Andreas

New piece of hardware

Hardware /

For some (smartphone related) project, I need wireless network access to do a proof of concept. In addition, I wanted to be able to work with the laptop also at other places in the house, not only on my desk, and I also wanted to get rid of the network cable. So it was time to get some wireless access point. After some research on the web, I found that the Linksys WRT54GL router had very good ratings. One advantage of this router is that the firmware can be replaced with some open source firmware which adds extended capabilites.

It was really easy to setup the router, yet two special things had to be considered:

  • The default router IP address is 192.168.1.1. But in my network, this address is already assigned to the existing primary router. So, the first thing was to connect the WRT54G router to a PC through one of the four normal router LAN ports, and then reconfigure the router address.
  • Then, unfortunately the quick start guide only describes how to connect the router to a broadband modem (through the WAN port). When used as access point “only”, the approach is a littlebit different: simply connect the router through one of the four normal router ports to the network. There is no crossover cable necessary, the router automatically detects that it is connected to a switch or hub and configures the port accordingly.

After these small problems have been solved, the router could be configured and I was able to test the new cable free world 🙂

Subversion plugin for Eclipse

News /

After installing Eclipse 3.4 (from eclipse.org – the version in the intrepid repository is still 3.2.2), I also wanted to install the subversion plugin. However, after I installed the plugin through the eclipse software update manager, each subversion operation showed the message “unable to load default svn client”. Searching google for this message gave some hints to add

-Djava.library.path=/usr/share/java/ -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni/
to eclipse.ini. Still, this was not sufficient – it is of course also necessary to install the appropriate libraries. These are contained in the package libsvn-java. After also installing this package, the subversion plugin is now working.

New Linux installation

Linux /

A couple of weeks ago, I installed kubuntu 8.10 as my primary operating system. My debian installation was quite outdated, because I did not change much in the last – well – two years or so. I really needed a stable system, but now it was time to update to a recent distribution. Even though I have a 64 bit CPU, I decided to install the 32 bit version of Kubuntu. The main reason was that in the past I often had issues with software which was not yet available for 64 bit Linux. The plan is to use a stable 32 bit system for daily usage, and create either chroot environments for other usage (like a debian unstable environment) or even use virtual machines when necessary. Installation of Kubuntu was quite straight forward, and I will talk about some of the less straight forward things in some upcoming posts.

First impression of upstart

Linux /

Yesterday, I had a closer look at upstart, a replacement for the sysv init daemon. My goal is to speed up the boot process of my Debian desktop installations, and the two systems which could help with this are upstart and initng. There are packages for upstart in Debian experimental, and installing is quite simple, but besides the upstart package itself it is almost a must to also install the package upstart-compat-sysv, otherwise commands like reboot and shutdown are not available anymore. Also, this package provides a default configuration for the upstart jobs which simply emulates the sysv-init based rc mechanism. Upstart uses the notation of jobs to define the services to start. Unfortunately the sysv-init emulation simply defines jobs like rc1, rc2 and so on, i.e. one job per run level; then, the old sysv-init scripts are still used to launch the services one after the other. The result is that the boot process still took 31 seconds, exactly the same time it took with the sysv-init system. I then started to write some jobs to launch services like apache2 and sshd independently from the rc scripts, using upstart event definitions. Creating the scripts themselves is quite easy, but I did not manage to stop the services again through upstart’s initctl command line interface: it seems that, since the processes fork, upstart assumes that they are stoped again after they have been launched. Investigation is ongoing …