December 2013 - luv-main

Ramble about embedded ARM boards (was: Firefox OS and ZTE phone)
by Toby Corkindale 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

On 27 November 2013 17:14, Robin Humble <rjh+luv(a)cita.utoronto.ca> wrote: [snip] > 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 really like the little ARM single-board computers. I just wish the distros would manage to sort the hardware support out properly, and then continue to support previous versions for just a bit longer. It's your typical case that a new version comes out, and then all the dev focus moves to it and the older version is stuck in time. Usually not too hard to bring it up to date if you know what you're doing, but it's a barrier to adoption for people who just want to have a small, stable platform, rather than spend all their time maintaining the platform. (Most of the distros are really just maintained by one or two people in their spare time. I was one of them, until I ran out of time.) Most of the boards sit a fair bit behind the current ARM tech, sadly. Eg. The common boards are a single or dual core 1GHz ARM A8 or A7. (And the raspberry pi is far behind that in terms of processing power) Meanwhile the ARM cpu in the Nexus 5 phone can get up to 2.3 GHz on four cores! I'd love to have that sitting in a cheap, low-powered server the size of a deck of cards.. (You can get Snapdragon dev kits, but they're expensive and aimed at developing for new devices, not just running as mini computers) TC

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Re: Firefox OS and ZTE phone
by Petros 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

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), > > mostly out of curiosity. The start with the ZTE Open is a disaster.. I am on a Telstra account. The phone finds "Telstra available" if I search for "3G only" networks. However, it only connects to "Telstra 2G EDGE" which does not give me an Internet connection at all - nothing loads in the browser, it all times out. This makes the phone useless as a smartphone.. Any ways to fix it? Thank you Peter

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is vmstat si including memory mapped file access?
by James Harper 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

I'm investigating a performance issue, and vmstat is showing: procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 4 3 846000 162048 1220 3002540 596 0 70008 766 18552 15943 3 6 67 24 2 3 845824 159284 1220 3008828 1116 0 73108 17183 17748 14786 6 11 54 28 0 4 845816 212872 1220 2958544 4 0 51452 57134 19235 16206 4 10 58 27 6 1 845812 156088 1220 3010976 4 0 65652 991 15372 13947 1 3 75 20 0 0 845808 167580 1220 3006876 0 0 63668 12689 20513 13451 2 4 84 9 1 0 845808 163356 1220 3011124 0 0 32868 80 11735 12122 1 2 93 4 0 1 845788 161248 1228 3008176 20 0 41712 540 13442 14301 1 3 88 8 1 0 845780 162364 1228 3012860 16 0 70844 13689 20596 16787 4 6 79 12 2 2 845756 162736 1228 3013604 112 0 36804 32394 16490 16794 1 4 78 16 3 1 845752 159280 1228 3009800 24 0 82608 890 17589 14989 2 5 69 23 0 3 845688 161016 1228 3017948 104 0 90356 25875 24452 15321 3 8 72 16 1 3 845580 163248 1228 3008712 208 0 84528 12806 20642 14609 3 5 71 20 0 1 845516 160536 1228 3019424 56 0 60240 16853 16595 13174 2 4 78 16 1 0 845444 166364 1228 3012828 76 0 22652 1674 12705 12765 1 2 91 6 There is activity in the si column, and iostat on the swap device is showing some activity. I'm wondering if 'si' also includes activity on memory mapped files, or if it is purely pagefile access? And is a figure like 100 high? I think it reflects 100kb so is tiny, and probably not significant. Thanks James

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A good OCR GUI for Ubuntu Lucid
by Tim Hamilton 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

Message: 4 > Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 08:14:19 +1100 > From: Carl Turney <carl(a)boms.com.au> > Subject: A good OCR GUI for Ubuntu Lucid > To: luv-main(a)luv.asn.au > Message-ID: <529660AB.4090207(a)boms.com.au> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > Hi All, > > I'm thinking of installing OCRFeeder into my Lucid system, as soon as I > get off work tonight, and can figure out how to add it's repository > through Synaptic. > > Any comments on personal experiences with this and other OCR programs? > > Cheers, > > Carl Turney > Bayswater > > Hi Carl, If you're looking for desktop OCR I've used gscan2pdf with some pretty good results, though I am using a much more recent distro. gscan2pdf a PDF scanning & manipulation package that uses either gocr or tessaract (among others) for its backend OCR. Results with a good quality PDF and using tessaract for OCR are very good, though the placement of the text layer within the image can be a little off and not quite at the quality of some proprietary software such as Adobe's Acrobat. The proprietary PDF Studio is also available on linux (through Ubuntu's software centre on recent distros) and looks like a pretty good all round PDF package. In the testing I did though, the OCR wasn't any better than that provided by tessaract in gscan2pdf. Cheers Tim

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Re: New ADSL line, new firewall..
by Petros 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

Quoting "Chris Samuel" <chris(a)csamuel.org> > On Tue, 26 Nov 2013 03:15:33 PM Petros wrote: > >> I don't understand it.. Why do the port 80 packets loop forever? > > I think that's a problem with traceroute, I see the same behaviour > from it but can successfully connect to that port on that host. Thanks. I guess the router before was discarding port 80 packets because they were not proper HTTP packets. A F5 or so will do that when doing content inspection (one theory at least) In the meantime I found the problem. An error in the configuration down the line to the ISP limited the MTU to much less than 1492 or 1500 bytes (1458 if I remember correctly). Everything bigger was "eaten" by the provider network. And because most requests were small it only showed up in a few requests - and quite random so I had problems to see the issue. Well, the ISP could not connect to the ADSL modem/router for a week. So they never checked the configuration of the device they own and manage. I needed to point at the MTU problem repeatedly until they finally sent a technician - first to regain remote access to their own device. It took them 4 weekdays to do so. Before it was always "someone else's" problem.. Well, I refreshed my TCP debugging skills;-) Thanks all Peter

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