December 2014 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

meeting tomorrow: topic?
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 15 Jul '15

15 Jul '15

According to <http://gtalug.org/> : "GTALUG is currently looking for speakers for the 9th December, 2014 meeting. If you are interested in speaking please contact our talks coordinator." Let's brainstorm on this. Here's a poorly organized dump of some of my thoughts. - I'd love to hear Lennart talk about what he's learned working on routers. - I'd like to learn what each of you has learned using Linux (or perhaps, not able to do using Linux) and what your current Linux-related interests are. - I'd like to hear how people have set up their internet gatways. What's worth doing, what's easy, what's hard. (It's time for me to revisit this after having a pretty static setup for a decade. I'd be willing to talk about what I've done but it is pretty stale.) - I'm interested in setting up my in-house services like a cloud. Perhaps <http://owncloud.org/>. Motivation: I want to keep control of my own data as much as possible. Can anyone speak to this? - Subproblem of above: I run MediaWiki already. Tips and tricks (eg. from Drew) about care, feeding, and use would be welcome. - I'd be willing to share 10 minutes worth of what I've learned about little Windows gadgets as Linux platforms. - I'd love to discuss whether this is interesting and useful <http://www.banana-pi.com/eacp_view.asp?id=64> This is a version of the Banana Pi with an added ethernet switch: 5 x 1G eithernet ports. The Banana Pi is intended to mimic the Raspberry Pi in some ways but with a stronger processor; my impression has been that this is goofy and that the Cubieboard2 and Cubietruck <http://cubieboard.org/> were more transparent uses of the Allwinner chips. But gluing on a switch seems very attractive. - chatting about peoples' workflow always seems useful: it's not just the tools, its how we use them, how we find them useful, and where they don't quite meet expectations. Examples: backup methodology, distro update methodology, favourite editor (leave out tribalism), programming language, etc. - why Go is interesting <https://golang.org/>. Why Rust is interesting <http://www.rust-lang.org/>. Why Python 2.x still has a loyal following. - what are you doing with your _____? Example: Raspberry Pi. - How you make your mobile device work with your desktop? Summary: we've had Question and Answer sessions, how about an Answer and Question session? By that I meen: people give a mini-chat about something they think is interesting and have the rest of us ask questions in response.

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Crypto Question: Where do you get your entropy
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 21 Jan '15

21 Jan '15

[Scott asked that we post our questions from tonight's meeting] Where do you get your entropy? Entropy (real bytes of random numbers, not pseudo-random numbers) is key for cryptography. - when generating keys for public-key cryptosystems (RSA, ECC, ...) - when generating session keys via a Diffie-Hellman exchange - challenging the other side in various ways (eg. proving liveness or proving possession of a private key) - probably other cases that I'm not remembering at the moment In many cases a Cryptographic Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) is good enough, but not these. Sometimes a Cryptographic PRNG can be used to "stretch" entropy: kind of like stretching soup by adding water or milk. Adversaries can easily break your cryptosystem if you don't have sufficient entropy. It's that bad. What sources do you use? /dev/random and /dev/urandom are the Linux channel for entropy. There are various sources that can be pooled by the kernel: - timing of unpredictable event (e.g. user keystokes, disk seek timing, ethernet packet timing, ...). The only one I kind of trust is the keystrokes thing, and that doesn't work for servers. Others might be controlled by or predictable to foes. Keystrokes are not as good as one would like. For example, USB keyboards have keystroke timing quantized by the USB scanning rate. - Recent Intel CPUs have true RNGs. (Assuming that they were not subverted by the US Government or something else. Or just plain buggy, something that might not be detectable) - external entropy source. - Scott mentioned several. One DIY example: harvest the americium pellet from a smoke detector and place it directly on a camera sensor. This makes a kind of Geiger Counter and Geiger Generator (I made that second term up). Physicists think that radioactive emissions are unpredictable (except for chain reactions) and thus should be good entropy generators. - Chris mentioned a Kickstarter(?) project that has produced what they claim is an entropy generator on a USB stick.

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Ubuntu need Adobe Flash?
by Chris Aitken 19 Jan '15

19 Jan '15

Hi, I haven't posted here for years. I guess Ubuntu has been working well for me, so I haven't had the need. I can't play videos on the Internet. I get an error that ... "Firefox has prevented the outdated plugin "Adobe Flash" from running on youtube.com." I get similar errors (that Adobe Flash needs updating) from other sites - fo instance trying to play videos Posted on facebook. My Firefox is 29.0 Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0 I'm running Ubuntu 12.10. I tried to install in this way ... chris@owner-HP-Compaq-dc5750-Small-Form-Factor:~$ sudo apt-get install fashplugin-nonfree [sudo] password for chris: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package fashplugin-nonfree chris@owner-HP-Compaq-dc5750-Small-Form-Factor:~$ ^C chris@owner-HP-Compaq-dc5750-Small-Form-Factor:~$ I thought re-installing Firefox might bring with it updates, but it seems I already have the latest version ... chris@owner-HP-Compaq-dc5750-Small-Form-Factor:~$ sudo apt-get install firefox Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done firefox is already the newest version. The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: linux-headers-3.5.0-17 linux-headers-3.5.0-17-generic suckless-tools Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. chris@owner-HP-Compaq-dc5750-Small-Form-Factor:~$ I tried the gui Synaptic Package Manager, which offered the hope that ... flashplugin-installer (version 11.2.202.359ubuntu0.12.10.1) will be re-installed No such luck ... W: Failed to fetch http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/f/flashplugin-nonfree/fla… 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.201 80] Also, I tried Epiphany, to see if the problem is system-wide or browser-specific. I got similar errors trying to play videos. Sigh. Any ideas? I'm off to be soon, but I'll stay up for a little while, in case anyone is online. Chris Aitken

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Cubox Dev Platform OS images?
by Thomas Milne 11 Jan '15

11 Jan '15

Hey there, I still have my old, original Cubox Dev Platform from a few years ago. When I power it on now though I don't get any indication it is booting up at all. I tried looking for newer boot/OS images to load on the SD card but everything now seems to be for the Cubox-i. Anyone have laying around or know where I could find something like this?

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Why can't I do a Debian netinstall of unstable or testing?
by Thomas Milne 10 Jan '15

10 Jan '15

I'm using Unetbootin to do a netinstall of Debian. It says there are no compatible kernel modules on any of the mirrors when I try anything but Stable. Obviously I know I can just install Stable and then do an upgrade, but still. What's up with this?

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Ubuntu Thunderbird Problem After Replacing Drive With /home
by Stephen 10 Jan '15

10 Jan '15

I am running Ubuntu 12.04. I had /home on its own drive and that drive was getting SMART warnings. I backed my data up, replaced the drive, restored, booted and everything seems OK except my Thunderbird filters. When a message comes in that has a rule to filter to a different folder Thunderbird is now raising an error: "message could not be filtered to folder because writing to folder failed". There was a bug but it is being reported as repaired on 2014-10-14. And the only platform mentioned is Windows. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=931303 Now, the messages are going to my Inbox just fine, and I can manually drag them and drop them into the folder that I want them filtered to. So I conclude that this is not a permission problem. Best I could find with Google is that Mozilla suggests that the way to go is to create a profile and move all my existing data to the new profile. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Thunderbird This seems like a Royal pain the kester. Before I undertake this this, I thought I solicit ideas as to possible solutions that are less onerous. Thanks -- Stephen

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Power Supplies & Video Cards
by DAVID CHIPMAN 09 Jan '15

09 Jan '15

I know this really isn't about Linux per se, but I thought I would ask this question here any how. I have a computer wit a 300W PSU. It currently has an onboard video chip, which I would like to replace with a video card. Now, the video card specs mention needing a 300W PSU. My question is: Would that 300W requirement be a minimum, or what the card would need to work full-on? Thanks, -David

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GnuPG Woes...
by Peter King 03 Jan '15

03 Jan '15

I could use some help from people who are more expert at GnuPG than I am, which is most people. Using GnuPG 2.0.26 and libcrypt 1.6.2, running under Gentoo with kernel 3.17.4, all at the command line. I have a gpg key (since 2004) and it's always worked well for me. Just today, though, I tried to use it to decrypt a file I'd successfully decrupted many times in the past: $ gpg -d File_to_Decrypt > decrypted_file I kept getting a "bad session key" error. After doing some googling, I eventually tried the suggestion to run: $ gpgconf --reload After doing so, however, when I try to decrypt the file as before: $ gpg -d File_to_Decrypt > decrypted_file gpg now asks for the data file, and when I offer File_to_Decrypt, I get back a list of of signatures, each correctly identified with my DSA key ID (as shown by the command gpg --listkeys), but each entry is followed by the line "BAD signature from <my_ID> [ultimate]" -- which seems like very bad news indeed. Naturally, the encrypted file is valuable (to me), and I have backup encrypted copies, but nothing in clear... Well, the gnupg key hasn't changed since February 2004, and it's worked fine all the way to at least mid-October 2014, the last time I encrypted/decrypted the file. Now I'm more or less clueless. What should I try next? -- Peter King peter.king(a)utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-978-3311 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42

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HummingBoard-i2eX First Impressions
by Scott Sullivan 02 Jan '15

02 Jan '15

This Christmas I got myself another ARM dev board. In this case the HummingBoard-i2eX from SolidRun. The Vendor ========== http://www.solid-run.com/ SolidRun is an Israeli company producing small form factor computers. They previously produced the CuBox (know to many on this list). In recent history they moved to creating their devices with FreeScale's iMX.6 SoCs. They started with a common SoM (System on a Module), and developed two complimentary product lines of base boards that the SoMs connect to. These are the CuBox-i and the HummingBoard. The CuBox-i is a continuation of their 2'x2'x'2' cube computer design. The HummingBoard is a Raspberry Pi-like form factor (more on this later). The Board ========= Vendor Product Page: http://www.solid-run.com/product/hummingboard-i2ex/ Local Distributor Product Page: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813455003 This is the Hummingboard base board, with the Dual Core + 1GB + Extra Features SoM. This boils down to a system with extra features of a mSATA slot on the bottom of the board, a miniPCIe slot on the top, and an extra 2x4 header with two USB extra connections on it. The Board is nearly perfect match for the Raspberry Pi B (not B+) form factor. All the connectors (HDMI, USB, Power, etc...) line up where they would on a Raspberry Pi B. The only trick bit is the height of the mSATA connector on the bottom which will not fit in any of the Raspberry Pi B cases I own. This should not be an issue with the Hummingboard-i1 or -i2 as they don't have mSATA. First Boot ========== The board as purchased from NewEgg comes only with the board. You will need to provide your own USB supply 5v@2A. You will also need your own microSD card for the OS. Prep the microSD Card --------------------- If your familiar with the Raspberry Pi, there is a NOOBs-like OS installer called Ignition. You dd this to your microSD card and then on the first boot you get a GUI that will then download and install the Distro of your choice. http://www.solid-run.com/wiki/Ignition Install your OS of Choice ------------------------- First Note: There is check box to show all OS options. Check this as it by default hides all but four (Android 4.4, and three XBMC variants). Second Note: There is a debug window, click it, and then re-arrange the two windows so you can see both. Some of the installs are broken, I discovered this when trying to install Fedora 20 via Ignition, it never downloaded an install image, and some of the partitioning looks to be broken. This is not a fault of the Fedora Project, but of the solidRun community member that put together the Iginition script. I haven't started debugging it yet. I ended up choosing Debian Wheezy, and the install took about 10-15 minutes downloading and installing. Your millage will vary. Poking Around ============= The boot loader is on microSD card. You need it to boot. The boot loader is uboot. Kernel lists as a 3.14.14-cubox, so a custom build. lspci list just a 'bridge' device. I powered down, added a spare mPCIe wifi card I had around, and it showed up when I rebooted. Memory was listed as the full 1GB, so video buffer stealing doesn't seem to be happening. But I can't confirm that fully. That's it so far. -- Scott Sullivan

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GNU Hurd Is Enjoying User-Space Device Drivers
by Thomas Milne 29 Dec '14

29 Dec '14

Interesting: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU5OTI

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