There is actually at least one very straightforward way to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix without a USB key, without even downloading the image, over the network.
Just follow the instructions in my previous article to get a working Ubuntu Installer over PXE. By default this installer will only setup a very minimal Ubuntu system, without any server or desktop packages.
At some point during the installation, you are offered the possibility to install additional software packages. At this stage you can just tick the box in front of "Ubuntu Network Remix" and that's it! You don't need to select any other package (eg Ubuntu Desktop) for a fully working UNR install. Personally I added "OpenSSH Server" because I want to be able to login remotely. Of course you could also add those packages later on.
A friend recently brought us a Linksys WRT54GL which had been laying around for a while and whose password was not available anymore.
None of the "easy" password recovery methods seemed to work (like holding the reset button, power-cycling etc.) - possibly because the corresponding options had been previously disabled.
However, it didn't work until all these conditions were met:
- the laptop with the firmware image and the tftp client had to be connected to the WRT through an external switch
- the switch had to be unplugged from the LAN
- I had to lauch a "ping -f 192.168.1.1" in a different terminal before powering on the WRT in order for the tftp transfer to start
- before and after the flashing I followed the 30/30/30 procedure (not sure if that one is mandatory but it is recommended)
To make sure the hardware was working I installed the latest firmware from the Linksys website (WRT54GL_v4.30.11_012_ETSI_EN_code.bin), but now I'll likely reflash it with OpenWRT - this time from the web interface :o)
Until now I always recommended to use PDF as a format to distribute documents in case the recipients don't need to alter them[1]. This supposedly guaranteed that the document would always look the same on any computer/platform. But today one of our customers (running Linux) contacted our support department requesting help because he was unable to view the contents of such a "portable document". To my surprise, I saw the following contents when opening the file with evince:
To view the full contents of this document, you need a later version of the PDF viewer. You can upgrade
to the latest version of Adobe Reader from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
For further support, go to www.adobe.com/support/products/acrreader.html
There doesn't seem to be anything "magic" in this document that I haven't seen in documents using the "older" format, so maybe this is just an attempt from Adobe to regain market shares by forcing you to use their product. On the other hand I always thought of PDF as an open standard so it's probably just a matter of time until the "competitors" catch up. At least a bug has already been filled for evince.
When trying to get the latest sys-libs/timezone-data on a somewhat old system, I got the following error:
[list of nearly all files the package was about to install] - Package 'sys-libs/timezone-data-2008i' NOT merged due to file - collisions. If necessary, refer to your elog messages for the whole - content of the above message.
According to equery, it looks like those files were installed by glibc:
# equery b /usr/share/zoneinfo/CET sys-libs/glibc-2.3.4.20041102-r1 (/usr/share/zoneinfo/CET)
I looked at the ebuilds and saw that newer glibc packages depend on sys-libs/timezone-data, so upgrading glibc should solve the problem too. I've submitted bug 258802 since I didn't find the info anywhere else.
I've successfully installed and ran Android on my N810 following the instructions here along with the modifications described here. In the next days/weeks I'll have a deeper look at it and will also try to install some more apps.
There is another project (involving the same people?) called NITdroid, which allows to run Android directly, bypassing Maemo. However my understanding is that short of reflashing the kernel there is no easy way to switch between Maemo and Android (with the first method you only have to reboot to get back to Maemo after using Android). There are discussion here and there about using kexec to swich between Maemo and Android but so far I'm not aware of anybody getting kexec to work on a NIT.
android-n810 on SourceForge looks quite similar to NITdroid, according to the README in the distributed files.
