Planeta SzLUUGa

Some OpenEmbedded/Poky tricks

2009-11-21T08:30:47+00:00

During use of OpenEmbedded and Poky build systems I learnt few tricks which I want to start sharing.

Installing l10n packages for all software in resulting rootfs

This one is rarely used — I know one company which makes use of it. How does it works? It is called after root filesystem is populated with packages and goes one by one and install “-locale-LANG” for each required language. As you may expect it makes whole process much, much longer. Activation is easy:

ROOTFS_POSTINSTALL_COMMAND += "install_all_locales; "

Code is available only for building from IPKG packages and is stored in rootfs_ipk.bbclass file. So far that code is present only in Poky Linux.

Building AUTOREV packages over slow link

How many times you had a situation when you did a build and many components used SRCREV="${AUTOREV}" setting? Parsing can take eons then…

But there is a solution. It will cache values of all SRCREV variables so just one parse will be long — next one use cached values. Of course you lose automatic revisions but instead you have fast parsing time which is blessing when most of your work is fixing build problems. Activation is easy:

BB_SRCREV_POLICY = "cache"

Save disc space by not generating GIT tarballs in DL_DIR

How many of you readers share your DL_DIR (directory where OE stores all fetched sources) with others? For those who answered “not me” there is a way to gain some space by not generating tarballs with GIT repositories.

By default BitBake clones GIT tree and checkouts it. Then 2 archives are generated: one with just “.git” directory and second with sources — the one which is used in do_unpack task. So why waste space for storing first one? We have it somewhere in DL_DIR/git/ for next time… Activation is easy:

BB_GENERATE_MIRROR_TARBALLS = "0"

Links for 2009-11-20 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-21T08:00:00+00:00

Graphing with Inkscape: The Art of Data Presentation
Graphs themselves are a visual art-form, and there are many ways to make digital graphs, but many are downright ugly and low quality. Each time that I see an Excel graph in a chemistry journal, I squirm with disgust and lament. A good graph should be beautiful, eye-catching, and high quality in addition to being easily understood; telling the data’s story in visual prose.

Driving with Ovi Maps

2009-11-20T15:05:41+00:00

My Symbian based Nokia E66 phone has Ovi Maps installed so one day I decided to make use of routing function in it when I was driving to the town (on a road where I did not needed to be guided). BT headset on ear, paired with phone and let’s drive.

At start road was selected quite properly, the problems started later. Many times it was recalculating route (the funniest was when I stopped at traffic lights it recalculated route and then made it again after driving for 5 meters). Directions changes information were also distracting: “on 200m go left” then “go right” when I reached point. Or “go left,right” when it was straight road or when I had to turn right at crossing.

I have to admit that after two tries I totally gave up on driving with it and switched back to TomTom device. But there is one good thing in Ovi Maps — it works quite good for walk navigation. I used it in many cities abroad and it handled. I hope that Maemo5 version will work at least that good as Symbian one.

Biją Tora.

2009-11-20T07:45:53+00:00

Nie pomyliłem w niedawnym wpisie. Atak na Tora po trudnej do obronienia, bo emocjonalnej linii stał się faktem.

Więcej..

Played a bit with Maemo 5 SDK

2009-11-19T22:07:34+00:00

Today I found some time and played with Maemo 5 SDK. As I am one of those who do not like Scratchbox I used official image for VirtualBox. After boot I landed in GNOME session of Ubuntu 8.10 and after few moments I got Maemo 5 started thanks to instructions from forum.

Ok, so let’s test it. As official release notes mentioned Polish translation I switched to it. What I saw was disaster… And the problem is that latest firmware has same version available. Examples:

Note: I did system update by using “apt-get update;apt-get upgrade” followed by “fakeroot dpkg --configure -a” (because sbox root ‘emulation’ was too weak for “libosso-abook”). As a result translation “6.0+r7250+0m5″ were installed (”calendar-l10n-plpl” package). Scary, isn’t it?

Next thing which I looked at was instant messaging — which I was not able to use since there was no Jabber support. It has ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, MSN, Sametime, Salut, QQ, Groupwise, Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo but no Jabber. I even installed “telepathy-extras” but that added me yet another MSN and still no Jabber… Probably other package needs to be installed but why it has to be? OK, maybe SDK image does not contain same packages as device one but why it supports such poor thing like Gadu-Gadu out-of-box?

Contacts app is improved when compared to Maemo4 one — finally something closer to application which I described some time ago in other post. Has some bugs (I can not enter “+48123456789″ as number because only digits are available (and ‘p’ for internal numbers).

Looks like there will be a long list of things to report as bugs when/if I will get my N900 (so far it is somewhere in deep nowhere). Why not reporting them now? Simple — I want to be able to check them on device itself.

Other things I will check next time. Now it is time to sleep.

Epidemia grypy, czy nietypowa karetka?

2009-11-19T18:25:21+00:00

Dziś idąc do pracy napotkałem dziwne zjawisko. Karetka, na sygnale, jakich wiele. Ale coś przykuło moją uwagę. Osoba obok kierowcy dziwnie wyglądała. Przyjrzałem się dokładniej - na pewno maska na twarzy, jeśli dobrze zauważyłem - także czepek, jak do operacji. To by jeszcze uszło, ale kierowca był w identycznym stroju. Przyznam, że nieswojo się poczułem - jak na filmie o epidemii, albo jakimś porwaniu (i wtedy maski po prostu do ukrycia twarzy).

Tak się zastanawiam, czy wszystkie karetki w Poznaniu teraz tak jeżdżą, czy jakąś wyjątkową napotkałem? Jeśli tak, to czy orientuje się ktoś w jakich okolicznościach się tak stroją? Kojarzę jakieś filmy o AIDS, gdzie noszowi byli jak na wojnę biologiczną wystrojeni (nawet bardziej, niż ci dziś). Za info z góry dzięki.

UPDATE: Karetka była nietypowa, a na pewno nie wszystkie tak jeżdżą - wczoraj widziałem normalną.

wondershaper is a real wonder

2009-11-19T01:36:30+00:00

Have you ever experienced "slow internet" when there is another ongoing transfer on your wire which fully saturates the bandwidth. Even if one can accept high latency of HTTP transfers (sooner or later the page will appear in the browser), in case of interactive sessions like SSH it is completely unacceptable. Wondershaper is a great remedy with minimal side effects - especially if your are running your router on Linux machine.

Wondershaper is using CBQ instead of HTB and I am aware that there are better approaches to traffic shaping in Linux. But "traffic shaping" is usually associated with the context of splitting the bandwidth of single internet link among many hosts. This is too much in my case and wondershaper does exactly what I expect.

My ADSL line is 1024/256kb officially. But in logs I can see different values:

ATM dev 0: ADSL line is up (1312 kb/s down | 320 kb/s up)

At first I tried to provide these values to wondershaper, however they were too high (high latency still and packet drops in addition). By using different values I finally established that official numbers give the best trade-off between latency and link speed.

In case of my link the average download rate is around 126KB/s. Now with wondershaper it is around 120KB/s - about 95% of the original speed - this the cost. However SSH sessions work like a charm when updates are being downloaded and the browser loads pages almost as fast as usually.

Now specific section of my /etc/network/interfaces (Debian specific) looks like:

auto ppp0
iface ppp0 inet ppp
    pre-up /usr/local/sbin/firewall.sh start
    pre-up while ! grep 'Line up' /proc/net/atm/speedtch:0 &>/dev/null; do sleep 1; done
    up wondershaper ppp0 1024 256
    post-up echo "1" >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
    down wondershaper clean ppp0
    post-down echo "0" >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
    post-down /usr/local/sbin/firewall.sh stop

Kupon jak zwykle

2009-11-18T08:48:05+00:00

Oto kupon rabatowy uprawniający Cię do 10 zł zniżki na zakupy w księgarni helion.pl! Kupon będzie aktywny do północy we wtorek 24.11.2009 r.

KOD KUPONU RABATOWEGO: E5F096-711EF4-H

Więcej o kuponie rabatowym przeczytasz na stronie: [ http://helion.pl/page4411.~info/kupon.htm ]

Różności: Radio Baobab, OpenWrt.

2009-11-18T07:35:19+00:00

Jakiś czas temu Wawrzek napisał u siebie o Radio Baobab i się zachwycałem tą stacją. Niestety, po około półtora miesiąca wychodzą na jaw wady - contentu nie jest aż tak dużo, przez co stosunkowo często trafiamy na te same audycje utwory, w dodatku w dużych setach. Druga wada, to stosunkowo częste zrywanie transmisji. Zależy od dnia, bo są takie, że godzinami działa OK, a czasem co kilka minut zrywa (też tak macie?). Kto jest winny (czy serwer nadający Baobaba, czy nie ISP lub jakiś styk w sieci) - jeszcze nie prowadziłem śledztwa. Ale nadal jak działa to czasem miło włączyć, bo ciekawe kawałki się zdarzają. No i całkiem inaczej, niż w innych stacjach.

Ostatnio służbowo musiałem pobawić się OpenWrt (na co miałem sporą chrapkę od dawna, ale jakoś na własnym routerku nie było czasu i warunków na eksperymenty). Padło na Kamikadze 8.09.1 z kernelem 2.4 (z różnych względów). Fajny jest i bardzo prosty, choć dokumentacja IMO niewystarczająca i może ludzi bez doświadczenia odstraszać. Wersja po kabelku chodzi od kopa, wifi nie testowałem, ale z opisów wynika, że da się bez problemu.

Jeśli komuś nie podoba się domyślne GUI, to polecam zapoznanie się z projektem x-wrt, czyli dużo ładniejszą i bardziej funkcjonalną nakładką graficzną na OpenWrt. Chociaż esencją i tak pozostaje konsola. Na razie w domu nie mam - muszę doczytać o Tor na OpenWrt, coś mi się obiło przy szybkim researchu, że są błędy jakieś i nienajnowsza wersja.

Sim.One #0006 arrived

2009-11-17T17:10:53+00:00

Today I got nice package in post office — Simplemachines One developer board (Sim.One in short). It is based on Cirrus Logic EP9307 processor with Maverick Crunch floating point unit. I got board with #0006 serial number.

Board is much better then EDB9301 which I used so far for EP93xx toolchain tests. What is on board:

EP9307 CPU
64MB ram
8MB NOR flash
MMC slot (connected over SPI so ~250KB/s max)
2 USB host ports
VGA out port — XGA 8bit or SVGA 8/16/24bit
serial port in RJ-45 instead of standard DB9 (but cable is in package)
audio in/out jacks
many connectors with different signals — will have to check schematics for that.

By default board boots into Debian ‘lenny’ system stored on 4GB SDHC card. But there are problems with it as this is MMC over SPI so speed is very limited (about 250KB/s only) and it time outs quite often so I plan to move to USB stick during next days.

Next step will be adding it into OpenEmbedded and running Ångström as base distribution.

BTW — how did I got it at all? That’s due my recent work on merging EP93xx support into OE — I was asked do I want developer board with this processor.

noatime

2009-11-17T00:41:04+00:00

If you need I/O performance bust it might worth to turn on noatime flag on important partitions. Look down to see how it pushed down the read level on a server with Apache serving a static content.

Usually I add noatime flag during a system installation, but this time forgot about it and had to remount the file system. Thanks that mistake I got this beautiful image ;)
You can go even further and turn on nodiratime, it should decrease read even more.

GMAIL and msmtp (Mutt)

2009-11-13T17:53:27+00:00

This is the example how to configure the msmtp (i.e. for Mutt) to use thegmail smtp server. Remember that you need the certificate. I have got mine from old Ubuntu installation (Saving /etc directory before reinstallation a box is good idea).

account your.user
logfile ~/.msmtp.log

tls on
tls_starttls on    
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
auth on

host smtp.gmail.com
port 587 
from your.user@gmail.com
user your.user@gmail.com
password YOUR_password

BTW, in Ubuntu you can grab certificate by sudo apt-get install ca-certificates.

Jak skonfigurować dźwięk, by wszystko grało (ALSA, dmix)

2009-11-13T12:03:07+00:00

Jak zwykle – zapisuję, bo zgubię…

Konfiguracja używa wtyczki dmix, do wypuszczenia całości dźwięku na kartę. Dmix potrafi połączyć wiele streamów jednocześnie, dzięki czemu unikamy sytuacji w której urządzenie /dev/snd/pcm* jest zajęte (jest, owszem, ale przez dmix) i jeden program odtwarza dzwięk, a inne muszą czekać na zwolnienie urządzenia.

Przykład najprostszej z możliwych konfiguracji poniżej.

pcm.!default { type plug slave.pcm "dmix" }

pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmix"
}

ctl.mixer0 {
type hw
card 0
}

Całość umieszczamy w pliku ~/.asoundrc.

P.S. Jak zwykle – nie ponoszę odpowiedzialności za użycie powyższego przykładu i spieprzenie sobie w ten sposób systemu. U mnie działa! Jeżeli u ciebie nie – znaczy, że być może coś przejmuje kontrolę na poziomie systemu (jackd, pulseaudio?). Daj znać w komentarzu – może będę w stanie pomóc.

Links for 2009-11-12 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-13T08:00:00+00:00

Linux Kernel Documentation :: sound : alsa : HD-Audio-Models.txt

Poky Linux 3.1.2 released

2009-11-13T06:45:34+00:00

Yesterday Richard Purdie released maintenance version of Poky ‘pinky’ branch. It contains mostly fixes to get it into buildable state in all distributions released since 3.1.1 was done.

It got over 50 changes during 1.5 year of development. Most of them were done by me as part of my work for Bug Labs company and their BUG Linux distribution. As policy of handling fixes requires to make them also in development branch it was more then just make a fix for ‘pinky’ — I also had to take care of ‘elroy’ (which had to be next stable version) and ‘master’. Some time ago support for ‘elroy’ was dropped anyway.

If you look at ‘git log’ output you will notice few authors other then just me. Thats because if fix was present in other sources such like Poky ‘master’ or OpenEmbedded I cherrypicked it and adapted to make it apply with keeping original author credits.

Did I add something new into it? Yes, few things were added:

SPLASH support in task-poky so you can use own bootsplash tool instead of psplash
warning for ‘/proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr’ not being set to 0 (which would break qemu)
Python 2.6 compatibility
BP/BPN variables which were used in Jalimo repository which we use as one of overlays
automatic resizing of ext2/3 images if rootfs do not fit in default size

What will future bring? I hope that new stable branch for Poky will be created in next few months so developers will be able to switch. I know that some companies did a move from ‘pinky’ to ‘master’ (or snapshot of it + own changes). We at Bug Labs are moving into OpenEmbedded ’stable/2009′ as we need newer software and want some functionality which is not present in ‘pinky’.

Back from OEDEM 2009

2009-11-12T13:46:32+00:00

During last weekend I was in Cambridge, UK where OEDEM 2009 took place. This time it was organized by Phil Blundell from Reciva company (they make nice Internet radio devices, new ones do also FM and DAB).

I travelled by Berlin and Stansted due to fact that at those days there are no flights Londyn — Szczecin on Friday and Sunday. That gave opportunity to meet Henning and Robert in Berlin and discuss misc things during travel.

Friday evening was spent in Red Lion pub in Histon. Nice, tasty English beers and interesting place. Both ways with taxi because of raining and price was comparable to public transport.

On Saturday we walked to OEDEM place using Phil’s notes and got there with just one short cut missed (we found it next day).

What was discussed during meeting? Many things, we had also OE e.V. meeting during which we voted for few new members, chosen new board, decided on sponsoring and selected Robert Schuster for PR guy.

So what was on topic:

OE e.V. meeting (minutes)
Establishment of technical steering committee (summary)
OE and Poky (summary)
Software development for OE derived distributions (summary)
Learning to love distro flags, or, What’s a distro for? (summary)
State of the art in package management (summary)
Splitting the recipes tree (summary)
Future plans for stable branch(es) (summary)
Bugtracker Discussion (summary)
Hosting arrangements (summary)
Death to checksums.ini? (summary)
BitBake Future Roadmap (summary)
OE Core Changes (summary)

Each entry was already summarized so I provided links for those who did not read OpenEmbedded development mailing list. Discussion was hot, many subjects had different opinions from audience and it was great.

As usual it was nice to meet friends from OE in person and for few of them connect face to name. And again I did not had any spare time to look around the city of OEDEM — too many things in small amount of time. But maybe another time :)

Discounted Devices Program: N900

2009-11-10T15:49:52+00:00

I just ordered N900 for 250€ directly from Nokia thanks to discount which I got recently.

Plan to write review after first days of use so stay tuned.

Dystrykt 9

2009-11-09T00:11:15+00:00

Właśnie wróciłem z kina i gdybym miał podsumować to jednym zdaniem to napisałbym Lepiej późno niż wcale. Film wywarł na mnie wielkie wrażenie. Ostatnio o czymś podobnym mogłem chyba powiedzieć po (w trakcie) oglądania Battlestar Galactica.

Nie powiem, że film nie pozbawionych jest wad. Szczególnie w scenariusz pojawiają się rozwiązania trochę naciągane. Nie da się ukryć, że szczególnie w drugiej, krwawej części filmu. To tylko jednak niewielkie niedociągnięcia, bo scenariusz ma to co najważniejsze — ciekawy pomysł! Oczywiście samo pomysł nie wystarczy, dlatego równie ważne jest, że akcja prowadzona jest ciekawie i trzyma dobrą dynamikę. Genialnie dobrano scenerię. Wspaniały pomysł, by kosmici pośród slamsów Johannesburga. No i ten ich wiszący nad miastem statek. Autorzy przyłożyli się do stworzenia ciekawych bohaterów, w szczególności Wikusa van de Merwe. Właściwie wszyscy inni to tło. Dużo w filmie zła, ludzie zgromadzeni wokół "Zony" to prawdziwy "katalog zboczeń". Z drugiej strony postawa Wikusa, jest obrazem nadzieje, że nie wszyscy i całkiem jesteśmy źli. Ze scenerią świetnie współgra intrygująca i tajemnicze muzyka. Bardzo dobre i dobrze dobrane efekty specjalne, a po przecież nie zawsze (wręcz rzadko?) idzie w parze. Pomagają budować akcję, a nie przygniatają jej.

Na zakończenie jeszcze taka jedna myśl. Oglądając film, przypominała mi się fantastyczne filmy Piotra Szulkina i Stalkera Tarkowskiego. Muszę je sobie odświeżyć.

Tragiczny kod widgetu AdTaily.

2009-11-08T12:47:40+00:00

Kiedyś, gdy AdTaily startowało (zamknięta beta), a ja miałem piękny i validujący się się XHTML 1.0 Strict na blogu, pierwszą rzeczą, na którą zwróciłem uwagę po zainstalowaniu widgetu, była była niezgodność z XHTML. Małe, a drażni, więc zgłosiłem błąd. Samemu nie udało mi się poprawić - primo, bardzo słabo znam JS, secundo, ok. 20 kB to jednak sporo do przeglądania.

O całej sprawie zapomniałem, aż do wczoraj, gdy niezależnie dwóm osobom (KosciaK i Tomasz Fiedoruk), o których wiedziałem, że powinny mieć umieszczony widget, napisałem, że wszystko fajnie, ale widgetu nie widzę. Winnym okazało się AdTaily, a raczej tragiczny kod ichniego widgetu, ale po kolei...

Więcej..

smartd.conf: the ultimate settings

2009-11-08T00:54:42+00:00

By "ultimate settings" I mean options which suit my needs best ;) . I had problems finding comprehensive example of smartd.conf options. Here is what I finally came to:

/dev/sda         \ # The device to monitor
 -a              \ # Implies all standard testing and reporting.
 -n standby,10,q \ # Don't spin up disk if it is currently spun down
                 \ #   unless it is 10th attempt in a row. 
                 \ #   Don't report unsuccessful attempts anyway.
 -o on           \ # Automatic offline tests (usually every 4 hours).
 -S on           \ # Attribute autosave (I don't really understand
                 \ #   what it is for. If you can explain it to me
                 \ #   please drop me a line.
 -R 194          \ # Show real temperature in the logs.
 -R 231          \ # The same as above.
 -I 194          \ # Ignore temperature attribute changes
 -W 3,50,50      \ # Notify if the temperature changes 3 degrees
                 \ #   comparing to the last check or if
                 \ #   the temperature exceeds 50 degrees.
 -s (S/../.././02|L/../../1/22) \ # short test: every day between 2-3am
                                \ # long test every Monday between 10pm-2am
                                \ # (Long test takes a lot of time
                                \ # and it should be finished before
                                \ # daily short test starts.
                                \ # At 3am every day this disk will be
                                \ # utilized heavily as a backup storage)
 -m root         \ # To whom we should send mails.
 -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner # standard debian script