICs.
Anyway, after searching a few days on the net to see what tools were
available on Linux for the AVR, I landed here, and now have a few
questions to get me started, as you might guess...

Today's question : I gather that there are two programs that exist to
download a program into the AVR : AvrDude and UISP. Why are they 2 tools
for seemingly doing the same job ? Which one is more appropriate in what
situation ?
The thing is, I have the latest UISP version in my Linux distro's
repository, but I don't have AvrDude. Since I am hopeless at compiling
things from source, I would favour UISP as it comes easy.

But the UISP website doesn't give any detail about the features of the
program, whereas AVRDude has a few words that suggest that it is quite
flexible/useful, like an interactive mode to read or write individual
bytes in RAM, things like that.

So on the one hand, I have UISP at hand but with possibly zero feature,
and OTHO, a possibly much more featureful/useful Avrdude, but which is
not available from the repositories of my distro.

So, in short, is avrdude really 'better' than UISP, is it worth working
hard to try and compile it on my machine ? I grabbed the latest tarball
but the 'make' fails early :o(

In case I am lucky and someone has the same system as me and can provide
specific guidance for installing avrdude, I am using Ubuntu 5.10
('Breezy').


Thanks much in advance for comments/help/info/suggestions.... :-)


It's probably the first question of a series in my learning curve, but I
promise I will try to keep them to a minimum and not flood the list ;-)


Regards,


--
Vince