tar –one-file-system diving into a bind-mounted directory

Using tar -c –one-file-system a lot for backing up large parts of my disk, I was surprised to note that it went straight into a large part that was bind-mounted into a subdirectory of the part I was backing up. To put it clear: tar –one-file-system doesn’t (always) detect bind mounts. Why? Let’s look, for [...]

Installing Linux Mint 19.1 with UEFI boot, RAID, encryption and LVM

Introduction These are my notes as I attempted to install Linux Mint 19.1 (Tara) on a machine with software RAID, full disk encryption (boot partitions excluded) and LVM. The thing is that the year is 2018, and the old MBR booting method is still available but not a good idea for a system that’s supposed [...]

Linux + APC Smart UPS 750 notes (apcupsd and other stuff)

Introduction These are my somewhat messy jots while setting up an APC Smart UPS 750 (SMT750I) with a Linux Mint 19 machine, for a clean shutdown on power failure. Failures and mistakes shown as well. Even though I had issues with receiving a broken UPS at first, and waiting two months for a replacement (ridiculous [...]

Controlling GPIO on the Z-Turn Lite board with Xillinux

Introduction This post shows how to access some GPIO functionalities from Xillinux running on a Z-Turn Lite board (with an Z-turn Lite IO Cape board attached), directly from the command line. Watchdog When the “WD” jumper at J26 on the board is placed, it’s possible to utilize the board’s watchdog chip, which resets the processor [...]

Linux: When Vivado’s GUI doesn’t start with an error on locale

Trying to running Vivado 2017.3 with GUI and all on a remote host with X forwarding, i.e. $ ssh -X mycomputer setting the environment with $ . /path/to/Vivado/2017.3/settings64.sh it failed with $ vivado & terminate called after throwing an instance of ‘std::runtime_error’ what(): locale::facet::_S_create_c_locale name not valid Now here’s the odd thing: The error message [...]

Nvidia graphics cards on Linux: PCIe link speed and width

Why is it at 2.5 GT/s??? With all said about Nvidia’s refusal to release their drivers as open source, their Linux support is great. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a flawless graphics card experience with Linux. After replacing the nouveau driver with Nvidia’s, of course. Ideology is nice, but a computer that works [...]

Quartus / Linux: Programming the FPGA with command-line

Command-line? Yes, it much more convenient than the GUI programmer. Programming an FPGA is a repeated task, always the same file to the same FPGA on the same board connected to the computer. And somehow the GUI programming tools turn it into a daunting ceremony (and sometimes even a quiz, when it can’t tell exactly [...]

Solved: netcat (nc) doesn’t terminate at end of transmission

Introduction I often use netcat to transmit chunks of data between two Linux machines. I usually go something like $ pv backup-image.iso | nc -l 1234 on one machine, and then maybe # nc 10.1.2.3 1234 > /dev/sdb1 This is an example for using another machine to write data into a USB disk-on-key, because writing [...]

Synplify Pro on Linux Mint 18.1: The cheat sheet

Introduction I needed to run Synplify Pro for a short trial period on my Fedora 12 machine (yup, it’s 2018, and still). And I have a full Mint 18.1 as a chroot jail on that machine for installing contemporary software. So these are my notes on the go. Consider everything below as run om Mint [...]

fetchmail, openssl and a sudden failure to authenticate certificates

Since around the beginning of December 2017, fetchmail stopped retrieving mails form Gmail servers silently, without issuing any kind of error message. Only when starting fetchmail in the foreground, I got fetchmail: Server certificate verification error: unable to get local issuer certificate fetchmail: This means that the root signing certificate (issued for /C=US/O=Google Trust Services/CN=Google [...]