Marcin Juszkiewicz - laptop

Remote BorgBackup machine

2024-04-01T15:56:00+02:00

Over three years ago I moved to using BorgBackup to keep my data save on other machines. Due to recent datacenter changes I needed to create a new remote space for my data.

Idea

The idea was simple: take some small computer, put some disk inside, install Debian and boot. And wait for incoming connections and store data for future.

Hardware selection

But then what kind of hardware to use? Many people would expect me to use something Arm based. Maybe Espressobin or RockPro64?

I have to admit: I though about them for a moment. And rejected both. First one stopped booting some time ago (no idea why), second one would require creating of case, checking does it boot etc.

Instead I used system which just got freed from duties: Fujitsu S920 thin terminal. I paid about 30-40€ for it a few months ago.

Fujitsu S920 thin terminal

I took 1TB hard drive from a drawer (with just 100 days of use) for data, installed Debian stable on internal 120GB mSata drive and started setup.

Ansible

Some time ago I was reviewing a book for my friends: The Linux DevOps Handbook. So decided to use Ansible this time instead of doing things by hand. As this way I have playbooks to prepare another such system in case of need.

Some vault related issues later I had system setup the way I wanted, required packages installed and could start preparing it for being BorgBackup remote machine.

There are some example roles for it in BorgBackup documentation. I took those, adapted to my needs and then first backups were done.

Future steps

I have some work to finish still. For example I want system to send me an email each time backup will be done with information which system sent data, how much time and space it took and how much space left on internal drive.

And have to transfer machine to some remote location because now it is on a shelf at my home ;D

Another Apple product at home

2023-03-15T13:06:00+01:00

Three years ago I wrote blog post about naming company laptops. Last week I got new one. So new name was needed.

Quest for Arm laptop

Many things changed during last years. Qualcomm released Snapdragon SoC line for laptops. All were running Microsoft Windows (for Arm) with bastard version of ACPI tables. Took some time for Linux community to get Linux running on those systems. In Device Tree mode as ACPI tables were so bad that it was easier to ignore them.

Apple released laptops and mini desktops with M1 SoC (in many variants) and then M2 (also with variants). With MacOS on them. Again, Linux community started working on getting Linux running there. Device Tree again.

Kapturek -> Gossamer -> Blossom -> ?

When I got Applied Micro Mustang I called it “pinkiepie” as my daughter was at “My Little Pony” phase then.

This time I have chosen Apple Macbook 14” (2021) with M1 Pro as my work laptop. So it got ‘applejack’ as hostname after other character from MLP franchise.

Applejack from My Little Pony

MacOS?

When I told my friends that my next work laptop will be Macbook their reactions were funny:

“why this way” in 3, 2, 1…

You and Macbook???

And then they followed with set of Linux->MacOS hints. Like “install brew at start”, information where to switch off “natural” scrolling, remapping Fn/Control/Option/Command keys to be more PC105 like etc.

I spent less than hour under MacOS - logged in, enabled encryption, installed brew, changed keyboard layout and started installer of Asahi Fedora Remix :D

Asahi Fedora Remix

Laptop boots to U-Boot. Then Grub is loaded and then it was Fedora Linux 37 system with custom kernel and some modifications. So far there is no installer support — mostly due to Apple partitioning and how boot selection is done.

I will not go with what works and what does not as it is work in progress all the time. Asahi Linux project has “Feature Support” wiki page for it.

Spent some time on customizing system to have encrypted /home partition, boot progress instead of kernel output etc. Then copied some settings and data.

But why Apple Macbook???

That was quite popular question during last weeks. I heard it from several friends who know that I run only FOSS operating systems on my machines.

There are several reasons:

it is one of most advanced AArch64 SoC when it comes to cpu features
it is fast so I can use it for Arm development

How fast it is?

I did not run any complex benchmarks — there are better skilled people for it. And there are several web pages with it already.

Tested kcbench. It built Linux kernel 5.15 several times:

Honeycomb (LX2160, 16 Cortex-A72 cores):

Run 1 (-j 16): 290.32 seconds / 12.40 kernels/hour [P:1393%, 879 maj. pagefaults]
Run 3 (-j 19): 290.83 seconds / 12.38 kernels/hour [P:1399%, 846 maj. pagefaults]

Macbook (M1 Pro, 10 cores):

Run 1 (-j 10): 115.77 seconds / 31.10 kernels/hour [P:882%, 536 maj. pagefaults]
Run 3 (-j 13): 115.18 seconds / 31.26 kernels/hour [P:896%, 245 maj. pagefaults]

my desktop (Ryzen 5 3600, 6/12 cores/threads):

Run 1 (-j 12): 219.29 seconds / 16.42 kernels/hour [P:1082%, 323 maj. pagefaults]
Run 3 (-j 15): 217.94 seconds / 16.52 kernels/hour [P:1094%, 231 maj. pagefaults]

Even if I say that my desktop had several other tasks running at same time it does not matter. M1 Pro is fast.

Next three years are covered

For my next three years I have Arm development system which is mobile. Last time it was 10 years ago with Samsung Chromebook. Just some numbers changed — 5 times more cores, 16 times more memory and storage is counted in GBs instead of MBs.

Why “Another Apple”?

During last two decades I owned some Apple products:

iPhone 5S (bought and gave to my mom as upgrade to 4S)
iPhone 7 (bought in USA, sold to friend in Poland)
PowerMac G4 (bought on some Friday, gave as gift on Sunday)

And last time I used MacOS on own hardware was in previous millenium with MacOS 7.5.3/7.5.5/8.1 on my Amiga (using Shapeshifter and/or Fusion emulators).

What ‘a new computer’ is?

2021-05-01T18:08:00+02:00

During last months I had several discussions about buying a new computer. Helped few friends with choosing setup etc. And several of them were surprised when I told that I never bought ‘a new computer’.

8-bit era

My first computer was Atari 65XE which my parents bought as a new computer. I learnt BASIC, tried few other programming languages (Forth anyone?) and played games. But it was not platform for long use.

Amiiiiga!

Two years later I earned money collecting berries in Swedish forests and bought my first computer — used Amiga 600. And two weeks later added 425MB hard disk inside. Nice improvement, still same 12” green monitor. More programming, less games. Demoscene watching started.

Time passed, I sold A600 and bought used Amiga 1200 instead. Same hdd and monitor (also same mouse as I liked old one more). Then some CPU accelerator card, then another, new ATA controller, new hdd, used cd-rom drive and used 14” VGA mono monitor.

AmigaOS was great operating system but platform was dying, hardware was expensive and slow, no new software.

Let move to PC

Year 2000 was moment when I decided to abandon AmigaOS and bought a PC. Which reused hdd, cd-rom and monitor. In some sense it was a new computer but still kept something from previous system. In next years some minor/major upgrades happened.

In 2006 I switched architecture of my desktop system. From x86 to x86-64. In as cheap as possible way. It was time when embedded Linux was starting to not be “just a hobby”.

Years passed, processors, mainboards, memory amount, storage, cases, expansion cards, monitors etc. were changing. But still there was no point of ‘ok, let me buy whole new computer’ as most of components were reused.

Do laptops count?

There were several laptops in meantime. One of them (Asus UL30A) was even brand new. But, contrary to other users, I use laptops only during travels — at home they usually sit connected to power and sometimes are used as headless build machine (as I tend to use different Linux distribution than my desktop there).

Arm?

And none of Arm systems I use count. I bought Sharp Zaurus SL-5500A (no longer own), Nokia N810 tablet and some small board computers like Wandboard (sold), Raspberry/Pi 3 (sold) or RockPro64. Android devices do not count either.

Summary

Who knows, maybe one day I will buy a new computer. Whole one — case, mainboard, processor, memory, storage, graphics. Or something NUC like.

Just there is nothing interesting so far to make such buy. Or I am not lazy enough to just buy whole workstation instead of building it on my own ;D

Switched to BorgBackup

2021-01-14T16:15:00+01:00

The old joke says that there are two types of people:

those who make backups
those who will make backups

I was in second group long time ago and then moved to first one.

Duplicity

So far I used Duplicity along with it’s fronted called Duply. It was installed by default on Ubuntu systems and was quite easy to setup.

But getting files restored from it was pain. And consistency was a problem. Especially when I wanted to restore one directory from quite old copy — turned out that one file (of many) was damaged so whole backup was useless…

BorgBackup

So I looked for alternatives and BorgBackup was one of suggestions.

Features list was long, FOSS, several platforms, compression etc. There were two things which brought my attention:

deduplication
mountable backups with FUSE

Deduplication

So why deduplication? Because it allows me to backup several machines into one place and separate copies of git repositories, source code will not take extra space:

                       Original size      Compressed size    Deduplicated size
All archives:                2.02 TB              1.57 TB            118.85 GB
                       Unique chunks         Total chunks
Chunk index:                 1060634             18670536

Or on my server where backups are run hourly:

                       Original size      Compressed size    Deduplicated size
All archives:                7.29 TB              5.36 TB             11.35 GB
                       Unique chunks         Total chunks
Chunk index:                  359783            260310747

Nice difference compared to Duplicity I used before.

FUSE mounting of backups

Instead of checking which options I have to use to restore that one directory from 2 months old backup I can now mount each backup using FUSE:

borgmatic mount --archive puchatek-2021-01-01 --mount-point /tmp/del/1

And then just copy whatever file(s) I want to restore. Very handy way.

Borgmatic

What Duply was to Duplicity, Borgmatic is to BorgBackup. Simple, easy to use frontend hiding most of internals behind easy to use command line interface.

Configure once, then simple commands like “borgmatic info”, “borgmatic prune” etc. All needed things are stored in config file.

Will it work for me?

Time will show does it work for me. Machines’ backup copies are done, syncing them between machines need some improvements.

Kapturek, Gossamer, Blossom!

2020-03-26T18:22:00+01:00

Few days ago I got company laptop refreshed (from Lenovo Thinkpad t460s to t490s). So it needed a new name…

I name my personal devices by characters from Winnie the Pooh books. More info about it in blog post from 2012.

But this is company laptop…

Rule above applies only to my own machines (or ones I maintain). For company hardware I use names from other stories. And those characters have to be red.

In 2013 I got first laptop. It got name ‘kapturek’ after “Czerwony Kapturek” (Little Red Riding Hood).

As we replace laptops every three years 2016/7 brought another one. I could just move operating system from one machine to another but it is new machine so new name.

It became ‘gossamer’ after monster from Looney Tunes:

Gossamer from Looney Toons (on the right)

Today I am installing operating system on 3rd laptop. Again, which name to choose…

Quick web searching gave me some characters to choose from. So this laptop will be called ‘blossom’ after Blossom from The Powerpuff Girls series:

Blossom from The Powerpuff Girls

Now I have some time before choosing new name ;D

ARMology

2013-06-08T17:30:00+02:00

When last time I was in Cambridge we had a discussion about ARM processors. Paweł used term “ARMology” then. And with recent announcement of Cortex-A12 cpu core I thought that it may be a good idea to write a blog post about it.

Please note that my knowledge of ARM processors started in 2003 so I can make mistakes in everything older. Tried to understand articles about old times but sometimes they do not keep one version of story.

Ancient times

ARM1 got released in 1985 as CPU add-on to BBC Micro manufactured by Acorn Computers Ltd. as result of few years of research work. They wanted to have new processor to replace ageing 6502 used in BBC Micro and Acorn Electron and none of existing ones did not fit their requirements. Note that it was not market product but rather development tool made available for selected users.

But it was ARM2 which landed in new computers — Acorn Archimedes (1987 year). Had multiply instructions added so new version of instruction set was created: ARMv2. Just 8MHz clock but remember that it was first computer with new CPU…

Then ARM3 came — with cache controller integrated and 25MHz clock. ISA was bumped to ARMv2a due to SWP instruction added. And it was released in another Acorn computer: A5000. This was also used in Acorn A4 which was first ARM powered laptop (but term “ARM Powered” was created few years later). I hope that one day I will be able to play with all those old machines…

There was also ARM250 processor with ARMv2a instruction set like in ARM3 but no cache controller. But it is worth mentioning as it can be seen as first SoC due to ARM, MEMC, VIDC, IOC chips integrated in one piece of silicon. This allowed to create budget versions of computers.

ARM Ltd.

In 1990 Acorn, Apple and VLSI co-founded Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. company which took over research and development of ARM processors. Their business model was simple: “we work on cpu cores and other companies pay us license costs to make chips”.

Their first cpu was ARM60 with new instruction set: ARMv3. It had 32bit address space (compared to 26bit in older versions), was endian agnostic (so both big and little endian was possible) and there were other improvements.

Please note lack of ARM4 and ARM5 processors. I heard some rumours about that but will not repeat them here as some of them just do not fit when compared against facts.

ARM610 was powering Apple Newton PDA and first Acorn RiscPC machines where it was replaced by ARM710 (still ARMv3 instruction set but ~30% faster).

First licensees

You can create new processor cores but someone has to buy them and manufacture… In 1992 GEC Plessey and Sharp licensed ARM technology, next year added Cirrus Logic and Texas Instruments, then AKM (Asahi Kasei Microsystems) and Samsung joined in 1994 and then others…

From that list I recognize only Cirrus Logic (used their crazy EP93xx family), TI and Samsung as vendors of processors ;D

Thumb

One of next cpu cores was ARM7TDMI (Thumb+Debug+Multiplier+ICE) which added new instruction set: Thumb.

The Thumb instructions were not only to improve code density, but also to bring the power of the ARM into cheaper devices which may primarily only have a 16 bit datapath on the circuit board (for 32 bit paths are costlier). When in Thumb mode, the processor executes Thumb instructions. While most of these instructions directly map onto normal ARM instructions, the space saving is by reducing the number of options and possibilities available — for example, conditional execution is lost, only branches can be conditional. Fewer registers can be directly accessed in many instructions, etc. However, given all of this, good Thumb code can perform extremely well in a 16 bit world (as each instruction is a 16 bit entity and can be loaded directly).

ARM7TDMI landed nearly everywhere - MP3 players, cell phones, microwaves and any place where microcontroller could be used. I heard that few years ago half of ARM Ltd. income was from license costs of this cpu core…

ARM7

But ARM7 did not ended at ARM7TDMI… There was ARM7EJ-S core which used ARMv5TE instruction set and also ARM720T and ARM740T with ARMv4T. You can run Linux on Cirrus Logic CLPS711x/EP721x/EP731x ones ;)

According to ARM Ltd. page about ARM7 the ARM7 family is the world’s most widely used 32-bit embedded processor family, with more than 170 silicon licensees and over 10 Billion units shipped since its introduction in 1994.

ARM8

I heard that ARM8 is one of those things you should not ask ARM Ltd. people about. Nothing strange when you look at history…

ARM810 processor made use of ARMv4 instruction set and had 72MHz clock. At same time DEC released StrongARM with 200MHz clock… 1996 was definitively year of StrongARM.

In 2004 I bought my first Linux/ARM powered device: Sharp Zaurus SL-5500.

ARM9

Ah ARM9… this was huge family of processor cores…

ARM moved from a von Neumann architecture (Princeton architecture) to a Harvard architecture with separate instruction and data buses (and caches), significantly increasing its potential speed.

There were two different instruction sets used in this family: ARMv4T and ARMv5TE. Also some kind of Java support was added in the latter one but who knows how to use it — ARM keeps details of Jazelle behind doors which can be open only with huge amount of money.

ARMv4T

Here we have ARM9TDMI, ARM920T, ARM922T, ARM925T and ARM940T cores. I mostly saw 920T one in far too many chips.

My collection includes:

ep93xx from Cirrus Logic (with their sick VFP unit)
omap1510 from Texas Instruments
s3c2410 from Samsung (note that some s3c2xxx processors are ARMv5T)

ARMv5T

Note: by ARMv5T I mean every cpu never mind which extensions it has built-in (Enhanced DSP, Jazelle etc).

I consider this one to be most popular one (probably after ARM7TDMI). Countless companies had own processors based on those cores (mostly on ARM926EJ-S one). You can get them even in QFP form so hand soldering is possible. CPU frequency goes over 1GHz with Kirkwood cores from Marvell.

In my collection I have:

at91sam9263 from Atmel
pxa255 from Intel
st88n15 from ST Microelectronics

Had also at91sam9m10, Kirkwood based Sheevaplug and ixp425 based NSLU2 but they found new home.

ARM10

Another quiet moment in ARM history. ARM1020E, ARM1022E, ARM1026EJ-S cores existed but did not looked popular.

UPDATE: Conexant uses ARM10 core in their next generation DSL CPE systems such as bridge/routers, wireless DSL routers and DSL VoIP IADs.

ARM11

Released in 2002 as four new cores: ARM1136J, ARM1156T2, ARM1176JZ and ARM11 MPCore. Several improvements over ARM9 family including optional VFP unit. New instruction set: ARMv6 (and ARMv6K extensions). There was also Thumb2 support in arm1156 core (but I do not know did someone made chips with it). arm1176 core got TrustZone support.

I have:

omap2430 from Texas Instruments
i.mx35 from Freescale

Currently most popular chip with this family is BCM2835 GPU which got arm1136 cpu core on die because there was some space left and none of Cortex-A processor core fit there.

Cortex

New family of processor cores was announced in 2004 with Cortex-M3 as first cpu. There are three branches:

Aplication
Realtime
Microcontroller

All of them (with exception of Cortex-M0 which is ARMv6) use new instruction sets: ARMv7 and Thumb-2 (some from R/M lines are Thumb-2 only). Several cpu modules were announced (some with newer cores):

NEON for SIMD operations
VFP3 and VFP4
Jazelle RCT (aka ThumbEE).
LPAE for more then 4GB ram support (Cortex A7/12/15)
virtualization support (A7/12/15)
big.LITTLE
TrustZone

I will not cover R/M lines as did not played with them.

Cortex-A8

Announced in 2006 single core ARMv7a processor core. Released in chips by Texas Instruments, Samsung, Allwinner, Apple, Freescale, Rockchip and probably few others.

Has higher clocks than ARM11 cores and achieves roughly twice the instructions executed per clock cycle due to dual-issue superscalar design.

So far collected:

am3358 from Texas Instruments
i.mx515 from Freescale
omap3530 from Texas Instruments

Cortex-A9

First multiple core design in Cortex family. Allows up to 4 cores in one processor. Announced in 2007. Looks like most of companies which had previous cores licensed also this one but there were also new vendors.

There are also single core Cortex-A9 processors on a market.

I have products based on omap4430 from Texas Instruments and Tegra3 from NVidia.

Cortex-A5

Announced around the end of 2009 (I remember discussion about something new from ARM with someone at ELC/E). Up to 4 cores, mostly for use in all designs where ARM9 and ARM11 cores were used. In other words new low-end cpu with modern instruction set.

Cortex-A15

The fastest (so far) core in ARMv7a part of Cortex family. Up to 4 cores. Announced in 2010 and expanded ARM line with several new things:

40-bit LPAE which extends address range to 1TB (but 32-bit per process)
VFPv4
Hardware virtualization support
TrustZone security extensions

I have Chromebook with Exynos5250 cpu and have to admit that it is best device for ARM software development. Fast, portable and hackable.

Cortex-A7

Announced in 2011. Younger brother of Cortex-A15 design. Slower but eats much less power.

Cortex-A12

Announced in 2013 as modern replacement for Cortex-A9 designs. Has everything from Cortex-A15/A7 and is ~40% faster than Cortex-A9 at same clock frequency. No chips on a market yet.

big.LITTLE

That’s interesting part which was announced in 2011. It is not new core but combination of them. Vendor can mix Cortex-A7/12/15 cores to have kind of dual-multicore processor which runs different cores for different needs. For example normal operation on A7 to save energy but go up for A15 when more processing power is needed. And amount of cores in each of them does not even have to match.

It is also possible to make use of all cores all together which may result in 8-core ARM processor scheduling tasks on different cpu cores.

There are few implementations already: ARM TC2 testing platform, HiSilicon K3V3, Samsung Exynos 5 Octa and Renesas Mobile MP6530 were announced. They differ in amount of cores but all (except TC2) use the same amount of A7/A15 cores.

ARMv8

In 2011 ARM announced new 64-bit architecture called AArch64. There will be two cores: Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 and big.LITTLE combination will be possible as well.

Lot of things got changed here. VFP and NEON are parts of standard. Lot of work went into making sure that all designs will not be so fragmented like 32-bit architecture is.

I worked on AArch64 bootstrapping in OpenEmbedded build system and did also porting of several applications.

Hope to see hardware in 2014 with possibility to play with it to check how it will play compared to current systems.

Other designs

ARM Ltd. is not the only company which releases new cpu cores. That’s due to fact that there are few types of license you can buy. Most vendors just buy licence for existing core and make use of it in their designs. But some companies (Intel, Marvell, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Apple, Faraday and others) paid for ‘architectural license’ which allows to design own cores.

XScale

Probably oldest one was StrongARM made by DEC, later sold to Intel where it was used as a base for XScale family with ARMv5TEJ instruction set. Later IWMMXT got added in PXA27x line.

In 2006 Intel sold whole ARM line to Marvell which released newer processor lines and later moved to own designs.

There were few lines in this family:

Application Processors (with the prefix PXA).
I/O Processors (with the prefix IOP)
Network Processors (with the prefix IXP)
Control Plane Processors (with the prefix IXC).
Consumer Electronics Processors (with the prefix CE).

One day I will undust my Sharp Zaurus c760 just to check how recent kernels work on PXA255 ;D

Marvell

Their Feroceon/PJ1/PJ4 cores were independent ARMv5TE implementations. Feroceon was Marvell’s own ARM9 compatible CPU in Kirkwood and others, while PJ1 was based on that and replaced XScale in later PXA chips. PJ4 is the ARMv7 compatible version used in all modern Marvell designs, both the embedded and the PXA side.

Qualcomm

Company known mostly from wireless networks (GSM/CDMA/3G) released first ARM based processors in 2007. First ones were based on ARM11 core (ARMv6 instruction set) and in next year also ARMv7a were available. Their high-end designs (Scorpion and Krait) are similar to Cortex family but have different performance. Company also has Cortex-A5 and A7 in low-end products.

Nexus 4 uses Snapdragon S4 Pro and I also have S4 Plus based Snapdragon development board.

Faraday

Faraday Technology Corporation released own processors which used ARMv4 instruction set (ARMv5TE in newer cores). They were FA510, FA526, FA626 for v4 and FA606TE, FA626TE, FMP626TE and FA726TE for v5te. Note that FMP626TE is dual core!

They also have license for Cortex-A5 and A9 cores.

Project Denver

Quoting Wikipedia article about Project Denver:

Project Denver is an ARM architecture CPU being designed by Nvidia, targeted at personal computers, servers, and supercomputers. The CPU package will include an Nvidia GPU on-chip.

The existence of Project Denver was revealed at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show. In a March 4, 2011 Q&A article CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that Project Denver is a five year 64-bit ARM architecture CPU development on which hundreds of engineers had already worked for three and half years and which also has 32-bit ARM architecture backward compatibility.

The Project Denver CPU may internally translate the ARM instructions to an internal instruction set, using firmware in the CPU.

X-Gene

AppliedMicro announced that they will release AArch64 processors based on own cores.

Final note

If you spotted any mistakes please write in comments and I will do my best to fix them. If you have something interesting to add also please do a comment.

I used several sources to collect data for this post. Wikipedia articles helped me with details about Acorn products and ARM listings. ARM infocenter provided other information. Dates were taken from Wikipedia or ARM Company Milestones page. Ancient times part based on The ARM Family articles. The history of the ARM architecture was interesting and helpful as well.

Please do not copy this article without providing author information. Took me quite long time to finish it.

Changelog

8 June evening

Thanks to notes from Arnd Bergmann I did some changes:

added ARM7, Marvell, Faraday, Project Denver, X-Gene sections
fixed Cortex-A5 to be up to 4 cores instead of single.
mentioned Conexant in ARM10 section.
improved Qualcomm section to mention which cores are original ARM ones, which are modified.

David Alan Gilbert mentioned that ARM1 was not freely available on a market. Added note about it.

My wife has a new laptop

2013-02-08T13:08:00+01:00

Few days ago was my wife’s birthday. As a gift I gave her new laptop — Acer Aspire One 722. With last released version of Ubuntu on it (with XFCE desktop).

As I got device two weeks earlier I had some time to play with it and do setup. Installed full XFCE desktop (xubuntu-desktop), LibreOffice, XBMC with set of plugins for Polish VOD services, VLC etc. No games as requested. Firefox + Thunderbird as default browser and MUA.

And then there was a day. I gave Ania laptop box with some Belgium chocolates inside (instead of computer) and when we stopped laughing I gave her new notebook in useful case. After coffee I started to migrate her configuration from Dell D400 she used before (with Microsoft Windows XP). Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and then documents etc. Easy stuff.

Configuration phase was funny — I connected our printer/scanner and before I found where to add printer I got notification “EPSON Stylus DX4000 printer configured”. OK, so maybe scanner needs configuration… Nope — Simple Scan just started scanning instead of complaining (which it did when I bought it few years ago).

Connected netbook to TV and Meta-p gave me choice which display I want to run on (my 42” Panasonic does not like 1366x768 so cloning does not work).

There are few things which I still have to find out:

How to remove “something has crashed” notifications. My wife will rather not report bugs directly.
How to make audio switching automatically to HDMI when on cable insertion.
How to make internal microphone working.

But other than those I did not have problems. And it is a strange feeling when you take new device, boot Linux on it and it just works.

I did not finished with Chromebook

2012-12-19T19:07:00+01:00

Some time passed since my earlier post. I had to think about few things and made some decisions.

I will write an installation instruction for Samsung Chromebook users — about installing other operating system on internal storage. Targeted at advanced users but with more or less exact steps. If you do not know how to enable “developer” mode in Chromium then sorry…

And in meantime I worked on packaging. Few minutes ago I pushed kernel to my PPA and once it get built I will offer it in Chromebook hackers PPA so users will be able to use it instead of Chromium OS one. It will need signing and putting on proper partition but, like I wrote above, my packages are not only for novice level users.

Thanks to work started by Antonio Terceiro we have preliminary version of vboot utilities package. I cleaned it a bit and got to state when “cgpt” and “vbutil_kernel” are provided so playing with partitioning will not need files from Chromium OS. Will upload it into PPA as well.

Left speaker in my Chromebook died totally so I decided to spend some time on getting UCM profiles available in “quantal” and “precise” releases of Ubuntu as well. SRU process in progress…

Also got 32GB microSD card so one step closer to having other distributions running. Thinking of Debian here of course. But it is in deep freeze now so harder to get new packages there.

How can you help? Test, file bugs, attach fixes to bugs. And can also replace speaker in my Chromebook so I will not have to use headphones ;D