Micoshaft Appil asstroturfing fraudster pounding the sock Moshe Goldfarb
wrote on behalf of Half Wits from Micoshaft Appil Department of Marketing:
>> Time to Face Some Facts
>
> Facts and Schestowitz in the same post is an oxymoron.
>
> Emphasis on the MORON part.
Thats your ritual asstroturfing done for today.
Why don't you learn some Linux and become a geek and get a job?
It pays 50% more than being an windummy developer.
Sheevaplug - pure Linux geek juice!!!
-------------------------------------
http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/developer/kirkwood/sheevaplug.jsp
Not very often you get a high end distro like Ubuntu 9.04
and a cheap embedded Linux developer system that is also
capable of running a high end distro.
The $99 Sheevaplug is very much it.
You get a mains adapter size box with a plug to
plug into mains. It has ethernet link, SDCard, USB
and a mini USB serial port.
Nothing else.
No monitor port, no keyboard, no mouse port, no nothing.
Its also running on an ARM chip!
So what does it do except sit there and do nothing?
Welll..... its the ultimate food from the
gods sent to geeks!!!
Since it has 'nothing' you have to bring it alive yourself
and mould it to your whims!!!
It is pure geek wallowing in Linux from here on in...
First connect the mini USB serial port to your
Linux Ubuntu desktop USB port. Running dmesg in a console
window shows it has been recognised and installed as /dev/ttyUSB1
The mini-usb plug is very flimsy and such small connectors are utterly
dodgy!
If the ftdi serial port chip is not recognised then manually
install the driver:
sudo modprobe ftdi_sio vendor=0x9e88 product=0x9e8f
(My desktop is Ubuntu.)
You now need some software to talk to the Sheevaplug.
Install minicom with
apt-get install minicom
in a console window.
Then run
minicom -s
to and change set up for 115200 baud 8 bits, N for no parity, 1 stop bit.
Change the default serial device to /dev/ttyUSB1
Press return to save changes.
Press save changes as default
Then Exit minicom.
Then run
minicom
again, and now you are connecting OK to the Sheeva plug through the
serial port.
Login as root with password nosoup4u
(yup that is the default password!)
First off change the password to something you like with the
passwd
command.
You can issue command like
shutdown -r now
and see the computer shutting down and rebooting like a real
computer through minicom.
Log back in, connect up the ethernet, give it a few
seconds and then enter
ifconfig
It shows the IP address of the Sheevaplug.
Now you can abandon the minicom console and start another
bash console window and connect via ssh!!!
ssh root@ipaddress_of_sheevaplug
So now you are in and looking around.
If you have konqueror installed on your desktop computer,
you can also get in by opening konqueror and entering in the URL
fish://root@ipaddress_of_sheevaplug
to snoop around to see what other software has been pre-installed.
First thing to do is to get the existing OS of the internal
flash chip (to avoid wearing it down) and run it off an SD Card
formatted with EXT2 to minimise wearing down the SD Card.
The instructions are here
http://plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/Category:HowTo
(Choose from all the howto available in that document
and don't use EXT3, use EXT2 - EXT3 will wear down your
SD Card. I used a 16Gb SD card and set aside 1Gb for swap
space - excessive because I didn't want to risk running
out of space for later parts of the experiments)
Having transferred everything off the internal flash and booting
off the SDcard allows you the freedom to install
lots of new software.
First off tried to get this useful utility installed
apt-get install wget
But it came up with error message - the issue is that two
directories are always in RAM and can get filled - so it forgets
to create them whenever Sheevaplug boots.
So create these two directories to get apt-get working
mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives
mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives/partial
Then I test downloaded a file using wget.
I then copied out the file from the sheevaplug using scp command.
So in effect the sheevaplug has just become my downloader
device consuming 5W that can be left running all night if need be.
and then installed away more stuff like the following
apt-get install lynx
apt-get install rsync
apt-get install youtube-dl
apt-get install sqlite3
apt-get install bash
apt-get install xterm
(If your /var/cache/apt/archives gets full,
then reboot the sheeva plug and recreate the
directories again)
(installing bash might have been redundant - but even
if redundant, you can see how it reacts to the command
to see if updates are available)
then I did
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
to upgrade the Linux to the latest version (but you may
have to do that before installing anything if some
of the packages got updated).
Then tried to get VNC server working
http://computingplugs.com/index.php/Installing_X11
Got that working.
(Be weary if you follow instructions to recompile from
source in that link to get xterm working
Your dependency checking may go out the window.)
And then got vncserver finally working!!!!
So even through Sheevaplug has no graphics card,
I can still get a VNC session on it going!!!
Then installed more complex software
apt-get install firefox
apt-get install pan
apt-get install openoffice.org
apt-get install mysql-server
apt-get install qcad
apt-get install konqueror
apt-get install xpdf
apt-get install dillo
apt-get install gnumeric
apt-get install abiword
apt-get install apache2
apt-get install dosbox (yes! and it works well!)
apt-get install kmail
apt-get install synaptic
apt-get install onboard (on screen keyboard)
apt-get install kwrite
All in all 2Gb of software got installed.
Your luck will vary as the software is
constantly being updated (and broken)
so wait a day if something doesn't work
and try again. [My current install has problems
starting X and crashes first time but
second time its OK when running applications
like firefox.] Some things like gambas2 and
its libs are not in the arm repositories yet, so
not everything can work just yet anyway.
GUI software like firefox I can use
ssh -X root@ipaddress_of_sheevaplug
and then run
firefox
to get it to run as a remote X session.
Same with pan, open office, konqueror, gnumeric, abiword,
xpdf, qcad and dillo.
Apache server and mysql server is running!
Its turned the sheevaplug into a powerful server.
But also desktop features available too...
I ran pan (newsreader) and change pan to use dillo (webrowser)
instead of firefox and I get near full speed
reading newsgroups and browsing links
even through I am running remote X session.
Running firefox or dillo with remote X session
is also a safer bet - I can move all the dodgy website
browsing to the sheevaplug and change the SD card if some
dodgy infection is suspected.
For $99, the sheeva plug is 1.2GHz ARM with 512Mbytes of
RAM and 512Mbytes of flash and from the above
you can see it runs a full version
of Ubuntu very well!!!
The hardware is open and the sofwtare is all open source
so you can go make your own hardware and install as much
software as the repositories and memory chips/hard disks
can carry.
This post is brought to you from the Sheevaplug
running knode through a remote x session
on the main desktop computer :-)
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