Skip to content
Posts
The little laptop that almost could
Swapping out ChromeOS for Ubuntu
So, when we were last here, I was talking about how I had been happily using my PixelBook for a year, and everything was just fine. Then, life happened, and things changed, and I found myself working out of the house for a while.
Why should this be a problem? Well, the program I use to remote into the office has a desktop client as well as a web-based one. Under Chrome OS, all I could figure out how to use was the HTML5 web based one.
This is a quick post so I can remember these details.
So, on the R810, I am currently running ArchLinux, which uses by default NetworkManager, which I have a love/hate relationship with. At my last job, I recommended removing it from our servers, as under RHEL6, it does very odd things to the network and is hard to manage. I have heard that it is better under RHEL7. But, it does let you do some really cool things.
So, I decided it was time to go TLS (aka https) with all my websites. This is something I have wanted to do for a while, but I held off due to the way I had to get my laptop on the wireless at the previous job. Now that I have left, there was no need for that, so away I go!
On the job front, this was an odd week to start with almost everybody on my new team being out due to the holiday.
Drive failed. Harley does not like that….
Wow…summer is almost over. Three more weeks until school starts again.
Need to spend more time putting pictures up from some of the trips we have done. I think there is time to squeeze another visit to the beach before school starts up, but we will see.
One of the projects I have been working on is taking over web hosting for an organization I volunteer with. The old hosting was with a former member at his hosting company, but he is retiring as of the end of July, so I stepped up to host it.
For some reason, we have had a bit of power issues around the house recently. No big deal, just enough to cause non-UPS computers to reboot. Well, one of them was the firewall (the UPS on it pop a while back, and I just have not gotten around to replacing it). But, it would not come back the last time. Drag a it over to a monitor and have a look at the console.
This is a quick post to capture something seen. Ansibel is a configuration management tool that I have been learning recently. More details in a future post. This is just to capture this idea:
From: Smith, Chris (Big Data)
To: ansible
Ansible Galaxy is a centralised Github repository of public Ansible content, see: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ It uses a local routine that is installed when you install Ansible, called ‘ansible-galaxy’, to create a blank template for your Ansible content.
And, again, I hit something which is causing massive disk performance issues. That, and suspend/resume does not work on either laptop.
I would try to debug the issues, but that means learning a whole new set of tools, and I will not have time for a while. Next week, I am in week long meetings which will run late every day, and then I have to finish writing and present a training class the last week of the month.
As the month draws to a close, I am further into the switch. I have rebuilt my main laptop to PCBSD. I am still setting a few things up, but it seems to be going well.
Two things I need to fix:
Skype: While there is not a native client, there are lots of folks who report success with the Linux client. I will need to do some research. Nikola: The software I use for my blogs.
Today is day 14 (pushing day 15 at this hour), and things are looking very good. Today, I got word from the PCBSD Project that a patch which I submitted to fix the issue with the WiFi NIC. Well, I got notice today that PCBSD Bug #7330 has been resolved, and I tested on the R810. It works!
Now, I just need to get a few things configured here first, like snapshots, backups, and porting my SDCARD reading scripts over to FreeBSD, and I should be good.
It is the 10th day of the month, and I am 10 days in trying to use FreeBSD as my daily non-work driver. How is it going?
Well, for the most part, well. I can spend most of my personal work-flow on the FreeBSD laptop with no issues. There are a couple of things I have not moved over yet, and those relate to my photo work-flow. The main application, AfterShotPro is installed and working (see [my previous desciption <freebsd-challenge-day-4-6>]{role=“doc”} of installing in), however, I have not moved over the scripts I use in the flow.
As 2014 draws to a close, I look back at the year.
Overall, it was a good year. The family staid reasonably health (just a case of the flu which every one of us caught).
Work slowed down a bit after only three trips, and the last one was in June, but I did get to spend two weeks in London which was cool. While the work has been not what I really want to be doing, it has been interesting, and next year promises to be very interesting.
So, even though I have been starting to [work with <back2freebsd-maybe>]{role=“doc”} [FreeBSD <freebsd-switch>]{role=“doc”} [again <one-step-closer>]{role=“doc”} , I am still running ArchLinux on my workstation.
And I wanted to run a script I wrote a long time ago to support a website of mine, which I have not updated in a while. The way I would update the site is by doing some batch editing of photos, park them in a directory, and then run my script which pushes the photos to the web server, and then interfaces with the CMS software to schedule the posts and all is good.
So, I have upgraded my servers at the house to FreeBSD, and have set up the basic functions needed on them. So, now, I am down to only my main laptop running Linux. Oh, and the work machine which runs Windows 8.1.
So far, not much different than running Arch for the server. But, the magic will be when I start working with jails...
I just noticed I have not updated this in a few weeks. Sorry about that.
I have my R810 running PCBSD 10.0.2, and I just patched and configured WiFi on it. I need to figure out how to submit a patch to see if I can get the Centrino supported in the main-line kernel so I do not have to compile a custom kernel just for that.
I almost have this working where I can switch to it full time.
So, I had a bit of time over the weekend, and spent it doing a bit of hacking around.
I had re-installed PC-BSD on my HP EliteBook R810. I used 10.0.2, and everything but the wireless looked good. I decided to try to get the wireless working with the internal WNIC. Previously, I used an external dongle to get WiFi working, but it was a pain to remember to pull it out, so I decided to try again.
Well, Something broke on the main computer. The speed when trying to run a few terminal apps, firefox, and thunderbird at the same time was appalling. I never had that sort of performance issues under ArchLinix on the same kit. I would love to take the time to debug it, but I am almost four weeks behind in dealing with my photos, including those from my trip to England, and I am getting ready to do run some training courses for work which will suck up all my free time.
Today, I got my new laptop dragon up on wireless with a little Edimax EW-7811Un 150 Mbps Wireless 11n Nano Size USB Adapter. Now, setup begins in ernest. I have disabled the on-board wireless NIC in the BIOS, and started to set up shop on it.
Next major task. Configure X. :)
d
Sorry about the lack of updates over the last two weeks, but my job sent me out of country for two weeks, and I had no time to work on this project. Once I unbury myself, I will return to this with a vengence. I am planning on upgrading my two servers to FreeBSD10 from Linux. One will involve a major disk reworking as one of the disks is about dead.
Busy day with other things than play computers, but I found a little time. I have FreeBSD 10-STABLE loaded with the custom WiFi hack on my Elitebook Revolve 810 . I would have to let it try to boot off the USB stick. After multiple tries, it would finally run the installer. I tried ZFS a few times, but if I did not select MBR format for the partition table, then it would not boot (no OS error).
Half-way point.
Much progress made in the world of a bootable USB stick to get my new-fangled WiFi chip working. I was able to make a new image, wrote it to a new USB stick, booted it, and was able to successfully scan for my Access Points! W00t!
Tomorrow, I will take the second laptop (HP EliteBook Revolve 810), and load it with 10-Release (slightly patched). I do not expect everything to work (it has a touch screen), but enough should work that I can start using it for the daily driver.
Ah, life with kids…not enough spare time with soccer and volleyball practices and games.
Things are going well. Found a few more small utilities that I use under Linux and added them via pkgng, and all is good.
Next up: system debugging. The system will slow down at random points, so I need to go find a good performance debug guide. The only thing changed was I imported my music library (~60G), but my drive is still plenty empty (~37% used), so I do not think it is ZFS, but I am not sure.
Again, work is dragging, so not much to update.
I have install btsync and I am now syncing home dirs between the laptop, desktop, and the FreeNAS.
My attempt to build a custom kernel to deal with the new WiFi was mixed. I was able to build the kernel and world just fine and it made a USB image for me. But, it would not boot...I do need to figure out how to debug this.
AKA Fight with Thunderbird and Lightning.
I broke down and installed a PBI for now. I could not get Lightning, the calendaring AddOn for Thunderbird to work using the native FreeBSD pkg or the linux-thunderbird one. The linux-thunderbird package actually refused to start for me. I need to go figure out how to generate a PR.
The other thing I am playing with is building a memstick image after patching the kernel using this post in the FreeBSD Forums.
Sorry…busy time at work and with the family.
Small updates: I have the external VGA dongle working. No config needed, just plug it in and it works. I really need to fix the WiFi so I can stop using the USB dongle on it. Also, I have updated mutt to 1.5.23, and that upgrade went smoothly. Since I am not using the default build, it was a matter of portsnap fetch && portsnap update && cd /usr/ports/mail/mutt && pkg remove mutt && make install clean and all is good!
No major work on the laptop today because I set up a FreeNAS box. I was able to get 4 x 3T drives, and set it up. Pretty easy. I am now busy moving my media over to it.
Just a quick update. Yesterday, I got abook working. Kind of a hack, though. I used gcc to compile it, vs. clang. I will have to revisit this and offer up some patches to the abook project.
I have also been playing with x11/xpra which bills itself as \‘screen for X11\‘. That, combined with sshuttle , lets me get in from work and do some work during lunch. It may also give me a tempory way to use AfterShotPro until I get the whole Linux compatability layer thing figured out.
So, a long time ago, I had a box which was running FreeBSD 4, running on a Pentium. This housed my public server, website, and mail server. After I while, I had to rebuild it, and went back to Linux.
14 years later, I have decided to get back into FreeBSD, now at FreeBSD 10. I have it running headless on two boxes, and I have decided to take the ‘30 Day Challenge’.
Well, as I [mentioned before <tale-of-install>]{role=“doc”}, I was trying to install OpenBSD. Well, my main workstation died, so I have to re-purposed the OpenBSD box as my workstation running ArchLinux. I am hunting for a suitable replacement.
Oh, and Happy New Year!
So, I am starting a new personal project at the house, and I need a new server. As I was wanting to learn more about the BSD, I started looking around at things like FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD.
Since there was a security part, I started with OpenBSD. One of the things I noticed quickly while doing my research is that while there is a lot of documentation, they do not really seem to care about making it easy for new folks to join the project, nor are the trying to support new-fangled hardware, like bootable USB drives.