Marcin Juszkiewicz

Today I again had to work on getting customer server working for website which we did at work. Since my last visit machine was replaced from crappy Celeron 333MHz with 128M ram and 2G SCSI harddrive — all under 5 years old Red Hat with 2.4.2 kernel — to dual p3/700 with 1G ram and much larger harddrive. It also got updated distribution but something a bit newer — Aurox 10.1 with 2.6.9 kernel.

Remote logged as root looks weird.. all shells with # — but if admin is lazy or do not know how to create user accounts…

The worst thing was that I had to be an admin there to get all LAMP components working in required versions. Now machine is building newer PHP from source because finding something on Aurox website is like looking into /dev/null ;( No informations for older releases, no public bugtracker, two misc forums (newer one treat my Firefox as WAP browser) — nightmare…

But it is nice to find that RPM based distros got some tools to fetch packages from network other then wget ;)

Train tickets bought. I will arrive in Berlin at 13:05 in Thursday 2006-10-05 and will leave on 12:40 on Sunday.

I plan to look around (never was in Berlin before), then meet Holger and then OEDEM evening meeting…

UPDATE: Some people asked me what is OEDEM. Let quote Michael ‘Mickeyl’ Lauer post:

OEDEM’06 (Open Embedded Developers European Meeting) in Berlin — it’s the first (of hopefully an annual series) conference about the BitBake Task Executor and the OpenEmbedded MetaData Repository, both in combination enabling to build Embedded Linux Distributions from scratch.

I will host two sessions there:

• OE Survey Discussion
• OE PR Launch for 2007 (with Mickeyl)

More information about OEDEM.

Yesterday I signed papers to extend my current mobile contract and bought Sony Ericsson k750i phone to replace my 4-years old Nokia 6310i.

Phone is nice and packed of features:

• connectivity: irda, bluetooth, usb
• 2Mpx camera with flash leds
• FM radio
• media (music, video) player
• java
• memorystick duo slot (64M card by default)

I’m in process of moving all data from my old phone to new one — tried OpenSync today and with help of pmarat from #opensync I got Kitchensync working and transferred my KDE addressbook into phone. Later I will work on sending datas from 6310i -> home computer -> k750i, then will have to work on synchronizing 6210 with something as I have to move whole content of 6210 to 6310i (with syncing with Thunderbird in between).

And now I know that Bluetooth is nice technology — few clicks in Konqueror and I have access to all files inside of phone.

I started own business. Main area will be OpenEmbedded consulting as I’m one of core developers of this buildsystem.

Things which I want to cover are:

• device support
• bug fixing
• adding/altering packages
• maintenance of external branches

Those kinds of things are nothing new to me — I maintain own branch used to build OpenZaurus, added few hundreds of packages (and changed countless of them).

Currently I prefer remote work due to fact that I still have full time job. Payments can be solved in two ways:

• payment per needed hours (this can be hard to count because some of it takes waiting for build)
• one price for whole work

I can provide invoice.

In his recent posts Pavel Machek wrote about OpenZaurus status on collie and how he hacked provided image to get it working better. After reading them I decided to write something about it instead of just adding comment on his LinuxJournal entries.

1. There is no need to mount JFFS2 images as all images in OpenZaurus are also provided as tarballs. So user can unpack tarball, edit it content and then use mkfs.jffs2 to create image for flashing (this tool is part of mtd-tools package in many Linux distributions).

2. Avoid removing /usr/lib/ipkg/ directory — this is needed to be able to install any extra stuff into image. If you need free space then rather use ipkg list_installed and remove not needed stuff with ipkg remove -recursive UnNeededStuff1 UnNeededStuff2 to free space. There are many things in default rootfs which user can remove if does not need them:

   • Bluetooth support
   • WiFi support
   • Prism2 cards
   • Spectrum/Orinoco/Hermes cards
   • tools
   • NFS support
   • other kernel modules

3. Touchscreen configuration is provided for 2.4 and 2.6 kernel version — proper one is selected in /etc/profiles.d/tslib.sh script which is run by any graphic environment on machine.

For those who wonder who is Pavel Machek: he is a guy who work on getting 2.6 kernel working on collie (outside of OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus kernel hackers team).

Today I released third testing version of OpenZaurus 3.5.4.2 version. It support only two models:

• poodle (SL-5600/B500)
• tosa (SL-6000)

I decided to do not ship collie (SL-5000/5500) images as they need some work (for example they lack udev) and as usual there is a problem to get OPIE/GPE images fit in this small rootfs space.

The most important changes in this release:

• touchscreen on tosa does not show heartbeat like it was before
• sound on poodle works — does not generate random noise

I want to mention our kernel hackers: Richard Purdie and Liam Girdwood for sound fix, Mike Arthur for touchscreen fix. Without their work this release would not happen.

Today morning my home machine does not boot properly (was working yesterday evening). I suspected XFS on rootfs and it was that. Booted into /bin/sh and started xfs_check -f /dev/hda1 followed by xfs_repair -f -d /dev/hda1. There were some problems but looks like it solved them so I rebooted. Again system fscked.. Another boot into /bin/sh and another xfs_check/xfs_repair combo and again nothing.

Booted into single user and then SSH connection to other machine to get help on #xfs channel on freenode. ‘dtm’ suggested me to run badblocks on disc to check does hdd is ok. So I installed Debian ‘sarge’ on my swap partition and started badblocks -v -n /dev/hda1 — 0 bad blocks found.

So I decided to reformat partition and reinstall whole system. Mounted old rootfs into /mnt/, chrooted into this to get list of installed packages with dpkg -l and archived whole partition with tar. Then umount, mkfs.xfs -f /dev/hda1 and restoring from tarballs.

Next step: apt-get install --reinstall all-installed-packages is in progress now:

Need to get 389MB/676MB of archives. After unpacking 0B of additional disk space will be used.

I hope that after this I will have working system again. System which will just works not like I had in last month when from time to time some files were missing from rootfs (kernel module or awk or other thing) but usually problem disappeared after reboot…

Maybe it is time to change something in machine — but how to find out what…

It was 13 years ago when Ian Murdock announced his new Linux distribution.

My usage of Debian started in ‘slink’ times. I chose it because there was no other maintained Linux distro for Amiga computers at that time (there was Red Hat 5.1 available but it was unofficial build without any support). After few installations of ‘potato’ I updated some parts of ‘Short Amiga installation instructions’. Then it got released and I moved to ‘woody’ (which was ‘unstable’ then).

But usage of Amiga with 720x480x4 screen and VGA mono monitor was far from comfort. I decided to not upgrading and sold it. Next machine was x86 desktop powered by AMD Duron — ofcourse it was powered by Debian. I started to use ‘unstable’ on it and still use it (but hardware was replaced by another AMD x86 platform).

Few years ago I had a plan to became Debian developer but then I found OpenZaurus and OpenEmbedded projects and they are taking most of my free time spent on computer things.

Why I use Debian:

• because it is FREE
• it has many applications to choose from
• it support all my hardware (but I use own kernels anyway)
• if I want to hack something which is in ‘main’ I do not have to check license to know that I can

Thank you Ian for creating such nice distro, thanks goes also to all Debian developers for keeping it alive.