Alexander Bochmann @galaxis@mastodon.infra.de

Haha. This stuff still works!

Sent the Tapwave PalmOS Wi-Fi driver via Bluetooth file transfer from a Linux box, installed on device - only now I don’t have any networks to connect to.

#retrocomputing #PalmOS

Test

It's a slightly overcomplex setup with several VDOMs. On the other hand that made it really easy to separate out the one subnet that has a default route out over an IPSEC tunnel (whereas the other networks route out directly on the local DSL line).

Did not manage to throw that in a single OPNsense setup in a working way up to now, and there don't seem to be any options to create VRFs...

Did not get much done in terms of retrocomputing this week, but at least I fixed a longstanding problem that prevented an integration of files on the NAS into my tape backup, and also freed up a couple 100GB by removing old btrfs snapshots that also held backup data from before I moved that onto a separate subvolume, plus some other small stuff I forgot about already...

Still pondering how to replace the Fortigate though. My first attempt at throwing in an OPNsense did not quite work out...

At some point I need to set up an insecure Wi-Fi to connect to with old devices…

(...and as it turns out, snd_hda_intel now gets remapped to IRQ 18.)

Unfortunately, the occasional display corruption problems persist. Guess I'll need to play with nouveau options?

I'm spending way too much time on this, but since I'm debugging Linux things on the Late 2009 Macmini3,1 anyway - found out how to get rid of the "irq 20: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option) [..] Disabling IRQ #20" kernel oops on boot:

I looked at everything that sits on IRQ 20 (as it turns out, ohci-pci,snd_hda_intel,wl), and added missing kernel modules for the latter two the the initramfs. Now they get loaded early on, and the message is gone.

WTF LMDE?

I've been searching for half an hour why an update-grub doesn't add my parameters from /etc/default/grub to the kernel command line...

> tail -6 /etc/default/grub.d/50_lmde.cfg
# grub-pc's postinst has some unwanted conffile management which removes
# /etc/default/grub, thus removing "quiet splash" from grub.
# Setting it here ensures we continue to have a splash, whether or not
# /etc/default/grub is present.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Had a look for current phones with physical keypads (yes, I'm aware of the Pinephone keyboard, but I really can't be bothered with the current state of its software stack), and basically the only option by now is Unihertz?

Turns out they're planning to release something that looks a lot like the BB Key2 (though probably is smaller)? Not going to re-register to Kickstarter for that one though, but I'll keep an eye out.

www.unihertz.com/en-de/pages/titan-slim-signup

After @enkiv2 pointed to a recent video about Kate Bush in https://eldritch.cafe/@enkiv2/108261683063784027, I notice my Kate Bush LPs all seem to have been run down by way too many listens on cheap record players and have some quite heavy distortions all over…

Randomly looking at the Xorg log file, and WTF?

[ 12159.134] (II) config/udev: Adding input device SOUNDBOX (AVRCP) (/dev/input/event4)
[ 12159.134] (**) SOUNDBOX (AVRCP): Applying InputClass "libinput keyboard catchall"
[ 12159.134] (II) Using input driver 'libinput' for 'SOUNDBOX (AVRCP)'
[ 12159.136] (II) event4 - SOUNDBOX (AVRCP): is tagged by udev as: Keyboard
[ 12159.136] (II) event4 - SOUNDBOX (AVRCP): device is a keyboard

Uh. No? Those are bluetooth speakers?

Somehow these newly acquired display problems seem inconsistent?

Sometimes I boot the machine and can work for hours with no problem. Sometimes I start a web browser and get display corruption within minutes (usually an area of the screen gets sort of an overlay with some coloured gemoetric shape when the web browser is rendering a page - or yesterday, just input field for image descriptions in Pinafore was being filled with sort of a colour gradient).

I've been using Amanda to do my backups at home for over 20 years, but I wasn't aware that file(1) on Linux has a basic parser for the dump file header that shows the first couple of lines?

# file /backup/20220507050001/platform.gxis.de.sda2.1
/backup/20220507050001/platform.gxis.de.sda2.1: AMANDA dump file, DATE 20220507050001 platform.gxis.de sda2 lev 1 comp .gz program /sbin/xfsdump\012ORIGSIZE=3250823\012NATIVE-CRC=00f14f11:3328842656\012CLIE

(It's just plain text with some metadata.)