↓
 

Adventures With Linux ™

Linux Technologies and Fun Times..

  • Home
  • About the Author…
  • Copyright and Trademarks..

Monthly Archives: March 2012

Back(up) to the Future..

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on March 30, 2012 by RGMarch 30, 2012

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 →

Posted in Fedora, LTO | Tagged adaptec, hp, linux, lto-3, scsi, tape backup, u320, ultrium | Leave a reply

SWAP on SD?

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on March 23, 2012 by RGMarch 23, 2012

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 →

Posted in Dreamplug, Fedora, kernel, Linux / ARM | Tagged arm, fedora, hang, linux, sd card, sdcard, swap, yum | Leave a reply

Fedora Bash FTP Bug…and Fix

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on March 19, 2012 by RGMarch 19, 2012

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 →

Posted in Fedora | Tagged bash, bug, failure, fc16, fc17, fedora, fix, ftp, login, update | Leave a reply

Pi in the Boot..

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on March 18, 2012 by RGMarch 18, 2012

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 →

Posted in compilation, kernel, Linux / ARM, Raspberry Pi | Tagged boot partition, boot partition contents, cpu/gpu, fat32, imagetool, kernel.img, raspberry pi | Leave a reply

Don’t forget your ACL…

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on March 13, 2012 by RGMarch 13, 2012

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 →

Posted in compilation, Fedora, kernel | Tagged acl, devtmpfs, fedora, kernel compilation, posix, sound not working | Leave a reply

Put a Fork in it…

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on March 12, 2012 by RGMarch 12, 2012

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 →

Posted in kernel, Linux / ARM, Opinion, Raspberry Pi | Tagged forked, github, kernel, raspberry pi | Leave a reply

Compiling the Pi Kernel.. My Way..

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on March 12, 2012 by RGMarch 12, 2012

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 →

Posted in Hacks, kernel, Linux / ARM, Raspberry Pi | Tagged compile, cross-compiler, fedora, kernel, linux, raspberry pi | Leave a reply

Pi Preparation.. An appropriate kernel cross-compiler toolchain

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on March 10, 2012 by RGMarch 10, 2012

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 →

Posted in Dreamplug, Fedora, Hacks, Linux / ARM, Raspberry Pi | Tagged arm, cross-compile, fedora, kernel, linux, mandriva | Leave a reply

Alpha by name…

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on March 9, 2012 by RGMarch 9, 2012

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 →

Posted in Crash and Burn.., Fedora | Tagged f17 alpha, fedora, linux, testing | Leave a reply

Upgrading a Dreamplug…

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on March 9, 2012 by RGMarch 9, 2012

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 →

Posted in Dreamplug, Fedora, Linux / ARM | Tagged arm5, dreamplug, fedora 17, fedora arm, kernel 3.2.9, linux arm | 2 Replies
Original content © Robert Gadsdon 2013
↑