udev, the “authorized” attribute and other failed attempts to ban a bogus USB keyboard

Introduction This is a spin-off post about failing attempts to fix the problem with a webcam’s keyboard buttons. Namely, that the a shaky physical connections caused the USB device to go on and off the bus rapidly, and consequently crash X windows. The background story is in this post. There is really nothing to learn [...]

adb, fastboot and ssh and other system stuff on Google Pixel 6 Pro

About this messy post As I rooted my Google Pixel 6 Pro, there were a few things to get in place on my Linux Mint 19 machine. These are random notes I took as I went along. Install ADB and fastboot # apt install android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot So that was easy. Next, opening the phone for [...]

Running Xilinx Impact on Linux Mint 19

Introduction This is my short war story as I made Xilinx’ Impact, part of ISE 14.7, work on a Linux Mint 19 machine with a v4.15 Linux kernel. I should mention that I already use Vivado on the same machine, so the whole JTAG programming thing was already sorted out, including loading firmware into the [...]

systemd: Reacting to USB NIC hotplugging (post-up scripting)

The problem Using Linux Mint 19, I have a network device that needs DHCP address allocation connected to a USB network dongle. When I plug it in, the device appears, but the DHCP daemon ignored eth2 (the assigned network device name) and didn’t respond to its DHCP discovery packets. But restarting the DHCP server well [...]

systemd / DBus debugging starter pack

Introduction Trying to solve a 90 second wait-on-some-start-job on each boot situation, I found that there’s little info on how to tackle a problem like this out there. Most web pages usually go “I did this, hurray it worked!”, but where do you start solving a problem like this if none of the do-this-do-that advice [...]

Solved: systemd boot waits 90 seconds on net-devices-eth0

Introduction After installing wireshark (and tons of packages it depends on) on a rather fresh and bare-boned Debian 8 (Jessie), I got the “A start job is running for sys-subsystem-net-devices-eth0.device” message for a minute and half on every boot. It was exceptionally difficult to find the reason, because so many packages were installed along with [...]

Tvheadend starting slowly with a HD-901T2 DVB-T2 USB stick: The udev solution

The problem Having A HD-901T2 DVB-T2 stick on a Linux Mint 18.1 running a 4.4.0-53-generic kernel, Tvheadend started painfully slow. It took more than a minute before the web interface was available. And here’s why: Mar 11 10:22:35 tv systemd[1]: Starting tvheadend.service… Mar 11 10:22:35 tv tvheadend[6019]: * Starting Tvheadend tvheadend Mar 11 10:22:35 tv [...]

A udev rule for my USB stick (disk-on-key)

Introduction I use USB flash sticks for backing up my system periodically by creating an image of the filesystem, and raw-writing it directly to e.g. /dev/sdd1. It’s just a matter of time before I wipe my hard disk by selecting the wrong /dev/something. Or just some other USB stick that happened to be plugged in. [...]