HomeCategoriesChoose a templateRecent EntriesEmdebian Grip updated
Monday, September 6 2010 screen, irssi and page control Sunday, September 5 2010 FreedomBox Wednesday, August 4 2010 check-deps.sh and xapt Thursday, July 8 2010 Switching from iceweasel to chromium Sunday, June 27 2010 World Cup QA Sunday, June 20 2010 multistrap 2.1.5 Monday, May 31 2010 HP laptop battery recall Monday, May 24 2010 DebConf10 Monday, April 26 2010 pdebuild-cross Saturday, April 24 2010 |
Wednesday, February 27. 2008Debconf8 flights
Noting comments by bubulle and Debian-uk preparations, I've started looking at flights for Debconf8 with an eye to actually making a booking.
There appears that there will be a variety of Debian-ites hanging around Madrid airport and catching an apparently very limited number of flights to Buenos Aires as I seem to only be able to find 2 flights a day between Madrid and Buenos Aires. Bubulle notes a connection from Paris to Madrid, I (and most of the UK team) would need a connection from London to Madrid. For some bizarre reason, leaving from Gatwick is more expensive than leaving from Heathrow. That's a PITA for me because my return flight home leaves from Gatwick. More annoying is that the evening flight is much more expensive than the (very) early morning flight. So much so that it comes out at almost double the cost of even a relatively expensive hotel for the night. My current ruminations revolve around: flight £780.62 - Expedia Special Fare The arrival back in London is good for me because it provides plenty of time to get between Heathrow and Gatwick, even on a Sunday. I guess London is a little further from Madrid than Paris - my trip comes out at over €1,000 compared to €900 from Paris. Can't really justify a return Eurostar for that difference. (Yes, I'm travelling out for DebCamp too.) Wednesday, February 27. 2008Comments (5) Defined tags for this entry: Emdebian
Problems with minicom over USB
Embedded systems (especially bootloaders) need serial connections but many laptops and modern desktops simply do away with the serial port altogether. Up until now, I've kept my previous desktop machine around (which happens to also have a parallel port so acts as the home network print server because I don't have a USB printer either) and then connect to minicom over SSH.
Now, yes, I can configure networking over USB once the device is installed but to actually fix installation problems, I need serial on my other machines. I've got a USB to serial converter, turns out to be a Prolific 2303 chipset (it's the basic one with a cable from Maplins) which is quite well supported. Now the weird stuff.My powerpc laptop sees the Prolific chipset and configures a USB device that, initially, minicom complains about - but if I set the port from 'dmesg' (/dev/ttyUSB0) in minicom -s, it works. Well, almost. I can see the output of the device but no keyboard strokes are passed on to the board which means it's almost workable whilst still being completely useless. My problematic HP laptop accepts the Prolific chipset but does not configure a USB device node. Without a device node, minicom just fails. Bah. This HP laptop is still causing me grief. USB seems to fail after hibernation and only works at all if irqfixup is added to the kernel boot parameters. With irqfixup, the laptop randomly hangs. I almost need to setup parallel configs in grub of "run USB but don't hibernate" and "run for more than 1 hour" as mutually exclusive. Oh, and the external monitor connection used for presentations is only seen if the projector is connected during a reboot of the HP laptop. Bah x 3. Tuesday, February 26. 2008Defined tags for this entry: Emdebian
Splitting emdebian-tools and cross building translationsSeparating out keyring and rootfs support
Finally got to test a request from some months ago to create a separate archive keyring for those people who just want to use the toolchains. I also took the chance to split out the scripts to build root filesystems from the scripts that build the packages for the repository. The Emdebian::Tools module was best split out too, it's needed for emdebian-rootfs and emdebian-tools. Not sure when this is going to happen for real, it's only a test branch right now. (browse SVN). It tests OK, so far and if other things check out, this could be 0.8.4 (in Emdebian), then whilst the same code badged as 0.9.0 spends time in the NEW queue so that I can upload 0.8.5 etc. to Emdebian, followed by 0.9.1 with the changes from 0.8.5 onwards. TDeb changes from FosdemIn the main trunk (0.8.3), I've updated a few parts of em_installtdeb but I haven't made much progress on whether TDebs should be Architecture: all or Architecture: any.
Wednesday, February 20. 2008Defined tags for this entry: Emdebian
emdebian-tools 0.8.2 in Emdebian
Although an interim release, there are a number of new features in 0.8.2 that are worth noting.
In common with all previous interim Emdebian releases, 0.8.2 has been uploaded to the Emdebian tools repository already added to your apt sources when installing emdebian-tools so apt will be able to upgrade seamlessly. (0.8.0 introduced a check in emsetup to ensure that the latest version has actually been installed.) Once features have stabilised (probably after testing at Fosdem), I'll upload 0.9.0 to Debian unstable, as usual, or maybe one or two more interim releases to Emdebian. Sunday, February 17. 2008Monitoring long running processes via ssh
I'm trying to work out how to monitor a remote script - in this case a mass build script. The script itself is trivial - a simple for loop in perl. It calls a script from emdebian-tools that calls a variety of other scripts and programs.
What's the best way for me to monitor that script from another machine on the network? Yes, 'ps wax' is usable but not particularly friendly - the script has to work its way through a list of packages that need building. I want to know which package is being built at the time and the 'ps' output does show this information but only if you recognise parts of the build process for particular packages. I thought about getting the script to output the current package name to some file in /var/ but that seems a bit of a hack (it's a userspace command and should not need to use sudo or require particular permission setups). Sending email is overkill. A file in /tmp/ is possible, true, but that means adapting the script itself. I'd like a solution that could work with (almost) any package, including binaries, without altering the source code. I've also thought of running the script within screen but then when the machine is in the middle of a compilation, it isn't easy to work out which package is actually being built just from the gcc output, plus there is the continual problem that screen doesn't support scrollback. I have a feeling this is a potential reinventing the wheel problem so I'm looking for ideas. Update:The closest process output I can use is ps wfh which at least collates all the processes started by the top level script into one tree. I've worked out why the info I wanted was not being shown - the call from perl was exec() not system(). Doh! Ne'er mind. ps wfh will be enough for what I need - but I will need to adapt the wrapper after all. Thanks to all those who posted comments. Sunday, February 17. 2008Comments (6) Defined tags for this entry: Debian
Monitoring long running scripts via ssh
I'm trying to work out how to monitor a remote script - in this case a mass build script. The script itself is trivial - a simple for loop in perl. It calls a script from emdebian-tools that calls a variety of other scripts and programs.
What's the best way for me to monitor that script from another machine on the network? Yes, 'ps wax' is usable but not particularly friendly - the script has to work its way through a list of packages that need building. I want to know which package is being built at the time and the 'ps' output does show this information but only if you recognise parts of the build process for particular packages. I thought about getting the script to output the current package name to some file in /var/ but that seems a bit of a hack (it's a userspace command and should not need to use sudo or require particular permission setups). Sending email is overkill. A file in /tmp/ is possible, true, but that means adapting the script itself. I'd like a solution that could work with (almost) any package, including binaries, without altering the source code. I've also thought of running the script within screen but then when the machine is in the middle of a compilation, it isn't easy to work out which package is actually being built just from the gcc output, plus there is the continual problem that screen doesn't support scrollback. I have a feeling this is a potential reinventing the wheel problem so I'm looking for ideas. Wednesday, February 13. 2008Defined tags for this entry: Debian
b43 on iBook G4 and kernel 2.6.24
OK, I may not have wireless yet on my HP laptop but I have managed to get wireless networking running with the new b43 native kernel driver for this iBook G4 laptop.
0001:10:12.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03) (that's the Apple internal card). Linux fergus 2.6.24-1-powerpc #1 Mon Feb 11 12:53:42 CET 2008 ppc GNU/Linux linux-image-2.6-powerpc 2.6.24+13 I needed: b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2 broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2 (Note the versions - older versions don't work, newer versions give errors from the kernel and don't work either.) www locations and full instructions available at http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43. The best bit is that because this is a native driver, network-manager is able to find it and use it so that I don't have to waste time with detailed settings in /etc/network/interfaces etc. The worst bit is that it still needs a second internet connection to download the firmware from Broadcom and compile the firmware cutter from source. As I've only just got it working, I've yet to test it with suspend etc. but at least I no longer have to use bcm43xx (which is deprecated by b43 anyway). It also appears that this will work with the HP laptop, once the device in that laptop is recognised by the kernel. Just such a pain that Broadcom don't open up the licence for the firmware so that we can have a sensible package that can be installed ready and working without all the work. Update - it continues working after suspend. Tuesday, February 12. 2008Comments (5) Defined tags for this entry: Emdebian
Embedded Debian still Debian?
The basic Debian debootstrap system is 180Mb or so. Embedded systems need a full GUI installation in 64Mb or less and a basic debootstrap-equivalent system of 10Mb or less.
Such radical reductions in size mean radical changes to the structure of the the system itself. The question is, at what point does a modified Debian system become no longer Debian? Main changes:
Main similarities:
So the question is, lazyweb, how far do we go before you would regard Emdebian as no longer Debian? I now have image tarballs for such a system - 18mb compressed with a full GPE GUI included, 48Mb installed. The scripts could, potentially, work with any debootstrap tarball. Although based on debootstrap, the Emdebian set can be unpacked separately from debootstrap so that as much of the workload can be done on the build machine as possible. This allows the "installer" to simply copy the decompressed filesystem onto the device, run /sbin/ldconfig and dpkg --configure -a and it's ready to go. I have a few issues to resolve within the packages themselves and within the available kernel for my test machine but the result is a full GUI installation that will fit on a 64Mb SD card (32Mb is a tad too small) with enough room to spare to add a Linux kernel zImage, modules.tgz, Windows executable/autorun runes and a bootloader. i.e. a possible method of installing Emdebian onto a handheld running Windows CE or Windows Mobile. The only issue is getting the right kernel and modules for the device. These are important benefits, the cost is whether such an installation still qualifies as "Debian". At what point does Debian cease to be Debian? |
ArchivesSyndicate This BlogQuicksearch |
