Ronald Prettyman

Did these with Gimp, well except the last 2 picture

Its been awhile since I’ve touched it, but I sort of reached my goal, figured out the rest. Yet to sit down and actually execute the plan. Lack of time really.

But to sort of pass the ball on this. I built the kernel to my specifications, wrote it to memory then set up the root file system with build root. Boot time is almost instant, after posting and mounting the sd card I have a quick script to load the modules for audio, wifi and keymap and then prepare the suspend. Then it displays login. Runs extremely fast and got memory useage down to about 3megs total size of rootfs is about 25megs. So the next step to create a useable device was a chroot. Use build root to get it booted and load drivers then have getty do a other shell like so

chroot /debian/sbin/login

To get the powerbutton to work I mapped the button to ctrl+alt+delete then in init changed the behavior of ctrl+alt+delete to run the suspend script. Wrote a basic one from scratch plenty of examples on google.

To get audio to work on buildroot you have to configure /dev manually by moving some objects around and setting permissions.

For the chroot, well its just a basic chroot, mount /proc and link /dev

So then I could have a debian userland boot in less then 3 seconds in the palm of my hand. I’ll post my configs for busybox and buildroot and write up some steps for the chroot boot process but from the information above, anyone should be able to get a working enviroment to boot in 3 seconds. Major improvement over ubuntu which was booting in about 5 minutes.

What works,

1. Power botton
2. Suspend
3. Audio
4. Keyboard
5. X
6. WiFi

What doesn’t

1. Hybernate
2. Headphones (well the quality is still garbage)

Been messing with the Zipit Z2. The ubuntu release by http://www.mozzwald.com/node/50. With some opitmization you can get a really useable thingy.

Started porting gentoo to the zipit. I have it booting now, just have to finish the touches on crosscompiler, then compile the packages I want. The first thing I’ve noticed is gentoo is only using about 13 megs of ram after boot though it takes twice as long to boot as ubuntu. Ubuntu was using about 25 megs at boot so its a significant difference. More to come on this, will probably be working on getting suspend, hybernate, xorg, sound, etc, in the next week. But it is booting which is promising.

If you want to try it, you can loosely follow http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-arm.xml. Your need linux running on a machine connected to the net to set it up and your want to use armv5tel. Recommend using uboot.

Been working on a new server still working some stuff. But I’ll post more details when its appropriate.

Never clever to say but here a pic

Same frame rate, same source, same audio rate. different bit rate.
One is 1500megs one is 700megs
Can you tell the difference?

Answers in the comments

I keep getting sucked into KDE 4. It just doesn’t seem to want to run stable on any of my hardware. I’m sure some people out their having it running great. But I haven’t had much luck. I haven’t tried to or even looked up how to optimize it cause I usually don’t care that much about the gui. I just find it interesting that distributions are incorporating it so early.  But as a gui interface, an alternative gui interface and considering how hard Nokia is trying to push the latest QT I can understand the logic.

But imagine if Samba 4 was released today, because they wanted to adopt it. That would quickly become very frustrating. I have been eagerly waiting for a production ready release for quiete awhile. Just for the oppurtunity to even considering eliminating all those active directory servers or at least cutting them down. I honestly believe Samba 4 could be whats needed to finally bring Linux onto the mainstream desktop. I can’t say its entirely a good thing. But I could see it happening and its exciting considering how long I’ve spent convencing friends and family to switch. Or at least considering their opions. At least it give microsoft a run for their money. But if Samba 4 took off and began mass adoption and migration. The implication would be massive. Once the server end was moved to linux in the domain controller sector, it wouldn’t be longer before organization considered moving their workstations too.

Now when you think about it, this could be what Oracle has in mind. Sun’s offerings make up a good chunk of the average linux distribution. If Oracle controlled them and linux took off on the desktop, Oracle would be in a very similar situation to where Microsoft is today. And knowing what I know about their history I think their is a very good chance, they may be planning to try and bring linux into the main stream and have their name on it. Hopefully better then Corels Walmart attempt.

Ok so you have a zfs volume in Opensolaris and you want it in Linux. So theirs no easy way to say this, but its not as easy as zfs import -a

You have to convert it to a lower version and theirs no easy way to do that.

Here is how I did it. I just don’t like how slow OpenSolaris is on x86 hardware so I’m moving my fileserver back to linux but I still want ZFS. I did some test in linux and it works great, better then it does in BSD which is surprising.

The best way to do this, is to export to the volume created in linux then export it to file from linux then import it into the newly created verision in linux.

The linux version doesn’t do well with internal send/receive. External send to internal receive. Or sending or receving to or from files <> seems to work well but its doesn’t want to duplicate pool to pool locally. I tested it with small and large pools and the two step process seems to work best. I don’t see this being fixed in the future as their doesn’t seem to be development at the moment.

I believe their is a good chance that oracle might pick up zfs and make it more compatible with Linux, either by relicensing it or something along thoses lines. They seem to have a vested interested in linux and adding ZFS support to their Redhat clone might help to give them an advantage. If I was oracle I would definately be looking at ZFS closely as well as other solaris feature. Some features of solaris would be nice to have in Linux. Such as zfs, dtrace, svc(SMF). I personally belive that the linux kernel is a supperior kernel in function, but wish it had a more open licensing like bsd. Their is a great deal more compatible with bsd at least from a legal standpoint.

I’ll update this tomorrow, with step by step instructions. With possible alternatives that should work according to ZFS specifications, but just didn’t in my setup, probably due mostly to the stablility of the still fairly young linux port of ZFS. Also note that in my experience thus far I have not had any luck running iostat while their is any activity on a zfs partition. I am curious to see if these compatibilites transfer to FreeBSD and I have a pretty good feeling they will as I belive this the version are the same and FreeBSD might even be a later version in the current build (13 I believe). Freebsd seems to have a higher likely hood of stability and has more development going on with ZFS probably due to the fack that it is being incorporated into the kernel and Solaris and BSD have more in common then Linux and Solaris.

EDIT: ZFS is still not usable on Linux. Hopefully this will change in the future. Maybe a change of licenses…