amiga, linux

AmigaOS4.1 (PPC) under FS-UAE and QEMU

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I recently purchased AmigaOS 4.1 with a plan to familiarise myself with the OS via emulation before purchasing the Freescale QorIQ P1022 e500v2 ‘Tabor’ motherboard. In particular, I wanted to investigate the ssh and X display options, including AmiCygnix.

OS4.1 running under FS-UAE & QEMU, showing config and network status

However, despite being familiar with OS3.1 and FS-UAE I still managed to hit a few gotchas with the OS4 install and configuration.

Installation of the QEMU module was simple using the download and simple instructions from: https://fs-uae.net/download#plugins. In my case this was version 3.8.2qemu2.2.0 and installed in ~/Documents/FS-UAE/Plugins/QEMU-UAE/Linux/x86-64/ (your path may vary).

I then tried multiple FS-UAE configurations in order to get the emulated machine to boot with PPC, RTG and network support. A few options clash resulting in a purple screen on boot. Rather than work through the process from scratch, it’s easier to simply list my config here:-

[fs-uae]
accelerator = cyberstorm-ppc
amiga_model = A4000/OS4
gfx_card_flash_file = /home/snetting/Documents/FS-UAE/Kickstarts/picasso_iv_flash.rom
graphics_card = picasso-iv
graphics_memory = 131072
hard_drive_0 = /home/snetting/Amiga/SteveOS41.hdf
kickstart_file = Kickstart v3.1 rev 40.70 (1993)(Commodore)(A4000).rom
network_card = a2065
zorro_iii_memory = 524288

I used FS-UAE (and FS-UAE-Launcher) version 2.8.3.

Things to note:

  1. See http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=75195 for install advice regarding disk partitioning and FS type. This is important!
  2. Shared folders (between host OS and Emulation) are *not* currently supported when using PPC under FS-UAE. Post install, many additional packages were required, including network drivers which resulted in a catch-22 situation. I worked around this by installing a 3.1.4 instance and mounting both the OS4 and ‘shared’ drives here, copying the required files over then booting back into the OS4 PPC environment.
  3. For networking, UAE.bsdsocket.library in UAE should be disabled but the A2065 network card enabled. The correct driver from aminet is: http://aminet.net/package/driver/net/Ethernet
  4. The latest updates to OS4.1 (final) enable Zorro III RAM to be used in addition to accelerator RAM; essential for AmiCygnix. Once OS4.1 is installed and network configured, use the included update tool to pull OS4.1 FE updates.

The documentation at http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=75195 is definitely useful as a reference but don’t rely on it; it’s dated (2014) and not necessarily accurate.

Whilst I’ve written this from memory, I’ll happily recreate my install from scratch if anyone has any specific questions or issues.

Good luck!

ROMs are available from Cloanto: https://www.amigaforever.com/
OS4.1 and updates from Hyperion: https://www.amigaos.net/

amiga, atari

Atari ST and Amiga Desktop Wallpapers

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I couldn’t find any good quality 1920×1080 (so called ‘full HD’) desktop wallpapers featuring either Atari ST GEM or Commodore Amiga Workbench 1.3. So, assembled from parts taken from various images on google, scaled with correct aspect ration maintained, tidied and assembled to fill the full resolution and with no JPEG compression artifacts – here we are:-

Atari GEM Desktop, 1920×1080 PNG
Commodore Amiga Workbench 1.3 + Boing Ball, 1920×1080 PNG

You’re welcome 🙂

hamradio, linux

Building qtel (Echolink client) under Fedora Linux

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With both my previous bad experience building qtel (the Linux EchoLink client) and recent discussions on a forum around similar difficulties – I thought I’d identify, resolve and document the issues.

I’m not sure what’s changed but the process is now very simple (Fedora 28):-

git clone https://github.com/sm0svx/svxlink.git
cd svxlink/
cd src
sudo dnf install cmake libsigc++20-devel qt-devel popt-devel libgcrypt-devel gsm-devel tcl-devel
cmake .
make
cp bin/qtel DESTINATION_PATH_OF_CHOICE

Depending on libs already installed, additional packages may be required – as indicated by failures during the ‘cmake’ stage.

linux, openshift

GlusterFS / VG Metrics in Prometheus (OCP)

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We had a requirement to gather LVM (VG) metrics via Prometheus to alert when GlusterFS is running low on ‘brick’ storage space. Currently, within Openshift 3.9 the only metrics seem to relate to mounted FS. A ‘heketi exporter module’ exists but this only reports space within allocated blocks. There doesn’t appear to be any method to pull metrics from the underlying storage.

We solved this by using a Prometheus pushgateway. Metrics are pushed from Gluster hosts using curl (via cron) and then pulled using a standard Prometheus scrape configuration (via prometheus configmap in OCP). Alerts are then pushed via alertmanager and eventually Cloudforms.

Import the pushgateway image:

oc import-image openshift/prom-pushgateway --from= docker.io/prom/pushgateway --confirm

Create pod and expose route. Then, add scrape config to prometheus configmap:-


- job_name: openshift-pushgateway
scrape_interval: 30s
scrape_timeout: 30s
metrics_path: /metrics
scheme: http
static_configs:
- targets:
- pushgateway-route.example.com

On GlusterFS hosts we then gather metrics in whatever way we like and push to the gateway via curl. Example:-

echo "VG_Gluster 42" | curl --data-binary @- http://pushgateway-route.example.com/metrics/job/pv_mon/pv/vg"

The metrics are then visible via prometheus UI / Grafana and alerts via alertmanager and CFME respectively.

openshift

Gnome 3 (Fedora 27) Screen Lock Timeout

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Gnome 3 doesn’t appear to offer any GUI control over the screen lock timeout.

So, to get current values:-

[snetting@lapper ~]$ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay
uint32 300
[snetting@lapper ~]$ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.screensaver lock-delay
uint32 0

And to set:-

[snetting@lapper ~]$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 600

idle-delay is the time taken to blank the screen.
lock-delay is an additional delay before locking.

openshift

OSEv3 Node Utilisation

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A quick and dirty script to query all nodes for utilisation data:-


#/bin/bash

printf "%-12s %-25s %-4s %-15s %-20s %-18s %-8s \n" "NODE" "STATE" "PODS" "CPU Req" "CPU Lim" "Memory Req" "Memory Lim"
oc get nodes --show-labels | grep user | while read NODE STAT stuff
do
printf "%-12s %-25s %-5s " $(echo $NODE | cut -f1 -d. ) $STAT $(oadm manage-node --list-pods $NODE 2> /dev/null | sed '/^NAME.*/d' | wc -l)
printf "%-7s %-7s %-7s %-12s %-12s %-5s %-12s %-5s\n" $(oc describe node $NODE | grep -a2 "CPU Requests" | tail -1)
done

docker, linux

Docker Panic, CMD and Hashbang

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Noticed issue when rebuilding dockerfile and running image:-

panic: standard_init_linux.go:178: exec user process caused "exec format error" [recovered]
	panic: standard_init_linux.go:178: exec user process caused "exec format error"

goroutine 1 [running, locked to thread]:
panic(0x6f3080, 0xc4201393b0)

Did much digging, identified that when specifying a script as a CMD in the Dockerfile, this script now requires a proper hashbang (aka shebang) or the above panic results.

#!/bin/bash
rm -rf /run/httpd/* /tmp/httpd*
exec /usr/sbin/apachectl -DFOREGROUND

Rebuilding the docker image with –no-cache option ensures the updated file is included.

linux

Dummy java loop/sleep for test of init scripts

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A dummy java executable (actually a jar) was required to develop init scripts without access to the client’s application.   The process of creating a Java ‘sleep’ application and wrapping within a ‘jar’ complete with manifest was not obvious to me.  The ‘thread.sleep’ also didn’t work as I expected, requiring an additional exception handler.  Not to mention the requirement for the manifest to require multiple new lines before being syntactically correct (and no report otherwise when incorrectly parsed, except ‘no main manifest attribute’ when attempting to run).  Why Java, WHY?

The following tgz contains both the compiled java executable plus source, manifest and instructions to build / compile the jar should the wait time (default 100 seconds) need to be modified.

WaitLoop.tgz (source and executable tgz)
WaitLoop (Github Project)

The .jar can be executed with:-

java -jar WaitLoop.jar
linux

X forwarding over ssh and sudo

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This has bugged me for years – with random success depending on sudo, su – etc.

The proper solution:-

steve@studio:~$ ssh -X 192.168.0.201
Last login: Fri Feb 10 21:54:11 2017 from 192.168.0.247
[steve@fleabox ~]$ xauth list
fleabox.track3.org.uk/unix:12  MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1  b4339e07fb0e4febdde6128fc56419e4
[steve@fleabox ~]$ sudo su -
[sudo] password for steve: 
[root@fleabox ~]# xauth add fleabox.track3.org.uk/unix:12  MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1  b4339e07fb0e4febdde6128fc56419e4
[root@fleabox ~]# virt-manager &
[1] 7168

Success!