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#1 Re: DIY » installing Devuan on Samsung Chromebook Pro » 2020-03-08 14:28:19

Camtaf wrote:

I put AntiX (systemd free) onto my Toshiba chromebook, (2GB ram/16GB eMMC), I used mrchromebox's boot replacement software.

https://mrchromebox.tech/

Thanks for the link, will check it out, atm i don't know what AntiX is etc, but i can read lol, and i appreciate the pointer.

#2 DIY » installing Devuan on Samsung Chromebook Pro » 2020-03-07 13:18:01

noname
Replies: 3

I'd like to replace ChromeOS with Devuan.  However, Gallium seems to be based on xubuntu, and as far as i can tell xubuntu is still using the dreaded system-d.

From what i've read, it's possible to get ChromeOS to drop into Legacy-Boot mode, but using the actual device i haven't been able to get into that mode.

I'm not sure if i've been looking at obsolete web-pages, or if i've been misunderstanding something.

Any clues might help, tia.

#3 Re: Other Issues » Arduino version currency? » 2020-03-06 07:34:23

It doesn't sound real encouraging but thanks.

edit:

I've had a look at the link you suggested, and did a search for "ESP32 module with display", which turned up some pricey ($150-ish) options along with a bunch of cheaper Arduino semi-equivalents ($20-ish).  The linked text mentioned that it used a standard open-source distro, which i fear will be some ubuntu flavor that uses system-d and i ain't going there no more, but this may be blind prejudice on my part, and they didn't *say* what distro...

The Moto Z4 (which i purchased mostly for the Hasselblad camera mod, and the Z4 seems (to me) like a fairly useless device since it has no bezels and capacitive touch is so jacked up it's almost impossible to control) has some onboard processor or other which seems like another possible alternative, if one wants to produce a Mod and wed himself to the phone; I'm fairly certain that i don't, i'm not even buying their camera Mod because the thing is too touchy to use imo, and the in-screen fingerprint sensor is both slow and stupid.

One thing i didn't mention is that for the various products i have in mind, i want to keep the parts-list simple enough that Joe Average-ish can buy the parts and build his own, as much as possible; i figure that should put a cap on the prices people have to pay for copies, since if having it made is too much one can build it himself.

Since i already have the Arduino to learn from, i'll see how far i can take the first project, which is a battery-string-controller.  The two-way communication issue is the one i expect to be the deciding issue.

Thanks again, i appreciate the assist.

#4 Re: Other Issues » Arduino version currency? » 2020-03-05 10:45:44

ToxicExMachina wrote:

If you want to learn MCU programming avoid Arduino. Arduino may be a good solution only for the case of noskill dirty and fast primitive things like led blinking.

TBH i'm not sure what i want to learn... no more than necessary to get the job done, i think, seeing as i'm old as dirt, and have lots of projects to get dealt with before i'm done on this planet.

I'm deeply involved in what one might call the "off-grid/self-sufficiency" thing, seeing as how i've been off-grid since 2003 and solar since 2006, and prefer to be as self-sufficient as possible.  I'm currently working on eradicating all use of propane here, since it's an external dependency.  I'm getting close, i haven't used propane for cooking in maybe a year, but it still runs the on-demand hot-water-heater, so i'm working on adding an on-demand electric-hot-water-heater.  Since i'm doing this microwave/induction-cooktop/smart-oven business and running a standard 120v refrigerator on a 4.8kwh system, it needs to be fairly efficient.

Anyway, i found that the idle-overhead for my inverter was eating my lunch, so i set up a remote control to turn it on/off when it was needed.  And when the cheap 12v fridge i was using went tits-up, i went to a 120v fridge.  Then i discovered it was using more startup power than was workable given the overall system configuration (compressor), i hooked up an "Inkbird-All-Purpose-Temperature-Controller-ITC-1000" to the "INSMA Wireless RF Switch" that turns the inverter on/off, so that the inverter would start whenever the fridge temp is out-of-range. That whole business works reasonably well, but i'm pushing the limits of what can be done with one-way-communication, and sticking these off-the-shelf components together is a kludge, so i'm looking to get closer to the hardware so to speak, something more reliable and easier to use.

As mentioned, i have a starter Arduino kit, and also a book "Practical Electronics For Inventors" which i've barely cracked open, but it looks like it will supplement what little i remember from the EE classes required when i was in CSc back in the day.  From what i've gathered there are numerous u-ctlrs on the market, Arduino, Raspberry-Pi, and whatever one is in the Moto-Z4, which i was thinking of using as a control unit before i got disgusted with the thing.

I'm not sure which one is going to be best, but i'll spend a little time experimenting with the Arduino while i'm learning what i can from the book.  There are a number of projects that i have in mind, from thermo-electric fridge to a battery charger and suchlike.  I suspect that the Raspberry-Pi is the one that'll make it easiest to monitor the system remotely and collect data, but it's early days yet.  I totally suck at installing and configuring linux, but i'm not seeing the Arduino as quite that capable.

ToxicExMachina wrote:

I also recommend to buy a cheap ISP for flashing the microcontroller (bootloader in Arduino is very unreliable thing). USBasp is suitable device. It's very cheap (the price is about 1-3$) and simple.

ISP is "internet service provider", right?  New meaning, or typo? 

I'm a bit confused, AVR seems to be a specific series of microcontrollers, but it also seems associated with Arduino somehow.

In a nutshell, what's the simplest setup that'll let me control a bunch of inputs/outputs, maintain two-way wireless-communication with something that has a fullscreen interface of some kind, and write data logs that can be analyzed by the control system?

#5 Other Issues » Arduino version currency? » 2020-02-27 20:34:52

noname
Replies: 4

So i have a new toy, an Elegoo Arduino starter kit.  Now, being the lazy individual i am, i just went to synaptic and installed the Arduino IDE shown there.  However, i'm concerned with whether the version in the library is current.  The Elegoo docs are all like, "you'll get a crappy old version", so what's the real deal?  Do i need to go through the manual install process, or is our version current?

#6 Re: Off-topic » need some help from my friends (FOSS development, Git, similar) » 2019-10-12 12:25:00

fsmithred wrote:

Graphics files can be part of a git project just like any other files. For example, ....

Yes, blobs of various sorts are needed for *software* projects; maybe what i'm asking is whether github (is it still the recommended repository?) is restricted to *software* projects alone, or if for example, blueprints for building a tiny-house,, as part of a construction project, would be accepted like anything else, or if they'd cause some problem?

#7 Off-topic » need some help from my friends (FOSS development, Git, similar) » 2019-10-11 11:57:30

noname
Replies: 2

Greetings and salivations.

I've been "around" for a long while.  But the thing with linux (pardon me saying this please) is that to really use it, you have to learn it all, and i've been learning just the bits that i've needed so far.  Many of them have changed from release to release, like the output of the mount command which changed... maybe 5 years ago, thus emphasizing the ill-advised nature of parsing command output.

Anyway I have too many projects and not enough time.  The most important of these is something i'm calling Hoss.  It's a... a lot of things, based on a new "hierarchical ontological-semantics" database, which is basically just another filesystem.  The thing about Hoss is, i want to make it freely available like all good FOSS applications, but... it will contain some chunks that i want to keep proprietary... not to hide secrets, but to make sure that when someone uses the resulting distro, they're using the approved/blessed/intended distro, not something hacked up to be unsafe.

It *seems* like i could do this by careful interface partitioning, so that the proprietary code is something external that runs on-top-of Hoss, but i'm not a lawyer.  Google et-all have been doing something like that, because we'uns don't have all the good stuff they've written on top of linux, because if we did, it would be mortally stupid not to have included it in Devuan or upstream.

Anyway it's about time for me to learn Git.  Is there anything "wrong" with placing engineering drawings on github?  I'm also building a smart-tiny-home controller for offgrid use; although i'll offer it as a product, i want full engineering diagrams/specs to be freely available, so that anyone who doesn't want to pay me outrageously to solder stuff together, can just order the parts and do it themselves.  Building physical stuff and shipping it is a mortal PITA especially if the customer lives outside the US due to customs tightening since 9/11, and i'd prefer to spend my time not-soldering.

I'm not asking for anyone to help write code.  Though there will be things later that i'll need to learn somehow, like directly accessing the linux framebuffer, digging the longhand-arithmetic routines out of PHP, things like that.

Mostly what i need is some guidance in how to legally structure a FOSS application so that it can include proprietary chunks.

And suggestions about using something like github to store engineering drawings.

If any of y'all would care to weigh in, i'd appreciate the company.  And if anyone out there wants to get stinking rich, this could be a way of getting from point-A to point-B without sacrificing ethics (or of wasting a whole bunch of time).

TIA for whatever.

#8 Re: DIY » A script to facilitate random note-taking in the terminal » 2019-10-06 16:39:38

msi wrote:

So, if anyone wants to check it out, the source is available on GitHub (for want of a suitable libre alternative). You can either browse the repository on the site or create a local copy of it with the following command:

git clone https://github.com/msiism/mote

Haven't tried it but thanks for putting it out there.  LOL, make up a simple note-taker with timestamp, convert it for use under Android, make a million bucks.  With all the BS about blogging and so forth, it amazes me that there's no simple note-taker.

Suggest you stick with simplicity. if you stick with UTC all you need is:  yyyymmddhhmmss text
Hook it up to an accelerator key (no idea how to do that, but it can definitely be done) for taking notes, hook it up to a real editor for browsing and cetera, you're off to the races.

There are too many editors out there already, people invent a new one at the drop of a hat.

Anyway Kudos for doing it, i'll probably be back to complain about it once i get a chance to try it LOL

#9 Re: Installation » dual boot setup question » 2019-10-04 14:26:49

zfawaz wrote:

I got a small laptop i am experimenting with for a dual boot setup. I am trying to figure out how to setup dual boot option with devuan and primeOS installed at the same time. I am searching on how to instructions to do this online.

What is the simplest way to setup dual boot option?

I'll be setting up a couple of dual-boot microSD cards today, if these unopened packages on my desk contain a WIFI card that actually works with both linux and Windows-10, and the storage cards i ordered.  It'll probably take a couple hours, but once you get it set up, it's a matter of using it.

I cheat.  Maybe that's my themesong lol.  Here is how i do it:

1. write a new ms-dos partition table to empty media.

2. quiesce all the OS's on your source system that you want to include.  for example, i run Devuan-ascii and Debian-jessie along with Ubuntu-oneiric.  Jessie is my go-to for this kind of operation... not that i can't use Devuan-ascii for it, but Devuan is my go-to OS for normal use, so it's easier if i run jessie to copy the quiesced Devuan partition, then reboot and use Devuan to copy jessie and oneiric onto the target media.

3.  run gparted or equivalent, to see how much space you need on the target media.  create the partitions at this point.  generally what i do is allocate 15gb for Devuan since it's still in daily use and may need more space.  If memory serves, i allocate 10g for jessie and 6g for oneric.  It's a matter of your usage.  I keep all of my user-data in a separate partition, and use a bind-mount in fstab to hook things up.

4.  make sure that you create at least 2 *primary* partitions, or create one and leave space for another.  there are some systems, forex the Dell xps-13, which are "windows-intended" so to speak, and their BIOS plays hardball with the Windows rue about booting only from a primary partition.  Once i have a primary partition of Devuan-ascii, and space left for ceres or whatever when it goes stable, i make the
remainder of the media into an extended partition.  In the extended partition are any other OS's (in my case oneiric) and partitions for my data.

5.  once you have your partitions laid out (this all takes about 10 minutes so far), pick a primary OS.  copy the quiesced OS to the new media (i use rsync because file-by-file is faster than dd etc, and probably always will be unless your partition is maybe 90% full.

6. after you've copied all your installed-and-running (but quiesced) OS, or multiple OS's and data partitions, you're 75% of the say there.

7.  the next step is to edit the copied /etc/fstab files.  use the UUID option to identify partitions, not dev-name or label; UUID is most unique and least problem-prone.

8.  in addition to fstab, you also need a swap partition to act as a suspend/resume device.  You need to put its UUID in the fstab for that OS so it doesn't hang up forever on boot while it times out waiting for the suspend/resume device which it won't find because you never assigned/updated it.  (bug, in startup, imo).  offhand i forget the filename that has to be updated (there are at least 2 different ones based on OS) something like blah/blah/resume.conf  Then you need to update initramfs so the booting OS can find the suspend/resume info.

9.  at this point it's a matter of hooking up grub.  imo grub sucks.  i wrote utilities years ago to do all this crap.  Whatever; it can be done manually, but it's nice to be able to get all your device information placed in the clipboard by poking one key, etc.

Of course if you want to fiddle with grub and its os-probes, the previous replies might probably do the job; i gave up on using the regular grub procedures years ago, because imo they are garbage.

Hey, i'm old and prejudiced, and i've done this "set up a multi-boot" thing more than a few times over the past 10 years or so.  Good luck, you'll figure it out with some help from your friends.

#10 Re: Installation » Devuan ASCII on Lenovo T430 » 2019-10-01 03:17:04

fsmithred wrote:
noname wrote:
fsmithred wrote:

I think the installer normally asks you for additional CDs early in the install. It's been a long time since i've done that. I do know that if you install without a mirror, there are some packages that won't get installed, such as wicd, firefox, and synaptic. If you want them, you'll need to install them afterward, even though they are on the installer media.

Please explain why this is considered acceptable?

I can't think of a reason why synaptic doesn't get installed automatically, but skipping the network stuff does kinda make sense if you don't have a network.

Those of us who don't have a network, such as myself, can scrounge up a wifi hotspot on a phone.  But if wicd and firefox and synaptic aren't available, you're immediately dumped into some hardcore jerry-rigging, i for one don't know all the commands behind wicd, and the various options for the utilities underneath synaptic, and the man pages are still as crap as they have always been, with very few exceptions.  The industry got lazy and put the doc on the web, of course most of the doc i find on the web these days is 5 years out of date, so basically you're left trying to hack it from memory, good luck with that.

Sorry if that qualifies as a rant hereabouts, but i'm disgusted with the whole damn industry, smart-phones that are so utterly stupid in their design that i can't set my new phone on my pants-leg without the oh-so-fashionable gizmo attempting to commit suicide by sliding onto the floor glass-first, easily done since both sides are glass.  Hair-stylists designing technical equipment, go figure.

#11 Re: Installation » Devuan ASCII on Lenovo T430 » 2019-09-29 20:20:10

fsmithred wrote:

I think the installer normally asks you for additional CDs early in the install. It's been a long time since i've done that. I do know that if you install without a mirror, there are some packages that won't get installed, such as wicd, firefox, and synaptic. If you want them, you'll need to install them afterward, even though they are on the installer media.

Please explain why this is considered acceptable?

#12 Re: Installation » [solved] not Cranky anymore: Lenovo 300e » 2019-09-26 13:43:32

fsmithred wrote:

It's a mouse, not a rat. (I've known that for so long, I can't cite the source.)

It's possible to run a 5.2 kernel in beowulf, which is mostly ready. (If you need policykit and its friends, getting there might be tricky right now.)

I don't think there's a way to delete an account without also deleting that user's posts. That would be too great a loss. Just stick with the new name.

Whatever works for admin, works for me; you got root, i'm just a mouthy guest. <g>

#13 Re: Installation » Devuan ASCII on Lenovo T430 » 2019-09-26 13:36:40

anatak wrote:

this doesn't answer my question but I guess thank you?
I read the info, i selected the cd rom set, the install never asked for the second nor third iso cdrom.

Devuan build procedures were inherited from whoever, the whole distribution and install process is a mess imo, we should be installing ALL drivers on a test system, along with a minimal set of core components like synaptic, which will let even android-iots get things up and running, but nobody has time to rewrite it all or try something new, this being largely a spare-time effort, if you get my drift?  ...and once the test system is up and running, put a snapshot of the ext4 filesystem into an iso file.  that way you get exactly what was tested, and if it doesn't work you can choose a regressed snapshot left laying aorund from when it was unstable.  But hey, it is what it is, and it's getting better imo. 

As for your particular situation... if i knew how to convert the entire contents of a hard-drive into an iso, i could make up a system for you from my krud in a couple hours or so, if i had time to do it.  Time's the thing, time's what's being stolen from every employee.  Sorry for the digression, let me know if i can help.  btw, the system i'm talking about is currently running just fine on a Lenovo t510.  The model you're talking about may differ in terms of chipsets and drivers.  Best luck.

#14 Re: Installation » [solved] not Cranky anymore: Lenovo 300e » 2019-09-26 13:19:33

golinux wrote:

@crankypuss . . . there is no rat icon in the Xfce default desktop.  smile

How many rats can you count in this image?  99% will get the wrong answer.

FluxBB bbcode test

Not being a "FluxBB" expert, and not wanting to become one, i copied the example from the doc, but it was so shitty that there's no telling what will display beyond "preview", if anything.  the link is good, count the rrrrrats, ay?

BTW, before any of the fuckwits herein bitch about my language, note that if *I* didn't want someone using certain words on my website, i'd change them in the code so they were unable to post them.  Kids these days, you gotta wonder.

#15 Re: Installation » [solved] not Cranky anymore: Lenovo 300e » 2019-09-25 13:40:24

golinux wrote:

@crankypuss . . . there is no rat icon in the Xfce default desktop.  smile

Isn't that interesting.  Seeing as how i'm logged in through an android tablet atm, it's a bit tough to grab a screenshot from my linux system... and you could very well be correct, i'm not sure how "default" it was when it presented the rat icon.  Of course by the time i'm done doing android-stuff and get back to my linux box, i'll no doubt have forgotten about snagging a screenshot.  so it goes.

btw, i've determined since my last post (above) that Devuan ascii does not contain the drivers needed for the Lenovo 300e's stock wifi card  (Intel 8265ngw).  The details are perhaps forgotten, but i think the Intel drivers for that wifi chip don't appear in the kernel until something like version 5.26, and given my experience  installing drivers for broadcom wifi and intel graphics on a a Dell XPS13... i decided it would be easier to just replace the wifi chip with an intel 7260 which is listed as a valid FRU in the Lenovo hardware manual and supposedly supported in the current ascii kernel.  Theoretically that chip is now waiting at the post-office, so we'll see how that goes.

I'm of the opinion (FWIW) that it would be very useful if the Devuan builds included all the currently released proprietary drivers as soon as they become available, rather than waiting months/years for the kernel that contains them.  Of course it may be a matter of what's been tested with which kernel containing what changes, but i'm not gonna wait around for a 5xx kernel release when Devuan is on 4xx and the only obstacle is a wifi driver, maybe i'm an outlier on this, who knows.

(Is there a way to delete an unused account from this site?  i'm really not cranky anymmore.)

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