- luv-main - luv.asn.au

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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Re: Fwd: New ADSL line, new firewall..
by Petros 29 Nov '13

29 Nov '13

Quoting "Andrew McGlashan" > On 26/11/2013 11:10 AM, Petros wrote: >> 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.. > > Yes, well, I had an issue with getting to the Billion website in AU ... > the ISP claimed no block, Billion claimed no block -- I got a temporary > extra block of IPs to test and another IP was fine from the same ISP, > but they never did find out what was blocking my normal IP, not the ISP, > nor Billion. In the end I just routed the connection via another > service, but most people don't have multiple services to /choose/ from. True. At the moment I have two links but one should be decommissioned soon. Interesting the difference between traceroute when using ICMP and TCP port 80: $ traceroute -I www.zeit.de traceroute to www.zeit.de (217.13.68.220), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets 1 115.186.196.105 (115.186.196.105) 20.636 ms 20.494 ms 20.224 ms 2 3812.Gi0.br1.cit190.uecomm.net.au (218.185.31.142) 19.917 ms 20.789 ms 20.960 ms 3 VLAN323.o3mlc76f05.optus.net.au (61.88.143.197) 20.641 ms 22.014 ms 21.419 ms 4 203.208.192.241 (203.208.192.241) 195.414 ms 194.884 ms 195.379 ms 5 203.208.172.242 (203.208.172.242) 194.133 ms 203.208.172.238 (203.208.172.238) 194.407 ms 203.208.172.246 (203.208.172.246) 194.606 ms 6 80.150.171.41 (80.150.171.41) 196.557 ms 197.589 ms 196.317 ms 7 bs-ea1-i.BS.DE.NET.DTAG.DE (62.154.99.34) 357.788 ms 358.499 ms 364.120 ms 8 dtag.gaertner.de (80.150.168.230) 353.579 ms 354.360 ms 354.330 ms 9 www.zeit.de (217.13.68.220) 355.478 ms 355.685 ms 358.413 ms BTW: I can ping www.zeit.de on both without packet loss.. Here for the new link if I do a traceroute using TCP port 80: $ traceroute -P tcp -p 80 www.zeit.de traceroute to www.zeit.de (217.13.68.220), 64 hops max, 64 byte packets 1 115.186.196.105 (115.186.196.105) 21.767 ms 20.853 ms 20.700 ms 2 3812.Gi0.br1.cit190.uecomm.net.au (218.185.31.142) 20.425 ms 21.105 ms 21.113 ms 3 VLAN323.o3mlc76f05.optus.net.au (61.88.143.197) 21.699 ms 20.173 ms 22.365 ms 4 203.208.192.241 (203.208.192.241) 196.148 ms 195.114 ms 195.871 ms 5 203.208.172.242 (203.208.172.242) 194.133 ms so-1-0-3-0.toknf-cr2.ix.singtel.com (203.208.173.22) 200.944 ms 203.208.172.246 (203.208.172.246) 193.771 ms 6 80.150.171.41 (80.150.171.41) 198.757 ms 195.419 ms 196.833 ms 7 bs-ea1-i.BS.DE.NET.DTAG.DE (62.154.99.34) 357.401 ms 359.721 ms 356.776 ms 8 dtag.gaertner.de (80.150.168.230) 354.517 ms 353.234 ms 355.168 ms 9 * * * 10 * * * 11 * * * 12 * * * 13 * * * 14 * * * .. 54 * * * .. I don't understand it.. Why do the port 80 packets loop forever? I never worked for an ISP so maybe people with this background have seen this before? I also see that the old link is using US addresses, the new one Singapore.. Regards Peter

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Firefox OS and ZTE phone
by Petros 29 Nov '13

29 Nov '13

Hi, I bought a ZTE phone with Firefox on it (from eBay for ca. $90, still on the way to me), mostly out of curiosity. I am browsing around about licensing and source code. Well, I find some information on the Mozilla website, with some hints about using Linux and some components. I have not find "the" source code yet. I am curious about it, how much of it is "vanilla Linux" and userland, how to get a shell, how to extend it, how to update etc. Do you know more about it? Regards Peter

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Fwd: [Chat] LCA2014 Official Announcement
by Bianca Gibson 28 Nov '13

28 Nov '13

Lots of linux.conf.au 2014 details below. I'm really looking forward to it, I hope to see lots of you there. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Paul Del Fante <pdelfante(a)gmail.com> LCA2014 Official Announcement Announcing linux.conf.au 2014 Overview In January 2014, Perth, Western Australia will be playing host to the continents premier open source conference – linux.conf.au. linux.conf.au draws attendees and speakers worldwide from all spheres of open source, geeks, hackers, professionals, hobbyists and business partners. Conference Format The linux.conf.au conference runs over 5 days from Monday 6th January to Friday 10th January. Conference tickets are available at Professional, Hobbyist and Student levels with associated pricing and perks. Over the first two days we host a series of miniconfs, small single day conferences covering particular topics. Intended as an incubator for related technologies and interests that could eventually hold their own conferences. The miniconfs are managed and run as independent conferences with their own call for papers and management committees. The remaining three days feature a packed conference schedule, in 2014 we will be running presentations over 5 simultaneous tracks. Each track will feature four 45 minute presentations per day. The full programme is available on our website at http://linux.conf.au/programme/schedule. On most days before the main sessions, the conference will open with a keynote presentation. The keynotes tend to follow a less technical approach and provide commentary and insight on broad global trends and open source challenges. Birds of a Feather Sessions Run outside the scope of the formal presentation agenda, linux.conf.au encourages delegates to arrange “Birds of a Feather” - BOF - sessions. These draw together people with a specific area of interest and are run after hours. Typical BOF sessions range from Astronomy, Video capture, Running, Cycling, Hacking and many others. The BOF sessions are a great opportunity to meet and socialise with like minded people during the conference. Video and Streaming All presentations made at linux.conf.au will be recorded and the completed videos made available for download and online viewing. This year we will be attempting to provide a live stream of the proceedings too. Social Programme The linux.conf.au tries to be as accessible to participants as possible, we generally run a partners programme to provide some interest and entertainment to partners of attendees who are not interested in participating. We also arrange a creche facility to care for children while delegates are attending presentations. We also run several semi-formal networking sessions including a speakers dinner on Tuesday, a professional delegates networking function on the Thursday and a penguin dinner open to all delegates on the Wednesday. In addition to the above, various organisations will be hosting social gatherings during the conference and on free evenings. Keynotes At present, we've announced two keynote presenters, with a third still being determined. The confirmed keynote presenters so far are: Jonathon Oxer Jon will be presenting an overview of the latest developments to the ArduSat project as part of his keynote presentation during linux.conf.au 2014 in Perth, Western Australia. Jon has been hacking on both hardware and software since he was a little tacker. Most recently he's been focusing more on the Open Hardware side, co-founding Freetronics as a direct result of organising the first Arduino Miniconf at LCA2010. His books include "Ubuntu Hacks" and "Practical Arduino". Jon has been variously referred to as Australia's geekiest man and as a cyborg-in-progress. As part of his “SuperHouse” home automation series, Jon has taken keyless entry to an all new level by embedding an RFID tag into his arm using a vet's chipping tool. Recently he has been working on ArduSat, a satellite that aims to give hobbyists, students and space enthusiasts an opportunity to design and run their own experiments in space. By choosing a standardised platform based on the hugely popular Arduino hardware design, ArduSat allows anyone to develop and prototype experiments at home using readily accessible parts and all based on a simple open source software environment. Kate Chapman Kate Chapman is the Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is an initiative of OpenStreetMap to apply the principles of open source and open data sharing towards humanitarian response and economic development. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team believes that freely available, up-to-date geographic data can be vital in responding to a disaster. They help communities and responders to utilize the OpenStreetMap data, and encourage them to contribute and update the data. Over the past two years Kate has been primarily based in Indonesia where she has lead the AusAID funded HOT program. The program Scenario Development for Contingency Planning (SD4CP) is a joint initiative of the Indonesian and Australian governments through BNPB (Indonesian Disaster Management Agency) and AusAID that aims to teach disaster mangers how to develop realistic impact scenario for contingency planning. HOT teaches disaster mangers to spatially analysis the combination of scientific hazard model outputs with community knowledge through the open-source software InaSAFE (Indonesia Scenario Assessment For Emergencies). OpenStreetMap is one of the keys elements of this procedure, as it allows the disaster mangers to draw on community knowledge to identify important buildings such as schools and hospitals that potentially be impacted during a disaster. We're really pleased to have Kate coming to talk with us as her personal efforts and her teams work represents an organization that we can really hold up as a shining example of how the open source model truly does work. Miniconfs Each year we try to select a range of topics for our focused mini conferences. This year's miniconf sessions are listed below. Monday: Systems Administration Developer, Testing, Release and Continuous integration Automation Open Government Open Radio Tuesday: OpenStack Linux Kernel Haecksen Astronomy Multimedia and Music Arduino Conference The main conference runs over the remaining three days, and is a full programme of five streams of deep technical presentations and tutorials covering a wide range of topics. To view the full schedule please visit our website at http://linux.conf.au/programme/schedule. Conference Location linux.conf.au will be held in Perth, Western Australia this year. Perth is Australia's most remote capital city, but is also where most of the action is happening. Perth is experiencing an huge amount of growth, driven by the mining boom, but encompassing all aspects of city life. Perth now has a vibrant cultural scene, and our outdoor lifestyle and coastal location is the envy of the world. The last linux.conf.au held in Perth was ten years ago in 2003, so we are really looking forward to hosting the conference again. The linux.conf.au conference is traditionally held on a university campus, utilising the lecture rooms and accommodation facilities they have to offer – 2014 is no exception, and we will be hosting the conference at the University of Western Australia (UWA). The UWA Crawley Campus is situated a short distance from the Perth CBD and adjacent to the magnificent Swan river and Kings Park public space. Accomodation Accommodation will be at the university colleges of St George's http://www.stgeorgescollege.com.au/ and Trinity http://www.trinity.uwa.edu.au/ for full details of the accomodation please refer to our wiki article https://lca2014.linux.org.au/wiki/Campus_accommodation. The accomodation is ideally situated just across the road from the conference and registration areas. Volunteering The conference is run as a voluntary effort. We rely on people to volunteer their time to organise and run the conference. During the conference we are always keen to welcome volunteers to come on board and help with the running of the conference. Interested people can sign up to volunteer at https://lca2014.linux.org.au/volunteer/new. We offer free registration for people who are willing to volunteer a significant portion of their time to the conference. Proposed Focus To provide a degree of consistency linux.conf.au normally selects a general focus to help guide the presenters in topic selection. For 2014 our focus is on “linux on the frontier and deep technical content”. With the scope of Linux broadening at such a rapid pace this provides a broad scope for speakers topics and allows topics to be drawn from just about any sphere of computing, be it cybernetics, mobile operating systems, astronomy, big data, gaming etc. Contacts Please send all correspondence to the LCA2014 Organising Team team(a)lists.lca2014.linux.org.au Our website is accessible from lca2014.linux.org.au #lca2014 _______________________________________________ Chat mailing list Chat(a)lists.lca2014.linux.org.au http://lists.lca2014.linux.org.au/mailman/listinfo/chat_lists.lca2014.linux…

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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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