What seems like eons ago, I ordered one of those SheevaPlug Development Kits. After about six weeks, they got around to shipping it, and then, yesterday, after I assume a tortoise had piloted it across the country on broken tricycle, it was finally delivered to me.
I booted it up, observed that there was some kind of Ubuntu thing on it, and set myself to correct that problem. Within an hour I had managed to lock myself out.
Here is something I should have read beforehand.
Thanks to Martin Michlmayr, it is now running Debian and allowing me to log in.
Here are some steps to follow if you would like to boot Debian off of a USB stick plugged into your Sheevaplug:
- Grab the tarball from http://people.debian.org/~tbm/sheevaplug/lenny/
- Make an ext3 filesystem on the first partition of your USB stick (ext2 will not work with the current image)
- Mount the USB stick's filesystem, unpack the tarball onto it, then unmount
- Plug the USB stick into the SheevaPlug's full-sized USB port
- Plug the SheevaPlug in, and use minicom or your favorite terminal program to console in over the mini-USB port (don't forget that you need to use the ftdi_sio module instead of usbserial; 115200,N,8,1, no flow control)
Abort the autoboot, and type the following commands:
setenv mainlineLinux yes setenv arcNumber 2097 saveenv reset setenv bootargs_root 'root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=10' setenv bootcmd_usb 'usb start; ext2load usb 0:1 0x0800000 /boot/uInitrd; ext2load usb 0:1 0x400000 /boot/uImage' setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(console) $(bootargs_root); run bootcmd_usb; bootm 0x400000 0x0800000' saveenv run bootcmd
That should be all there is to it.
Next I'm wondering if SDIO wireless cards work.
Posted Wed Apr 29 18:20:19 2009This is about two things that are not robust.
zomg, as of version 0.5.7, can play libre.fm radio streams without modification. It does not do this particularly well.
As of today a second type of libre.fm radio stream is available, so I will give two illustrative examples:
To play free music tagged 'Blues' (note that almost none of this is actually blues),
zomg -r librefm://globaltags/Blues
To play free music performed only by Abscondo (note that the "similarartists" is there to mislead you):
zomg -r librefm://artist/Abscondo/similarartists
These stations lack the intelligence to avoid annoying duplication or much of anything but randomization. However, both zomg and libre.fm are free software, and anyone can chip in and improve this if desired.
In other news, the state of client support has moved a bit, though not as much as one might have hoped. You can get a picture of that here.
Posted Sun Apr 26 21:59:52 2009As far as I am aware (and I am unanimous in this), ZOMG is the only released software that can scrobble tracks to both libre.fm and last.fm near-simultaneously.
Posted Tue Apr 7 11:12:18 2009certtool --generate-privkey > cakey.pem
echo 'cn = exampleCA' > ca.tmpl
echo 'ca' >> ca.tmpl
echo 'cert_signing_key' >> ca.tmpl
echo 'expiration_days = 732' >> ca.tmpl
certtool --generate-self-signed --load-privkey cakey.pem \
--template ca.tmpl --outfile cacert.pem
for i in host1.example.org host2.example.org host3.example.org
do
certtool --generate-privkey > $i-key.pem
echo 'organization = Example' > server.tmpl
echo 'unit = Messaging' >>server.tmpl
echo "cn = $i" >> server.tmpl
echo 'email = postmaster@example.org' >> server.tmpl
echo 'expiration_days = 366' >> server.tmpl
# echo 'tls_www_server' >> server.tmpl
echo 'encryption_key' >> server.tmpl
echo 'signing_key' >> server.tmpl
echo "dns_name = $i" >> server.tmpl
certtool --generate-certificate --load-privkey $i-key.pem \
--load-ca-certificate cacert.pem --load-ca-privkey cakey.pem \
--template server.tmpl --outfile $i.pem
done
A long time ago, I had the idea of improving the interface between
shell completion and the programs being completed. The result of
this was the bzr shell-complete command (or bzr s-c for short),
which was never fully fleshed out, and has since fallen into disrepair.
The principles behind this are + the program is the best place to store up-to-date and accurate information + the program already knows all these things (albeit usually in unparseable forms) + duplicating information and effort is annoying
Here is an excerpt from bzr s-c, which was intended to give a comprehensive
list of subcommands, paired with short descriptions:
diff:show differences in the working tree, between revisions or branches
export:export current or past revision to a destination directory or archive
get:create a new copy of a branch
help:show help on a command or other topic
ignore:ignore specified files or patterns
ignored:list ignored files and the patterns that matched them
info:show information about a working tree, branch or repository
init:make a directory into a versioned branch
There is one subcommand per line, separated from its description by a colon.
Next you can invoke something like bzr s-c diff to get the possible options
and arguments for the diff subcommand, although the output you would see today
is broken and nearly useless.
Since I've lost faith in bzr, I'll illustrate what the output might be
corresponding to topgit's tg remote if topgit supported this kind of thing:
--populate
REMOTE
This would mean that tg remote can understand the option --populate, which
takes no argument, and that the first non-option argument should be a
REMOTE.
REMOTE would then be defined, for example, in zsh's _topgit function as
some kind of git remote which is completed in the same way you might complete
a git remote for git.
The exciting part then, is that if tg remote starts taking a --decimate
option, the topgit completion helper subsystem will start outputting it
and _topgit will do the right thing without having to be altered.
For tg export, things are a bit more complicated, so let's have it be
described in the style of the zsh completion system:
'(--collapse)--quilt:directory:_directories'
'(--collapse -b --branch)'{-b,--branch=}':branches:BRANCHES'
'(--quilt)--collapse:branch:BRANCH'
This means that --collapse and --quilt are exclusive, that -b
and --branch cannot be used with --collapse, that -b and
--branch are equivalent, that -b and --branch take an argument
in the form of BRANCHES, that --collapse takes an argument in the
form of BRANCH, and that --quilt takes an argument that's a
real directory in the filesystem.
Then _topgit would have logic to interpret BRANCH as a branch, and
BRANCHES as a comma-separated list of branches.
A similar idea is the one used by axp. If you invoke axp self completion zsh,
it will output zsh completion functions for you. To me this seems more onerous
on both the developers and the end users, but I suppose it gives you immediate
flexibility that a more generic interface would lack.
For a while, lots
of
people
have been using their zsh prompts to display information
about their current VCS (git in particular) working directories. I am no
exception, though I was just doing a simple git rev-parse and
git symbolic-ref in my precmd().
Starting with zsh-beta 4.3.6-dev-0+20080921-1, I am now using the vcs_info subsystem developed by Frank Terbeck. It has backends for bzr, cdv, cvs, darcs, git, hg, mtn, p4, svk, svn, and tla. These backends can be enabled or disabled via configuration.
To get it working quickly, do something like
autoload -Uz vcs_info
precmd() {
psvar=()
vcs_info
[[ -n $vcs_info_msg_0_ ]] && psvar[1]="$vcs_info_msg_0_"
}
PS1="%m%(1v.%F{red}%1v%f.)%# "
Freshly stolen from Europe:
b() {
setopt localoptions extendedglob
if [[ $# -eq 1 ]]; then
case "$1" in
([0-9]##)
links "http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=$1"
;;
(*@*)
links "http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?submitter=$1"
;;
(*)
links "http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=${1%%_*}"
;;
esac
else
print "$0 needs one argument"
fi
}
I needed to quickly stuff a bunch of random music onto a ridiculously small vfat medium. I used this:
#!/bin/zsh
# also released under the gnocchi-ng license
zmodload -i zsh/datetime
zomg_shuffle() {
declare -A h
local +h -Z 5 RANDOM=$EPOCHSECONDS
integer i
for ((i=1; i <= $#; ++i)) { h[$i.$RANDOM]=$argv[i] }
reply=( $h )
}
zug=( /pathtomusic/ogg/**/*.ogg )
zomg_shuffle $zug
for i in "$reply[@]"
do
cp -v "$i" /media/tinyflashdrive/"${${i:t}//[:?\"*]/_}" || { rm -v /media/tinyflashdrive/"${${i:t}//[:?\"*]/_}" ; exit 1}
done
Someone gave me an MP3 player. He did so for somewhat devious reasons, but that's outside the scope of this post. It is a SanDisk Sansa—stop thinking of pulp fantasy—and it has roughly 500 gigs too little storage space. The FAQ says such cute things as “The original firmware is recommended for charging at this time,” and “Rockbox does not currently provide either functionality so you will need to continue using the original firmware (for now) in MSC (UMS) mode to add music to the Sansa.”
Please don't tell my Sansa about this FAQ because it thinks that both of those claims are false.
I want my newfangled device to participate in the spyware fiesta known as last.fm, and Rockbox has an option for supporting that; if you turn it on, it fills a /.scrobbler.log file with tab-delimited lines for your parsing pleasure.
Rather than download additional software to cope with my new lifestyle, I whipped up the following script (released under the gnocchi-ng license) which “converts” the log to something you can just stuff into your ~/.zomg/cache file and send up to the submission server at your next appropriate invocation of zomg. I'm afraid you'll have to handle any timestamp sorting by hand, but if you script it, be a dear and implement some kind of cache file locking.
#!/bin/zsh
# Copyright (C) 2007 Clint Adams. All rights reserved.
# This program has no name and is released under the terms of
# the gnocchi-ng license.
audioscrobbler_urlencode() {
if (( $+options[multibyte] )); then
setopt localoptions extendedglob nomultibyte
else
setopt localoptions extendedglob
fi
input=( ${(s::)1} )
print -- ${(j::)input//(#b)([^A-Za-z0-9_.!*\'\(\)-])/%$(([##16]#match))}
}
audioscrobbler_constructquery() {
local sid="$1"
local artist=$(audioscrobbler_urlencode "$2")
local track=$(audioscrobbler_urlencode "$3")
local album=$(audioscrobbler_urlencode "$4")
local mbid=$(audioscrobbler_urlencode "$5")
local length=$(audioscrobbler_urlencode "$6")
local ttime=$(audioscrobbler_urlencode "$7")
local source="$8"
local tracknum="$9"
reply=("&s=${sid}" "&a[0]=${artist}&t[0]=${track}&i[0]=${ttime}&o[0]=${source}&r[0]=&l[0]=${length}&b[0]=${album}&n[0]=${tracknum}&m[0]=${mbid}")
}
while read -r line
do
local -a field
field=("${(@ps:\t:)${line}}")
if [[ $field[6] == L ]]; then
audioscrobbler_constructquery "" "$field[1]" "$field[3]" "$field[2]" "" "$field[5]" "$field[7]" P "$field[4]"
print "$reply[2]"
fi
done <<(grep -v '^#' .scrobbler.log)
The zsh-lovers man page contains the following example.
# Show me all the .c files for which there doesn't exist a .o file. $ c=(*.c) o=(*.o(N)) eval 'ls ${${c:#(${~${(j:|:)${o:r}}}).c}:?done}'
What's with the ugly dollar-sign prompt? I'd do it this way instead.
print *.c(e_' ! -e $REPLY:r.o '_)