A Glimpse on GNU/Linux

I was sort of happy with my Debian lenny installation in my laptop. However, the time taken for booting the machine was slightly higher (specially when I set the wlan on dhcp). So, for a change, I have switched to Opensuse 11.2 today. Till now , everything goes well.

Opensuse 11.2 boots in a minute and almost everything is up now. One of the interesting commands specific to opensuse is zypper. It is equivalent to the ‘apt-get’ in debian.

maxin@linux-fqsa:~/Documents> zypper search vim
Reading installed packages…

S | Name                   | Summary                                | Type
–+————————+—————————————-+———–
| avimanager             | Manage your (large) movie (DVD,DivX,-> | package
| avimanager             | Manage your (large) movie (DVD,DivX,-> | srcpackage
| gvim                   | A GUI for Vi                           | package
| gvim-debuginfo         | Debug information for package gvim     | package
| supercollider-vim      | SuperCollider support for Vim          | package
i | vim                    | Vi IMproved                            | package
| vim                    | Vi IMproved                            | srcpackage
i | vim-base               | Vi IMproved                            | package
| vim-base-debuginfo     | Debug information for package vim-base | package
i | vim-data               | Vi IMproved                            | package
| vim-debuginfo          | Debug information for package vim      | package
| vim-debugsource        | Debug sources for package vim          | package
| vim-enhanced           | A version of the VIM editor which in-> | package
| vim-enhanced-debuginfo | Debug information for package vim-en-> | package
| vim-plugin-devhelp     | Developer’s Help Program for GNOME     | package

After copying the firmware for Broadcom BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN , the wireless lan is working and I am able to connect to the internet.

One of the annoying thing about opensuse was the absence of mplayer or vlc player with the installation media itself. We need to setup the players and resolve the dependencies by ourselves as described in this URL:

http://www.susegeek.com/media-player/install-configure-mplayer-free-opensource-media-player-in-opensuse/

Since, I wanted to wash my clothes, I have decided to go with the easiest way (can’t think of spending time for a generic application like Mplayer after using debian (apt-get) for a long time).

The mplayer installation steps in Opensuse 11.2 is as listed below:

sudo zypper ar http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/11.2 mplayer

sudo zypper mr -r mplayer

sudo zypper in mplayer

Well done ! … It’s done

mplayer in opensuse 11.2

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Wooooww..

I am still intoxicated by the charm of Foss.in/2009. I can’t believe that it is over. It was , by far, the best  FOSS event that I have ever attended.

The reason why I felt it most attractive was it put the “zip on the mouth” and provided you with two powerful hands which could mould your idea into a reality- be it in Software or in Hardware.  This time, there were less talks and more “workout sessions”, which means we could work with the project of our choice, code and if the core developer likes it, it will be committed to the repository , right away!!!

There are pros and cons to every events. Now, let me show you the list of pros and cons of the foss.in  so that you will get a feel of what happened over there. Since, I have the habit of finding pleasure in finding the faults, let me put the cons first

Cons:

1.    The Foss.in people used OSX laptop for projecting presentations in the Main Auditorium

Pros:

1. Less number of Talks (More time for workouts.. go to first floor, meet the people and work with them).

2. Timing was great : 11 AM to 10 PM – In Bangalore, considering the traffic, if you are fortunate enough,  you can  reach a place like NIMHANS and attend the programs if it is scheduled at 9AM. It also allowed the “Software Professionals” like me to, go to office for their daily bread,come back in the evening and attend Foss.in. I was able to attend the Keynotes everyday and also participate in some of the hands on sessions in the evening (after 6 PM ) because of this schedule.

3. Selection of  Talks/Speakers were good.

4. I got the opportunity to meet some of the great minds and discuss something with them. The list is as follows:

a. Harald Welte : We discussed about Openezx project and issues with Motorola not realeasing the kernel source code for A1600 mobile.

b. Santhosh Thottingal: We discussed about the Silpa project. Silpa is an amazing project and Santhosh is doing amazing things with it. He explained the algorithms that he has used in the Silpa project for Language computing.

c. Stefan Schmidt : We discussed about the Openezx project. Tried to boot the A1600 with the latest 2.6.x kernel . However, the attempt failed after about 5 -6 attempts and he guided me to have a look into the bootloader code “Blob”

d. Baiju. M:  He has presented about “Buildout” . We discussed about Silpa.

e. Jain Basil Aliyas:  The “scribus” boy. We discussed about how his girl friend got engaged to another person . Probably he is so busy with his codings, that he couldn’t spare time for her

f.  Milosch Meriac: We discussed about Openbeacon project and he helped me in setting up the arm toolchain for openbeacon project in my laptop.

g. Ciju Rajan : My college mate and now a proud “IBM LTC” guy. I have attended his presentation on “Suspend and Resume”  in Linux.

h. Hundreds of other “Birds of the same feather”  flying with their groups  and very rarely fighting with the birds with slightly different color (KDE v/s GNOME )

5.  The “TRDP” band’s performance at the end of Foss.in was awesome. It was the first time I came to know that the Kannada Folk songs are this sweet. Kudos to Raghu Dixit for a wonderful evening.

In this event, I also witnessed some of my friends get their form back . One such example was Justin’s workout with Openbeacon project. He was so interested in the project that he spent 2 days with Miloch and finally coded the “Jana gana mana ” using the Openbeacon’s PWM in FreeRTOS. Miloch became so happy that he gifted the Openbeacon board and tag to Justin and he accepted Justin’s code to the openbeacon repository after some optimizations.

Justin.. way to go…

Sujith was running around with the KDE guys despite his health issues.  He was totally with the  KDE group that I seldom found him attending other sessions .. Kudos to Sujith

I felt sorry that I couldn’t attend Jain’s presentation on Scribus. I have also missed Pramode sir , who couldn’t attend  Foss.in/2009 due to health issues. Felt sad when Atul Chitnis said he is not going to lead from the next Foss.in onwards.  I think he should be the “BDFL” of Foss.in. I also felt happy when Atul Chitnis mentioned the amazing hack of “GPL” by RMS. In fact, it was the first time I heard Atul said something good about RMS

In effect, it was kind of “event of a lifetime” for me. Some of the snaps from Foss.in

Me along with Harald Welte and Stephan Schmidt

Khasim and Sony Team

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I have started my journey from Bangalore to Kozhikode on October 23.  The purpose of my journey was to conduct a workshop on Tathva-09, the three-day annual techno-management festival of the National Institute of Technology, Calicut (NIT-C).

A week before this, Vivek (my friend from GEC who is currently doing in MS in NITC, a GNU/Linux hacker and geek) has called me and asked me whether I can present a session on how to contribute to Free Software projects. Though, it was the first time for me, I never wanted to say “NO” to Vivek. I have agreed to conduct the “User2Hacker” session and prepared the presentation in Latex+ beamer using Lyx.

I have reached NITC campus on 24th, Saturday morning. The organizers has arranged for a cab to pick me and they also arranged accommodation for me at the NITC hostel.

Since  I was free on that day, I have decided to attend the “beagle board” session by Khasim. The session was very interesting and Khasim demonstrated some amazing ideas using beagle board. He also mentioned about the new “Hawk Board”.After that event, me and Vivek went to the Lab to setup the softwares needed to conduct the “Hands on session” . We have installed vim, indent, svn, git ..etc on  20 machines.

Next day, I went to Vivek’s room after breakfast. After that,  we went to the lab. As I have called up Pramode sir about the talk, he has informed a number of students about the talk and almost 10 people from GEC, Thrissur came to attend my workshop. The total number of students attended the workshop was around 50. I was happy about this number as this was the healthiest number of participants for a “Hands on workshop”. Later I have presented the “User2Hacker” workshop.

User2Hacker @NITC

Response from the students were very good. Some of them hav already contributed to the FOSS community. Some of them are willing to contribute provided somebody guide them in the right way. I liked their attitude and determination. For me, this was the purpose of my workshop. I am glad that I could at least make a number of  to seriously think about the various possibilities of the FOSS world.

The organizers were very energetic and professional. I felt the freshness of college after a couple of years. I thought about my days in GEC. The organizers has arranged a cab for my travel from NITC to Kozhikode Town.

I have tried the “Manchurian Dosa” for the first time from Kozhikkode. It is similar to Masala dosa .. however, in Manchurian Dosa, they replaced ordinary “masala” in masala dosa with Gobi Manchurian. It was an experiment worth trying

The Hindu reported “The User 2 Hacker workshop had a positive response” : http://www.hindu.com/2009/10/26/stories/2009102650160200.htm

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Today, I got a mail from Greg Kroah-Hartman !!!

from Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de> to linux-usb@vger.kernel.org cc Maxin John <maxin.john@gmail.com>, “Maxin B. John” <maxinbjohn@gmail.com>, Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de> date Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 7:25 PM subject [PATCH 056/142] USB: serial: Spelling correction in Motorola USB Phone driver

hide details 7:25 PM (24 minutes ago)

From: Maxin John <maxin.john@gmail.com>

Spelling correction in Motorola USB Phone driver

Changed: * Mororola should be using the CDC ACM USB spec, but instead
To: * Motorola should be using the CDC ACM USB spec, but instead

Signed-off-by: Maxin B. John <maxinbjohn@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
—
drivers/usb/serial/moto_modem.

Link to the patch: moto_modem.c

It’s now in Linux-2.6.32-rc1 tree:

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SystemTap GUI is an application for easy use of the SystemTap tool in Linux. This is an Integrated Development Environment for the SystemTap scripting language. This will perform data visualization and analysis of the probed data from running Kernel. Further details are available here:

http://stapgui.sourceforge.net/

The present state of Systemtap GUI server (.cpp files) Makefile will allow us to use only the native g++ present in the system. This was creating issues in building the stapgui-server for another target like ARM/MIPS. I have modifed the makefile for cross compiler friendliness and sent the patch to the SystemTap GUI community.

Today, I have received a mail from Anithra, a SystemTap GUI developer saying that the modification will be included in the next release version of SystemTap GUI. I am eagerly waiting for the next release.

Happy Hacking !!!

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I have downloaded the GNU ARM cross toolchain for A1600 from
http://ezxdev.org/qtopia/sdk/old/arm-linux-ezx.tar.bz2
Thanks to Antonio Ospite (AO2) of #openezx

I have downloaded and cross compiled inetutils-1.6.tar.gz (mainly for telnetd) , busybox-1.14.3.tar.bz2 (for httpd and other useful commands) and util-linux-2.12r.tar.gz (for dmesg). Cross compiled these packages using the ARM cross tool chain and transferred to the phone using the flash card.
I have started the telnetd using the below given command
/mmc/mmca1/busybox telnetd -E /bin/bash

Connected the phone to the debian linux laptop using the usb connector after putting the usb mode of mobile in Modem mode. After that , I have started the usbnet application in the phone. Now , I have usb0 interface in my laptop.

I have configured the usb0 interface using the below given command in laptop:

ifconfig usb0 192.168.1.1 mtu 1500

After that, I have successfully telnet to the phone using the command:
telnet 192.168.1.2

It works!!!.. After that , I have started the busybox httpd server on the phone . I was able to open the index.html from the host machine.

A webserver on my mobile… See the action:

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I have installed zmplayer on A1600. Now I can play whatever formats that you can throw into a mobile … without any format converters.. It can play .dat, .mpeg, .avi and even .vob files . See zmplayer in action:

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3 months ago I bought one Motorola A1600 mobile. There were three reasons behind that decision:

One of the reason was my Sony Ericsson  K300 stopped working after 3 years of faithful work. It was a great mobile and almost all my J2ME experiments were done on it. I think it was more than worth the money that I have spent on it.

The other reason was I was looking for a Linux smart phone.  I have attended the Herlad Welte’s BOF and presentation of A780 on Foss.in-2005. That had a long lasting impression on me.  I thought I should  go for an updated version of the same mobile which is based on EZX platform.

The final reason was GPS .. Yes, though I came to Bangalore more than a year ago, I still don’t know some parts of the Bangalore.  So, with a GPS enabled phone, I thought I should roam around freely. However, I wasn’t that ready to pay for a GPS service on a monthly basis. So, I choose A1600. It has gps support and has a builtin map of India (We are free to download the map of any country, though… after all , that’s what freedom means) . It even shows the way from Bangalore to Kollam (my district in Kerala). I must say that this GPS on A1600 helped me very much when me and my cousin brother Lalu drove my modified Swift car from Bangalore to Kerala 2 months ago.

The first month with the A1600 was a bit boring. I was not able to spend more time for it. I also found that the built in real player needs some format converter software to run my favorite videos and songs (some are ogg files).  I was able to run some java me programs on it.. and the first j2me program that I ran on this mobile was ‘chicken warrior’ , my own production

I couldn’t believe that I have wasted 2 months without doing anything with my Linux mobile . Finally, I decided to do something.. I can’t let my mobile to be just another ‘ good looking mobile’ that just does what it’s supposed to do. It’s running GNU/Linux.. It is way more than just a mobile. If this was my purpose, I could have bought another ‘good looking M$’ mobile.

One of the hurdles that I have faced during the initial stages of  ‘moto modding’  was the inability to install the packages (mpkg files which are nothing else but tar.gz files with cross compiled binaries for ARM architecture) which are not trusted by Motorola, not by me. The installation of untrusted applications in the mobile were blocked in firmware by Motorola and it was a real not so cool thing for a Linux phone.  The way to avoid this was installing the  ‘MPKG’ package which resolves this issue. It is available at

http://www.modmymoto.com/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=4179

All we have to do is download it , unzip and copy the .system  and replace the .system in the A1600 phone with that folder.  I have downloaded the MPKG package for A1200 which is the previous version of A1600. It works well on A1600. Later , I found that almost all the apps of the A1200 works on A1600 as well. Installation steps of MPKG package is as follows:

How to install A1600 Mpkg Installer.
1. extract Mpkg_A1200.rar and you ‘ll get .system folder. It’s hidden folder If you cann’t see try show hidden file.
2. copy .system folder into your flash card in usb mode.
3. restart A1600 and you are ready to go.

After installing MPKG, we can install all the .pkg (again tar.gz files) to  the A1600. Even if the application is .mpkg, just rename it to .pkg and you can install it. The details of .pkg/.mpkg format is available here:

http://wiki.openezx.org/MPKG

I have downloaded the Ekonsole application and installed it on my phone from here:

http://www.motorolafans.com/forums/a1600-general-chat/24911-ekonsole-a1600.html

Now I have a cool konsole running on my mobile. Here are some outputs:

$ ps ax

PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
1 ? S 0:01 init [
2 ? S 0:00 [keventd]
4 ? SN 0:00 [ksoftirqd_CPU0]
3 ? S 0:00 [ipmd]
5 ? S 0:00 [kswapd]
6 ? S 0:00 [bdflush]
7 ? S 0:00 [kupdated]
8 ? S 0:00 [keventd]
9 ? S 0:00 [kdebounced]
10 ? S 0:00 [kemud]
12 ? D 0:00 [swapper]
13 ? S 0:02 [mtdblockd]
14 ? S 0:00 [khubd]
39 ? SN 0:00 [jffs2_gcd_mtd8]
42 ? SN 0:01 [jffs2_gcd_mtd9]
45 ? SN 0:09 [jffs2_gcd_mtd15]
54 ? S 0:01 ./musbd -r /ezxlocal/download/mystuff -s 30Mib -t fat16 -C UTF8 -U 2000 -G 233 -B 0 -H 0Kib -e
85 ? S 0:03 /usr/SYStapi/tapisrv
86 ? S 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/modem/modemlauncher
92 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/apmd
93 ? S 0:01 /usr/bin/emud
99 ? S 0:50 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/windowsserver -qws
102 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
105 tty1 Ss+ 0:00 -bash
113 ? S< 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
116 ? S< 0:01 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
117 ? S< 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
118 ? S< 0:01 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
119 ? S< 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
120 ? S< 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
121 ? S< 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
126 ? S< 0:34 /usr/SYSqtapp/phone/phone
145 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
146 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
153 ? S 0:03 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/misc1
165 ? S 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/misc1
166 ? S 0:02 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/misc1
169 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/SYStapi/lapisrv
187 ? D 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/misc1
275 ? S 1:34 /usr/SYSqtapp/am/am
276 ? S 0:15 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/openwindow
277 ? S 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/am/am
292 ? S 0:19 /usr/SYSqtapp/messaging/messaging
297 ? S 0:02 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
301 ? S 0:01 /usr/SYSqtapp/opera/brwdaemon
302 ? S 0:02 /usr/SYSqtapp/addressbook/addrbk
303 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
304 ? S 0:34 /usr/SYSqtapp/sui/sui
305 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
309 ? S 0:11 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
342 ? Ss 0:00 ./inetd
354 ? Ss 0:00 ./smbd -D -l /dev/null
372 pts/0 Ss+ 0:00 -bash
379 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
447 pts/1 Ss+ 0:00 -bash
575 ? S 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/messaging/messaging
593 ? S 0:03 ./ekonsole
600 pts/2 Ss 0:00 -bash
607 pts/2 R+ 0:00 ps ax

A1600 details:

An ARM processor based mobile which runs on EZX platform with the following confirguration

Processor: Intel XScale PXA27x rev7 v5l

RAM : 64 MB

Software info:  Montavist linux 3.1 with linux kernel-2.4.20

Telnet to the phone

MontaVista(R) Linux(R) Consumer Electronics Edition 3.1
Linux/armv5tel 2.4.20_mvlcee31-mainstone_pxa27x

Will be updated soon with more adventures ..

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Hi,

Starting something new. Finally a ‘digital home’ for me : http://www.maxinbjohn.info

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