Category Archives: Linux

Everything related to Linux really

Linux, Rockbox

Rockbox presentation video

Robert Menes held a talk at the NYLUG a while ago about the Rockbox project:

I started out the talk by giving a little background on Rockbox; basically how it started, how it was ported around to new targets, and how the community grew as interest peaked. I showed off features of Rockbox, as well as supported targets, nearly supported targets, and even in-progress targets. I then went into describing Rockbox’s features in greater detail, and then a run-down of the development process, as well as how to compile your own builds. Many people asked questions along the way, so I answered them as they were asked. I also think that people were probably shocked at the sheer amount of targets that were shown off (nearly 40 DAPs were there!)

The 76 minute (1.6 GB) video from that event is available from the download.rockbox.org mirrors. Set your video player to stream from there unless you really want to download that entire thing!

Rockbox at NYLUG presentation video

cURL and libcurl, Linux, Open Source

libcurl in version management

Already before, I’ve mentioned that libcurl is becoming popular within package management.

libcurllibcurl is a generic library for file transfers over a wide variety of protocols. Over the years, some of the recent ditributed version management softwares have learned about libcurl’s powers and they now use it:

darcs – was born in 2003 and is written in Haskell. I’m under the impression these guys wrote their own binding layer to interface libcurl from Haskell.

git – possibly best known for being created by Linus Torvalds and being used by the Linux kernel project, is using libcurl for HTTP(S) accesses.

bazaar – is written in Python and accordingly uses the pycurl binding for libcurl.

Anyone know of other version control systems using libcurl?

Ironies here include that libcurl itself is still kept within a CVS respository, and also quite possibly that the first version management project I myself participated is Subversion and that not only has two different HTTP dependencies, but none of those two are libcurl (they are neon and serf)…

Update: it seems that Mercurial is also using pycurl as an optional dependency.

Development, Linux, Open Source

Going full-time Haxx

I realize noHaxxt a lot of you who read my site or blog are aware of my actual real world day-job situation (nor should you have to care), but I still want to let you guys know that I’m ending my employment at CAG Contactor and my intention is to find my way forward with my own company, Haxx AB, as employee number 1.

Haxx has existed for over ten years already, but we’ve so far only used it for stuff on the side that wasn’t full-time nor competing with our day-jobs. Starting in October, I’ll now instead work only for and with Haxx.

I don’t expect much in my actual day to day business to change much as I intend to continue as a contract developer / consultant / hacker doing embedded, Linux, open source and network development as an expert and senior engineer.

So if you want my help, you can continue to contact me the same way as before, and I can offer my services like before! 😉 The only difference is in my end where I get more freedom and control.

This move on my behalf will affect some of you indirectly: I will move a lot of web and other internet-based services from servers owned and run by Contactor to servers owned by Haxx. So, expect a lot of my sites and contents to get some uptime glitches in the upcoming month in my struggle to get things up on the new place(s).

Linux, Open Source

kernel hacker foodfights

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The concept of flame wars and public pie throwing is not new in the open source world, and the open nature of the projects make us – the audience – get to see everything. To read every upset word and get to point back to the mails in retrospect.

I don’t think people in the open source community is any particularly more trigger-happy to start the flame wars than people are outside of the openness, but open it is and then we can see it.

I’ve always disliked the harsh attitude and language that seems to have become popular in some circles, and I believe Linus Torvalds himself is part of that movement as he’s often rude, bad-mouthed and very aggressive in his (leadership) style. I think that easily grows into a hostile and unfriendly atmosphere where little room is left for fun, for jest and for helping out among friends.

So even if that is not the reason for the recent developments, here’s two episodes from August 2009:

A short while ago we got to see well-known kernel hacker Alan Cox step down as tty maintainer after an emotional argument on the lkml. The argument there was basically Linus telling Alan he should’ve admitted his error and acted on it earlier than he did.

Nearby, on the mailing list linux-arm-kernel a long-going argument about the management of the actual mailing list itself again sparkled up a fire. The argument in this case have been a long going discussion whether the mailing list Russell King (the main ARM Linux maintainer) runs should be open to allow non-subscribers to post without them needing moderation or not. It ended today with Russell shutting down his lists.

Right now, it seems the linux-arm-kernel list is being transferred over to infradead.org by David Woodhouse to continue its life there, but I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this yet so things may settle differently. There’s also this patch pending which suggests using the linux-arm list on vger.kernel.org.

(Readers should note that I myself don’t take side in any of these arguments.)

Development, Linux, Rockbox, Technology

Decrypting ipods

Recently we’ve seen progress by the linux4nano guys in their quest to get custom code to run on an Ipod Nano 2nd generation. They’ve apparently managed to extract the bootrom off a 2nd gen ipod nano (my copy of their extracted data is here – a reminder on objdump usage: “arm-elf-objdump -D --target binary -marm [file]“). I believe their intent is to port Linux to the newer ipods. Possibly ipodlinux. They do mention providing the necessary info to Rockbox and yes we will welcome it.

A large crowd of Rockbox hackers have joined their IRC channel and have been hanging out with them and helped out discussing ideas and pushed them towards publishing their news and infos on how this all is accomplished etc. Their SVN repo hosts some (most?) of the tools made so far.

The Rockbox wiki page for nano2g has been updated and hopefully it will keep track of what happens.

There have been speculations, but I don’t yet know based on what facts, that this recent news and hacks will be usable on other recent (encrypted) ipod models.

Summary: very interesting progress has been made. Lots of it is still left to figure out. There seems to be a bunch of skilled people around and now we’re seeing information and documentation for this getting published so I can’t but to hope for a bright future!

Electronics, Linux

Kernels on those phones

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So Google says there could be 18 phones running Android by the end of this year. In Sweden we just days ago got HTC Magic, the first ever Android phone showing up here (tied to a ridiculous operator deal that makes me and lots of my friends not go that route). Then Palm shipped their Palm Pre just days ago, also based on Linux.

This has brought the interesting questions: how is the state of these kernel HTC Magicports in regards to the mainline Linux tree? They’re both using ARM cores (of course).

The ARM kernel maintainer Russell King himself is not impressed. Apparently Google hasn’t even tried to push their work upstream to the kernel in a long while. The tone in that discussion did make it sound as if they might be starting to work on this again now.

The Palm guys apparently haven’t even yet shown any code at all, but is said to be releasing their code within two weeks to opensource.palm.com.  They have not even tried to push their work upstream, so I figure they’re either not even going to bother or they are facing a rather steep uphill battle in the future.

Electronics, Linux

Eeepc with Linux and Swedish 3g

This is a follow-up on my “getting the new toy” from a week or so ago. An Eee PC S101.

I didn’t like easypeasy on it. It seems that distro is more or less Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) with a little EEE flavor applied. What’s not to like about it? They seem to think that because this is a netbook, normal UI guidelines no longer apply so therefore they’ve scrapped the ordinary main desktop (and its menu) concept and instead have a new full-screen “app launcher”. That’s not too shabby, but it comes with another idea that I can’t accept: they run all applications in full-screen mode by default.md400 And I couldn’t figure out how to alter that default.

Full-screen might be fine for some apps at some times, but then I’d like to explicitly ask for it instead of having to learn now to “unmaximize” each app (they’ve also removed/altered the window decorations so there are no standard three buttons on the upper right corner of the maximized windows). To top it off, it seemed that the latest easypeasy isn’t built with the latest ubuntu and thus it failed to connect with my 3g modem…

Instead I took the base version of eeebuntu for a spin and that is so much closer to what I want in a linux. It’s ‘base’ so it only comes with the bare minimum. It has no fancy alternative UI but relies on the traditional well-proven and by me liked X11 (gnome) desktop.

I inserted my Sony Ericsson MD400 USB 3g modem that I got from Telenor/Bredbandsbolaget and within a few seconds I was online. It couldn’t have been a much smoother ride.

I know people have expressed opinions that it’s a better idea to use laptops/netbooks with an internal 3g modem so that you don’t have to use any external devices so that it’ll be more slick and all. I think I was of that opinion as well until I got this usb thing in my hand. It’s basically just a tad larger than any ordinary USB memory stick (70 x 28 x 15 mm) so it’s really not much “in the way” or disturbing when inserted in a laptop and it comes with windows drivers on it (as it dual-serves as a usb mass-storage device as well). It makes it a perfect little device to move between different laptops. We have so far three laptops in our household and now I can get any of them onto 3g if I want to.

A little side-note on my eeebuntu install on the SD card: when I ran unetbootin I selected to install the “live/install” version on the hard drive (which of course is a SSD but anyway) to then install it on my SDHC card, but it simply wouldn’t work. I tried three times and every time it froze somewhere in the middle of the install. When I then re-ran unetbootin and made a boot usb stick, and then ran from there instead when I did the install, it worked perfectly…

Linux, Network

Linux on eee s101

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I got myself a new toy the other day: an Eee PC S101 with 16GB SSD, an extra 32GB SDHC and 2GB ram.

Asus EEE PC S101There’s already a bazillion instructions on how to install and run Linux on your EEE PCs out there, but they all seemed to miss one (for me) crucial little detail:

In order to boot from the SD card, you need to press Escape when the bios start-up screen shows.

But now: to get the bios screen to show, you need some extra magic: you need to press F2 immediately at start-up to enter the bios setup screen and then you need to disable “boot booster” as otherwise it’ll skip the escape checking entirely!

Using this trick, I’ve now installed easypeasy on it and I’ll dual-boot with XP for a while since it came factory installed with that.

I’ve fallen for the commercials and also subscribed to 3g broadband now (you know the blatant lying “up to 7.2mbit” which never in reality can even come close even if I would be alone sitting on top of a base station) and I warmed up my toy and connection the other day (still running XP then) by working on curl code and made a few commits etc, while sitting on a wooden bench next to the field where my daughter was having her soccer practice.

In fact, SSHing to my primary servers and editing code with emacs or reading email with alpine turned out a much better experience than I anticipated as I’ve read about how terrible the roundtrip times can be over 3g. It actually didn’t feel a lot more different than my regular SSHing from home over wifi.

Linux, Open Source

Open Source Sweden?

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I’m fascinated by this Swedish organization who call themselves Open Source Sweden (“Leverantörer av Öppen Programvara i Sverige” in Swedish which means “Suppliers of Open Source Software”)

They claim to be some kind of business organization for companies that work with and within open source in Sweden, and they want to promote open source and help companies work with open source etc. All pretty fine ideas methinks.

So, let’s hypothetically say I am employed and associated with several companies and I basically work exclusively with Open Source software on my job and I work in many open source projects. Why would I make my companies join this organization? Their web page(s) give very few answers to that, and yet they have many members and some of them quite well known in our community.

For this very non-compelling reason to join, they charge ~600USD/year for membership if your company has less than 6 employees “with open source capacity” up to 3100USD/year if you happen to have more than 25 open source capable persons.

The only thing I’ve ever seen from this gang is that they get the honors to speak up on open source subjects in the media and they did issue a press release almost a year ago…

Their site lists 31 member companies (and a bunch of them are clearly in the >25 section). That’s a lot of membership fees every year.

So if anyone reads this. Why would I talk my companies into becoming a member? What can possibly be worth all that money?

cURL and libcurl, Linux, Mail, Network, Web

HTTP Status Report

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Mark Nottingham Mark Nottingham held a very interesting one hour talk on the status of HTTP and the work on HTTPbis on a QCon conference recently, and luckily for us HTTP geeks there’s this great video/presentation from that.

curl is mentioned at least twice in the slides, unfortunately it has a wrong fact on the second mention where it says curl uses “Pragma: no-cache” as it isn’t true anymore. It used to do that, but we’ve stopped doing it in curl since a while ago.

I’m a subscriber to the httpbis mailing list and a casual contributor, but nonetheless his summary and overview of the state was refreshing as I’ve not been able to keep up with all the details and I haven’t been tracking that working group from its start either.