Shades of the late-’90s and early-’00s again… I decided I needed a reliable and practical backup for my systems, and having an array of n-TB disks seemed complete overkill (and _expensive_).. So, I’m getting a reasonably-priced HP Ultrium 960 LTO-3 external drive, which is relatively expensive (£450), but the tapes (400GB / 800GB ‘compressed’) are not – … Continue reading →
I have been having continuing problems with yum ‘hanging’ on my Dreamplug – through several different versions of Fedora, and numerous kernel updates (currently FC17 and Kernel 3.3..) The Fedora rootfs image did not include any swap, so – after some digging around – I decided to add a ./SWAP file, and activate it… The results (so … Continue reading →
There still seems to be a persistent bug with the latest FC16 and FC17 versions of the bash rpm, which causes ftp logins to fail after you attempt to put in the password. The cause is that vital data is erased from the /etc/shells file, during the rpm update. The file should contain: /sbin/nologin /bin/dash /bin/bash /bin/sh … Continue reading →
The Raspberry Pi boot sequence is somewhat unique, due – amongst other things – to the binary code blobs necessary to drive the Broadcom CPU/GPU at boot time. The FAT32 boot partition looks like this: The three binary files arm<nnn>_start.elf provide varying allocations of the processor for CPU (compute) versus GPU (video) work. This effectively means that … Continue reading →
If you are in the habit of compiling your own kernel, don’t forget to stay up-to-date with the latest necessities! ACL used to be one of those ..’don’t select unless you know what you are doing’… options, but now is an absolute necessity for ‘newer’ versions of Fedora.. So.. don’t forget to select the tmpfs / POSIX … Continue reading →
The Linux kernel source for the Pi has been ‘forked’, rather than being released as a patch set.. This is probably a necessary evil, in order to get a working version out in public… But.. This has the (obvious) downside that we have to rely on regular creation of ‘newer’ forked versions, and the current Pi kernel … Continue reading →
This is how I compile ARM kernels. There are other ways of doing this, but this works, for me.. First – I should mention – Read the Wicki! This is at http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Hub After getting the ‘forked’ kernel I then had to obtain a suitable config file, which included the necessary extra items for the Pi Broadcom chipset.. … Continue reading →
The Fedora armv5tel / x86_64 cross-compiler toolchain is a bit ancient (GCC 4.1.2!), and the Pi is armv6.. So.. I needed a more up-to-date and architecture-friendly substitute.. After some abortive attempts (some of the other armv7 cross-compilers were just as old!) I found a set of armv7 / x86_64 cross-compiler rpms – including gcc version 4.6.1 – … Continue reading →
Tried the Fedora 17 Alpha release on a crash-and-burn x86_64 system… Definitely alpha quality… Biggest show-stopper was the weird behaviour of grub2 and dracut, which meant that only one of the kernel choices in the grub2 menu booted OK, but others got ‘lost’ and threw all sorts of worrying udev and ‘xxx not found’ messages, before hanging … Continue reading →
Just spent some time upgrading my ARM Dreamplug to Fedora 17 (pre-release) and kernel 3.2.9.. Kernels are compiled on my Fedora x86_64 desktop, using the armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi RPM set.. I’ve installed the XFCE desktop (rebuilding some missing RPMs from source..), and hacked an old (F13) ARM version of Epiphany for a working browser (as Firefox crashes all the … Continue reading →