Yellow Cow Blog

I found this quite useful since I’ve been doing some more mock builds lately:

This will speed up mock builds on your multi-core system. Basically mock uses tar and gzip to create a cache of the buildroot contents before building so that it doesn’t need to install a fresh buildroot every time you do a mock build. Unfortunately gzip can only use one core of your multi-core processor at a time. pigz is a mutli-threaded implementation of gzip that is fully compatible. You can tell mock to use pgiz instead of gzip.

As root do:

1. yum install pigz
2. open /etc/mock/site-defaults.cfg in your favorite editor
3. find the line
   # config_opts['plugin_conf']['root_cache_opts']['compress_program'] = “gzip”
   In my cfg is is at lines 65.
4. Uncomment that line and edit it to say pigz instead of gzip
5. You’re all set.

Warning: This only works for Rev. B1 of the DIR-825. Rev. A1 will not work.

Since support for the D-Link DIR-825 Rev. B1 found it’s way into OpenWRT about 3 weeks ago I started playing around with it.

Here’s a little how-to on installing OpenWRT on the DIR-825. Basically it’s pretty easy. For those of you who just want to get started, I recommend the OpenWRT snapshots.

Here is what I did:

1. Press and hold the reset button until the power LED starts blinking (usually takes around 45 seconds)
2. Set your computer’s IP to anything but 192.168.0.1 in the 192.168.0.0/24 range.
3. Browse to 192.168.0.1, make sure you use Internet Explorer or Chromium here. From my experience Firefox doesn’t work.
4. Upload the openwrt-ar71xx-dir-825-b1-squashfs-backup-loader.bin image
5. Don’t be scared if the flash stops while progress is still under 100% and the box goes offline. That usually means the flash is done anyway.
6. Power cycle your box and telnet to it on IP 192.168.1.1
7. Don’t forget to set a password with passwd

Enjoy!

Restoring the original firmware works similarily: Follow steps 1 to 3 and in step 4 select the original D-Link .bin image instead.

By the way: If you prefer JFFS2 over SquashFS you can view the other images at http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/

Edit:

Because I got some comments on not being able to bring the wifi up here’s a little guide to do that:

1. Install the hostapd package:
2. opkg update
   opkg install hostapd kmod-ath9k
   
3. Then go to Network -> Wifi
4. Press Edit for the Radio controller you want to set up.
   Note: The DIR-825 has two Radios: One 2.4GHz single band and one 2.4/5GHz dual band.
   On my device phy0 (radio0) is the 2.4GHz only and phy1 is the dual-band radio
5. Enter your desired ESSID
6. As network choose lan
7. Mode: Access Point
8. Encryption: WPA2-PSK
9. Key: your WPA2 key
10. Save and apply.

Edit: I forgot to mention that you need to install kmod-ath9k (Thanks Jeroen)

OpenTTD 0.7.1 hast just been pushed to f10/f11-updates. It should now be possible to get it by just yum install openttd

Have fun!

I always wondered why there is no easy way to clone my display to the VGA output of my ThinkPad T61p. I thought I found the solution in the fact that NVIDIA just sucks on Linux (well, they break my suspend/resume every other update). However a few weeks ago I found a script that simplifies the whole process. It is called Disper and can be downloaded here. In conjunction with the Thinkpad Screen script I can finally just Fn-F7 and use my Projector/DFP-Screen.

I also made a RPM of disper for the lazy:

• RPM
• SRPM

Recently I tried to use my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone to access the web via it’s 3G modem that is available over Bluetooth. I wanted it to work together with NetworkManager nicely so that other programs (such as Pidgin) receive the online status and also to ease the connection/disconnection process. However NM and also gnome-bluetooth are not ready for the job yet (Blueman alledgedly is).
I found a blog entry by Harald Hoyer that offers a Python script to simplify the whole process of adding the phone as a modem. However that script isn’t up to date anymore. Unfortunately NM doesn’t trust HAL to determine the capabilities of the phone anymore (thus allowing this nice Python hack-script) but rather additionally asks udev for it’s opinion. This will result in the following error message in the debug log of NM:

NetworkManager: <info> (rfcomm0): found serial port (udev: hal:GSM)
NetworkManager: <info> (rfcomm0): ignoring due to lack of probed mobile broadband capabilties

I worked around this by setting all rfcomm* ports to be “probed” modems via an udev rule. I know that this probably is not the nicest way to do this but hey, it works. Furthermore I updated the script to the new Python 2.6 popen functions.

Here is what I came up with:

dialup-bluetooth.py
90-rfcomm-nm.rules

The udev rule belongs in /etc/udev/rules.d. The python script can be put anywhere you want but keep in mind that it must be run as root.

Have fun browsing the web on the go!

OpenTTD will hit Fedora rawhide/testing repos soon. I’d be glad if you do some testing and add some karma to the package in Bodhi when it works for you.

Here are the links:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/openttd-0.7.1-0.3.rc2.fc11
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/openttd-0.7.1-0.3.rc2.fc10

Happy playing!

Yeah I know I’m probably a bit late but nevertheless: The FrOSCon Call for Papers startet March 24th. So for anyone from the Fedora community who’s interested: pleas feel free and submit your papers to show a bit Fedora presence on FrOSCon. That would be awesome

Check it out at: http://www.froscon.de/en/program/call-for-papers.html

If you have any further questions regarding FrOSCon don’t hesitate to ask me.

So I finally got around to create a blog as well. Until now I successfully resisted to have one since I usually hate writing stuff that no-one really reads. But I find that this blog can pretty well serve me as a nice place to keep notes to myself that might be considered useful for others.

The first thing to blog about is my visit to FOSDEM.
It was my first year at FOSDEM and I must say I really liked it. After meeting fellow Fedora Ambassadors at the FAD EMEA 2008 for the first time I now had the chance to meet even more of them. I really enjoyed meeting people of whom I only knew the name and what they did before. It’s always great to have a face with the name in your mind.

I arrived together with Christoph in Brussels-Midi on Friday and after we checked into the hotel we began making our way to the Beer Event. We started to “love” the city of Brussels for it’s layout and road design which at times can be really confusing. But we finally arrived at the beer event. I had some “Delirium Tremens” which were very good. The next morning I found out that mixing strong beer with absinthe is not a good thing to do. Unfortunately the headache lasted the whole day and so I wasn’t really fit on Saturday.

On Sunday I was feeling quite well again and stayed at the booth for quite some time talking to people and handing out swag. I also managed to attend Max’s talk and the FreeIPA Talk later on, which was quite interesting.

I’m pretty sure that I’ll be going to FOSDEM next year as well.