This post shows how you can extend Finit with your own conditions. The
example we will use is a simple Internet connectivity checker. When it
triggers we start BusyBox ntpd which, if started with any other type of
condition (none, default route, etc.) may get stuck trying to resolve
pool.ntp.org.
I believe there is a gap in the market between BusyBox init and
systemd. In particular in the embedded space. This blog post shows how
easily it is to get up and running quickly with FastInit (Finit)!
I’m a really bad salesman, and an even worse writer, so instead of
trying to convince you with my poor English, I’ve made a demo. It is a
Buildroot external
that can be used to add Finit to your own projects.
I still use my awesome little ThinkPad X200, in fact I now have more of them and even a few X201’s. They are truly the best machines I’ve ever used! :-)
One annoying thing though, when going back to these traditional ThinkPad keyboards is the prev/next keys next to the arrow keys. On modern ones they are PgUp/PgDn and I recently learned how to elegantly remap them in X. Note the difference, below, to the original at ThinkWiki.
The logger(1) tool in your system, /usr/bin/logger, standardized in IEEE Std 1003.2 (“POSIX.2”), has many different implementations. For Linux users the most common one is part of the util-linux package.
I’ve always considered this one of those weird Linux:isms. The logger tool is closely tied to the system log daemon, so in the sysklogd project we ship our own implementation of logger. Our implementation is derived from the Finit project’s logit tool.
SMCRoute is a daemon and command line tool to manipulate the multicast routing table in the UNIX kernel. Both FreeBSD and Linux kernels are supported, but it may work on other systems as well.
SMCRoute can be used as an alternative to dynamic multicast routing daemons like mrouted or pimd when (only) static multicast routes should be maintained or no proper signalling exists.
The full documentation of SMCRoute is available in the manual pages, see smcrouted(8), smcroutectl(8), and smcroute.
This post shows how you can create your own operating system based on Buildroot. Add your own packages, patches, and your very own flavor to the experience.
My own take on this is myLinux, which started out as a TroglOS, and before that as miniroot, by Henrik Nordström. Please feel free to dig around myLinux for more inspiration and tips on how to solve common use-cases.
The manual, section 9, describes the basic process of setting up a our customizations as a BR2_EXTERNAL tree.
Because I always tend to forget steps, and haven’t half replaced myself
with a shell script (yet), here’s a reminder to myself on how to post a
patch to the Linux netdev mailing
list.
This is a mini-HowTo on running Finit in an LXC system container. We
will be using a variant (external) of Buildroot, called NetBox to
create a squashfs (read-only) image for the root filesystem. Then we
will give the container a single writable directory from which it then
uses bind mount to emulate a full-blown system.
It is expected you have LXC installed and all the relevant build tools
needed to create the image. How to set that up is not covered by this
tutorial.
As a follow-up to my previous Buildroot mailing-list post about the
git format-patch and git send-email commands, this post covers how
to set up the latter.
I’m very pleased to announce Finit v4.2! It comes seven months
after the last release, v4.1, with a bunch of fixes and some new
features. See the release notes for details.
