Looking at the options for blocking ads, people usually first look at browser extensions. Google's plan is to disable adblock extensions in 2024. The alternative is usually an app (on phones) or a "VPN" that does filtering for you. All these methods are quite heavyweight, and require installing software on your phone or PC. What is less known, is that you can you DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-HTTPS for…
The current high prices of gasoline have made many people to demand gas tax cuts. Some governments have even responded to the call, and cut gas taxes. I do understand some people are hit hard by rising gas prices. But in Finnish we have a saying "Pakkasella pissa housuissa lämmittää vain hetken". Roughly Translated "In winter, peeing into your pants will only keep you warm for a moment". See, the…
If you have to choose one year when you won't fly, this year, 2020, is the one to choose. Why? Because CORSIA. What the heck is CORSIA? CORSIA is not a novel virus, but "Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation". In a nutshell, the aviation industry says they will freeze their co2 emissions from growing. Actually, aviation emissions are still going to grow. The airlines…
The copyright holders in europe are pushing hard mandate upload filters for internet. We have been here before - when they outlawed circumventing DRM. Both have roots in the same problem. The copyright holders look at computers and see bad things happening to their revenue. They come to IT companies and say "FIX IT". It industry comes back and says.. "We cant.. making data impossible to copy is…
Hey, I can do these clickbait headlines too! Recently it has gotten media's attention that Linus is dismissive of ARM servers . The argument is roughly "Developers use X86 PCs, cross-platform development is painful, and therefor devs will use X86 servers, unless they get ARM PCs to play with". This ignores the reality where majority of developers do cross-platform development every day. They…
Ever stared at output of /proc/cpuinfo and wondered what the CPU is? ... processor : 7 BogoMIPS : 2.40 Features : fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 cpuid CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 8 CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xd03 CPU revision : 3 Or maybe like: $ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l) BogoMIPS : 50.00 Features : half thumb fastmult vfp…
Debian stretch comes with cross-compiler packages for selected architectures: $ apt-cache search cross-build-essential crossbuild-essential-arm64 - Informational list of cross-build-essential packages for crossbuild-essential-armel - ... crossbuild-essential-armhf - ... crossbuild-essential-mipsel - ... crossbuild-essential-powerpc - ... crossbuild-essential-ppc64el - ... ⏎ Lets have a quick exact…
Open Build Service from SuSE is web service building deb/rpm packages. It has recently been added to Debian , so finally there is relatively easy way to set up PPA style repositories in Debian. Relative as in "there is a learning curve, but nowhere near the complexity of replicating Debian's internal infrastructure". OBS will give you both repositories and build infrastructure with a clickety web…
fte (0.44-1) unstable; urgency=low * initial Release. -- Riku Voipio Wed, 25 Dec 1996 20:41:34 +0200 Welp I seem to have spent holidays of 1996 doing my first Debian package. The process of getting a package into Debian was quite straightforward then. "I have packaged fte, here is my pgp, can I has an account to upload stuff to Debian?" I think the bureaucracy took until second week of January…
For testing kvm/qemu, prebaked images cloud images are nice. However, there is a few steps to get started. First we need a recent Qemu (2.5 is good enough). An efi firmware is needed, and cloud-utils, for customizing our VM. sudo apt install -y qemu qemu-utils cloud-utils wget https://releases.linaro.org/components/kernel/uefi-linaro/15.12/release/qemu64/QEMU_EFI.fd wget…
Since I've now been using Linux for 20 years, I've dug up some artifacts from the early journey. First the book, from late 1995. This from before Tux , so the penguin in the cover is just a co-incidence. The book came with a slackware 3.0 CD, which was my entrance to Linux. Today, almost all of the book is outdated - slackware and lilo install? printing with lpr? mtools and dosemu? ftp, telnet…
Is your table a mess of wires? Do you have multiple devices connected via serial and can't remember which is /dev/ttyUSBX is connected to what board? Unless you are a embedded developer, you are unlikely to deal with serial much anymore - In that case you can just jump to the next post in your news feed. Introducting ser2net Usually people start with minicom for serial access. There are better…
The C1 Server Scaleway started selling ARM based hosted server in April. I've intended to blog about this for a while, since it was time to upgrade from wheezy to jessie was timely, why not switch provider from an X86 based to ARM one at the same time? In many ways scaleway node is opposite to what "Enterprise ARM" people are working on. Each server is based on an oldish ARMv7 Quad-Core Marvell…
The Thing on Internet I've now had an "Internet of Things" device for about a year. It is Logitech Harmony HUB , an universal remote controller. It comes with a traditional remote, but the interesting part is that it allows me to use my smartphone/tablet as remote over WiFi. With the android app it provides a rather nice use experience, yet I can see the inevitable end in anger. Bare minimum GPL…
Tollef posted about using BeagleBone Black for temperature monitoring . There was a passage about patching the DTB (device tree) file: ... This needs to be compiled into a .dtb. I found the easiest way was just to drop the patched .dts into an unpacked kernel tree and then running make dtbs. There are easier ways. For example, you can get the current device tree file generated from /proc: apt-get…
GCompris is the most established open source kids educational game. Here we practice use of mouse with an Efika smartbook . In this subgame, mouse is moved around to uncover a image behind. While GCompris is nice, it needs nice graphics badly. Now the GCompris authors are running a indiegogo crowfund exactly for that - to get new unified graphics. Why should you fund? Apart from the "I want to be…
Linaro uses LAVA as a tool to test variety of devices. So far I had not installed it myself, mostly due to assuming it to be enermously complex to set up. But thanks to Neil Williams work on packaging, installation has got a lot easier. Follow the Official Install Doc and Official install to debian Doc , roughly looking like: 1. Install Jessie into kvm kvm -m 2048 -drive file=lava2.img,if=virtio…
Setting up basic systemd-network was recently described by Joachim , and the post inspired me to try it as well. The twist is that in my case I need a bridge for my KVM with Lava server and arm/aarch64 qemu system emulators... For background, qemu/kvm support a few ways to provide network to guests. The default is user networking , which requires no privileges, but is slow and based on ancient…
A quick update - Linaro ARMv8 OpenEmbbeded images work just fine with qemu 2.1 as well: $ http://releases.linaro.org/14.07/openembedded/aarch64/Image $ http://releases.linaro.org/14.07/openembedded/aarch64/vexpress64-openembedded_lamp-armv8-gcc-4.9_20140727-682.img.gz $ qemu-system-aarch64 -m 1024 -cpu cortex-a57 -nographic -machine virt \ -kernel Image -append 'root=/dev/vda2 rw rootwait…
Qemu 2.1 was just released a few days ago, and is now a available on Debian/unstable. Trying out an (virtual) arm64 machine is now just a few steps away for unstable users: $ sudo apt-get install qemu-system-arm $ wget https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/trusty/current/trusty-server-cloudimg-arm64-disk1.img $ wget…
Debian has recently received a donation of 8 build machines from Marvell. The new machines come with Quad core MV78460 Armada XP CPU's, DDR3 DIMM slot so we can plug in more memory, and speedy sata ports. They replace the well served Marvell MV78200 based builders - ones that have been building debian armel since 2009. We are planning a more detailed announcement, but I'll provide a quick summary:…
Wanna-build, wanna-build, which packages spent most time on armel buildd's since beginning of 2013? package | sum(build_time) -------------------------+-------------- libreoffice | 114 09:16:34 linux | 113 02:58:50 gcc-4.8 | 064 01:21:09 webkitgtk | 059 19:09:27 acl2 | 043 16:40:50 gcc-4.7 | 028 14:03:53 iceweasel | 026 19:02:13 gcc-snapshot | 026 01:31:21 openjdk-7 | 020 02:41:53 php5 | 019…
I recently got my self and Galaxy S3 for testing out Replicant , an android image made out of only open source components. Why Galaxy S3? It is well supported in Replicant , almost every driver is already open source. The hardware specs are acceptable, 1.4Ghz quad core, 1GB ram, microsd, and all the peripheral chips one expects for a phone. Galaxy S3 has sold insanely ( 50 million units…
A recent google+ post by Jon Masters caused some stormy and some less stormy responses. A lot of BIOS/UEFI/ACPI hate comes X86, where ACPI is used from everything from suspending devices to reading buttons and setting leds. So when X86 kernel suspends, it does magic calls to ACPI and prays that the firmware vendor did not screw it up. Now vendors do screw up, hence lots of cursing and ugly…
Public service announcement When porting GNU/Linux applications to a new architecture, such as 64-Bit ARM, one gets familiar with the following error message: checking build system type... x86_64-pc-linux-gnu checking host system type... Invalid configuration `aarch64-oe-linux': machine `aarch64-oe' not recognized configure: error: /bin/sh config.sub aarch64-oe-linux failed This in itself is…