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]

Motivation

A few years ago, I bought an Orange Pi Zero to run a Telegram bot I use to open and close my garage door.

It worked very well for several years. Then, when Debian bookworm became stable, I decided to reinstall the system, and the trouble began.

After more than one month of frequent crashes, I first tried to upgrade the kernel. However, apt was unusable, and the system reinstallation was my only choice. So, I decided to also check other distributions out.

First, I tried with OpenWrt. It was a good setup, except I could not use GPIO through /dev/mem. This was a big problem because memory-GPIO is more versatile and performant.

So, I decided to also try Alpine Linux. Before this adventure, I had used this distribution only for containers, but I felt this could also be a case in which it can shine. But the effort it took me to get it working as I wanted reminded me of the old days 😅️. It also made me appreciate how easy setting up Debian is these days. … [Leggi il resto]

A couple of months ago, Debian bookworm became stable and I decided to upgrade my Orange Pi Zero. I wanted to re-install the system with the smallest amount of physical access and that made the whole process tiresome and longer.

The new system did not work well. It often crashed, and I continuously had to reset the system by power cycling it. As stated in my previous article, physical access to that system is not easy, which made the problem even less bearable.

After one of the crashes, I managed to get some logs, and I saw they mentioned a “kernel bug”. However, I believe high temperatures were to blame, as July was very hot here. Anyway, I had a little hope that installing a more recent kernel could solve my problem, so I tried to run apt upgrade, which gave me this output:

Preparing to unpack .../base-files_12.4+deb12u1_armhf.deb ...
Unpacking base-files (12.4+deb12u1) over (12.4) ...
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_12.4+deb12u1_armhf.deb (--unpack):
 unable to stat '.' (which was about to be installed): Value too large for defined data type
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_12.4+deb12u1_armhf.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I do not have a minimal clue about what this means. It might be related to the Orange Pi being 32-bit and me having created its system from a 64-bit system. But the error is so generic that I struggled to find its cause. … [Leggi il resto]

Up until a couple of years ago, we had HP Color LaserJet CP1215, a regular USB printer. It was also supported on Linux with the foo2hp drivers (part of the printer-driver-foo2zjs package on Debian).

I do not remember the exact reason why we changed it. I think it was broken, each toner cost around 80€ (it had four: CYMK) and maybe some other reasons.

We switched to an HP Envy 6000, an ink-jet printer. It works, but the documents do not look sharp when printed with it, and its cartridges do not last long. So, we also bought a cheap HP Laser 107a to print in black and white.

It works fine for us, but it has a slightly annoying problem for me: officially, it is supported on Linux only with proprietary drivers. And not only are they proprietary, but they do not work at all on my system.

foo2qpdl

I do not print often: usually only for bureaucratic stuff that I do begrudgingly and with urgency. So, I decided not to fight with printers (the eternal battle of informatics 😄️). Instead, I prepare PDFs on my Linux computer, run an HTTP server with Python, and go to the other floor to print them on another computer on Windows. … [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]