litenverden.org

Welcome litenverden.org

Mon, 6 Oct 2008 12:45:00 -0700

"Liten verden" is Norwegian for "small world". That's where we all live.

This little blog is intended to be a �lab book� for my activities with and learning about technology I find useful in building (or rebuilding) and sustaining a Free, open, and dynamic technical culture. That is a broad domain. Here, you will find articles on open cell telephony, open computing, Free culture, and, from time to time, sustainable life-style. I see all these things as related. I hope this will help people who are trying to understand and promote Free and open technology for whatever peaceful and just reason they may have.

The burden of dealing with spam and poisoned links in comments has forced me to close this blog to non-members. You can request membership by email. Decode my address below.

Frihet

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frihet dot 2 at
litenverden
dot org

LibriVox And The EeePC

Mon, 6 Oct 2008 11:40:00 -0700

Check out http://librivox.org/. LibriVox is a community of audio book readers, editors, and listeners. From the website: "LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books."

I recently signed up and recorded a book section to see how it worked. It's pretty cool, I must say. Also cool was the way in which I recorded my section. I loaded Audacity on my Mandriva EeePC and connected it to a Samson C01U USB microphone. Yep, I connected the PC to the microphone. The mic is bigger than the PC.

The combination makes a good recording rig. The EeePC is cheap, takes up little room, requires very little power, and makes almost no noise. Audacity is LibriVox's most popular recording tool (open source, works well). What better way to make public domain recordings than with Free and open software?

Frihet

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More Real Linux On The EeePC (Mandriva)

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 23:04:00 -0700

After trying eeeXubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and two flavors of Mandriva One 2008.1, I replaced the Mandriva One KDE RC2 I was running with the official Mandriva 2008.1 Gnome release. As I had thought it would be, Mandriva is the "real" Linux way to go for the EeePC. The installation was textbook. Everything including WPA2-PSK wireless worked -- with native drivers.Well, everything worked after I fixed my Eee. Somewhere in the middle of testing Linux distros, the keyboard and trackpad quit working. I tore the machine down to the last screw, inspected it, cleaned connectors, and reassembled. It worked just fine. $350 saved.

There were no detours through a terminal session to patch things up. You do have to click a pop-up box to tell Mandriva to stop reporting a battery failure on startup. The battery is fine, and that is properly reported on the panel. There are patches to fix this, but they are not needed. Kexi was in the repository and installed just fine. I need Kexi for my ever evolving and growing Norwegian-English dictionary.

I ended up with the Gnome desktop because it is what I'm used to, and it seems more refined. If you like KDE, it's probably for the same reasons.

I also tried installing eeeXubuntu on an SD card. In theory this is a good idea. Why wear out the internal flash when you can run on a cheap replaceable SD card? Well, it is not as easy as it looks. You can get an image installed on an SD card, but you'll have to tweak things with terminal sessions to get it to boot. It's not hard, but I just did not want to have to remember that stuff every time I did a reinstall. I also found the Eee SD slot did not like the SDHC class 6 and class 4 cards (boot errors) I had. It preferred a plain old SD card. I could not find any 4G SD cards locally. I did use a 2G for eeeXubuntu, and it worked fine. It appeared to me that by the time I got this figured out, SD card technology would have run away from the Eee.

I have had the machine running for over a week now. So, I thought I would check for updates. The Mandriva update tool seemed hopelessly broken (at least on my machine). I always got a locked URPMI database, and nothing would fix it. I tried rebooting, rebuilding the rpm database (which seemed to work), but to no avail. Any attempt to do an update resulted in a locked URPMI database message and what appeared to be a hung Control Center update application. This is the kind of thing Mandriva used to be famous for, and probably one reason why Ubuntu is doing as well as it is.

But, things were not as bad as they looked. I decided to let the update tool run after the URPMI lockup message appeared. It ran for an hour and finished, updating several applications successfully. So, what we have is an update program that throws a false error (???) and runs very slowly on the Eee. But it runs.

Update 07/27/2008: This slowness and the URPMI lockup messages have gone away. Updates are now about as fast as one could expect on such a basic platform. The problem may have been resolved by one of the updates. I don't know.

Frihet

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A Force To Be Ignored

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:36:00 -0700

I was reading an article about Microsoft's patent strategy at Linux Today this morning. It got me thinking, so here is one of my infrequent philosophical posts.

In the United States, the best strategy is to see Microsoft not as a force to be reckoned with, but a force to be ignored. There is little hope for just action from U.S. legislative bodies, the dysfunctional USPTO, or the Justice Department. This is not unusual. Even a light reading of European and American history tells us that only rarely has government really served the interests of the people in the regulation of commerce. In the United States, this is not one of those rare times.Those who wish to see a little economic justice and opportunity restored to the information technology marketplace, those who value their property, privacy, and liberty will have to secure these things for themselves by simply not doing business with Microsoft and others of their kind. Thanks to Free (not free as in free beer) and open source software, good alternatives do exist. Through use of these Free alternatives, the monopolies and trusts can be slowly weakened and broken down without or in spite of the action of government agencies.

Of course, Microsoft knows this, and if it can, will try to turn the institutions that are intended to protect the public interest to its own purposes. Witness the current ISO-OOXML debacle. (1,2) Microsoft is trying to redefine property rights to protect its interests. They know what they are doing. Bill Gates from 1991:

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today. The solution . . . is patent exchanges . . . and patenting as much as we can. . . . A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." Fred Warshofsky, The Patent Wars 170-71 (NY: Wiley 1994). (3)

I think there was a time when Microsoft thought patents might do the job. They certainly put a lot of effort into building a portfolio. (4) Today I do not think that Microsoft can sue Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Mandriva and get away with it. At least they cannot get away with it Europe, where all the regulatory institutions do not presently appear to be in commercial hands. If Europe will stand up for justice that will be sufficient. In case one has not noticed, the United States is no longer calling the shots. Is it, too, becoming a force to be ignored?

Frihet

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http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7183/469

http://www.noooxml.org/irregularities

http://lessig.org/blog/2003/08/the_eu_fight_against_yuck_epat.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/business/yourmoney/31digi.html

Real Linux On An EeePC (Ubuntu)

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:00:00 -0700

I have had an EeePC Surf 4G for two weeks now. I fired it up to see what the Xandros Linux distribution looked like and decided that was not for me. For two reasons. First, Xandros, like SUSE, has drunk the Microsoft "kool-aid", (1) and second, because it is not a clean GPL product. It may not even be GPL compliant where GPL software is used (it's unclear). (2,3) I found clicking the "I agree" button on the license agreement really hard to do -- even if it was only to see what Xandros had done.But all that is OK. I had never planned to use Xandros because of the ethical problems surrounding points 1 and 2, above. All I wanted was the machine. Within hours of opening the box, I had it up and running on Ubuntu 7.10. I formatted the internal flash drive as a single bootable ext2 partition.

Ubuntu is, of course, GPL compliant, and has not signed its soul over to Microsoft. I've seen evidence that Fedora (4) and Mandriva (5) will also run nicely on the EeePC. The Mandriva option is very interesting because the April 2008 release is supposed to be "100% Eee-friendly".

The instructions for installing Ubuntu 7.10 on the EeePC can be found on an Ubuntu Community site. (6) I will not repeat them here. They worked very well at almost every step of the way except with respect to wireless. More on this in the next paragraph.

The Ubuntu site gives some important direction on installing in such a way as to avoid excessive writes to the EeePC's internal flash. That's something to make sure you do without regard to what real GPL distribution you decide to use. I did the recommended write reduction changes BEFORE I tried to install Madwifi. This not what the author said to do, although one would think log files and wireless functions would be independent. Anyway, the build-essential installer could not find a hard-coded log directory and failed. So, I backed out the flash write reduction entries I had made in FSTAB and tried again. Madwifi built and installed with no errors. I restored the FSTAB entries.

I have finished testing every combination of WEP and WPA I could create with my D-Link DWL-G700AP wireless access point. The network management tool won't let me select no encryption. The news is that nothing works with the Madwifi option. Pretty much what I expected, but disappointing, never-the-less. Note that the Community site article may have been correct. It is possible that ASUS has changed the hardware on the Surf models.

I had not planned to attempt the NDIS wrapper solution, but I went ahead to see what would happen. Sadly, the same result. Scanning other articles indicates this is the way things are. I can find no clear article claiming wireless will work that I can attempt to duplicate. If you need wireless on the EeePC (Surf, at least) without playing ball with the WIPO mob, you may have to wait until Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, or someone else you can trust comes up with a practical and solid fix.

As much as it pains me, I will go back to the Xandros distribution using some manual tweaks to activate the "advanced desktop" (KDE) until another choice pops up. And, it's not all roses even with Xandros. Using the "advanced desktop" breaks some applications that startup scripts launch (Privoxy, for example). The software repositories provided are limited in scope (No Kexi, for example, because of library incompatibilities) and contain older versions (OpenOffice, for example) than Ubuntu. But, there is enough that is good enough to make the machine productive enough for me until a real Linux comes along with the required fixes. Not a glowing endorsement, huh?

In my final attempt at an Ubuntu install, I did not implement the desktop customizations or over-clocking changes outlined in the Community article. I felt the customizations added little value and I have my own tweaks that work better for me. I had no need for the over-clocking stuff.

Frihet

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1. http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=199900828
2. http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/11/27/asus
-resolves-eee-gpl-violation-releases-asus_acpi-code-changes
3. http://boycottnovell.com/2007/11/24/xandros-asus-eee-gpl/
4.http://mysite.verizon.net/vze2j8bn/eeePC-F8.html
5.http://eeepc.net/mandriva-20081-works-with-eee-pcs/
6. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC

Android Philosophy

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 13:22:00 -0800

I found and interesting post about Google's Android project this morning on ZDNet.co.uk (1). I am aware of the "openness" debate going on in the FOSS phone community about Android at this time. Even if it is not perfect, Android seems to offer good organization, good tools, and a large, focused and communicative community. It is a step in the right direction and certainly has a chance to catch on. This post offers an opportunity to read what Android's creator, Andy Rubin, thinks about the project.

Frihet

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http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39291001,00.htm

OpenMoko GTA01 USB Networking

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:08:00 -0800

Following is my networking checklist. It is crude, but it works for me.

Execute from a terminal:

ifconfig usb0 192.168.0.200 netmask 255.255.255.0

From a terminal, add a route to your Neo:

/sbin/route add -host 192.168.0.202/32 dev usb0

You can check your work by executing from a terminal:

ping -I usb0 192.168.0.202

If your connection works, log in to the Neo from a terminal:

ssh root@192.168.0.202

If you get:

root@host:~# ssh root@192.168.0.202
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
e7:08:59:28:ad:bb:83:e8:f4:74:bc:ba:92:02:58:39.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:1
RSA host key for 192.168.0.202 has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.
root@host:~#

Then delete the known_hosts file (Warning, I have nothing else in this file. That might not be true for you. Check the wiki if you are unsure):

cd
rm .ssh/known_hosts

Go back to the login step. You should be good to go.

Frihet

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Derived from http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Getting_Started_with_your_Neo1973#By_using_Ethernet_emulation
_over_a_USB_cable

Flashing OpenMoko GTA01

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:08:00 -0800

This is my checklist for flashing an OpenMoko GTA01 image (rootfs and kernel). The steps will also work with Qtopia images. This is a living document and may change from time to time.

I am using Ubuntu 7.10 on a Toshiba Satellite U200.

Download the images you need. For example:

OpenMoko-openmoko-devel-image-glibc-ipk-P1-Snapshot-2007102
-fic-gta01.rootfs.jffs2
and
uImage-2.6.22.5-moko11+svnr2937-r3-fic-gta01(2).bin.

Notice the "devel" in the first file. As I understand it, that means it has breakpoints for debugging. A file named the same, but without "devel" in the name is functionally the same for use. The first file is the root file system. The second file is the kernel. I download these files with a normal user account and store them on a USB key.
From this point on, run as root.

Prepare to flash by unplugging the Neo from your computer. The Neo is off.

Hold the phone's AUX button and then press the phone's POWER button. You'll need to hold the POWER button for about 4 seconds before the device will turn on. Otherwise the screen will only flash white for a second and the phone won't power up.

The u-boot menu should appear.

Set the Neo to usb mode by pressing the aux button until the usb selection is highlighted.

Plug the Neo into the host with the supplied USB cable.

Using a terminal (terminal 1), connect to the Neo. You can cut and paste this command:

screen -l /dev/ttyACM0

Do not cut and paste to terminal 1 after this point!

The Neo session may time out on you is you are slow. You can execute the following commands to increase your session time. Note: I assume this is done only once in the life of your Neo:

GTA01Bv4 # setenv boot_menu_timeout 65000
GTA01Bv4 # saveenv

If you want to be certain that you have clear nand you can execute the following commands. Note that this should not be required with u-boot 1.2 and higher:

nand erase kernel
nand erase rootfs

Using another terminal (terminal 2), flash rootfs. Note that cut and paste is ok on terminal 2. I keep my files on a USB key and copy the filepath information from the file properties:

dfu-util -a rootfs -R -D filepath

Reminder: The rootfs image will have a name like: OpenMoko-openmoko-devel-image-glibc-ipk-P1-Snapshot-20071021-fic-gta01.rootfs.jffs2

Using terminal 2, flash kernel. Note that cut and paste is ok on terminal 2. I keep my files on a USB key and copy the filepath information from the file properties:

dfu-util -a kernel -R -D filepath
Note: the kernel file will have a name like: uImage-2.6.22.5-moko11+svnr2937-r3-fic-gta01(2).bin

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This document is derived from http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Flashing_openmoko