So Dell now has 32GB solid state disks as an option on the Latitude D420 and the Latitude ATG. They’re still a bit pricey (almost $500 extra) and not very big, but that will change soon. I wonder what percentage of the PC market will be using solid state disks in a year or two…
Massachusetts should use free software
The Myissue.devalpatrick.com website has a new issue listed about the use of free software in Massachusetts government. If you are a resident of the Bay State, please support this issue!
Posted in Free Software/Open Source
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a new record
This morning, a user on one of our machines (inadvertently) created a mail loop with a bad procmail script:
09:42:05 up 120 days, 9:23, 20 users, load average: 3367.40, 3265.08, 2751.75
I had seen machines go up to about 200 before, but never this high. If you ever wonder about the stability of the 2.6 kernel – and this is a Xen setup! – here’s your answer. Even with the load this high, the machine was responsive enough on a couple of ssh sessions to solve the problem remotely.
Posted in Free Software/Open Source, Sysadmin, Xen
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gigabyte m57sli-s4 with extra bios socket
ST wrote up a nice howto on adding a PLCC socket to the m57sli-s4.
This is a great alternative to de-soldering the original chip to add a socket. He still needs to do some more testing, but this sure looks promising!
In other news, the LinuxBIOS v2 mainline tree now has the m57sli-s4 code merged, so it builds and works properly without need for extra patches. I’ll update my build tutorial shortly.
Posted in coreboot
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FLASH-PLAICE
Bari Ari wrote to the LinuxBIOS mailing list a couple days ago announcing FLASH-PLAICE: a programmer, logic analyzer and in-circuit flash emulator project that will speed up LinuxBIOS development considerably.
The project is based off an inexpensive Xilinx Spartan FPGA development board ($150). The idea is to use it to build a flash emulator that can plug into a motherboard flash socket if there is one, or clip onto an existing flash chip if it is soldered onto the board. It would also allow the flashing of a soldered-on chip, even if the board has been ‘bricked’.
Initially, Bari is planning to support SPI flash devices – but hopefully LPC will be supported soon, too. Most current mainboards use LPC-based PLCC chips – even though SPI-based boards are starting to appear. Bari is looking for help – particularly on the PC software side; some sort of tool will need to be written to communicate with the FLASH-PLAICE board. Do get in touch if you can lend a hand!
Posted in coreboot
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the beginning of the end for DRM on music
Good news this Monday morning: Apple is going to sell songs from the entire EMI digital music catalog without DRM, starting next month. Non-DRM”d tracks will come at a premium price ($1.29), but also with better quality – 256Kbps AAC. There will be an option to upgrade existing purchases to the higher-quality non-DRM’d versions, for $0.30. Album prices will remain unchanged at $9.99, even for the DRM-free version, which should boost album sales.
This is very exciting. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start. The press release mentions that Apple hopes to be able to offer more than half of the music on the iTunes music store in DRM-free format by the end of the year, which suggests that negotiations with the other labels are ongoing.
This is it – the end of DRM for music. It might still take a while, but I’m pretty confident that 5 years from now, DRM on music will be history. The sales data from the DRM-free tracks on iTunes is going to prove conclusively what everyone but Big Media has known all along: DRM hinders sales. Stop treating your customers like criminals, make it easy to purchase unencumbered music legally, and the majority of people will do so.
Why it had to take more than 10 years for the music industry to understand this is beyond me…
Posted in DRM
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m0n0wall
I purchased a Soekris 4801-60 with a LAN1641 plugin board for my parents’ home, to replace a Debian-based internet gateway on an old pc that I set up way back in 1999.
The idea was to replace the old, coax-based network with a UTP network, and use the Soekris as internet gateway/switch. Its seven ports suffice for this small home network, at least when combined with a couple of small switches in other parts of the house. Also, the Soekris only uses a fraction of the power of the old pc – even though my dad designed some ingenious electronics to power the pc on and off (not on standby, really off) based on network traffic or the absense thereof.
I had not used m0n0wall before, and while I have seen a couple of Soekris boxes up close – and have one in use at a colocation – I had never set one up before. That turned out to be ridiculously easy – hook up serial (19200n8) to see the console, and you can do what you want. I installed the latest stable m0n0wall image onto an old CF card (8Mb is big enough!), plugged it in, and the thing just worked.
One thing that disappointed me about the Soekris is that it’s network ports are not autosensing. In this setup that’s somewhat annoying, but it’s not a big deal, we just rewired the lines throughout the house to be cross cables.
m0n0wall is pretty much perfect – except for one thing: it only supports bridging over 2 interfaces. Ideally I want to bridge the 6 LAN interfaces – but it looks like I’ll have to install a full-blown OS in order to do that. For now I’ve bridged the 2 most important interfaces, which is probably sufficient, but I’d still like to bridge all 6. It’s only a problem for microsoft networking, of course – for everything else it does not matter.
Posted in Free Software/Open Source
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Gigabyte m57sli-s4 LinuxBIOS build tutorial
I’ve written up a LinuxBIOS build tutorial for the Gigabyte m57sli-s4.
This tutorial still works off Yinghai Lu’s big MCP55 patch, but a patch from Ed Swierk hit the list today which resolves the last issues for building the m57sli code (if you disable the USB debug code). I’ve tested it – it works fine – so I hope it will be merged into the tree later today or tomorrow. I’ll update the tutorial when that happens.
Remaining issues for the m57sli port are: ethernet MAC address changes between proprietary BIOS and LinuxBIOS (but that might get resolved soon), and no ACPI support yet.
Posted in coreboot
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MaxedOut
Went to see MaxedOut tonight in a special showing at Harvard Law. Highly recommended – catch it if you can. It’s also very timely now that (subprime) debt is “suddenly” a big issue because a couple of big lenders are in financial trouble. As the film shows, credit card companies and major banks are doing some very nasty stuff and have no intention of changing their ways – they make way too much money doing what they do.
We obviously need some major policy change, but that will no doubt take a lot of time. As a more concrete step, it would be nice to change banks to a less evil, more progressive one. There are some out there – smaller ones like Wainwright in Boston, for instance. But high-quality, extensive online banking is really, really important to me, and from what I hear their online banking isn’t quite on par with the offerings from bigger banks quite yet. I’ll keep an eye on them though.
Posted in Finance/SRI
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it boots!
I finally managed to get the Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 to boot LinuxBIOS today. Turns out that some kernel boot parameters were required to make it do the right thing with the IRQs.
It’s not perfect yet: the network interface doesn’t work, there’s no ACPI support, the USB debug device support needs to be disabled (probing for the device adds a lot of time to the boot), and I’m still working off Yinghai’s fork of the code, because it has not been merged into the V2 tree completely.
But we’re making progress 
Posted in coreboot
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