There are *a lot* of really cheap Sun boxes on Ebay these days. We picked one up for our lab. Here are a few tips for newbies trying to bring up Solaris on a Sun Sparc box that might be useful. First off, go to sun.com and download the CD images of Solaris. If you […]
Bringing up Solaris
Solaris Companion CD
There is a free set of utilities for Solaris available here that provides many of the GNU tools and other free software for Solaris. If you don’t have a console you will need to make sure that the host you telnet in from is resolvable from your Solaris box (add the host to /etc/hosts or […]
REALbasic: The PC is the Computer
REALbasic creates a single machine code executable that will run on Older Macs, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and Microsoft Windows systems from 98 on. There is no requirement to install a bunch of DLLs, so the target system has fewer side effects to worry about. Certainly rollback is quite clear. Further, you don’t need a […]
Using Regular Expressions With REALbasic
Here is a bit of code from Mountain Climbing Journal that combines an if statement and regular expressions to match an image and display it: if left(me.SelText,9)=”<img src=” AND Keyboard.AsyncControlKey=TRUE then dim rg as new RegEx dim match as RegExMatch dim f as folderItem dim imgsrc as string if instr(me.SelText,”/”) <> 0 then rg.SearchPattern=”<img src=”+chr(34)+”\S*/(\w+\.\w+)”+chr(34)+”>$” […]
Binding EditFields to a Multi-Column ListBox
If you have a ListBox with multiple columns and want to bind EditFields to the columns so that when you select a row with a mouse click or with arrows the EditFields match the columns in the ListBox, then use the change event for the ListBox and assign the EditFields. For instance, for a ListBox […]
Setting up an NFS Server on Solaris
Solaris 9 comes with an NFS server. The first step is to edit the /etc/dfs/dfstab file. We just added this entry: share -F nfs -o rw=srv-1 -d “share” /share Start the server: # /etc/init.d/nfs.server start On the client side: root@srv-1 u-1 # mount -t nfs srv-50:/share /share2 root@srv-1 u-1 # ls /share2 lost+found tmp root@srv-1 […]
Disabling Power Management on Solaris
We have a Sun box that displays “Saving system state… Please wait…” overnight. Well, this is the power management kicking in. Not happy with servers, so we need to disable this. The behavior of the power management service is set in /etc/power.conf. We can disable the automatic shutdown by editing this file. Change: autoshutdown 30 […]
Using uClibc For Control Systems
We wrote about keylogging in this article, and used gcc and Linux to intercept and decode a key push via the parallel port. We have also written in the past about various homebrew projects where a limited development system would be very useful. The perfect platform for many of these projects is discarded PCs that […]
Bringing Up a uClibc System
We wrote abut uClibc in this article. In this article we will build an entire Linux system using uClibc that has gcc, system utilities, a 2.4.20 kernel, and uses less than 63 megs total for the entire system. The intent is for us to write homebrew articles on a stable system that can run with […]
Moving a uClibc System to Zip
In this article, we built up a uClibc system. In this article, we will transfer the filesystem to a 100 meg zip disk. What this means is that if you have an old parallel port zip drive laying around, you can bring up a development system running Linux without touching your hard drive. There are […]
GIAGD: More Fun / Introduction
There is a new section on NetAdminTools, now, called GIAGD. In this section we will configure a system based on uClibc. Now, we aren’t planning on updating the system beyond what is needed, so we will probably be staying with the uClibc root filesystem as of March 01, 2003. There are newer versions out there, […]
Video for Crackers
Now, you could consider this an article about how to set up a web cam using GNU/Linux or something… Naw… We want to write a story involving chickens. Crackers is Agatha’s new GIAGD machine that she uses to put up pictures of the chickens living in her moveable chicken coop. We bought a used SE440BX-2 […]
SSHD on GIAGD
The uClibc dev system includes SSHD, but you need to set up host keys in /etc first: [root@crackers /]# ssh-keygen -t dsa -f /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key Generating public/private dsa key pair. Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key. Your public kkey has been saved in /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub. The […]
New GIAGD distribution
For more information on the fabulous furry GIAGD fun, see this article. I revisited this, because there is a new root filesystem available at uclibc that includes perl and ssh. I nosed around for new versions of the extra source code I needed to get housey to boot. Here are some links: Lilo NASM GPM […]
Debian on a USBCard — Part 1 – Creating the filesystem
We have used our GIAGD distribution for our various utility computers that run stuff like our 8048 dev system and our chicken cam. It is a bit of a pain to maintain our own distribution based on uClibc; however, there is a fabulous new development. You can now get a port of Debian woody compiled […]
Debian on a USBCard — Part 2 – Transferring the Filesystem
In this article we discussed the Debian port to uClibc, and we created an ext3 filesystem on a USBCard. Now, we need to transfer the filesystem from the tarball to the USBCard. First, let’s mount our newly created filesystem: root@srv-1 / # mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc1 /mnt root@srv-1 / # mount /dev/hda3 on / type […]
Debian on a USBCard — Part 3 – Compiling the Kernel
In this article we transferred the filesystem to our UBCard. Now, we need to create a kernel. Before we create our kernel, though, we need to know what options to compile in. We are starting with our GIAGD .config from this article. Now, we are using VMware to bring this filesystem up. Since we don’t […]
Debian on a USBCard — Part 4 – Final Configuration
In this article we created a kernel for our USBCard system. Once we have the kernel in place we need to run lilo and adjust some other configuration files. To do this, just boot off of the Superrescue CD again and: mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt chroot /mnt Now, we can edit /etc/lilo.conf: boot = […]
A Small GNU/Linux System – Revisited
We have a number of utility computers running that are based on uClibc. Every time we rebuild the devices, we have to basically create a new distribution. It appears that the Debian packages are no longer being maintained. That is OK, though, because we have figured out most of the tricks to getting this to […]
Running GTK Apps Without X
Check out the GTK on DirectFB project, if running an app like the GIMP without X11 excites you. DirectFB uses the framebuffer device in the Linux kernel, and can replace X as a “Window System”, or at least, the basic parts of one. The fact that an app as complicated as the GIMP can run […]
