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  • Sunday, 29 April 2012
    Linux in the Education Conference 2012 (Comments)

    http://lok.hu/images/circle.jpg

    The Hungarian Linux in the Education Conference 2012 was held today @ Budapest, I held a generic session about LibreOffice (slides), also talked a few guys into submitting Easy Hacks. ;)

    Other interesting stuff: a free Logo interpreter in PyUNO by Laszlo, available here.

  • Monday, 16 April 2012
    Thanks for the Hackfest 2012 (Comments)

    http://libreoffice.hu/files/2012/04/335px-HHHackfest.png

    We were in Hamburg during this weekend, and I think all of us had great fun, kudos go to the organizers! If you are curious, here are the topics I worked on besides mentoring when I was asked to do so:

    Also thanks Stefan for correcting the misleading icons of the horizontal/vertical flipping in Writer. ;)

  • Wednesday, 07 March 2012
    OpenSource is the Source of Innovation Conference (Comments)

    http://vmiklos.hu/pic/20120307_100028.t.jpg

    We presented TDF on this conference with Andras today. It was nice to see familar and new faces as well, we turned some mentioned problems into bugreports and I also fixed the barcode extension to work again with LibreOffice 3.4+, as requested by a user.

  • Sunday, 26 February 2012
    TL-WN422GC (Comments)

    The title is a wireless card usable for desktop machines. Why I can recommend it:

    • It’s better than those cheap wifi stricks, having a high(er) gain antenna.

    • It has proper Linux support. Kernel module name: ath9k_htc, the required htc_9271.fw firmware is part of kernel-firmware, so it works out of the box on any modern distro.

  • Sunday, 29 January 2012
    LPSP (Comments)

    I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

    We will give a talk about LPSP and CMIS with Cedric at FOSDEM2012. If you wonder what LPSP and CMIS are:

    • LPSP: LibreOffice extension providing connection to SharePoint

    • CMIS: Content Management Interoperability Services

    See you in Brussels!

  • Thursday, 26 January 2012
    LCA 2012 Videos (Comments)

    I think last year it was the systemd video I watched, now it was btrfs. Especially the "can’t you do online corruptions?" part. ;)

    Also: did you know the filefrag and sum commands? (e2fsprogs, coreutils)

  • Friday, 06 January 2012
    mtd-utils (Comments)

    Quick node about this useful project I packaged two days ago. It has a long FAQ - I was interested in how can one access the builtin nand storage on an arm board using it.

    First, check your dmesg, you should see something like:

    Creating 3 MTD partitions on "orion_nand":
0x000000000000-0x000000100000 : "u-boot"
0x000000100000-0x000000500000 : "uImage"
0x000000500000-0x000020000000 : "root"

    As the names say, the three items here are the bootloader, the kernel and the root filesystem. To access and mount the last one, you need:

    ubiattach /dev/ubi_ctrl -m 2
mount /dev/ubi0_0 root
... hack hack hack ...
umount root
ubidetach /dev/ubi_ctrl -m 2

  • Wednesday, 04 January 2012
    Frugalware arm port install HOWTO (Comments)

    I recently got a GuruPlug. It has Debian by default, and it’s apt config is set to stable, while in fact at the moment what’s the factory default is considered as oldstable by upstream. So if you blindly do a few apt-get install foo, soon you’ll have newer userspace than kernel, and your device will no longer boot (based on true story - and yes, this is not Debian’s fault). Moreover, I was interested in how to install Frugalware on this device, so here is a quick howto.

    Install rootfs

    First you need to bootstrap Frugalware from Debian. It’s a good idea to install Frugalware on a USB stick, so you can switch back to Debian in case you messed up something and start from scratch again.

    Partitioning is up to you, you’re recommended to have a small FAT (type: 0x0b) partition (32MB for example) at the beginning, we’ll use that later. The second can be the rest, ext4 or so.

    Format and mount it (your device name may differ!):

    mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
mkdir -p /mnt/sda2
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2

    Then install our pacman-g2 binary to the Debian system, so you can bootstrap:

    wget http://ftp.frugalware.org/pub/frugalware/frugalware-stable/frugalware-arm/pacman-g2-3.8.3-2mores2-arm.fpm
unxz pacman-g2-3.8.3-2mores2-arm.tar.xz
cd /
tar xf /path/to/pacman-g2-3.8.3-2mores2-arm.tar
rm .CHANGELOG .FILELIST .PKGINFO

    Installing the required packages is a single command, as described here:

    pacman-g2.static --noconfirm -Sy core base -r /mnt/sda2/

    Upgrade the bootloader

    Once the rootfs is ready, you need a new bootloader that will be able to boot our vanilla kernel.

    You need a JTAG Board, so you can access the serial console. If you connect the USB cable to you PC, you can use for example

    screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

    to access the device.

    Given that we want to boot a vanilla kernel, we need a vanilla bootloader as well. Before you mess with the bootloader, it’s a good idea to make a backup of its config (there is a 3 second timeout during boot - if you press any key there, you get the Marvell prompt). Here is my config:

    Marvell>> printenv
bootcmd=${x_bootcmd_ethernet}; ${x_bootcmd_usb}; ${x_bootcmd_kernel}; setenv bootargs ${x_bootargs} ${x_bootargs_root}; bootm 0x6400000;
bootdelay=3
baudrate=115200
x_bootcmd_ethernet=ping 192.168.2.1
x_bootcmd_usb=usb start
x_bootcmd_kernel=nand read.e 0x6400000 0x100000 0x400000
x_bootargs=console=ttyS0,115200
x_bootargs_root=ubi.mtd=2 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs
ethact=egiga0
bootargs=console=ttyS0,115200 ubi.mtd=2 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs
ipaddr=10.10.10.10
serverip=10.10.10.179
ethaddr=F0:AD:4E:00:CE:C3
stdin=serial
stdout=serial
stderr=serial

    The only semi-unique part is the MAC address of the network interface(s).

    If you want to update the bootloader, a possible way is to put the new binary to a pendrive. Given that the default bootloader does not support ext*, we need a fat filesystem. So format the first small partition we created already (the device name may be different in your case!):

    mkdosfs /dev/sda1

    Till Frugalware 1.6 is released, support for GuruPlug is available in Frugalware -current only, so download the binary package from there, extract the u-boot.kwb file from the guruplug directory, put it to the new partition. (A few other models are explained here).

    Before you reboot, copy also /boot/uImage to the fat partition, you may have problems problems with reading the kernel from the ext4 partition with u-boot.

    Once copying the kernel is done, reboot and in the u-boot shell do:

    usb start
fatload usb 0:1 0x0800000 u-boot.kwb
nand erase 0x0 0x60000
nand write 0x0800000 0x0 0x60000
reset

    You can verify the updated bootloader with the version command:

    Marvell>> version

U-Boot 2011.12 (Jan 03 2012 - 16:55:38)
Marvell-GuruPlug
gcc (Frugalware Linux) 4.6.2
GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.22

    If Frugalware is mentioned, that’s a good sign. :)

    Boot the new rootfs

    Now you can boot your new rootfs:

    usb start
fatload usb 0:1 0x00800000 /uImage
setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sda2 rootdelay=5
bootm 0x00800000

    If it booted fine, you may want to make this the default:

    setenv bootargs 'console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sda2 rootdelay=5'
setenv bootcmd_usb 'usb start; fatload usb 0:1 0x00800000 /uImage'
setenv bootcmd 'run bootcmd_usb; bootm 0x00800000'
saveenv

    Finalize

    The rest is up to you:

    • setting up a root password

    • setting up network by default using netconfig

    and so on… you know this already, nothing arm-specific.

    For the reference, here is the tested CPU and Frugalware version:

    $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l)
BogoMIPS        : 1191.11
Features        : swp half thumb fastmult edsp
CPU implementer : 0x56
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant     : 0x2
CPU part        : 0x131
CPU revision    : 1

Hardware        : Marvell GuruPlug Reference Board
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 0000000000000000
$ cat /etc/frugalware-release
Frugalware 1.5 (Mores)

  • Thursday, 22 December 2011
    Samsung Galaxy S (Comments)

    As this post already suggested, about a week ago I replaced my S40 with $title. (Yes, I know that S II is just released, but that pushed down the price of S a bit, and I don’t want to waste so much money for a phone.)

    So far I’m quite pleased about the product, here are the tools I used to migrate data:

    • gammu, to convert the calendar to ics, which can be imported by the calendar

    • gammu2gcontacts to extract contacts from the gammu backup (earlier post)

    • mgmaps can export to kml, which can be imported to my maps

    • finally a throw-away (use once, and never look back) script to generate emails from my notes, which can be imported by gnotes

    The hardware is supported by CyanogenMod, but I did not experiment with that so far. (bookmark)

  • Sunday, 18 December 2011
    Recent contributions (Comments)

    • BitlBee: a patch for skyped got merged, helping to avoid the cryptic openssl error messages when the certificate is missing.

    • openSUSE: the mutt package now contains one more patch from Frugalware’s mutt-ng package, which means my mutt config can be used unmodified (no more unknown config settings)

    • jBPM and bpm-console: these were part of my MSc thesis, github branches are available, upstreaming is in progress (on IRC they confirmed that they are interested in the feature, at least)

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