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.
Every so often someone new to Open Source shows up on GitHub or in my
inbox with a question like:
“I just downloaded your software, what’s next?”
“It doesn’t build on my system, can you help?”
“How can I adapt it to my own use-case?”
“Could the build system be improved?”
These are all good questions, and this HowTo tries to answer the most
common ones up front.
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 of my projects are also available in Debian/Ubuntu/FreeBSD. If
you installed one from there, please report bugs to them first, they
may carry their own patches.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.