Anton’s Stuff

Linux.com | ESR gives up on Fedora

ESR gives up on Fedora

For the record, I gave up on Fedora for exactly the same reasons about a year ago. Ubuntu rocks, and to date I’ve only had one small dependency issue which occured when I attempted to jump two full versions with one dist-upgrade. The dependency was fixed in less than a minute and the upgrade continued on without a hitch.

To quote Eric:   Fedora, you had every advantage, and you had my loyalty, and you blew it. And that is a damn, dirty shame.

Debian Package of the Day » Blog Archive » qalculate: the ultimate desktop calculator

So what is qalculate? First and foremost, its a calculator. Which means that it can do what you typically expect a calculator to do, no surprises there.

A very cool desktop calculator.  Handles polynomials, unit conversions, and much more.

Adobe Labs - Downloads: Flash Player 9 Update

Yipee, the Flash Player beta is out for Linux.

1. Get the Installer for Linux
2. tar xzvf FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz
3. cd flash-player-plugin-9.0.21.55
4. locate libflashplayer.so (On Ubuntu it’s often in /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/)
5. sudo cp /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/backup.libflashplayer.so
6. sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
7. restart firefox and you should be good to go.

The audio lag in movies seems to be gone now.  Not certain about stability yet, but it can’t be worse than before.

CM-X270 Computer-On-Module - XScale PXA270 SBC with WLAN/WiFI 802.11b, 2700G, PCI bus, 100BaseT, Flash Disk, LCD and Audio

The CM-X270 is a small Computer-on-Module board designed to serve as a building block in embedded applications. The CM-X270W has all the components required to run operating systems such as Linux and Windows CE. Ready packages for these operating systems are available from CompuLab.

$52 each in quantities of 1,000.  Anyone want to sell me just one?

Tech-Recipes.com - ZFS: Ten reasons to reformat your hard drives

The much anticipated release of the new ZFS filesystem in Solaris 10 will revolutionize the way system administrators (and executives) think about and work with filesystems.

Apache2 SSL and Subversion in Debian

Debian Sarge comes with an apache2 package. I thought I’d give this a go to get it working with a self signed SSL certificate. However, I had little idea of what I was doing. Eventually I worked it out - and it’s easy:

Handy howto on setting up Apache2, SSL, and SVN in 683 seconds. I’m quite certain it took me much less than that to copy and paste all the commands but it worked well and was easy.

I gave my first stompbox presenation at the XCSSA meeting in San Antonio tonight. It was a good mix of old and young geeks, mostly hardware afficianados with a love of the non-standard.

I hope everyone enjoyed my first attempt at presenting to a user group. it was good to meet new people and I’ll definitely try to attend future meetings. XCSSA meets at 7pm on the 3rd Monday of every month in the Nail Technical Center, San Antonio College.

Rich Jennings presented the the Cubix embedded computer stack. It’s 1.5″ square, runs an ARM[?] processor with 256K of RAM and 2MB of flash. Power consumption is under 100mA for most applications. It runs the open source eCos OS and can be programmed with a number of free and commercial applications.
Nate brought his Nokia 770. The 770 is now officially on my want it now but will have to wait list. It runs a variant of debian complied for the ARM processor and has a lot of potential. The LCD is amazing for a pocket display with fonts that work great in an xterm. Bluetooth and WIFI round out the connectivity getting you to the net and allowing use of a bluetooth keyboard.

Price

It’s quite expensive for a toy. I had a hard time justifying the cost to myself but the old laptop I was using had some issues and I didn’t expect it to last long. My wife wasn’t too happy with the expense but she got over it this weekend when she was able to surf the web and IM with people while we drove 4 hours to Galveston.

If cost is a real concern, just get the evdo card and plug it into your laptop. The next option is one of the commercial 3G routers that can be up and running for under $300. It’s probably possible to do the stompbox for under $500 but it’d be tough and you’d have to scrounge a lot of parts.

Value

The stompbox is a solid and robust solution. I don’t have experience with any of the cheaper commercial routers but would expect them to be as reliable and nearly as solid. One thing the stompbox offers is endless configuration and software options. It’s 133Mhz 486 processor and 64MB of RAM make it powerful enough to run a large selection of applications. If you’ve got some Linux experience, time, and a few C-notes to burn then I’d suggest giving it a try. The project has and continues to be fun.

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USB

My very next step is a PCMCIA USB adapter. Fortunately these things aren’t too expensive if you’re patient on ebay. I may even build a small 5V power supply that taps off the 12V in to allow more devices. From this point on any other peripherals will have to be USB or RS-232. The obvious advantage of USB is that the device can be powered by the port.

GPS

Now what good is a mobile router if it doesn’t know where itself is? The original stompbox image supports gpsd and I plan to get one of the small “gps mice” that are on ebay for $50-60. Once we know where we are and export that information with gpsd we can use a wide range of scripts or apps to access it. A laptop running linux in the car can get gps data over the wifi, we can send the data off to a web server for real-time vehicle tracking and we can also log to a local disk for some war driving logs.

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Configuration

By now you should have a login prompt in your serial console. Login as root, no password and run the stompbox config script, /usr/local/bin/initial-setup. The questions are pretty self explanatory. If you don’t know the answer to a question, take the default. I don’t have a camera or gpsd setup but it still asked me to configure those items. I just hit enter on the defaults to keep going. I do recommend getting a dynDNS account and entering that info. It makes it a lot easier to get to your stompbox from the real world. If you don’t want to mess with dynDNS then just enter something and we can disable it later. When the script is done you should reboot the box.

The setup script fails to update /etc/resolv.conf so you’ll need to do that before you can get along with much else. Put the box in RW mode (remountrw) and vi /etc/resolv.conf. Change the IP of the nameserver to the local wifi address (127.0.0.1 should work too). If everything went well you now have a working stompbox.

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