Ronald Prettyman

Going to be moving the flashy part of this site to STUPIDFLANDER.ORG this will be where I’ll be putting my flash and other experimental content.

http://stupidflander.org

My music collection server is back up. Any of the following will get you their.

https://www.phuckyou.us

http://dfgs.info

Their are several others but their too long to be worth mentioning.

Might of noticed the site has changed. Removed the frames, music and flash animations and phuckyou.us is down, along with some of my other sites. Well I’ll be moving my flashy site to another domain and using this one to present a more professional look and feel since it is associated with my name. I’ll also be going through and trying to fix up or delete older post and probably posting more new post. The word press is quite a bit easier to use and the old site was just starting to look dated.

So all my post have been migrated, still working on a better solution for migrating my pictures but for now this will have to do.

The old site as well as the ampache/phuckyou.us site will be moved to a new server I have coming in tomorrow. Stayed tunned for links to that new system.

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.

Sites been up for over two years it seems. searched for my site on the web archives and found an entry for 2008. Enjoy

http://web.archive.org/web/20080228172650/http://ronaldprettyman.com/

After several different iterations finally settled on Ubuntu Server. Tried FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, CentOS, but just didn’t find all the features I wanted. The bsd’s had the easiest setup as far as routing/firewall/nat(network address translation) but I ran into problems with the NAT(network attached storage) the UPnP, the printer drivers and the LDAP. I wanted to consolidate all my servers into one small and energy efficent machine for under 100 bucks. I ended up going with an  Intel Atom 230, dual core with hyper threading for 4 threads. 1 gig of memory. Ubuntu Server 9.10 (will switch to 10.04 when it comes out next month, has a longer support path and will inevitably be more stable), 750g of storage, and dual intel gigabit nics. It does a great job. I was surprised to see a noticable performance boost moving from sparcs, then again when moving from bsd to linux.

The Machine is able to juggle all the task I have it running (won’t list them all here today maybe later) but it does great.

The only thing is I have a bridge and it takes a couple second to come up which cause some network services to fail, I had to delay their start by 60 seconds and that took care of the issue.

Never clever to say but here a pic

Been using windows at the new job. I know I know, I sold my soul. But honestly I like the change of pace and to Windows credit it is doing a damn fine job of trying to act more like unix. Now if they could just disable the gui completely (not like the guiless install crap you get with server 2008) but a true headless server, take away the resource hogging graphics and their just as annoying inputs, stick to whats required. A network input, a console out and possibly a keyboard and very basic video out. The keyboard and video out being very, VERY optional. They should be reserved for the WORKSTATION server crowd. I’d rather have a console switch then a damn kvm. One more layer of hardware, one more layer of failure, one more thing to have to consider when diagnosing problems. 

Save the gui controls for the workstations where they belong, if I really need a gui, i’ll install a tool to graphically manage the server through a web interface or a remote application client. But enough about my opinions on operating systems and why the complexity of modern operating systems such as osx and windows has no place in a serious business enviroment.

I promised to share this little trinket so I will.

windows key+r

cmd

before you know it, cisco switch’s will come with VGA and usb ports

Its going to be one year this week since I started this part of the site. I can’t say, well you can see for yourself that I haven’t put a whole hell of a lot of entries in here. But one thing I need to get working on is organizing my paper work.

Had to find a document for a job and spend a good hour looking through misc folders on shelves. I found countless crap I should of thrown away years ago. I even found a receipt for a 20oz Pepsi dated 2007. Not even sure how that got in the keep pile. Sad thing is I have that receipt but don’t have the xbox receipt from the same year. Good thing I don’t actually need either one.

But not much to say. Got a new job today suppose to start Monday. Its a Windows job, but I’ve been meaning to brush up and become more efficient at it any ways. Need to read up on exchange server and active directory and the windows cli. I’m not actually sure how much exchange server I’ll be dealing with as their doesn’t seem to be much need for it in small business, but I’ve seen stranger things. Did some testing for the position and was surprised at how much I retained. They even threw some 98 at me, your have to note I did have an advantage at that, if you go back 6 months your see an entry about playing with networking Windows 98 against Solaris so I had a slight edge on that one.