A couple of years ago, after upgrading my Orange Pi Zero to Debian bookworm, I encountered several problems, and eventually, I migrated to Alpine Linux.

Everything worked well until a couple of weeks ago, when my system died. It stopped booting, and I could not read its microSD with my computer, either. I think the cause might be the power losses, which are more frequent than I would like at home.

I have a backup, but I do not remember if it contains the final configuration. Moreover, Alpine is a rolling distribution, so I would have needed to update and possibly reconfigure in any case, and I feared this would have taken much more time than I wanted to dedicate.

So, I gave Debian another chance, but it did not end well. It worked as expected for some days. Then, at a certain point, the system started becoming unreachable after a few hours (and, of course, it broke in the worst moments).

I even tried to set up a cronjob for daily reboots and a watchdog, but I still had the problem.

At this point, I thought that maybe the Orange Pi Zero support in bookworm’s kernel (6.1.x) was not mature enough, and I hoped a newer kernel was more stable. Debian trixie is becoming the next stable this year, so I just anticipated the upgrade… and it worked! (At least for now 😄).

I kept the scheduled reboot, but I think the system would keep working also without it.

My only problem was that the upgrade removed my changes to the kernel command line in /boot/boot.cmd, so I had to restore them manually and re-create /boot/boot.scr.

Devo ammettere di essere un po’ un accumulatore.

In tanti anni, non ho mai buttato via i miei computer vecchi, pur sapendo che realisticamente non li riaccenderò mai. Soprattutto quelli degli anni ‘90, che sono potenziali bombe a causa della piaga dei condensatori. Ma alla fine ho deciso di buttare via quelli che un tempo erano stati protagonisti della categoria muletto di questo sito.

Prima, però, ho deciso di creare un’immagine dei loro dischi. E, dato che c’ero, ho deciso di avviarle con Qemu per vedere cosa avevo lasciato dentro.

Il primo computer era dotato di un Pentium MMX. Probabilmente risaliva a circa il 1996, ma non sono troppo sicuro perché mi è stato donato da una conoscente di famiglia, che altrimenti lo avrebbe buttato. Se ben ricordo, aveva 64MB di RAM, che io avevo portato a 128MB (di più non supportava). Mi sembra che proprio per comprarla fossi andato per la prima volta alla fiera dell’elettronica di Pordenone. E quella volta avevo comprato anche la scheda wireless Edimax EW-7128g, che mi aveva fatto tribolare non poco. … [Leggi il resto]

Un mese fa, ho finalmente messo da parte il rame per la mia connessione a Internet per passare alla fibra ottica.

Come ad ogni passaggio, certe cose cambiano, altre rimangono le stesse.

La configurazione, grosso modo, è rimasta invariata. Fin dai tempi dell’ADSL Alice, TIM richiede l’uso del protocollo PPPoE, senza validare però username e password. Quelli che erano VPI 8 e VCI 35, sono diventati l’id VLAN 835 per FTTC e FTTH.

E proprio questo uso di VLAN rende un po’ più difficile la configurazione delle connessioni TIM.

Dopo la morte del mio secondo TD-W8970, ero passato ad un router generico con un modem in bridge connesso alla porta WAN. La VLAN veniva gestita dal modem, un Technicolor TG789vac v2 con firmware di iiNet.

Invece, con l’ONT fornitomi da TIM, un Sercomm FG1000R, la VLAN deve essere impostata nel router.

OpenWrt

Sul mio Cudy WR2100 mi è bastato modificare /etc/config/network in questo modo: … [Leggi il resto]

A couple of weeks ago, Debian Bookworm became stable. I have a few devices running stable, including an Orange Pi Zero I use to open and close my garage door with a Telegram bot.

So, I SSH’ed in it, and ran the following commands:

apt update
apt upgrade
apt dist-upgrade

Without even changing my /etc/apt/sources.list because I already keep stable instead of the codename 😎️.

End of the story, just like any other major Debian update there in the last 6 years… Or is it?

I just wanted a new kernel…

Many boot files were dated June 2017, so the system probably started as Debian Stretch. And actually, it was an Armbian installation (which uses the official Debian repos, contrarily to Raspbian, plus a custom repository for a few additional packages).

The Linux kernel was one of these custom packages, and its version was 4.11.3, released on May 25, 2017, so quite old. I wanted a more recent kernel with security vulnerabilities fixed and all the other improvements.

Debian supports a configuration they call ARMMP (ARM multiplatform). With a single kernel and DeviceTree, it targets many different devices, and the Orange Pi is one of them. So, I tried to install Debian’s official kernel instead of the one I was using… and for the first time in 6 years, I screwed up to the point I needed to remove the thumb drive I use as storage on that system. It was somehow annoying because the board is in an electrical box, and there were several things I needed to move to get to it. I tried to troubleshoot it for an entire evening without success. Eventually, I went back to the old kernel, closed the box, and moved everything again. … [Leggi il resto]

Wow, I have not needed to write a guide about installing a Linux system for years (well, these are my notes rather than a complete guide).

Partly because I found it quite easy in the latest… 5 years? Partly because I avoid reinstalling my systems unless strictly needed.

This time is different: I am targeting a peculiar device (a Surface Pro 2017) with a microSD (I am too lazy to repartition its SSD) and full disk encryption (including /boot).

But I am happy because I have learned a lot! For example, if you choose the expert installation for Debian, you can disable the source repositories immediately!

Big caveat: my initial plan was to install GRUB on the microSD, but it did not work. If I understood correctly, the Surface cannot boot from SDs. So, I used the ESP of the SSD. If you wanted a completely autonomous system on a microSD that disappears as soon as you remove it, I fear you cannot get one.

Preparing the install drive

After I discovered Rufus, I have always used it to prepare installation drives on Windows.

But Debian ISOs have a feature I really appreciate: in UEFI mode, you can just extract the image to a FAT32 partition. The advantages are that you do not need Windows, and you do not have to format the drive, you do not lose any existing data. And, on top of that, secure boot worked at the first try (with Microsoft & 3rd party CAs, but I do not remember if it is the default). I have tried with other distributions, but none worked in the same way. … [Leggi il resto]