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Cubox Dev Platform OS images?
by Thomas Milne 10 Jan '15

10 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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War story: OpenWRT USB access
by Giles Orr 10 Jan '15

10 Jan '15

In honour of Hugh's "war stories," which I enjoy and think/hope I'm learning from, here's one of my own about trying to get USB access on an OpenWRT router ... and the dangers of thinking you know what you're doing. This is cut and pasted from my blog, so it' I've just purchased a TP-Link wireless access point. Despite owning the thing, the model of the item remains somewhat unclear: it's variously known as the "TL-WDR7500," "AC1750," and the "Archer C7." Fortunately, what was clear is that it has good specs (including immensely more memory than the WRT54Gs I've been playing with, and two USB2 ports), it's very well supported by OpenWRT (mine is the one with three antennas). This is a version 2, which is also good as that has more memory than version 1.x. And installing OpenWRT was literally as easy as downloading barrier_breaker/14.07/ar71xx/generic/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-factory.bin, logging in to the router's admin interface and then to "Firmware Upgrade," pointing to the downloaded file, and pressing the "Upgrade" button. It doesn't get much simpler than that. Getting OpenWRT to talk to the two USB ports on the device was unpleasantly difficult. With the default install, dmesgmade it clear that the insertion of a USB device was duly noted with a log entry like this: usb 2-1: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci-platform but there was no further information - perhaps noting whether or not it was a drive rather than a mouse? Or what device number it was. I started to work through the information at http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/usb.storage . So I installed: kmod-usb-storage kmod-scsi-core which you'd think would be in the default squashfs file for this specific device as they'd already included kmod-usb-core. I kind of understand why they didn't include the filesystem types (who knows which you're going to need?) so I installed: kmod-fs-msdos kmod-fs-vfat It was possible to do insmod kmod-usb-storage and insmod kmod-fs-vfat after these installs, but I found behaviour was better after a reboot: I have to assume there's scripts and autodetection that set these up better than a naked insmodcommand. Still, it's a bit annoying to have to reboot a Linux device as if it were Windows ... And finally I installed: block-mount which is apparently required to mount any device. Again, shouldn't that be in the default image? At this point, dmesg was acknowledging that we have genuine USB storage devices attached: usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci-platform usb-storage 1-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected scsi0 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0 scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access USB 3.0 USB Flash Drive 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6 sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 30883840 512-byte logical blocks: (15.8 GB/14.7 GiB) sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00 sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: disabled, read cache: disabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA sda: sda1 sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk But attempting to run mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/ fails with mount: mounting /dev/sda1 on /mnt/ failed: Invalid argument, although we do now have a /dev/sda1 device in the /dev/ folder and /mnt/ is a valid folder. After hours of tests and googling, I finally stumbled across an obscure hint from someone who was asking another question but had "solved the USB problem" ... they had installed the appropriate NLS ("Native Language Support") packages for their area. Seriously? But I'm willing to try anything by this point, so I installed: kmod-nls-iso8859-1 kmod-nls-cp437 Test again, and ... I can mount USB storage devices! At least ones with a filesystem that I've installed, so I guess I need to install NTFS and/or ext3/4 support if I want to use hard drives. This solution is both non-obvious and not well documented. I see in looking back at the OpenWRT documentation that they DO mention the NLS packages. But I didn't notice at the time and they weren't dependencies enforced by the package manager, so they got lost. <sigh> -- Giles http://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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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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Canadian ISPs Responding to Copyright Notices By Adding Information on Notice System, Privacy Concerns - Michael Geist
by Thomas Milne 09 Jan '15

09 Jan '15

Teksavvy as usual is the awesomest http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/01/canadian-isps-responding-copyright-notic…

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New M.2 PCIe 2.0 drives show off future of solid-state storage
by Thomas Milne 09 Jan '15

09 Jan '15

Quote "For newer computers that possess PCIe 3.0 interfaces, the Samsung and Mushkin drives can reach 2,150MB/s read speeds and 1,550MB/s write speeds. (In comparison, a drive using a SATA 6Gb/s interface can only transfer files at a maximum speed of 600MB/s.)" http://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2015-new-m-2-pcie-2-0-drives-show-off-futu…

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Second router as wireless ethernet bridge
by Thomas Milne 08 Jan '15

08 Jan '15

Here's another project I'm working on that is driving me around the bend. Sorry this is such a long story... A computer in our basement has no wireless, so instead of running a long cable to it, I wanted to put a router beside it and have it connect to that router by ethernet, and then have that router connect to the main one over wireless. No, I did not plug the computer into the WAN port... ;-) I have an old Linksys router WRT54GL v. 1.1 running Tomato 1.28, and my main router, the Buffalo N600 which has DD-WRT. According to about a hundred different howto's it should be very simple. I set the second router to an IP outside the DHCP range of the first, and set also set it to use the first router as gateway and DNS. I also set the SSID and password the same, and also the type of security used. Oh, and obviously I set the second router as 'Wireless Ethernet Bridge'. router 1 is 192.168.11.1, router 2 is 192.168.11.2 both have 255.255.255.0 as subnet mask Router 1 gives out addresses starting at 192.168.11.5 Am I correct in assuming that DHCP broadcasts should be relayed by the second router? In wireless bridge mode it doesn't appear to even have the option of offering DHCP... I noticed that the Buffalo will let you set up a virtual interface, so I tried using that with no security at all. I also found something here: http://www.cnet.com/how-to/reuse-an-old-router-to-bridge-devices-to-your-wi… that said I should set the second router to operate as a router and not as a gateway so I changed that. Still no ping response from google.com :-\ The only thing I can think of is that maybe the firewall settings are wrong on the second router, running Tomato. Respond to ICMP is unchecked, Allow Multicast is unchecked, NAT Loopback is set to Forwarded Only, and Enable SYN cookies is unchecked. Help! -- Thomas Milne

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Linksys 1200AC, an inexpensive, open-source 802.11ac Wi-Fi router
by Thomas Milne 08 Jan '15

08 Jan '15

"The dual 2.4 and 5GHz band AC1200 router is powered by an ARM 1.3GHz Dual-Core Processor. This is backed by 128MB of Flash memory, 512MB DDR3 RAM. A Belkin product manager said that the memory can be upgraded. It also comes with eSATA/USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, four Gigabit Ethernet ports and a Gigabit WAN port." Daaayum http://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2015-linksys-1200ac-an-inexpensive-open-so… -- Thomas Milne

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Experience with TekSavvy Business DSL
by Sadiq Saif 08 Jan '15

08 Jan '15

Hi all, I am curious if anybody on the list has experience with TekSavvy's business DSL service. I am looking at their 25/10 business service with a dry loop. Any good/bad/ugly thoughts experiences? -- Sadiq Saif https://staticsafe.ca

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