Sunday, November 12th, 2006

Work in progress

Posted in Network Info

hey guys,

Sorry for the lack of action. I’m in the process of writing articles on two common minimal boxes: the HP 712 HPPA and the Mac m68k.

I will be covering the only distribution that seems to cover those two platforms: Debian.

 

So stay tuned :)

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Friday, October 27th, 2006

A look at FreeSCO

Posted in Distros

FreeSCO is a floppy-based Linux distribution that would qualify as an unexpensive replacement for cisco routers. It makes a great home or small office router/gateway/firewall. Why am I talking about this here? Because freesco is as small as they come. Although a bit outdated, it is still an excellent solution for many people, and as it’s Linux, most likely easy to update.

A single floppy gives you:

* a simple bridge with up to 10 Ethernet segments
* a router with up to 10 Ethernet segments
* a dialup line router
* a leased line router
* an Ethernet router
* a dial-in server with up to 10 modems (with multiport modems).
* a time server
* a dhcp server
* a http server
* a ftp server
* a dns server
* a ssh server
* a print server (requires TCP/IP printing client software)
* PPPoE, and PPtP clients
* Dynamic DNS, Zonedit and DHS support.

The beauty of freesco is that it’s extremelly light, and does not require any hard drives. Just dig your old 386 or 486 out of the closet, stick two network cards in it, and boot using the freesco floppy. You have an instant router/gateway/firewall ready for use.

One of the things that makes it so powerful is that although it doesn’t require hard drives, you can install it to a FAT16/FAT32 or EXT2 partition, and have additional modules for many network services, daemons, and applications available to you, that would not fit on a standard size floppy.

You can check it out at http://www.freesco.org.

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Sunday, October 22nd, 2006

Unretired

Posted in Blogging Info

Ok, I’m taking over! *MOUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*

Seriously, Jon has granted me the privilege to write on Minimum Linux. In my upcoming blogger career (if there is such a thing), I plan to write about running Linux/Unix on limited hardware: lightweight distributions, window managers, command-line stuff, etc.

For those who are sitting there going “Who the heck is this guy?”, here goes: I am mostly known on the ‘Net as dadexter. You can google me up, or checkout ##slackware, #archlinux, #slackbuilds, and a few other places on IRC @ Freenode.

So, stay tuned for some exciting stuff! Maybe I’ll be able to help you make those old 386 and 486 boxes of yours do more than just sit in the corner of the basement :)

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Friday, October 6th, 2006

Retired!

Posted in Blogging Info

Sadly, Rod has decided to move on from Linux World Net. Minimum Linux will stay up in order to continue to make the information herein available to the world, but unless a new author steps up there will be no new posts.

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Thursday, September 14th, 2006

Another low-cost PC

Posted in General

I found this little gem via Slashdot. Unfortunately, most of the article talks about the controversy surrounding the Godson-2 CPU and it’s similarities to the MIPS chip. I’d be much more interested in the footprint and capabilities of this machine beyond what is already known: A Linux machine based on a 800Mhx - 1Ghz Godson-2 CPU, 256MB RAM, 40-60GB hard drive. Cost will be initially be $150-$175, though the article says that if initial sales are successful, mass production should lower the price to $125. I’ve been doing a bit of searching this morning, and I can’t find much beyond that.

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Monday, September 11th, 2006

FreeDOS 1.0

Posted in General

This news isn’t directly Linux-related but I thought it of interest anyhow. On September 3, 2006, FreeDOS finally reached the 1.0 milestone!

FreeDOS is a free, open-source, replacement for MS-DOS. As someone who migrated to Slackware from MS-DOS, not Windows, I’ve spent a lot of time running various versions of DOS via DOSemu, including many older versions of FreeDOS that have come with DOSemu over the years. This latest version of FreeDOS is the most excited I’ve been about DOS in years!

You can read the original announcement of the 1.0 milestone on the Sourceforge FreeDOS project page. The announcement is available here.

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Friday, September 8th, 2006

Ohio LinuxFest

Posted in General

First, I’d like to apologize for my absence. I work full-time and attend university as well, and fall quarter has begun, which has briefly disrupted my rhythm. I’m settling in to a new routine, so regular entries should start showing up again.

Ohio LinuxFest has announced their speakers, and though I’ll be covering many of them over on Linux Security, Matthew Porter, from Embedded Alley Solutions, Inc, will be giving a talk titled Using Linux in Embedded Systems - Challenges and Solutions that I plan of covering here. While the focus of Minimum Linux isn’t necessarily embedded systems, many of the challenges are similar, so this session should fit it very well around here.

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Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

MythTV

Posted in Projects

While my Windows-based solution is working out well enough, I haven’t completely given up on MythTV as the basis for my HTPC. I’ve followed some suggestions and picked up an amplifier to try to fix my snow problem. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense that it would work under Windows just fine but not under Linux, but maybe the drivers have a sensitivity issue that isn’t present with the manufacturer-supplied Windows drivers. So at some point over the weekend, I’m going to give KnoppMyth another go, especially since I’ve discovered the issue with my wireless NIC.

Some wireless NICs have an issue with associating properly to an access point. I mentioned this last time as well, and have since tested it out, but the trick is to put the card into ad-hock mode, and then put it back into managed mode. It seems to work for my card, so it was not an issue with either ndiswrapper or the Linux wireless tools, or any sort of version mismatch between the two, even though that’s what I originally suspected.

Hopefully, soon, I’ll be able to report that I have a MythTV box that is working wonderfully. I things work out well, I’ll post a step-by-step HOWTO to simplify the process for everyone else.

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Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

MythDora

Posted in Projects

As mentioned previously, I’m working on a home theater PC, and not having much luck with KnoppMyth. After a bit of digging around, I discovered MythDora.

Let me start off by stating that I am not a fan of Red Hat. I can’t qualify that feeling, other than to say that I’m a Slackware user. However, Slackware is not a “minimum effort” distro, which is what I’m aiming for with this project. I also realize that Fedora has come into it’s own of late, so I thought I’d give this Fedora-based distro a shot.

I’ve downloaded and burned MythDora to CD, and set my BIOS to boot from CD first, and I start following the excellent installation instructions. The only place I deviate is in setting up ndiswrapper. This time, I’m presented with an error message, but my wireless NIC actually works! So I continue through the installation and configuration process, and I end with the same result as before - both tuners have snowy pictures on all channels. I’ve tried updating the IVTV drivers without any luck.

This project was meant as a “minimum effort” project, yet it hasn’t turned out this way. So for now, I’ve installed Windows XP Home on the machine and have went with GB-PVR. I’ve also tried Got All Media and Media Portal as well. None of the three are ideal, as I’d much rather be running MythTV on Linux.

My recommendation for a pain-free install of MythTV would be to do as much research before you start. If you’re using a wireless NIC, make sure it has built-in support in Linux. Also, make sure there are no known issues with the tuner you chose. Many people blame the internal splitter for a lack of power in the signal, but running the Hauppauge dual-tuner under Windows disproves this theory. Had I gone with a pair of PVR 250s or 350s, and an external splitter, I probably would have had much better luck. Had I made better hardware choices, both KnoppMyth and MythDora would have provided a pain-free, 10-minute install of MythTV.

As a note to the project leads for both KnoppMyth and MythDora, a nice feature might be to prompt for the Windows drivers CD for a wireless NIC, and attempt to set up ndiswrapper automatically. It would be a nice feature for those who might have made otherwise good hardware choices.

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Friday, August 25th, 2006

KnoppMyth

Posted in Projects

As I mentioned the other day, I have set out to build a home theater PC that runs MythTV. I also wanted to keep with my “minimum” theme and do it with minimum effort. So, I downloaded KnoppMyth, only half-expecting to have things up and running in the 10 minutes or so that they managed to pull off in Systm Episode 2 - MythTV. As you can probably guess by the fact that I’m doing an entry on it, things did not go quite as planned…

I have the system built, and it fires up just fine (after discovering that I misread the motherboard header information and plugged the power switch in at the wrong spot). I set system the date and time to UTC and told the system to boot from CD. Everything is going well until I get to network detection. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, as I’ve disabled the onboard NIC and used a Linksys WiFi card from another system. So I thought I’d skip anything that required the network and do those items later.

And then I discover another problem. Even though everything else appeared to go well, both tuners display a snowy picture. This may be a result of choosing us-cable instead of us-cable-hrc or us-cable-irc, but I had not discovered how to check this yet. From what I gather, if you tune to channels 5 and 6 and they’re clear, then this setting is incorrect. But, as I said, I didn’t know this at the time and went searching the web for possible solutions. Many seemed to indicate that because of the internal RF splitter for the dual tuners, I may need an RF booster.

I immediately stopped where I was, and because I only had 10 minutes invested, did a quick install of Windows XP Home. I installed my WiFi drivers and the drivers for my dual-tuner card, and downloaded some free Windows PVR software. Both tuners display nice and clear, so I’m guessing newer IVTV drivers (the Linux drivers for the Hauppauge X50/500 tuners) might solve my problems. So, back to installing KnoppMyth I go, planning on using ndiswrapper to load my wifi drivers and download the ivtv drivers.

After a bit more searching, I discover that ndiswrapper is included in the latest KnoppMyth distribution. Except it doesn’t want to work right with my card for some reason, and I’m not sure why. I think it could be a version conflict between ndiswrapper and the Linux wireless tools that are included in KnoppMyth, but I’m not sure. Everything seems to load OK, but I cannot get the card to associate with any AP. It insists that it stay in adhock mode instead of managed mode, despite being told otherwise. So, download the ndiswrapper source to CD from another machine, and copy them to the KnoppMyth machine and try to compile, but receive an error about having the wrong version of gcc.

A little more searching the web, and I discover that some wifi cards might need switched to “mode any” and then back to “mode managed” before the setting will stick, so I decide to try to determine if my card is one of the ones that suffers this bug, and install Fedora Core 4 on the MythTV machine. I copy the ndiswrapper source from CD and compile, and load my WiFi drivers with complete success. So, since I have Fedora already installed, I try out the Fedora Myth(TV)ology Howto. But it breaks with the nVidia video drivers. Go figure.

So far, this has been much more than minimum effort. Since Fedora seemed to be going well until I had trouble with the nVidia drivers, I did a little more digging on the web and discovered MythDora. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but I hope is solved the “minimum effort” problem. I’ll try it this evening and report back with my findings.

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    Minimum Linux is about putting the power of Linux to work on limited hardware. Need more info? Email Martin at Linuxworldnet dot com.