November 2013 - luv-main

Re: Firefox OS and ZTE phone
by Petros 28 Nov '13

28 Nov '13

Quoting "Robin Humble" <rjh+luv(a)cita.utoronto.ca> > On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:54:05PM +1100, Petros wrote: >> I bought a ZTE phone with Firefox OS on it (from eBay for ca. $90, still >> on the way to me), > > I digress, but in general if you just want a small linux computer then > things like RPi, cubieboard are somewhat easier to get real OS's > (fedora, ubuntu, etc.) running on. even then, accelerated graphics > remains problematic. I think all small arm thingies still have binary > blob graphics, but some have linux/glibc blobs instead of android > blobs(?). kernel versions are typically frozen because of these blobs. > lima and freedreno etc. are making progress fast though :) I understand the "BLOB thing" but should be more or less kernel related only. (?) For the purpose of illustration: I am running FreeBSD servers with multiple jails on it. I keep the kernel (shared by the jails) for months as longs as there isn't a security issue. But the userland of a jail gets refreshed regularly, or I use the newest userland for new jails. This userland comes centralised from the FreeBSD project (base system and ports). Well, if there are one/two/many ARMs (my knowledge of this architecture is pretty blury still).. in general you can compile or cross-compile if you need to, so that should be possible for ARM devices too (as said userland) (btw. that should give Gentoo some advantage - it is built to be upgraded from source?) This userland based on open source creates a more or less trustworthy system so I know what the computer is doing. And it gives me a useful collection of software so I don't have the feeling "I miss out" because of some manufacturer software which is needed to have it working properly. It is not for me only, it is for "average Joe" who can download, use and upgrade a Debian/Fedora.. for its desktop. As said, I am not talking about upgrading the kernel, being able to upgrade the userland would be a mighty helpful step. Is this achievable? Thanks for the answers. It is quite helpful. I don't think I have enough knowledge and time to port a whole OS to a new device so I am more interested in a kind of "distribution". But I am still interested to know how it works, to tweak it for my own purposes etc. Regards Peter

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Re: Firefox OS and ZTE phone
by Petros 27 Nov '13

27 Nov '13

Quoting "Brian May" <brian(a)microcomaustralia.com.au> > On 27 November 2013 14:54, Petros < Petros.Listig(a)fdrive.com.au > wrote: >> I bought a ZTE phone with Firefox on it (from eBay for ca. $90, still >> on the way to me), > > Do you mean a ZTE phone running Firefox OS? Or a ZTE phone running > Android, with Firefox as an app? Apologies for not being more precise. I mean Firefox OS. > If you are referring to Firefox OS, have you seen the Firefox OS > documentation? > > e.g.: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Architecture Yes. It gives me a bit of a picture. Still, I could not find the source code yet, and I don't know how many binary BLOBs will be on the ZTE phone. It also does not give me an idea what I can expect in regards of upgrading. IMHO, one of the pitfalls of Androids and others is to rely on the manufacturer to upgrade a system. If it's "magically patched" there isn't a way to deal with this properly. A central repository would be good, as we have for Linux and *BSD distros. But any insight of the project would be welcome. Regards Peter

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Determining the software list on machines in my network
by Andrew Greig 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

Hi All, I am struggling to correctly define a search for a tool to help me list the software in my two machines, desktop and notebook, both running SUSE 12.3. As a consequence Google has been of no help. My two computers have different video handling set ups. desktop needs VLC to handle flash and avi files - nothing else works, whereas my notebook needs GnomeMPlayer only for the same tasks (VLC is useless) both machines are 64bit. I will soon be upgrading to SUSE 13.1 and I would like to have a consistent inventory in each machine. Apart from that, video in SUSE is hard to set up (go figure), so I would like to pre-specify the package list. Andrew Greig

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Hacking a T-Box
by Andrew Greig 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

Hi All, Has anyone successfully re-purposed a telstra T-Box? I have a client who previously had the T-Box under BigPond, but with the change to Telstra business broadband she has now discovered that her T-Box will no longer work as it did. I thought that it might still access the bigPond movies site but the downloads would be metered. It seems though that she can no longer use it to record Free to Air channels. Any ideas, any experience in this, please? Andrew Greig

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Re: New ADSL line, new firewall..
by Petros 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

Quoting "Julien Goodwin" <jgoodwin(a)studio442.com.au> > On 25/11/13 17:45, Petros wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I have a new ADSL connection for our office, and a new firewall behind it. >> >> I pointed a proxy server (squid) to it, and.. it works most of the time. >> >> Just a few websites don't seem to like it. E.g.: >> >> 1385361294.211 18410 192.168.50.199 TCP_MISS/502 1217 GET >> http://www.zeit.de/index - DIRECT/217.13.68.220 text/html >> >> There are a few sites that don't work, most of the time it is a 502, >> occasionally a 504. >> >> I suspected the new firewall but cannot see any related packets >> dropped (and logged) there. > > Check that you haven't disabled the "forwarded for" setting in squid. Thanks, I will keep that in mind. However, the same config works on the ADSL line in production. I stripped back the whole network just to have my own PC directly on it. MTU to 1492, 100MBit/s full duplex to the NetComm NB9WAXXTLAN modem, no proxy or so - still the problem exists. Weird that only some worksites don't work.. it's a bit how a friend living over in China describes it - randomly some stuff is blocked. I hope we are not there yet.. Well, at the end I lodged a fault at the ISP. Will see what comes out of it. Sadly I did not catch the problem last weekend when installing. It frustrated people Monday morning so I moved back to the old line. Thanks again Peter

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Re: New ADSL line, new firewall..
by Petros 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

Quoting "Brian May" <brian(a)microcomaustralia.com.au> > On 26 November 2013 11:10, Petros < Petros.Listig(a)fdrive.com.au > wrote: > Do they have a transparent proxy? If so, their proxy might be > returning the 502/504 errors, not you. I should detect it when I do a "traceroute -P tcp -p 80 www.zeit.de" (sending port 80 packets)? The packets seem to go the same way as ICMP echos ("traceroute -I"), leaving Australia.. so I don't think so. (?) Regards Peter

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mysql transaction theory
by Brian May 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

Hello, If I have two transactions in two different sessions that execute a "INSERT INTO ..." of the same primary key into the one table, one session will wait for the other session to complete before being allowed to resume. Something like this obviously has to happen, Mysql has no idea of the first transaction is going to complete with "rollback" or "commit" and as such can't tell if the second INSERT should fail or not (conflicting primary key). It didn't match my limited understanding of how SQL transactions work however, and I would be interested to more about why the second process is blocked, and what the scope is for this block, etc. Anyone have any good references? The only thing I can find about transactions is that they are atomic, but nothing about transactions causing other processes to block. Is this the same for other non-mysql databases? Thanks -- Brian May <brian(a)microcomaustralia.com.au>

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New ADSL line, new firewall..
by Petros 25 Nov '13

25 Nov '13

Hi, I have a new ADSL connection for our office, and a new firewall behind it. I pointed a proxy server (squid) to it, and.. it works most of the time. Just a few websites don't seem to like it. E.g.: 1385361294.211 18410 192.168.50.199 TCP_MISS/502 1217 GET http://www.zeit.de/index - DIRECT/217.13.68.220 text/html There are a few sites that don't work, most of the time it is a 502, occasionally a 504. I suspected the new firewall but cannot see any related packets dropped (and logged) there. Thanks for any ideas Peter

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wifi card
by Bianca Gibson 25 Nov '13

25 Nov '13

Hi, I need a wifi card for my desktop computer. I'm looking for either a free one or recommendations for one to buy. I'd like any recommendations to be cheap, money is tight at the moment. I can pick it up at the next meeting. Cheers, Bianca

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Re: wifi card
by mjones11 23 Nov '13

23 Nov '13

Or you could get a usb device also around $40 and more portable between machines. -------- Original message -------- From: Jason White <jason(a)jasonjgw.net> Date: 23/11/2013 10:17 (GMT+10:00) To: luv-main@luv.asn.au,mlug-au@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: wifi card Bianca Gibson <bianca.rachel.gibson(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > I need a wifi card for my desktop computer. > I'm looking for either a free one or recommendations for one to buy. I'd > like any recommendations to be cheap, money is tight at the moment. If you have a PCI-Express slot available, you could buy a TP-LINK TL-WDN4800. I have one of these in my desktop machine, which I'm using as an access point with hostapd. $45 from msy.com.au as I recall. lspci shows 80:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR93xx Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01) _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list luv-main(a)luv.asn.au http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main

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