Linux

For over a decade, I was running my home server on a trusty AMD Athlon II X4 PC, without any issues.

After upgrading to a newer motherboard the retired one was left unpowered for several months. Then when powering it up, Linux would not boot on it no matter what I tried.

Various distros were attempted, including Xubuntu desktop, and Finnix (highly recommended for testing and troubleshooting from the command line). The symptoms were the same: the PC reads the media, then the screen flickers and goes black with nothing on it.

Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform, written in Python. I have been running it for several years for various tasks.

However, I am running it using a less common Home Assistant Core installation method, consciously deciding not to run the custom Raspberry Pi image for Home Assistant, nor the docker container version for many reasons.

These reasons include:

Years ago, I wrote about using syslog-ng on OpenWRT for logging.

Times have change, and OpenWRT has evolved. With the current stable version (19.07.3), syslog-ng is no longer the preferred method. Instead, I have found that rsyslog works better. In this article, I describe how to install and configure rsyslog.

If you have been experiencing audio skips or stuttering on a Raspberry Pi, then I may have a solution for you.

For background, I use an older Raspberry Pi as an audio player, using mpd as an audio server, MPD Remote on my Android Phone, and Sonata on my Xubuntu Laptop.

It was working fine for a long time, but then it started skipping audio every 10 or 20 seconds, regularly.

Yesterday, I gave a talk for the KWLUG on Incremental Backup For Linux. This is targeted towards home networks or small businesses using Linux, although I touched a bit on some enterprise considerations and technologies.

The solution I use relies on the dump and restore utilities for the ext4 filesystem, along with rsync from laptops.

The slides are attached below, as PDF. The meeting was recorded, and the video should appear here shortly.

If you want to use the Arduino IDE for STM32F103 boards, you need to do the following.

The instructions are for Linux, but it is just downloading, extracting and renaming, so you can use similar steps for Windows of Mac OS/X.

Install the Arduino IDE

First, go to the Arduino web site

Select your platform, and download

Extract the IDE

tar xJvf ~/Desktop/arduino-1.8.5-linux64.tar.xz

Rename the directory

As someone who only runs Linux, I occasionally need to run DOS for updating the BIOS on various machines.

Floppy disks are no more an option, since it has been nearly two decades with machines not shipping with them. Therefore, the only realistic option is using USB flash drives.

One excellent alternative to Microsoft MS-DOS, is FreeDOS, a free clone that needs very little resources to run. It can be used to run legacy applications, and one of them is flashing a new BIOS.

When I was running Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS on my home server, I had installed minidlna as a media server that is accessible to DLNA capable clients, including a Smart TV where one can view photos on a large screen.

However, when the server was upgraded to 14.04 LTS, minidlna stopped working. Searching Google turned up forum posts from 2014 with instructions that no longer work.

Yesterday, I gave a talk at the KWLUG.

It covered the following: