Wolfmans Howlings

A programmers Blog about Programming solutions and a few other issues

Upgrading a Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 server to Lucid 10.06 with software RAID 1

Posted by Jim Morris on Mon Nov 29 23:06:57 -0800 2010

I needed to upgrade a remote server that was running Dapper to Lucid, as Dapper is no longer supported (or will soon be EOL'd). This server uses a software RAID 1, and that seems to be the problem.

I tried to do this over the network via ssh in a screen, however after it upgraded to Hardy it failed to boot.

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Posted in Linux  |  Tags ubuntu,dapper,lucid,upgrade,raid  |  no comments

Converting a Sidewinder 3D pro joystick to USB

Posted by Jim Morris on Sat Oct 24 14:50:02 -0700 2009

In playing with my new Rovio I decided that my Old MS Sidewinder 3D Pro Joystick would be an excellent way to control it, as it has the twist which can rotate the Rovio, and the joystick up/left/down/right can move the Rovio in those directions while still facing forward.

The problem is that the joystick has a game port connector, and my Linux workstation does not have a game-port. After doing the obligatory Googling I found this Exactly what I needed, except this was for Windows not Linux. Thinking I would have to modify the code I contacted Grendel who graciously sent me the source code for the project, however it turns out the code he wrote was so good it works as is on Linux, I just needed to modprobe sidewinder and it worked.

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Posted in Linux,Embedded,Robotics  |  Tags joystick,usb,soldering  |  1 comments

Fun with a PC104 board, embedded Linux and wifi

Posted by Jim Morris on Wed Oct 21 01:32:16 -0700 2009

Around 10 years ago I was playing with some home robotics, built a simple robot, with some sensors and an on-board Linux-based PC. The purpose was to experiment with Robot AI, a continuation of my PhD thesis I started on some 30 years ago, but did not complete.

The robot had a camera, a digital compass, a sonar scanner and a short range IR range detector, plus some bump detectors. I could control it over a wifi connection, that was a Orinoco PCMCIA board plugged into the PC104, 586 based Linux PC that was on-board. All powered by several batteries.

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Posted in Linux,Embedded  |  Tags linux,pc104,wpa_supplicant,microdrive  |  no comments

OpenMoko Freerunner after a few weeks

Posted by Jim Morris on Tue Jul 22 13:20:08 -0700 2008

Well I have had this thing for a few weeks now, and I have burned a lot of hours playing with it :) (Wish I could bill someone for those hours it would have paid for the phone 4 times over!)

I started with 2007.2 the built in image, and upgraded it initially with dfu-util, then with opkg update && opkg upgrade.

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Posted in Openmoko,Linux  |  Tags openmoko,freerunner  |  5 comments

Upgrading Ubuntu Gutsy to Hardy

Posted by Jim Morris on Sun Jul 13 04:32:03 -0700 2008

I did my duty and upgraded from Gutsy to Hardy, after letting Hardy settle for a while. For the most part it was painless (unlike the last upgrade to Gutsy!).

Unfortunately the sound was now broken I have a HDA-Intel AD198x Analog chip set.

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Posted in Linux  |  Tags ubuntu,hardy,cups  |  4 comments

OpenMoko Freerunner first impressions

Posted by Jim Morris on Fri Jul 11 13:53:11 -0700 2008

OK so I just got my shiny new OpenMoko Freerunner GTA02.

This is an Open source GSM cell phone, running Linux and OpenMoko S/W stack.

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Posted in Openmoko,Linux  |  Tags openmoko,freerunner  |  19 comments

Getting beagle compiled on KUbuntu 6.10 edgy

Posted by Jim Morris on Sat Feb 03 22:32:35 -0800 2007

The version of beagle available as a standard package with Ubuntu Edgy 6.10, is horribly buggy and uses a lot of memory (2Gbytes on my machine).

I wanted to build the latest version of Beagle (0.2.15.1) on my system which is actually KUbuntu, and this required a lot of effort! I had to install a bunch of added support libraries for gtk which do not appear to be installed by default on KUbuntu. I downloaded the latest source from here.

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Posted in Linux  |  Tags kubuntu,edgy,beagle  |  1 comments

Upgrading a Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake system to a Core Duo MoBo

Posted by Jim Morris on Sun Dec 17 02:57:15 -0800 2006

My current development system is Ubuntu 6.06 using an Athlon 2500+ Barton processor and an Asus A7V8X-X motherboard and 1GB of DRAM. It has been pretty stable, and relatively fast, but it is about 3 years old, and I like to upgrade when I can at least double my perceived performance. (ie I have to notice the difference, not just going on specs).

So I decided the latest hot system seems to be based on the Intel Core 2 Duo 6600, and I like a quiet system so I decided to build one spec'd out by Silent PC Review. The one in particular was SPCR Model One: Modern General Purpose PC.

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Posted in Linux  |  Tags ubuntu,coreduo,dapper,edgy  |  no comments

Epsilon Programmers Editor

Posted by Jim Morris on Sat Sep 30 17:20:15 -0700 2006

I use Lugarus excellent Epsilon Editor for most of my programming editing needs, on Win32 and Linux.

(An exception is for Java programming where I use Eclipse).

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Posted in Linux,Rails,Ruby  |  Tags ide,ruby,rails,epsilon,editor  |  1 comments

Getting f-spot to upload to flickr on KUbuntu

Posted by Jim Morris on Sun Aug 27 20:29:43 -0700 2006

f-spot is a good photo importer and organizer, but it is a gnome application. When I installed it on KUbuntu, which uses KDE, using aptitude install f-spot it worked ok, except I got the following error when I tried to send my photos to flickr.

GLib.GException: There is no default action associated with this location
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Posted in Linux  |  Tags kubuntu,flickr,fspot  |  no comments