linux

Once upon a time, a Marvell developed a product called the Sheevaplug to drum up interest for their "Kirkwood" ARM-compatible CPU line. This was a complete linux system hidden in a wall wart, whose design they gave away as a reference. This led to a number of Sheevaplug-based devices hitting the market, including the PogoPlug, a line of cheap NAS devices which are all based on the Sheevaplug design with various single-core Marvell CPUs. They are now discontinuing not only that line but also the service for the same, so the devices are cheaper than ever before right now, and this is a great time to pick one up — I got one for $13.

I needed a quick version of lspci for looking at some linux systems without pciutils, so I threw this one together in a couple of minutes.

It's very simple, it doesn't tell you what the devices are, but it does tell you what kind of devices they are and what their PCI ID is. Then you can go look that up online to figure out what they are. It wouldn't be a horrible stretch to add support for the pci.ids file, but it wasn't necessary for my purposes.

I just got a nice Samsung EVO 850 SSD, and therefore got the chance to remove two spinning disks from my PC. But in order to make this happen, I had to move Windows to the SSD I had in my PC already. So I mounted the new SSD and formatted it ext4, and transferred Linux without a hitch. Then I booted up and used gparted to transfer Windows to the old SSD I'd just vacated, and it wouldn't boot. I thought these problems were over? I used my Linux install (with vmware player) to fix the problem just as I had used it (with gparted) to copy Windows from one volume to another.

Short, short, short form: Before installing, install setfsb, then add a REG_EXPAND_SZ (named, perhaps, underclock) like this to the registry in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run:

c:\programs\setfsb\setfsb.exe -w0 -s50 -q

I recently became reinterested in pogoplug devices when they seemed to have come down to a fairly reliable ten to twenty dollars for the latest models, the kind with an SD slot. They're nice little ARM-based machines with a lovely case and pads for a 3.3 volt serial port. Now I wanted to add a little basic functionality to them when running Debian.

Once I bought a dockstar, and was mightily annoyed by it. Eventually new Pogoplugs came out, and I invested a whopping nine bucks in a used pogoplug mobile. After having it deregistered by support, I tried installing ArchLinuxARM on it. This produced a brick with a flashing green light, so do not try to install Arch for ARM on this device. It's probably possible to make it work, but the default install instructions don't work. Further, the revert process didn't work either! Seems like their u-boot is broken for this device.

Since this site is really just my personal blog, it requires little in the way of resources as compared to any "real" site. Drupal caches most content for anonymous users, and I am generally the only person logged into the site and I'm not on it very often. As a result I've always gone for the cheapest hosting that seemed it would do the job at the time I was looking. This has sometimes had mixed results, but these days it's mostly fairly simple to change hosting, and this is what I've just done.

The Seagate Dockstar is the lowest-end PogoPlug device, a tiny low-power ARM server which runs Linux. Devices like this are ubiquitous now, but when the PogoPlug came out it was extremely unusual. It also cost substantially more than it does today, when a Rev.2 PogoPlug (not the new-new one, the old new one) is only $20. The only cheaper ARM-based server I know of is the Dockstar, which can be had for as little as $14 through Amazon today. Regardless of which PogoPlug you might have, you probably want to run Debian Squeeze with a recent kernel featuring LED support, which is not that difficult — but finding all the information you need is.

I myself probably should have looked for one of these before I made this one; it's a .desktop file for gksudo that gives you access to it from the GUI in non-incidental ways. Below the break you'll find the text, which is not very long.

Hey, nVidia, what has happened to your drivers lately? They seem to have all the quality I expect from ATI drivers. I have new problems I didn't have before my last Linux driver upgrade. What, exactly is wrong over there, and what can I do to help short of buying a $600 graphics card from you? Sincerely, formerly a rabid pro-nVidia, anti-AMD Linux user.