12 Oct 08 Help Debian, today’s Linux news.

I was browsing Linux Today this evening and made some observations:

Debian Linux Needs Your Help

Original post details:

Debian Linux Needs Your Help
Cyber Cynic: “The community was doing much better this time for the forthcoming release of Debian 5, Lenny, but some last-minute problems still need cleaning up and the Debian developers would like you to help.”

I’ll give it a go. The posting details the following simple steps to upgrade:

1. Make backups

2. Change your /etc/apt/sources.list

3. Run aptitude update to get information about new packages

4. Run aptitude install dpkg aptitude apt to install the newest package management

5. Run aptitude full-upgrade

I wouldn’t advise testing on a production machine but as a 30% Windows XP/70% Debian etch user, I have a desktop or two that is pretty ‘debian’ intensive in terms of usage and packages so would be glad of what is supposed to be a reasonably stable upgrade and happily report back bugs.

What he’d like from developers is “pretty easy: Fix rc-bugs, take care, that the fixed packages are migrated to “Lenny,” do upgrade tests, document problems in the release-notes. Pretty simple, isn’t it?” Well, it is if you’re a Linux developer, but otherwise, not really.

It’s a worthwhile cause imho, however coming at a bad time for me as I just get into the swing of things with the robot project. I will have to try and put some time away for help with Lenny but I can’t promise how much.

Tags: debian, lenny, Linux, News

12 Oct 08 The Robot: Hardware List, Wheel Plan, More Ideas, Steps to launch

Thanks to some further thought and some great comments and suggestions, I’ve got a clearer idea of what I’d like to build, and I’ve devised a preliminary hardware list. I’ve divided this into various categories to help planning and ordering.

Discuss this in the forums here: http://www.adamsinfo.com/forum/linux-robot/the-robot-hardware-list-wheel-plan-more-ideas-steps-to-launch/

Hardware
My bad wheel plan mockup for 4 wheels and omnidirectional movement:

Please excuse the awful graphics

The base layout should be as follows. The diamond shape is a very thin metal plate which will have the motors and motor casing attached. The metal plate will be at the very bottom of the device. The square (overlayed) will be the acetate base of the unit, and build up to form the base “box”.

I’d like the motor’s to be simple 6-9v, 10W max. motors

Each motor will be held on it’s own bracket and will not be connected via an axle. Each motor will require independant control via a motor controller. The motor controller will be required to convert digital input to variable voltage (5v/7v/9v?) output. 4 speed (4.5v/6v/7.5v/9v>) would also be fine.
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Tags: alix, analog, camera, cf card, digital, electronics, i2c, io ports, LED, Linux, Linux robot, microphone, motors, Robot, sensor, speaker

07 Oct 08 PHP, MySQL, Apache2 install HOWTO on Debian

Setting up a PHP/MySQL/Apache2 environment on Debian is really easy, and as a PHP MySQL Developer, it’s kinda important! I’ll walk through a quick Debian lamp install howto and optimization process. I’ve optimized it for a 1.5Gb to 2GB RAM machine with reasonable load.

Now download eaccelerator from http://eaccelerator.net
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Tags: apache2 optimization, debian, Debian lamp install howto, Development, LAMP, LAMP Optimization, MySQL, mysql optimization, Optimization, PHP, PHP Developer, PHP MySQL Developer, php optimization, php5, Programmer

05 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 3 – Installing Debian, Prebuilt Disk Image

Follow on from 01 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 2

The device runs a 2.4.30 kernel on a debian woody (mipsel) environment. If anyone can contribute anything for 2.6.x and debian etch, that would be great.

In this part, I’m going to provide a download link to a prebuilt image which you can write directly onto your own CF card with dd or similar tool. I’m also going to provide a step by step to installing debian yourself without my prebuilt disk image.

Prebuilt image is here:

The prebuilt image also contains a number of scripts and tools that I’ll comment on and come to in later parts.

Now installation instructions:
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Tags: 532a, apnicbox, apt-get, atftpd, CF, compile, cross compile, Custom Kernel, dd, debian, dhcpd, dhcpd.conf installer, forward, initrd, initrd.gz, iptables, ip_forward, kernel, Linux, linuxrc, masquerade, mikrotik, mipsel, mkfs, mknod, mount, partition, prebuild image, routerboard, routerboard 532a, scripts, sed, tftpd, vmlinux, wget

01 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 2 – Hardware Modifications

Follow on from 01 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 1

Custom Hardware Modifications

Here’s a labelled image of the inside of the device. You can also look towards the bottom left of the image for my simple solder modifications. Enlarge the image to see the labels.

1. External 2.4GHz/5GHz antenna. Same on opposite side.
2. 5V solder point
3. 5V connector for miniPCI USB card
4. 2x 2USB Headers. 1 Header in use providing 2x USB interfaces, one to regular host connector for mass storage or other usb connection. Other port for picoLCD on top
5. 512MB CF card
6. miniPCI USB controller

On the underside of the board there is a single miniPCI socket which houses an Atheros 5212 802.11a/b/g miniPCI card. It has two antenna outputs which run under the board and two the two external antennae. I haven’t taken a picture of this but if anyone really wants to see it, I will power down the device, get a picture of it and post it here.

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Tags: 2.4ghz, 532a, 5ghz, 802.11, antenna, APNIC, APNIC Box, atheros 5212, Linux, mikrotik, minipci, minipci usb, picolcd, routerboard, routerboard 532a, solder, soldering, usb interfaces, usb ports

01 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 1 – The Device

I put this device together for fun sometime around the start of 2007. The ideas that spawned this was using OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT54G access point. A surprisingly powerful and full linux distro with all kinds of advanced capabilities running on a Linksys wireless router which I’d previously thought to be a reasonably dumb device with computing power more comparable to a calculator than a PC. The project opened my eyes to embedded devices, and I wondered what device base I should start with. To cut a long story short and for reasons that I can’t even remember anymore I came across the Mikrotik Routerboard 532A and decided that I should start with that.

Conception

Here’s a picture of the device from the outside with some labels, view the full image to see them.

1. Status LEDs. Blue at the bottom left shows it’s on, orange at the top right shows that there’s wifi activity.
2. Ethernet (eth0)
3. Standard Serial Console (57600, 8 N 1)
4. Ethernet (eth1)
5. Ethernet (eth2)

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Tags: adsl2+, APNIC, APNIC Box, distro, ethernet, isp, linksys router, Linux, Linux routing, modem, openwrt, picolcd, public IP, redundancy, routerboard 532a, serial console, switch

01 Oct 08 Playing poker on Linux

Linux is always gaining popularity on the desktop. Playing poker on Linux isn’t that hard and you’ve got a few options:

1. Find something web or flash based. Poker Room, Euro Poker and Hollywood Poker are a few examples of sites that offer that.

2. Java is a cross platform SDK. Absolute Poker, Party Poker, Poker Room, and quite a few others offer Java play.

3. Wine. I managed to get my favorite poker site Titan Poker working perfectly in Wine. Here are instructions for debian based systems:

It’s that easy! If you get a regsvr32 error during setup, it is safe to ignore it.

Double click ‘Titan Poker’ which will now have appeared on in ~/Desktop/Titan Poker

It works well, graphic and game quality is the same as Windows, sound also works with the right Wine configuration.

If any poker players are reading, I’d personally recommend signing up at Stoxpoker http://www.stoxpoker.com as a fantastic training site.

Tags: Linux, Playing poker on Linux, poker

30 Sep 08 DNS Hijacking, ISP Packet Modification, Morals and Privacy

While looking at some data statistics for one of our racks, I noticed that the DNS service has become incredibly busy as of late. Now about 4 years ago when these particular name servers were set up, they were left with their default option to respond to DNS queries to anyone for anyone. It’s not really terrible but hardly ideal so I began changing some settings. I do notice though that we seem to now be providing name server access to the large majority of the world. Only recently did I read an article on DNS Hijacking that certain ISPs use to deliver pay per click ads to their subscribers when they do anything from first start their browser to each time they hit a DNS error.

Now personally I think it’s a pretty cheap thing to do, and it’s also quite frustrating to those users that have to suffer this ‘feature’. A number of ISPs use such methods to ‘improve’ the quality of your service and I think it’s all pretty bad. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with legitimate website ads in order to earn an author or site master some money – I’m going to put a few here sometime, however offensive advert popups or other nasty behavior are really not acceptable by anyones standards anymore.

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Tags: ads, adverts, DNS Hijacking, dns server, internet connection, ISP Packet Modification, Morals and Privacy, open source, sniffing http

29 Sep 08 The Legality of Peer to peer software

Following a read of the Electronic Fronteir Foundation (EFF) press releases http://www.eff.org/press/releases I was confused as to why it wasn’t easier to legislate against piracy, specifically peer to peer network misusage.

It’s crucial that courts continue to protect emerging technologies that are capable of substantial lawful uses, even if they also can be used in less acceptable ways, said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann.”

Well obviously. No one is suggesting that someone comes up with a definition of a peer to peer network and then criminalize taking part in, running, or conspiring to run such network. Why not just define more clearly how peer to peer is often used for piracy and legislate against that?

“In Arista v. Lime Wire, the recording industry plaintiffs seek to hold Lime Wire liable for acts of copyright infringement by users of its software.”

By all means target the Companies who host the networks that pirate users operate on. Obviously no well known service such as Lime Wire ever actively promotes piracy though. On a network however where any user can upload or download any software, videos, music and pictures what do you think is going to happen? Surely without needing to legislate against peer to peer technology itself, it’s clear that the network operators are failing to uphold their duty of care to their Clients in providing a reasonable level of protection.

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Tags: eff, electronic fronteir foundation, file sharing, limewire, p2p, peer to peer, piracy, The Legality of Peer to peer software

23 Sep 08 Thoughts on “Google denies disassembling Vista code for Chrome”

Inspiration: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39492220,00.htm

Is disassembling software wrong? Well, I’d suggest that it isn’t. You may have agreed to a plethora of licencing terms when you downloaded, bought or installed a piece of software, but where does it say that the software running on your PC shall remain a mystery and you should not explore it?

Each time you run the software, your platform will essentially take it apart and run it for you. If your platform is expected to understand the software in machine readable format, then why shouldn’t you?
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Tags: compile, decompile, disassemble, legal, moral, reverse engineer