flashing a soekris 4801 – or how yet another proprietary BIOS sucks

Posted on June 9, 2007 by ward

I got a Soekris 4801-60 for use as a firewall/gateway at one of my (very) remote setups. These things are reliable, very low power, and they have no moving parts if you boot off compact flash. They are Geode-based, so it’s x86. You can run the various flavors of BSD on them, or your favorite GNU/Linux distro. There is no VGA out, only a serial port for console access. The (text) console is automatically redirected to the serial port, which is very convenient. All in all, great little boxes.

But they still have a proprietary BIOS. This particular 4801 came with BIOS version 1.29, which was succeeded by version 1.30, with these errata:

comBIOS vers 1.30
* fixed bug from 1.29 with LBA disk translation
* fixed net48xx Serial COM1 RI noise SMI lockup

I was having problems with grub on a compactflash card – grub error 16, which means corrupt filesystem, which is not the case. I came across this hint that a BIOS upgrade might solve the problem. Upgrading the BIOS should be simple, right? There’s a ‘download’ command, and then a ‘flashbios’ command. The download has to happen with … Xmodem/CRC. Seriously.

And that turns out to be a bit less than trivial on a modern GNU/Linux system. Minicom has a send file mode, of course, but I couldn’t get the file across, kept getting errors like ‘Retry 0: NAK on sector’. Minicom was configured to call the ‘sx’ command. I tried with ‘cu’, but couldn’t get that to work either.

In the end I had to

a) drop speed to 19200 baud
b) make sure that XON/XOFF flow control was disabled in minicom
c) start the download with the ‘download -’ command in minicom (note that extra dash, presumably a stdin redirection)
d) quit minicom
e) from the command line, feed it the new bios like this
sx -vv b4801_130.bin /dev/ttyUSB0

That worked:

Sending b4801_130.bin, 608 blocks: Give your local XMODEM receive command now.
Bytes Sent: 77824 BPS:1771

Transfer complete

Finally:

> flashupdate
Updating BIOS Flash ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,..,,,,.. Done.

Apparently, upgrading is also pretty easy with ‘cu’ on openbsd, but the ‘lsz’ tool referred there doesn’t seem to exist in GNU/Linux land.

This was way more complicated than it should have been. I’m inclined to think that this would be easier if the Soekris ran a free bios – someone would have managed to squeeze in something a little more sane than xmodem for file transfers. Perhaps something that actually works with standard tools like minicom or cu. In other words, there is room for improvement here. The LinuxBIOS project has been making a lot of headway of late with Geode support…

But at least the BIOS upgrade solved my ‘error 16′ problem.

Posted in coreboot, Free Software/Open Source | 3 Comments

40% efficient solar cells

Posted on June 2, 2007 by ward

Scientists at a subsidiary of Boeing have published research on solar cells for electricity generation that are more than 40% effective. These are solar cells for use in concentrators, perhaps like the one in Seville, Spain, though that one of course heats water to make steam to turn a turbine. This is very exciting – pumping up solar cell efficiency is key to making solar power more cost-competitive when compared with traditional, polluting power sources like coal and nuclear.

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power supply efficiency

Posted on May 25, 2007 by ward

This article is a very good read about power supply efficiency and what Google is trying to do to improve the quality of the average PC power supply. More power to them!

I’ve long wondered why we don’t have a centralized source of 12V or so in the average home. Electronics generally don’t require high voltage, and having each device do it’s own (inefficient) voltage-conversion is just wasteful.

The wiring would have to be thick enough to make sure that the transmission losses are negligible; at 12V that might otherwise be an issue even over short distances. I wonder if that would make such a system prohibitively expensive.

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I am…

Posted on May 21, 2007 by ward

Anders F Björklund‘s “I am…” mashup is hilarious:

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

analyzing power usage

Posted on May 17, 2007 by ward

Intel has released powerTOP, a tool to help analyze which applications are using (too much) power. Particularly helpful if you have a laptop and want to extend battery life. Very nice.

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norway’s pension fund

Posted on May 5, 2007 by ward

The New York Times has an interesting article about how Norway is divesting some of its huge pension fund based on ethical considerations – in this particular case, Wal-mart’s turning a blind eye to child-labor at its suppliers, and its anti-union stance.

It’s refreshing to see a huge investor apply ethics deliberately. It’s also particularly refreshing to see a country actually build up a pension fund, rather than deplete it to fund budget deficits. Of course, Norway has oil so this is ‘easy’ for them – but all that extra income must make the temptation to spend it even bigger, and they are not.

Posted in Finance/SRI | Leave a comment

Nikon Coolpix S10 vs. 995

Posted on May 5, 2007 by ward

20,000 pictures and roughly 5.5 years after I got my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 995, I’m ready to finally retire it in favor of a Coolpix S10. Both cameras are of course from Nikon’s famous ‘swivel’ range – once you use a swivel camera, you don’t want to go back to an ordinary camera. Shooting without being able to swivel just seems so… primitive.

Here are some initial impressions, comparing the S10 with the 995.

Positive:
* 10x optical zoom with image stabilization (the 995 had just 4x, and no stabilization).
* Big screen, much easier to see in sunlight.
* 6 megapixels instead of 3.4 in the 995.
* The S10 is much smaller and lighter than the 995.
* less than 1/3 of the price I paid for the 995
* Support for 2 time zones
* Faster startup time
* Much faster USB transfers (though still not USB 2)

So-so:
* unlike the 995, the S10 has an orientation sensor… but it’s not really reliable at all. Because of the many ways the camera can be oriented, I presume, the exif orientation data is basically wrong as soon as the camera is swivelled. I think I’ll just switch the sensor off.

Negative:
* No manual controls, not even focus
* Slow autofocus at the end of the zoom range in low-light conditions

And this is for all the people that want to make sure the Coolpix S10 works with your average GNU/Linux distrubution: yes, you can set it to usb ‘mass storage’ mode. I have not tried the PTP mode.

For a detailed comparison of specifications, have a look over at dpreview.com. Their comparison incorrectly states that there is no orientation sensor on the S10 – though arguably that’s not all that far from the truth given how unreliable it is.

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clarification of the OLPC and Microsoft situation

Posted on May 3, 2007 by ward

Ars technica published a story that exposes the reports by Reuters and AP earlier in the week about OLPC ‘supporting’ Microsoft Windows as, well, a load of nonsense.

Says Walter Bender of OLPC:

“We are a free and open-source shop. We have no one from OLPC working with Microsoft on developing a Windows platform for the XO. MS doesn’t get any special treatment from OLPC”.

and

Microsoft has not contacted OLPC regarding its $3 software bundling program, nor have any governments requested that the XO be outfitted with Windows.

Pfew.

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Dell machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu 7.04

Posted on May 1, 2007 by ward

So it’s official, Dell is going to start shipping machines with Ubuntu Feisty preloaded by the end of May. This is great news. Check out the vlog by Mark Shuttleworth (in Ogg Theora format!) for more background information.

The most important part of this announcement is this, in my opinion:

Dell updated its policy on driver support of new Linux desktop and notebook products to use open source drivers in kernel.org where possible

This shows that Dell really understands the GNU/Linux development model. By making sure that hardware is supported in the ‘stock’ kernel.org Linux kernel, companies like Dell can largely sidestep the whole ‘which distribution should we ship with?’ problem. All GNU/Linux distributions track the kernel.org kernel; if the hardware is supported in that kernel, chances are it won’t matter what distribution people want to run – their hardware will just work.

A number of questions remain, of course. What about support for problematic hardware, like most 3D-accelerated video cards and wifi hardware, for which the availability of entirely free drivers is still problematic? And will the price of these new systems finally compare favorably to their cousins with the usual proprietary operating system?

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the Economist on DRM

Posted on May 1, 2007 by ward

In an editorial on Economist.com, the case against DRM is made. Here’s a nice quote:

Belatedly, music executives have come to realise that DRM simply doesn’t work. It is supposed to stop unauthorised copying, but no copy-protection system has yet been devised that cannot be easily defeated. All it does is make life difficult for paying customers, while having little or no effect on clandestine copying plants that churn out pirate copies.

I’m happy to read stuff like this in a publication as mainstream as the Economist. People are finally starting to understand the folly of DRM – it’s about time. The writing is on the wall, Big Media. Better do something about dropping DRM soon, or risk going the way of the dodo…

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