Month: February 2016

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Running AROS / Icaros Desktop on VirtualBox

I love to install and check out different operating systems. Installing on something like VirtualBox means you can install as a guest, play with it, and either continue to use it or delete the disk image, with no impact to your host OS. So here’s an unusual one to check out:

AROS is an open source implementation of the AmigaOS 3.1 apis, that runs on Intel and PowerPC cpus (Amigas were originally Motorola 68k based). It seems there’s a couple of different variations, the one I installed was Icaros Desktop, which comes with a live CD, which you can also install from.

One installed, it boots from a GRUB menu, and wow, does it boot quick, within a couple of seconds (running under VirtualBox on my i7 MacBook Pro). It boots so fast I might be tempted to install this as a bare metal install on an old PC and play around with it for a while. It also looks very pretty 🙂

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Industries that build their own tools

Here’s an interesting observation, and maybe something you haven’t thought of before. If you work in IT, particular in software development, the tools that you use as a developer were built by other developers.

Think about that for a minute. Can you imagine if chefs built their own ovens, or doctors made their own medicines?

Is there any other industry that builds it’s own tools?

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Packet radio: Direwolf and pilinbpq

I’ve been playing around recently with setting up some packet radio software on the Raspberry Pi. The next thing I was interested in getting working was a BPQ32 node with BBS and Chat. G8BPQ’s instructions here are pretty easy to follow. What I got stuck on however was whether BPQ needed or used ax25, and apparently it doesn’t. So from the simplest direwolf and linbpq setup, you start direwolf, configure linbpq to point to Direwolf’s virtual kiss tnc serial port, and off you go.

I played around testing with 2 radios, one with Direwolf, linbpq and a Rigblaster connected to a Yaesu FT-60 HT, and the second, an Icom 880 connected with a Rigblaster Plug and Play to a desktop running Linux Mint, also using Direwolf. There was some random oddness wth connecting from one to the other, maybe because of the radios in close proximity, that turned out I just needed to increase default timeout settings. I set these both to the same in direwolf.conf and bpq32.cfg:

TXDELAY=300

TXTAIL=30

Once I’d added these (based on other suggested settings elsewhere in other people’s BPQ configs), then I was off and running. Looks good!

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How to reset your password on Raspbian

What not to do: reset your password before you change/setup your keyboard locale, use punctuation characters in your new password, and then change the locale. Yeah, that’s not going to work. Now I don’t know where some of the characters moved to 🙂

I’m going to leave this post right here for future reference.

Update 2/3/16: after I edit the cmdline.txt and booted to a shell, passwd gave me this error:

passwd: Authentication token manipulation error
passwd: password unchanged

Further down the post, this recommendation to remount / solved my issue:

mount -rw -o remount /

Then I did passwd and the change worked this time.

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