Search Results: "Uwe Hermann"

This is what I set up for backups recently using a cheap USB-enclosure which can house 2 SATA disks and shows them as 2 USB mass-storage devices to my system (using only one USB cable). Without any further introduction, here goes the HOWTO: First, create one big partition on each of the two disks (/dev/sdc and /dev/sdd in my case) of the exact same size. The cfdisk details are omitted here.

  $ cfdisk /dev/sdc
  $ cfdisk /dev/sdd

Then, create a new RAID array using the mdadm utility:

  $ mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

The array is named md0, consists of the two devices (--raid-devices=2) /dev/sdc1 and /dev/sdd1, and it's a RAID-1 array, i.e. data is simply mirrored on both disks so if one of them fails you don't lose data (--level=1). After this has been done the array will be synchronized so that both disks contain the same data (this process will take a long time). You can watch the current status via:

  $ cat /proc/mdstat
  Personalities : [raid1]
  md0 : active raid1 sdd1[1] sdc1[0]
        1465135869 blocks super 1.1 [2/2] [UU]
        [>....................]  resync =  0.0% (70016/1465135869) finish=2440.6min speed=10002K/sec
  unused devices:

Some more info is also available from mdadm:

  $ mdadm --detail --scan
  ARRAY /dev/md0 metadata=1.01 name=foobar:0 UUID=1234578:1234578:1234578:1234578
  $ mdadm --detail /dev/md0
  /dev/md0:
          Version : 1.01
    Creation Time : Sat Feb  6 23:58:51 2010
       Raid Level : raid1
       Array Size : 1465135869 (1397.26 GiB 1500.30 GB)
    Used Dev Size : 1465135869 (1397.26 GiB 1500.30 GB)
     Raid Devices : 2
    Total Devices : 2
      Persistence : Superblock is persistent
      Update Time : Sun Feb  7 00:03:21 2010
            State : active, resyncing
   Active Devices : 2
  Working Devices : 2
   Failed Devices : 0
    Spare Devices : 0
   Rebuild Status : 0% complete
             Name : foobar:0  (local to host foobar)
             UUID : 1234578:1234578:1234578:1234578
           Events : 1
      Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
         0       8       33        0      active sync   /dev/sdc1
         1       8       49        1      active sync   /dev/sdd1

Next, you'll want to create a big partition on the RAID device (cfdisk details omitted)...

  $ cfdisk /dev/md0

...and then encrypt all the (future) data on the device using dm-crypt+LUKS and cryptsetup:

  $ cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/md0p1
  Enter your desired pasphrase here (twice)
  $ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md0p1 myraid

After opening the encrypted container with cryptsetup luksOpen you can create a filesystem on it (ext3 in my case):

  $ mkfs.ext3 -j -m 0 /dev/mapper/myraid

That's about it. In future you can access the RAID data by using the steps below. Starting the RAID and mouting the drive:

  $ mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
  $ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md0p1 myraid
  $ mount -t ext3 /dev/mapper/myraid /mnt

Shutting down the RAID:

  $ umount /mnt
  $ cryptsetup luksClose myraid
  $ mdadm --stop /dev/md0

That's all. Performance is shitty due to all the data being shoved out over one USB cable (and USB itself being too slow for these amounts of data), but I don't care too much about that as this setup is meant for backups, not performance-critical stuff.

Quick public service announcement (which probably comes a bit too late, sorry): There's a coreboot developer room at this year's FOSDEM (Free and Open-Source Software Developer's European Meeting), which starts roughly... um... today. In 20 minutes, actually. Unfortunately I cannot be there, hopefully there will be video archives of the talks. If you're at FOSDEM already, here's the list of talks:

Sat 13:00-14:00 coreboot introduction (Peter Stuge)
Sat 14:00-15:00 coreboot and PC technical details (Peter Stuge)
Sat 15:00-16:00 ACPI and Suspend/Resume under coreboot (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 16:00-17:00 coreboot board porting (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 17:00-18:00 Flashrom, the universal flash tool (Carl-Daniel Hailfinger)
Sat 18:00-19:00 Flash enable BIOS reverse engineering (Luc Verhaegen)

Highly recommended stuff if you're interested in an open-source BIOS and/or open-source, cross-platform flash EEPROM programmer software.

Only few days ago a long-standing bug in coreboot, the Free Software x86 BIOS/fimware project, has been fixed: Adding support for a laptop/notebook. The code was developed by coresystems GmbH (thanks a lot!). Quoting from the announcement:

coreboot is running on a multitude of different computers, ranging from tiny embedded systems as small as the palm of your hand over desktop and server systems to super computers with thousands of nodes. However, one might say that in the area of mobile computers coreboot has to catch up, compared to its support of other devices. Thus, I am especially glad to announce that coresystems GmbH is releasing coreboot for the Roda RK886EX a.k.a Rocky III+ notebook today. It's a rugged notebook, protected against shock, vibration, dust and humidity:
http://www.roda-computer.com/en/products/notebooks/rocky-iii-rk886ex.html We have been testing various Linux distributions as well as Windows XP and Windows 7 booting on this nice notebook. I want to sincerely thank those who made this project possible with their funding:

secunet Security Networks AG

Bundesamt f r Sicherheit in der Informationstechnologie (Federal Office for Information Security, BSI)

A big thank you also goes to everyone who worked with coresystems on this project.

The committed patch series includes improved support for the Intel i945 / ICH7 chipset (which was also written by coresystems), the SMSC LPC47N227 Super I/O, the Texas Instruments Cardbus+Firewire bridge TI PCI7420, and finally the Renesas M3885x Embedded Controller (EC). Btw, the latter, the so-called embedded controller (sometimes integrated in the Super I/O, sometimes it's an extra chip) is one of the major problems for coreboot support on laptops. They are almost always undocumented (i.e., no public datasheets are available), but they have low-level control over power/battery management, early power-up sequence, and often include keyboard controller functionality and other important stuff. Luckily, for this notebook an EC datasheet is available. Checkout the coreboot EC support code for the Renesas M3885x for an impression of what this stuff is all about. Anyway, there is hope that this laptop will only be the first in a row of multiple supported ones in the future. Interested developers and contributors are of course always welcome on the coreboot mailing list :-)

I recently almost died from a heart attack because after a really horrible crash (don't ask), Debian unstable on my laptop wouldn't boot anymore. The system hung at "Waiting for root filesystem...", and I was in panic mode as I feared I lost all my data (and as usual my backups were waaay too old). At first I was suspecting that something actually got erased or mangled due to the crash, either at the dm-crypt layer, or the LVM layer, or the ext3 filesystem on top of those. After various hours of messing with live CDs, cryptsetup, lvm commands (such as pvscan, pvs, vgchange, vgs, vgck) and finally fsck I still had not managed to successfully boot my laptop. I finally was able to boot by changing the initrd from initrd.img-2.6.30-2-686 to initrd.img-2.6.30-2-686.bak in the GRUB2 menu (at boot-time), at which point it was clear that something was wrong with my current initrd. A bit of debugging and some initrd comparisons revealed the cause: Both, the cryptsetup and lvm2 packages were no longer installed on my laptop, which made all update-initramfs invokations (e.g. upon kernel package updates) create initrds which did not contain the proper dm-crypt and lvm functionality support. Hence, no booting for me. I only noticed because of the crash, as I usually do not reboot the laptop very often (two or three times per year maybe). Now, as to why those packages were removed I have absolutely no idea. I did not remove them knowingly, so I suspect some dist-upgrade did it and I didn't notice (but I do carefully check which packages dist-upgrade tries to remove, usually)...

Nice coreboot news the Free Software x86 firmware ("BIOS") is featured on the cover of issue 186 of the Linux Journal. Anton Borisov's article Coreboot at Your Service! explains the basic ideas behind coreboot, how to build an image for your board, which payloads are available and how they are used, e.g. GRUB2, SeaBIOS if you need legacy BIOS callbacks (e.g. for booting Windows), Etherboot/GPXE, or more fun stuff such as space invaders or tint (a tetris clone) in your flash ROM chip... If you read the article and think the build process is a bit complicated and ugly, do not despair! We're currently in the process of converting the whole coreboot code base to use kconfig (the widely-known configuration tool used by the Linux kernel, busybox, and other projects), so in the very near future the whole process for building a coreboot image will work like this:

  $ make menuconfig
  $ make

Flashing the image can then be done using an EEPROM programmer and/or via the user-space utility flashrom (available for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, etc.)... It's nice to see that coreboot is getting more and more coverage in "mainstream" media and is growing both in number of deployments and in number of supported chipsets and boards. We are desperately in need of more developers though, there are just way too many chipsets, boards, and datasheets out there; we're happy about every patch and every new tester or developer who likes to mess with code that runs in the very first few (micro)seconds after power-on. If you think kernel hacking and related low-level development is nice, you might also be interested in writing code where there's no RAM yet (as coreboot has to initialize it), there's no serial port for debugging (coreboot has to initialize it), no PCI devices have been set up, most of your auxiliary hardware is not yet up (ethernet NIC, parallel port, audio, IDE, SATA, USB, you name it). It's a fun environment to work in and you'll learn a lot about PC hardware, even if you (so far) thought you knew everything there is to know. Feel free to join us on the mailing list or on IRC in #coreboot on Freenode.

I've been using CRM114 as spam filter for a while now, and I'm quite happy with it. Due to bug #529720 though (incompatible upstream file format changes) I decided to start my setup from scratch with a recent CRM114 version from unstable. Here's a short HOWTO, hope it's useful for others. First you need to install crm114 and set up a few files in your $HOME directory.

  $ sudo apt-get install crm114
  $ mkdir ~/.crm114
  $ cd ~/.crm114
  $ cp /usr/share/doc/crm114/examples/mailfilter.cf.gz .
  $ gunzip mailfilter.cf.gz
  $ cp /usr/share/crm114/mailtrainer.crm .
  $ touch rewrites.mfp priolist.mfp

Edit ~/.crm114/mailfilter.cf and set the following variables (some are optional, but that's what I currently use):
:spw: /mypassword/ :add_verbose_stats: /no/ :add_extra_stuff: /no/ :rewrites_enabled: /no/ :spam_flag_subject_string: // :unsure_flag_subject_string: // :log_to_allmail.txt: /no/
The :log_to_allmail.txt: /no/ option should probably stay at "yes" for the first few days until you have tested your setup and everything works OK. The ~/.crm114/allmail.txt file will contain all your mails, in case something goes wrong. Now set up empty spam and nonspam files like this:
$ cssutil -b -r spam.css $ cssutil -b -r nonspam.css
Test the setup by invoking mailreaver.crm as follows, typing some test text and then pressing CTRL+d:
$ /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u ~/.crm114 test [CTRL-d] ** ACCEPT: CRM114 PASS osb unique microgroom Matcher ** CLASSIFY fails; success probability: 0.5000 pR: 0.0000 Best match to file #0 (nonspam.css) prob: 0.5000 pR: 0.0000 Total features in input file: 8 #0 (nonspam.css): features: 1, hits: 0, prob: 5.00e-01, pR: 0.00 #1 (spam.css): features: 1, hits: 0, prob: 5.00e-01, pR: 0.00 X-CRM114-Version: 200904023-BlameSteveJobs ( TRE 0.7.6 (BSD) ) MF-35EB8B9A [pR: 0.0000] X-CRM114-CacheID: sfid-20090920_151224_574131_D290E589 X-CRM114-Status: UNSURE (0.0000) This message is 'unsure'; please train it!
The output should look similar to the above. If there are errors instead, you should check your settings in ~/.crm114/mailfilter.cf. Now you have to setup a procmail rule for crm114:
:0fw: crm114.lock /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114 :0: * ^X-CRM114-Status: SPAM.* IN.spam-crm114
In my case this rule is also followed by a spamassassin rule, so all my mail goes through two different spam filters (will look into dspam and bogofilter also I guess, the more the better). Finally, in .muttrc I have the following configs so I can press SHIFT+x to mark a mail as spam, and SHIFT+h to mark it as non-spam (ham).
macro index X ' formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --spam' macro index H ' formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --good' macro pager X ' formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --spam' macro pager H ' formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --good'
Important: crm114 is most effective if you start with empty CSS files (as shown above) and only train it by marking mails as spam/ham when it gets them wrong. The process will take a few hours or maybe a day (depending on how many mails per day you get), then the misclassification rate gets very low... Update 2009-09-23: Changed --spam/--nonspam to the correct options for mailreaver/mailtrainer, --spam/--good.

If you ever wanted to support an open-source project but you are not a programmer, here's one (of many possible) ways to help: The Miro project (Internet TV / Video and Audio Podcast application for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X) is seeking for pledges/donations that will be used to add subtitles support in Miro. To quote from the announcement:

We re hoping to build real subtitle support into Miro in the next couple months, but we need your help! So we ve started a Kickstarter project to raise $1,000 to develop this feature for Miro on all three platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Can you pledge to help make it happen? One of the great things about the Kickstarter model is that unless we can reach $1,000, your pledge won t be charged.
[...]
(if you live in the United States, donations are tax deductible we are a 501c3 non-profit)

There are 11 days left to make a pledge.

After a long time of ignoring (or at least not using) micro-blogging services such as Twitter, I recently tried the Free-Software based identi.ca service, and I'm beginning to like it. The choice of service was pretty obvious while Twitter uses proprietary software and has custom Terms of Service, identi.ca is based on software under the GNU Affero General Public License, and the contents are CC-BY 3.0 licensed. The code behind identi.ca is called Laconica (recently renamed to StatusNet) and is hosted at gitorious:

 $ git clone git://gitorious.org/laconica/mainline.git

My account details are available under http://identi.ca/uwehermann, where I'm posting smaller announcements and notes about random technical stuff I'm working on (slightly more regularly than in this blog). Sometimes I use the web interface for posting, but using the Jabber integration available at identi.ca is even more convenient. You can both be notified of new posts ("dents") in real time via Jabber, as well as post your own dents from within your Jabber client, which is nice. identi.ca seems to become more popular every day, which will hopefully make the proprietary Twitter pretty much irrelevant sooner or later.

Dear Lazyweb, is there any Free Software utility for putting those nice logos/images on LightScribe CDs or DVDs? I'm considering buying such a CD/DVD burner, but only if there's open-source software to control the device. I guess burning CDs/DVDs should be no problem using wodim/cdrecord, but adding images as labels on the CD/DVD is likely not possible without special software. I know about the LightScribe Linux software (which is binary-only and not open-source, it seems) and LaCie LightScribe Labeler for Linux (which only creates labels but does not write them to the CD/DVD, and is not open-source either, I think). Anyone aware of a Free Software utility for this? Or at least a public specification/datasheet which could be used for creating one? I might even be willing to join development if datasheets are available.

I have mentioned the flashrom utility in my blog in the past. This is a small command line tool which allows you to update your BIOS/coreboot/firmware chips without opening the computer and without any special boot procedures. Yesterday, flashrom 0.9 was finally released. Here's a short passage from the release announcement:

After nine years of development and constant improvement, we have added support for every BIOS flash ROM technology present on x86 mainboards and every flash ROM chip we ever saw in the wild. Highlights of flashrom include:

Parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI flash interfaces.

157 flash chip families and half a dozen variants of each family.

Flash chip package agnostic. DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40 and more have all been verified to work.

75 different chipsets, some with multiple flash controllers.

Special mainboard enabling code for dozens of nonstandard mainboards.

No physical access needed. root access is sufficient.

No bootable floppy disk, bootable CD-ROM or other media needed.

No keyboard or monitor needed. Simply reflash remotely via SSH.

No instant reboot needed. Reflash your ROM in a running system, verify it, be happy. The new firmware will be present next time you boot.

Crossflashing and hotflashing is possible as long as the flash chips are electrically and logically compatible (same protocol). Great for recovery.

Scriptability. Reflash a whole pool of identical machines at the same time from the command line. It is recommended to check flashrom output and error codes.

Speed. flashrom is much faster than vendor flash tools.

Supports Linux, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X. Please refer to the README for build instructions.

Please note that rewriting your flash chip can be dangerous and flashrom developers make no guarantees whatsoever. That said, many users have successfully replaced proprietary tools such as awdflash, amiflash and afudos with flashrom.

Download: flashrom-0.9.0.tar.gz
SVN: svn co svn://coreboot.org/flashrom/trunk flashrom
Debian: apt-get install flashrom Do yourself a favor and try flashrom next time you want to upgrade your BIOS. No more floppies or bootable CD-ROMs with DOS/Windows binaries or similar crap. Run flashrom conveniently from the Linux command line, or even via SSH or serial console if you want...

If you recently upgraded your kernel to the 2.6.29 Debian package, you might have noticed some (e.g. graphics) drivers stopped working or are working slower. In my case, this was the radeon driver, which inexplicably seemed to cause lots of slowdowns in some applications and games. A quick look into dmesg revealed the reason:

  [drm] Initialized radeon 1.29.0 20080528 on minor 0
  agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: AGP 2.0 bridge
  agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
  pci 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
  [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
  [drm] Loading R200 Microcode
  platform radeon_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/R200_cp.bin
  radeon_cp: Failed to load firmware "radeon/R200_cp.bin"
  [drm:radeon_do_init_cp] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware!

As noted in the changelog file, the radeon firmware R200_cp.bin has been removed from the kernel, and is now available in the separate firmware-linux Debian package. So the simple fix for this issues is:

  $ apt-get install firmware-linux
  $ dpkg -L firmware-linux   grep R200_cp.bin
  /lib/firmware/radeon/R200_cp.bin

After restarting X, the dmesg output looks more sane again:

  agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: AGP 2.0 bridge
  agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
  pci 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
  [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
  [drm] Loading R200 Microcode
  platform radeon_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/R200_cp.bin
  [drm] writeback test succeeded in 2 usecs

When trying to port coreboot (previously LinuxBIOS) to a new mainboard you're often confronted with a big problem: the BIOS/ROM chip on the respective motherboard is soldered onto the board (i.e., not in a socket). This means that you cannot easily (hot-)swap the chip during development or for recovery purposes. So you basically have exactly one try to flash the ROM chip with a fully working/booting coreboot image. If that goes wrong your board is bricked.

This makes it pretty much impossible to develop a coreboot port for such boards (and soldered-on ROM chips are becoming more and more common, unfortunately). However, I've recently tried to replace the soldered-on (PLCC) ROM chip on one of my boards with a socket. What sounds pretty scary at first, especially given that I have almost non-existant soldering skills, turned out to be really not that hard. Also, it can be done with relatively cheap and readily available equipment. I have written a short HOWTO for desoldering chips and soldering on sockets in the coreboot wiki, and also finished a video showing most of the process, which I hope will be helpful for others:

archive.org: Ogg Theora, small (32 MB), Ogg Theora, big (154 MB)

Youtube (FLV, small, 13 MB). Direct download:

  $ youtube-dl -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30x4oxyczH4'

blip.tv: FLV, small (20 MB)

The video is CC-BY-SA 3.0, music is taken from ccmixter.org and is CC-NC 3.0 licensed. Video editing was done using Kino (which uses ffmpeg2theora for Ogg Theora export). I also tried to upload the video to Vimeo, but first they told me to install the Flash 10 abomination (and there's no way I will do that). After browsing the help/forum pages a bit I found a traditional, non-flash upload form, but that then tells me that I cannot upload Ogg Theora videos. WTF?

The Ogg Theora video support feature request has been open for more that a year. Until that issue is fixed I'll just use other video services, thanks...

Note to self: If you do suspend-to-disk with 2.6.24, do not try to resume with 2.6.28 or any other version of the kernel, it won't work. When asked whether you want to continue, say "no" and reboot with the correct kernel, in order to not lose your suspended data...

TuxMobil - Linux on Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones

I recently got my hands on a Lenovo IdeaPad S9e netbook for a short amount of time (I don't own it), so I did a few tests with Debian unstable (more or less Lenny right now) and a Linux 2.6.28 kernel on it, see results below. The machine type is 4187-42G, and it features an Intel Atom N270 CPU (with HyperThreading) at 1.6 GHz, 1 GB of DDR2 RAM, an 80 GB SATA drive, an 8.9" WSVGA 1024x600 (glossy) screen, VGA port, LAN, wifi, bluetooth, 2xUSB, SD card slot, PCI ExpressCard slot, built-in microphone, and a webcam. BIOS You can enter the BIOS by pressing F2, the boot menu by pressing F12 during boot. Booting from USB works fine on this netbook. There's a Splashtop installation on the netbook (called "Lenovo Quickstart" here) which you can disable in the BIOS. Installation There's no CD-ROM drive, so the simplest way is to use a USB thumb drive for installation. Here's how you can prepare one containing a Lenny installer (assuming your USB thumb drive is /dev/sda):

  $ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.0/i386/iso-cd/debian-500-i386-netinst.iso
  $ wget http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz
  $ gunzip boot.img.gz
  $ dd if=boot.img of=/dev/sda1
  $ mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt
  $ cp debian-500-i386-netinst.iso /mnt
  $ umount /mnt

If the above USB thumb drive doesn't boot correctly (which it did not in my case: GRUB error 17) it's probably because of a messed-up MBR. This is how you can fix it:

  $ apt-get install mbr
  $ install-mbr /dev/sda

Then insert the USB thumb drive in the Lenovo IdeaPad S9e, choose USB boot in the BIOS, and start the installer. Most of the process works as usual, the only small difference is that you might want to load the "parted" installer module in order to resize the Windows-partition on the disk (if you want to keep it) to make space for Linux. The second (fat32) partition seems to keep a restore image and/or the Splashtop stuff, not sure. Audio Works out of the box using the snd_hda_intel driver. The hardware is onboard audio in the southbridge (82801G / ICH7) and uses the Realtek ALC269 codec. If some programs don't have working audio, try modprobe snd-pcm-oss. Built-in microphone Untested so far. Bluetooth Works out of the box using the bluetooth and btusb driver. The laptop's Bluetooth device is USB-attached internally and shows up in lsusb as:

  $ lsusb
  Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:2150 Broadcom Corp.
  $ dmesg
  usb 3-2: Product: BCM2046 Bluetooth Device

After modprobe btusb you can use hcitool / hciconfig etc. as usual, and/or enable more related stuff with /etc/init.d/bluetooth start. Sensors The lm-sensors script detects the lm75, eeprom, i2c-dev, and i2c_i801 modules. The following is the 'sensors' output:

  $ sensors
  acpitz-virtual-0
  Adapter: Virtual device
  temp1:       +36.0  C  (crit = +95.0  C)

The hard drive temperature can be viewed with:

  $ hddtemp /dev/sda
  /dev/sda: FUJITSU MHZ2080BH G1: 44  C

HPET The Intel ICH7 southbridge in this laptop supports High Performance Event Timers (HPET) which allows for more power savings and thus improved battery life.

  $ dmesg   grep -i hpet
  ACPI: HPET 3F6E1E41, 0038 (r1 INTEL  CALISTGA  6040000 LOHR       5A)
  ACPI: HPET id: 0x8086a201 base: 0xfed00000
  hpet clockevent registered
  HPET: 3 timers in total, 0 timers will be used for per-cpu timer
  hpet0: at MMIO 0xfed00000, IRQs 2, 8, 0
  hpet0: 3 comparators, 64-bit 14.318180 MHz counter

You can check the wakeups-per-second with powertop. SD card slot Works out of the box. It seems to be attached via USB internally (usb-storage driver).

  $ lsusb
  Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:0158 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Mass Stroage Device

PCI ExpressCard slot Untested so far. ACPI Works fine, see comments for "acpitool" output. Network card Works out of the box using the tg3 driver.

  $ modprobe tg3
  tg3.c:v3.94 (August 14, 2008)
  tg3 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
  tg3 0000:02:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
  eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95906) rev c002 PHY(5906)] (PCI Express) 10/100Base-TX Ethernet 00:11:22:33:44:55
  eth0: RXcsums[1] LinkChgREG[0] MIirq[0] ASF[0] WireSpeed[0] TSOcap[0]
  eth0: dma_rwctrl[76180000] dma_mask[64-bit]

Touchpad Works out of the box, both in X as well as in the console using gpm.

  $ dmesg
  Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 7.2, id: 0x1c0b1, caps: 0xd04731/0xa40000

Suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-RAM I'm using the hibernate Debian package. You can explicitly force the usage of either method in /etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf by uncommenting the respective lines.

  TryMethod disk.conf
  # TryMethod ram.conf

Suspend does not yet work out of the box, however, as the machine is unknown:

  $ s2ram -n
  Machine unknown
  This machine can be identified by:
      sys_vendor   = "LENOVO                          "
      sys_product  = "418742G         "
      sys_version  = "Lenovo                  "
      bios_version = "14CN51WW  "
  See http://suspend.sf.net/s2ram-support.html for details.

After a few test I found that s2ram -f -a 3 works fine (tested from console only so far). Now this needs to be integrated upstream and in the Debian package (I'll file a bug report). Update: Submitted bug #520848, and an email to the upstream mailing list. Wireless There doesn't seem to be a mainline driver for the Broadcom BCM4312 wifi card in the laptop, yet:
$ lspci -nn 05:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
Neither the b43 nor the b43legacy drivers work as of 2.6.28. For now, one of two possible options is to build a (partly non-free) driver provided by Broadcom from source (option 2 would be to use ndiswrapper, I guess, but that's untested):
$ wget http://people.debian.org/~adamm/kernel/linux-kbuild-2.6.28_2.6.28-0.1_i386.deb $ dpkg -i linux-kbuild-2.6.28_2.6.28-0.1_i386.deb (currently needed in unstable due to bug #518115) $ apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-2.6.28-1-686 $ mkdir temp; cd temp $ wget http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5_10_79_10.tar.gz $ tar xfvz hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5_10_79_10.tar.gz $ make -C /lib/modules/ uname -r /build M= pwd clean $ make -C /lib/modules/ uname -r /build M= pwd modules
If that worked, you can load the driver via:
$ rmmod bcm43xx; rmmod b43; rmmod b43legacy (you could also permanently blacklist these modules) $ modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip $ insmod ./wl.ko $ dmesg wl: module license '' taints kernel. wl 0000:05:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 wl 0000:05:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 eth1: Broadcom BCM4315 802.11 Wireless Controller 5.10.79.10
You can now run iwconfig, iwlist, etc. from the command line, or use some GUIs such as kwifimanager. In order to disable wireless, run:
$ rmmod wl
So far, I only tested WEP (but not WPA). CPU frequency scaling Works out of the box using the acpi_cpufreq driver. Use cpufreq-set -c 0 -g performance if you need full CPU power, cpufreq-set -c 0 -g powersave otherwise. Use -c 1 to do the same with the other CPU/core. PC speaker Works fine out of the box using the pcspkr module, tested with beep. Graphics card Works out of the box using the intel X.org driver.
$ xrandr Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 600, maximum 1024 x 1024 VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) LVDS connected 1024x600+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 195mm x 113mm 1024x600 60.0*+ 800x600 60.3 640x480 59.9 TV disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DRI works out of the box with the (mainline, open-source) driver:
$ glxinfo grep direct direct rendering: Yes
If you attach an external monitor or projector, you can enable it using xrandr as usual:
$ xrandr --output VGA --auto
You can also use a dual-head setup by adding this to your "Screen" section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
SubSection "Display" Virtual 2048 2048 EndSubSection
After restarting the X server, you can play with xrandr and move the external screen (VGA) "below" the laptop's LCD screen (LVDS) for a simple dual-head setup. The GUI tools arandr or grandr are probably a bit simpler to use than plain command line xrandr. USB Works fine, of course. The only small problem is that there are only two USB ports, more would have been better. Disk drive Works fine, it's an 80 GB SATA drive. Webcam Works out of the box using the uvcvideo driver.
$ lsusb Bus 001 Device 005: ID 5986:0141 Acer, Inc $ modprobe uvcvideo uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device Lenovo EasyCamera (5986:0141) input: Lenovo EasyCamera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-3/1-3:1.0/input/input9 usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=5986, idProduct=0141 usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=1, SerialNumber=0 usb 1-3: Product: Lenovo EasyCamera usb 1-3: Manufacturer: BISON Corporation
You can use luvcvideo for webcam viewing. Battery Lasts for ca. 3.5 hours, probably less if the system is under high load. Special keys Fn+CursorUp / Fn+CursorDown (brightness), Fn+ESC (enable/disable webcam), Fn+F1 (sleep mode), Fn+F2 (enable/disable TFT backlight), Fn+F6 (enable/disable thouchpad), Fn+F7 (Num lock), Fn+F8 (scroll lock), and Fn+F11 (F12 key) all work fine. Fn+F3, Fn+F5, Fn+F9, Fn+F10, and all other special keys are untested. LEDs The power, disk activity, CAPS lock, Num lock, and battery charging LEDs all work fine out of the box. lspci -tvnn
-[0000:00]-+-00.0 Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Memory Controller Hub [8086:27ac] +-02.0 Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27ae] +-02.1 Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27a6] +-1b.0 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller [8086:27d8] +-1c.0-[0000:02]----00.0 Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express [14e4:1713] +-1c.1-[0000:03-04]-- +-1c.2-[0000:05]----00.0 Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g [14e4:4315] +-1d.0 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:27c8] +-1d.1 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:27c9] +-1d.2 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:27ca] +-1d.3 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:27cb] +-1d.7 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller [8086:27cc] +-1e.0-[0000:06]-- +-1f.0 Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge [8086:27b9] +-1f.1 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller [8086:27df] +-1f.2 Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller [8086:27c4] \-1f.3 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller [8086:27da]
cat /proc/cpuinfo See comments. Resources

Lenovo/IBM announcement (German), specs (German), S9e/S10e overview

Wikipedia: IdeaPad

s10lenovo.com wiki

Thinkwiki entry

All in all it's a really nice hardware, and it works (more or less) flawlessly without much hassle with recent distros/kernels. Update 2009-03-22: Updated various sections, added more info. Added resources section.

Back in 2008 I wrote a small article about resizing LVM physical volumes. I had to do something similar, but slighly more complicated, recently. My /usr logical volume (LV) was getting full on my laptop disk, thus I wanted to shrink another LV and move some of that space to /usr. Here's one way you can do that. Requirements: a Live CD containing all required utilities (cryptsetup, LVM tools, resize2fs), I used grml. Important: If you plan to perform any of these steps, make sure you have recent backups! I take no responsibility for any data loss you might experience. You have been warned! First, shutdown the laptop and boot using the Live CD. Then, open the dm-crypt device (/dev/hda3 in my case) by entering your passphrase:
$ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/hda3 foo
Activate all (newly available) LVM volume groups in that encrypted device:
$ vgchange -a y
(maybe you also need a vgscan and/or lvscan, not sure) Check how much free space we have for putting into our /usr LV:
$ vgdisplay grep Free Free PE / Size 0 / 0
OK, so we have none. Thus, we need to shrink another LV (/home, in my case) and put that newly freed space into the /usr LV. In order to do that, we have to check the current size of the /home LV:
$ mount -t ext3 /dev/vg-whole/lv-home /mnt $ df --block-size=1M grep -C 1 /mnt $ umount /mnt
(if you know how to find out the size of an ext3 file system without mounting it, please let me know) Update: See comments for suggestions. Write down the total amount of 1M chunks of space on the file system (116857 in my case), we'll need that later. Now run 'fsck' on the /home LVM logical volume, which is needed for the 'resize2fs' step afterwards. This will take quite a while.
$ fsck -f /dev/vg-whole/lv-home
Next step is resizing the ext3 file system in the /home LVM logical volume, making it 1GB smaller than before (of course you must have >= 1 GB of free space on /home for that to work). We use fancy bash calculations to do the math. Note: I'm not so sure about the sizes here, in my first attempt something went wrong and resize2fs said "filesystem too small" or the like. Maybe I'm confusing the size units from 'df' and 'resize2fs', or the bash calculation goes wrong? Please leave a comment if you know more!
$ resize2fs /dev/vg-whole/lv-home $((116857-1024))M
Then, we can safely reduce the LV itself. Note: order is very important here, you must shrink the ext3 filesystem first, and then shrink the LV! Doing it the other way around will destroy your filesystem!
$ lvreduce -L -1G /dev/vg-whole/lv-home
Now that we have 1 GB of free space to spend on LVs, we assign that space to the /usr LVM logical volume like this:
$ lvextend -L +1G /dev/vg-whole/lv-usr
As usual, we then run 'fsck' on the filesystem in order to be able to use 'resize2fs' to resize it to the biggest possible size (that's the default if resize2fs gets no parameters):
$ fsck -f /dev/vg-whole/lv-usr $ resize2fs /dev/vg-whole/lv-usr
That's it. You can now shutdown the Live CD system and boot into the normal OS with the new space allocations:
$ vgchange -a n $ cryptsetup luksClose foo $ halt

I've been planning to write about building custom ARM toolchains for a while (I used stuff from gnuarm.com in the past, but I switched to the lastest and greatest upstream versions at some point). Among other things, recent upstream versions now have ARM Cortex support. First you will need a few base utilities and libs:

  $ apt-get install flex bison libgmp3-dev libmpfr-dev autoconf texinfo build-essential

Then you can use my tiny build-arm-toolchain script, which will download, build, and install the whole toolchain:

  $ cat build-arm-toolchain
  #!/bin/sh
  # Written by Uwe Hermann <uwe@hermann-uwe.de>, released as public domain.
  TARGET=arm-elf                         # Or: TARGET=arm-none-eabi
  PREFIX=/tmp/arm-cortex-toolchain       # Install location of your final toolchain
  PARALLEL="-j 2"                        # Or: PARALLEL=""
  BINUTILS=binutils-2.19.1
  GCC=gcc-4.3.3
  NEWLIB=newlib-1.17.0
  GDB=gdb-6.8
  export PATH="$PATH:$PREFIX/bin"
  mkdir build
  wget -c http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/$BINUTILS.tar.bz2
  tar xfvj $BINUTILS.tar.bz2
  cd build
  ../$BINUTILS/configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX --enable-interwork --enable-multilib \
    --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld --disable-nls
  make $PARALLEL
  make install
  cd ..
  rm -rf build/* $BINUTILS $BINUTILS.tar.bz2
  wget -c ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/$GCC/$GCC.tar.bz2
  tar xfvj $GCC.tar.bz2
  cd build
  ../$GCC/configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX --enable-interwork --enable-multilib \
    --enable-languages="c" --with-newlib --without-headers --disable-shared --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld
  make $PARALLEL all-gcc
  make install-gcc
  cd ..
  rm -rf build/* $GCC.tar.bz2
  wget -c ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/newlib/$NEWLIB.tar.gz
  tar xfvz $NEWLIB.tar.gz
  cd build
  ../$NEWLIB/configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX --enable-interwork --enable-multilib \
    --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld --disable-nls
  make $PARALLEL
  make install
  cd ..
  rm -rf build/* $NEWLIB $NEWLIB.tar.gz
  # Yes, you need to build gcc again!
  cd build
  ../$GCC/configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX --enable-interwork --enable-multilib \
    --enable-languages="c,c++" --with-newlib --disable-shared --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld
  make $PARALLEL
  make install
  cd ..
  rm -rf build/* $GCC
  wget -c ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/$GDB.tar.bz2
  tar xfvj $GDB.tar.bz2
  cd build
  ../$GDB/configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX --enable-interwork --enable-multilib
  make $PARALLEL
  make install
  cd ..
  rm -rf build $GDB $GDB.tar.bz2

The final toolchain is located in /tmp/arm-cortex-toolchain per default, and is ca. 170 MB in size. I explicitly created the build script in such a way that it minimizes the amount of disk space used during the build (ca. 1.2 GB or so, compared to more than 3 GB in the "naive" approach). Using the "-j 2" option for make (see script) you can speed up the build quite a bit on multi-core machines (ca. 30 minutes vs. 60 minutes on an AMD X2 dual-core box). Also, you can change the script to build for other target variants if you want to (arm-elf or arm-none-eabi, for example). Checkout the blog entry How to build arm gnu gcc toolchain for Mac OS X by Piotr Esden-Tempski for similar instructions for Mac OS X users. Oh, and while I'm at it does anybody have any idea why there are no pre-built toolchains for embedded (microcontroller) ARM targets in Debian? There are some toolchains for other microcontroller architectures (avr, m68hc1x, h8300, z80) but not too much other stuff. Is there some specific reason for the missing ARM toolchains (other than "nobody cared enough yet")? I have heard about Emdebian, but from a quick look that seems to be more intended for toolchains with Linux/libc, not for microcontroller firmware (i.e. no MMU, no Linux, no libc etc.), but maybe I'm wrong?

Just as a reminder for myself, as I'll probably need this more often in the future (and maybe it's helpful for others): Per default, if you use a big xterm (232x74 in my case) where you start minicom, the $COLUMNS and $LINES environment variables will be 80x24 nevertheless, and those applications which honor them (vim, for example) will be too small and not use the full xterm size of 232x74.

  $ minicom
  $ echo $COLUMNS; echo $LINES
  80
  24

You can fix that like this:

  $ eval  resize 
  $ echo $COLUMNS; echo $LINES
  232
  74

After you do eval resize the variables are updated and vim will use the full xterm size. That's all.

I have no idea how such a great open-source game as Teeworlds has been able to exist without me hearing about it until recently. Teeworlds is a fast-paced realtime multiplayer shooter. You control a small "Tee" which can hold various weapons (hammer, gun, shotgun, laser-rifle, rocket launcher, ninja-sword) while running and jumping around frantically on the map, trying to frag as many other Tees as you can before you're killed by some other guy. Easy, eh?

There's are many game servers to choose from, as well as various game modes (death match, team death match, capfure the flag and some unofficial "mods"). You can join servers on the Internet, or create your own server, be it a public one or a LAN server. Installation Usually I would suggest apt-get install teeworlds, but for now the packages in unstable are an older 0.4.x version, whereas upstream released a much-improved 0.5.1 version. I have already filed a bug and I'm optimistic there'll be a new version in unstable soon. In the mean-time however, you can manually build the game from source via:

 $ apt-get install zlib-dev libsdl1.2-dev
   (maybe also libgl, libglu, and python, if not already installed)
 $ wget 'http://teeworlds.com/trac/bam/browser/releases/bam-0.2.0.zip?format=raw' -O bam-0.2.0.zip
 $ wget http://teeworlds.com/files/teeworlds-0.5.1-src.zip
 $ unzip bam-0.2.0.zip
 $ unzip teeworlds-0.5.1-src.zip
 $ cd bam-0.2.0
 $ ./make_unix.sh
 $ cd ../teeworlds-0.5.1-src
 $ ../bam-0.2.0/src/bam release

Running the game

 $ ./teeworlds

You'll obviously need a working OpenGL/DRI setup (check if "glxinfo grep direct" says "Yes"), otherwise the game will be way too slow. In case you experience graphics glitches and distortions, first exit the game, then:

 $ vi ~/.teeworlds/settings.cfg

Change the "gfx_noclip 0" option there to "gfx_noclip 1" and restart the game.

Firewalls If you use a local firewall as I do, you need to open at least ports 8300-8303 (UDP), even better 8300-8310 for more choice in game servers:

 $ iptables -A OUTPUT -m state --state NEW -p udp --dport 8300:8310 -j ACCEPT

Further resources

Official website
Forums (yuck)
For developers: trac, bugs, wiki, mailing list
Code repository: svn co svn://svn.teeworlds.com/teeworlds/trunk
Unofficial "Teewiki"
Lots more useful links

Have fun!

Stuff I didn't expect I'd had to type today:

  $ dpkg-repack dpkg-repack

Seriously.

Yes, just when you thought the spamming of Planet Debian with "Lenny released" blog posts had finally stopped, here comes another one :-) Let me join the crowd by saying a great "thank you!" to all the people who made this release possible, especially so the release team who organized everything, as well as the thousands of contributors (in one form or another) who helped shape the new release! Personally, I'm eager to try out the new Linux 2.6.28 kernel package in unstable now (which have been uploaded today or so, but haven't yet reached my mirror), since they contain mainline wireless drivers for my One A110 netbook, among many other things. Also, in the next few days I'll probably re-install my NSLU2 ARM box using the latest Lenny installer, following the HOWTOs by Martin Michlmayr (I'll probably write about the experience later). This re-install is long overdue, as I'm currently running the box from an 1GB thumb drive, which works ok, but I'm slowly running out of space. So I'll re-install on a 4 GB (or bigger) thumb drive.

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