Showing posts with label ubuntu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ubuntu. Show all posts

Tuesday 25 May 2010

Pre-built Joggler Images

It seems everyone buying a Joggler is doing so for their own good reasons with thoughts about how to hack the device to their needs. I include myself in this too, why else write these blog posts? The majority of people aren't so interested in the hacking side of things as simply getting the device to do what they want and that's where using a pre-built, already hacked, operating system image can come in very handy indeed.

The Images
Easily the two most popular images are Ubuntu based although there are Joggler communities for Android, Mer and Meego, all of which are Linux based platforms. I've only tried the first of these but can lend my recommendation to either of

As I said, both are Ubuntu based with the key difference being the first image uses the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (a.k.a UNR, Ubuntu Netbook Edition and UNE) while the second one uses "normal" Ubuntu.  You'd perhaps expect them to be in fierce competition with each other but in good open source spirit quite the opposite is true. Both are produced by nice guys who help each other (and the rest of the community out) by sharing what they do.

There's no sense in me reproducing how to download and use either of these images.  Both come with pretty bullet-proof instructions on what to do.  I would, however, heartily recommend you produce the images from a Linux system having recently helped a friend struggling with downloading the images successfully and finding the right tools to do the job under Windows.

Fair's Fair
From my own investigations and messing around with putting Fedora on the Joggler I can certainly vouch for the amount of time and effort these guys have put into producing such good quality, usable hacks.  So, if you do more than just evaluate these for your own use i.e. you really are using your Joggler with either of these images then do give serious consideration to spending a few quid giving something back to the guys as they ask through a small donation.  I have no idea how much they might stand to make through donation and other revenue such as the Google ads, but it's probably not a huge amount and is definitely well earned.

Modification
If you try the images out and there's something you don't like, fine, you don't have to stick with that particular quirk.  There's never going to be a one-size fits all approach so if you don't like, for example, the on screen keyboard, the user interface or something else then feel free to change it.  It's your system once you've downloaded and booted it after all.  There are a lot of, dare I say, complaints on the forums about things not being quite right.  If it's something major then let the guy know who produced the image, it will probably get fixed in their next version.  Also, there's a huge wealth of help and support out there in various places so try looking for someone who's already "been there, done that".

Subject to some of the Joggler Hardware Gotchas it is possible to use these images on devices much bigger and faster than a 4GB USB stick.  I've tried with an 8GB stick and USB hard disks from 80GB through 320GB and even one disk of 1TB.  Simply follow the instructions for either image to write to your larger device as if it were a 4GB stick.  Then use a tool such as gparted (again I recommend Linux simply because it's easy and the tools are readily available) to resize the second partition to be as big as you like.  If you move to a hard disk (rather than USB stick) then you can undo some of the modifications made in the images for efficiency and to try and protect your stick:
  • Change the file system back to ext3 from ext2
  • Add a swap file or swap partition
You can change the file system type from ext2 to ext3 either before or after changing the size of the partition.  Simply boot the image on your Joggler and run the command "tune2fs -j /dev/sda2" then edit the file /etc/fstab to change bit that says ext2 to say ext3, save that file and you're all done.  The reason for making this change is your files will be a little safer in the event of unplanned events such as sudden loss of power.  This was quite rightly turned off for the USB stick images because more data is written to the device and since USB sticks are only capable of being written to a relatively small number of times the trade-off between stick reliability and file system reliability has to be made.

Adding a swap file (if you don't know what this is then have a go at understanding paging)is probably easier in many ways than adding a swap partition and with a recent version of Linux such as the ones used in these images doesn't lead to any loss of performance as might have been expected in older versions of Linux.  Feel free to add a swap partition in gparted though, don't forget to add a line to /etc/fstab to tell Ubuntu to use this partition as swap.  To add a 1GB swap file simple run the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=1024; swapon /swap" then add a line to /etc/fstab so next time you reboot Ubuntu will use this file for swap space.

You can find a lot more of my information about the Joggler at my Joggler Index post. I also have a list of Joggler Bookmarks.

Tuesday 12 August 2008

Byebye Ubuntu, Hello Fedora

My recent experiments with installing Ubuntu on my little home server came to an end this weekend. I'm working hard to debug problems with my media streamer software, SqueezeCenter. After finding tons of forum posts and various problems with installing SqueezeCenter on Hardy Heron I decided to try another approach so I'm now running Fedora 9 at home instead. Both Hardy and Fedora 9 are supposed to be supported by Slim Devices for their Squeeze-stuff. However, it appears neither of these work but I'll save that rant for another day once I've worked out what's wrong (I have my suspicions about Slim Devices testing against Perl 5.10).

I'm actually quite relieved to be back in my comfort zone with Fedora at home again. I really enjoyed the experience of playing with Ubuntu but it's just not for me for various reasons...

I've met quite a few Canonical guys in my professional role and they've all been great; helpful, very approachable and in the case of some, such as Jono Bacon very decent techies too. That's not my experience with non-Canonical Ubuntu contributors though. I found if the Ubuntu documentation (which is excellent for pretty much everything before Hardy Heron right now) failed me, then talking to the community was not a good experience. I found I was met with an abrupt RTFM attitude in most instances, where the assumption of the community is that people asking questions are dumb. Personally, I blame this on the typical Ubuntu user being non-technical where Linux is concerned so I guess the community receive lots of silly questions which must get annoying at times. All that said, I still believe Ubuntu is really important and plays an extremely valuable role in trying to bring Linux to a more mass audience.

I also found Hardy to be down level in various instances compared with the packages available in Fedora 9. The big one for me here, on my little server, is the OpenChrome drivers for the graphics chipset. Fedora have the version that supports my chipset, but when I asked about inclusion in Ubuntu there was no interest in updating the down level version in their repositories. I also enquired about the broken Via proprietary driver in Ubuntu which resulted in the Via driver being marked for removal! So rather than update the open drivers or fix the package for the proprietary drivers, the response was to remove the proprietary one and not update the open driver which left me in a position of manually maintaining my own graphics driver until the next major Ubuntu release.

I've used RPM and yum way more than I have deb and apt so I sway towards the former simply through familiarity. Having the chance to play with debs again recently has been great too, there's some nice additional touches you don't get with RPM such as the suggested packages and the ability to remove dependencies installed with a certain package, etc. Ubuntu have done a nice job of packaging this all up with Synaptic too. Aside from those few nice-to-haves I don't really see any other advantages to the Ubuntu system, yum and RPM would do exactly the same job when fronted by Synaptic but as ever in the world of open source having choice and competition is good.

Hiding root from the general user is a decent idea too, no need for that confusion in a simple desktop environment, and makes it feel a little closer to what people expect from a Windows box.

Gnome is the desktop of choice for both mainstream Ubuntu and for Fedora so I've been going with that recently instead of my usual choice of KDE. I've been really impressed with Gnome too, for a simple desktop environment it's fantastic but I know if I were to use it every day there would be some features and tools I use regularly under KDE that I would dearly miss. However, I think I've been converted for home use over to Gnome, particularly as KDE is going through turbulent times with their version 4 releases right now. Having everything written in one toolkit is really nice, you can't avoid running GTK and QT apps under KDE but at least under Gnome you have the option of not running QT and sticking with the same look and feel everywhere.

I hope I managed to stabalise on one distribution soon so SqueezeCenter actually works, I get the feeling that will likely be Fedora 8 in the short term until Slim Devices get their act together for Perl 5.10 if my current thoughts are correct. So for now at least it's goodbye to Ubuntu until the next time I give it a run somewhere.

Friday 1 August 2008

What Ubuntu Thinks of a TinyTuxbox

I've been meaning to log some, I think I'll call it... Linux type stuff, to do with the TinyTuxbox for a while. Here's my attempt to look at what Ubuntu makes of this little box.

First, the CPU (from /proc/cpuinfo):
processor : 0
vendor_id : CentaurHauls
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : VIA Eden Processor 500MHz
stepping : 0
cpu MHz : 498.706
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge cmov pat clflush acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 tm nx up pni est tm2 xtpr rng rng_en ace ace_en ace2 ace2_en phe phe_en pmm pmm_en
bogomips : 998.77
clflush size : 64


The interestingness here comes from the fact we have a 500MHz Via Eden with 128k cache and just under 1000 bogomips which (although it shouldn't be) is often used as a trivial performance metric of a processor. Next, lets have a look at what's on the PCI bus (courtesy of lspci):
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge (rev 03)
00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
00:08.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700M2 IDE
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 90)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 PCI to ISA Bridge
00:11.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Internal Module Bus
00:13.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700M2 UniChrome PRO II Graphics (rev 03)
02:01.0 Audio device: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA High Definition Audio Controller (rev 10)


Highlights here come from the Realtek Ethernet which is well catered for out of the box by pretty much any major Linux these days. There are also two IDE controllers, USB controllers and an audio controller that are all well supported. It's interesting that most of the PCI devices are provided by the single CX700M2 chipset which I believe is built onto the processor board for the Via Eden's. The one thing from this list that has been a pain in the back side is the graphics controller. It works out of the box both in frame buffer mode and via the open source via unichrome driver called Openchrome. However, Openchrome don't support the CX700M2 board yet (not officially anyway, the code is still in SVN according to the guys I spoke to on their IRC channel) so graphics processing was eating lots of CPU. Fortunately, I found a link to later via drivers at linux.via.com.tw than are available through the official Via driver site where they're still only supporting Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10. Seems I'm caught in the middle for now, the Via drivers work nicely but will be a pain to maintain until the Openchrome drivers find their way into Ubuntu and I switch back over to them.

Then there's the memory. For a small box this one has a relatively generous helping of 512MB RAM, some of which is stolen by the CX700M2 for graphical shared memory. Free is currently showing 439MB total memory, 390MB used and 49MB available; swap is 100% free. That's not bad at all considering I'm running Xorg with Gnome, SSH, SqueezeCenter, 2 instances of MySQL (SqueezeCenter starts its own instance), and a Nanobroker with some Perl code to log my Current Cost data. It'll be running Apache soon too as I move towards writing some more web based Current Cost facilities.

Just in case anyone is interested, here's the list of modules currently loaded into Ubuntu's 2.6.24-19-generic kernel: drm af_packet ipv6 cpufreq_powersave cpufreq_conservative cpufreq_ondemand cpufreq_stats freq_table cpufreq_userspace sbs container sbshc video output dock battery iptable_filter ip_tables x_tables ac parport_pc lp parport loop snd_hda_intel snd_pcm_oss snd_mixer_oss snd_pcm snd_page_alloc snd_hwdep snd_seq_dummy snd_seq_oss snd_seq_midi snd_rawmidi snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq snd_timer snd_seq_device snd soundcore serio_raw evdev psmouse pl2303 usbserial pcspkr button i2c_viapro i2c_core shpchp pci_hotplug via_agp agpgart ext3 jbd mbcache sg sd_mod pata_acpi pata_via ata_generic 8139cp ehci_hcd uhci_hcd libata usbcore 8139too mii scsi_mod thermal processor fan fbcon tileblit font bitblit softcursor fuse

I'll spare the full dmidecode output but from this information I can determine it has an AMI Bios version 8.14 released on 03/28/2008. The CPU is listed with, amusingly, Family "out of spec" and 128K L1 parity cache and 128K L2 ECC cache. A single soldered 512MB Dimm.

I'm still surprised at just how well it matches up to being a standard x86 box, providing all the interfaces you would expect of such a box given its size. Clearly it's never going to be the fastest or have the most memory, but it really does stack up nicely for all but the most intense home serving tasks or gaming. It certainly shows me we can fill most of our computing needs with such a small box and only 8 watts of power. Ubuntu seems no problem for it and it's reported to run Windows XP too. I'll definitely be bearing it in mind next time someone asks me to recommend a box simply for browsing the web, e-mail or a bit of word processing!

<Edit>
Memtest86+ shows the processor as a Via C3 Samuel 2 clocked at 498.7MHz, 128K L1 cache @ 2035MB/s, it doesn't detect L2 cache, and shows 447MB RAM @ 367MB/s.
</Edit>

Thursday 17 July 2008

Installing Ubuntu On A TinyTuxbox

With my new toy now in hand the time soon came to get it installed with Linux. At first glance it might appear to be tricky to install given the lack of CD or Floppy drives. However, it boots from just about anything you attach to it whether that's USB, Compact Flash or Network Boot. Setting up a one-time PXE server seemed a little over the top so I was planning to boot from a USB stick until I found someone at work with a USB CDROM.

Ubuntu IconUsually I like to run Fedora at home, it's the thing I'm most comfortable with having spent my career tinkering with Red Hat and SUSE based distributions so one of the things I wanted to do with this box was install the much hyped Ubuntu distribution. This wasn't to see what all the fuss is about (I'm familiar with Ubuntu having tried it a couple of times before but always gone back to Fedora) but really just so I can get to know it even better. This machine is going to be part desktop and part server so Ubuntu kind of makes sense too.

I installed the hard disk into the box myself and once I got over some initial hardware niggles (that I caused I should add) the installation was simple. Boot from USB CDROM with the Hardy Heron CD in it and the rest is history. It's amazing how such a small box can run a full whack desktop operating system and do all that on just 8 watts.

In these early days, I have three things in mind for the box. The primary use will be to serve my music collection to my stereo; next is to connect my current cost meter to allow some more in-depth analysis of our power usage at home; then there's simply using it as a desktop for the simpler day-to-day computer usage i.e. browsing the web.

Setting up the music streaming was pretty easy after transferring my collection to the hard disk. I added the apt sources for the SqueezeCenter software that operates with my SqueezeBox Duet, did an apt-get update and an apt-get install squeezecenter and job done. The TinyTuxbox can much better cope with running the MySQL server this is based on along with the web front end and the music collection scanning services associated with the software than the SLUG I tried previously. All in all, couldn't have been much easier.

I've not tried hooking up my current cost meter yet, ironically I've run out of power sockets near the computer with only a six-way adapter and plugs for the PC, TinyTuxbox, Printer, Monitor, ADSL Modem Router, and speakers although it shouldn't be a hard problem to rectify.

Last of all, one of the additional benefits of this low-power box is every day usage. It can easily run a web browser so instead of starting up a large PC just for this, we can switch to the TinyTuxbox desktop and browse there. This should add to our power saving, even though it's likely the TinyTuxbox will be run all the time soon to serve the current cost data. That reminds me, I really should discuss batch-uploading of current cost data so I can save even the 8 watts the TinyTuxbox uses most of the time too.