Weird Screen Artifacts on X200

August 23, 2020 - 1 min read

I blogged earlier about the awesome little ThinkPad X200 I found and its blinking WiFi LED. Briefly I mentioned an odd issue with X/Wayland on LMDE 4. This turned out to be a HW bug that can only be worked around by disabling hardware acceleration for virtualization: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Windows-8-1-8-7-Vista-and-XP-Discussions/Bizarre-screen-artifacts-on-R400-Integrated-Graphics-running-Win-7-RTM/m-p/153980?page=1#199768 The post says it should be sufficient to “Disable Virtualization Technology for Directed-IO (VT-d)”, but that didn’t work for me, and I wanted to keep the 8 GiB of RAM I managed to fit into it.

HowTo: Build & Use My Projects

Joachim Wiberg - August 14, 2020 (updated October 5, 2021) - 5 mins read

Ever so often someone new to Open Source show up on GitHub or in my inbox. It usually starts something like this:

“Hey, I just downloaded your software, what’s next?”
“Your software doesn’t work on my system!!!!”
“How can I do that weird-thing that fits my odd use-case?”
“I have zero documented experience but I think you should fix your build system!”

This HowTo is for you.

0. Short Version

Download a versioned archive from the project’s Releases page
Extract archive for v1.2.3 and change to its directory, cd archive-1.2.3/
./configure --help, or use something like the following …
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var && make && sudo make install

Some projects of mine are available in Debian/Ubuntu/FreeBSD, if you use that, please report bugs to them and not me. I have no control over what they do.

Cheers
/Joachim

Wireguard and DNS Timeout

Joachim Wiberg - July 17, 2020 - 2 mins read

For a while now my Wireguard VPN provider has been handing out a bad DNS server. So whenever I do a DNS lookup it takes five (5!) seconds timing out, which is quite annoying.

This blog post is about how you can fix this with openresolv in Ubuntu.

Open Source Releases

June 9, 2020 - 1 min read

The last couple of months have been crazy. The downturn in the economy due to Covid-19, mass layoffs, social distancing and quarantine. Not to mention the unrest in US and Europe in the wake of George Floyd’s uneccessary death.

sudo tricks

June 7, 2020 - 1 min read

“My name is Joachim and I’m a sudo su - user.”

Before you read any further, please read A life without sudo.

Minix Editline

April 5, 2020 (updated July 4, 2026) - 2 mins read

This is a line editing library for UNIX. It can be linked into almost any program to provide command line editing and history. It is call compatible with the FSF readline library, but is a fraction of the size (and offers fewer features). The small size (<30k), lack of dependencies (no ncurses needed!) and the free license should make this library interesting to many embedded developers seeking a replacement for the GNU readline library.

Fix blinking WiFi LED on X200

March 28, 2020 - 1 min read

Recently got my hands on a ThinkPad X200, the last model without the useless touchpad and with the awesome classic keyboard. A fine little machine that can easily be upgraded with an SSD disk and 8 GiB RAM!

I set it up with Linx Mint (LMDE 4), which worked great to begin with, but there was some odd issue with X/Wayland that sometimes caused the screen (only the screen) to freeze up and show random color patterns. Only way to workaround it was to suspend, wait, and resume again. So now I’m running Ubuntu 20.04 on it and everything seems to work a lot better, this far.

HowTo: Install pre-built packages

February 23, 2020 - 1 min read

Every now and then people ask me for pre-built packages of software I maintain. Up until today I’ve had to refer them to the cold hard build instructions for each of my programs.

Mini SNMP daemon

February 23, 2020 (updated July 4, 2026) - 4 mins read

This is an SNMP server for small and embedded systems, currently Linux and FreeBSD are supported. It is easily portable to other UNIX systems since it’s written in C. A stripped binary is ~80 kiB and comes nowhere near the feature set of Net-SNMP, so it has a very low impact on system resources — a good fit for routers, NAS boxes, and other embedded devices. See my mini HowTo: Playing with SNMP for a quick introduction to setting up the SNMP tools and MIBs to avoid having to use numerical OIDs.

Small and Simple DDNS Client

February 20, 2020 (updated January 3, 2024) - 2 mins read

In-a-dyn is a small and simple Dynamic DNS, DDNS, client with HTTPS support. It is commonly available in many GNU/Linux distributions, used in off-the-shelf routers and Internet gateways to automate the task of keeping your DNS record up to date with any IP address changes from your ISP. It can also be used in installations with redundant (backup) connections to the Internet. Presentation here. Example The configuration file on most systems is in /etc/inadyn.