Archive 2012

Sqlite3 gem not supported on Heroku

Published at November 18, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

When I tried to deploy second part of RoR tutorial to Heroku I get this error: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 An error occurred while installing sqlite3 (1.3.5), and Bundler cannot continue. Make sure that `gem install sqlite3 -v '1.3.5'` succeeds before bundling. ! ! Failed to install gems via Bundler. ! ! Detected sqlite3 gem which is not supported on Heroku. !...

Categories: app-dev


Prepare for Ruby on Rails on Debian wheezy

Published at November 18, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  3 min read

I start to learn Ruby on Rails. As always when you learn new programming language toolchain is required. In this tutorial I will try to go through toolchain preparation for my Debian wheezy. Of course I based on Vim as my editor of choice. Second requirement will be using some parts of toolchain in latest greatest version. As a beginner point for learning Ruby on Rails I choose this tutorial. I will try to use their methods of setting environment adding my comments where it is needed....

Categories: app-dev


Mutt tutorial part 4 - html mails, address book and other useful features

Published at May 13, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

How mutt can handle mails in html format ? Takling about html mail handling is talking about handling any type of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. Mutt supports handling for all MIME types in one place for all programs. This place is .mailcap file. Googling a little bit I found below mailcap file configuration (kudos to Bart Nagel). 1 2 3 4 text/html; pandoc -f html -t markdown; copiousoutput; description=HTML Text; test=type pandoc >/dev/null text/html;lynx -stdin -dump -force\_html -width 70; copiousoutput; description=HTML Text; test=type lynx >/dev/null text/html; w3m -dump -T text/html -cols 70; copiousoutput; description=HTML Text; test=type w3m >/dev/null text/html; html2text -width 70; copiousoutput; description=HTML Text; test=type html2text >/dev/null Of course we need to install all applications to make mailcap work correct:...

Categories: miscellaneous


Mutt tutorial part 3 - sidebar, URLs in e-mails

Published at May 13, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

Information in this post came from lunar linux page. Kudos to its author. In this post I want to discuss two topics: sidebar and how to open urls form inside mutt. Sidebar is mutt feature delivered in mutt-patched package in Debian. It cause to split standard mutt window in two parts. In first we can find list of folders defined in the $HOME/.muttrc file, second window is a known old window with the list of posts....

Categories: miscellaneous


Mutt tutorial part 2 - secure login

Published at May 13, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

This is second post of mutt tutorial series. As in the previous post for below information I need to thank Kousik for posts about gpg and using it with mutt. But probably the most important to simplify this method was Fau comment here. So going to the point of secure login for mutt we need gpg. First of all we need to install it by simply: 1 sudo apt-get install gpg After that we generate our keys by:...

Categories: miscellaneous


Mutt tutorial part 1 - setup IMAP account

Published at May 13, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  3 min read

Mutt is one of those programs that make people call you a linux geek, nerd or a snob. This is because using TUI or command line tools in world of fancy GUI for most people is weird. What’s so great about mutt? I probably still have not found much of its advantages, but at first glance we can notice a few things. First, it keeps Unix convention of small programs for specific task “Make each program to one thing well” or KISS....

Categories: miscellaneous


Vim as a Blogger editor

Published at April 21, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

Blogger.vim is a vim plugin for interfacing with Google’s Blogger. Below I will use my workspace git repository. To use this plugin we need pretty new ruby >= 1.9.2 and gems nokogiri and net-https-wrapper. Let’s install latest possible ruby for Debian, before that make sure you have latest updates: 1 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get dist-upgrade And ruby: 1 sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.3 Before we install gems , we need to resolve some dependencies:...

Categories: miscellaneous


Debugging coreboot in qemu environment - part 2

Published at April 18, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

In previous post coreboot was configured and installed. Here we try to establish good debugging environment for it. To create a good emulated environment to debug, research and learn coreboot few tricks are required. First of all we need to know how to run our emulated environment (qemu). What I mean by that?...

Categories: firmware


Building ARM toolchain? part 2: gcc and eglibc

Published at April 12, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  4 min read

Unfortunately after few tries of cross compiling eglibc using different source for instructions I always end with hard to solve issues. Luckily, in the sources of eglibc I noticed instructions for cross-compiling written long time ago by Jim Blandy(I know i should start here). Lot of thanks to him for it. Below I describe my experience which I gained during eglibc cross compilation for arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi and procedure that I used. Commands below contain some constants that I used in previous works....

Categories: app-dev os-dev


How to download videos from videos.linux.com

Published at April 6, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

Therefore, I’m leaving for the Easter holidays I wanted to download some lecture on embedded systems, which was presented at the 2012 Embedded Linux Conference. Although I regret I found that I could not find as good quality copy in the network as on the Linux Foundation page. It is unfortunate that linux.com site does not have the possibility of direct downloading video files. But there is a workaround. Follow below tutorial:...

Categories: miscellaneous


Building ARM toolchain - part 1: libs and binutils

Published at March 20, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  3 min read

Searching the Internet for information on how to build arm toolchain from scratch I realize that it is very hard to find information about this matter (and recent one even harder). I will try to fill this lack of information and try to build toolchain. My main goal is to use a component based on the GNU public license, and using them in as the newest version as it is possible....

Categories: app-dev os-dev


Quick build of arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi with crosstool-ng

Published at March 14, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

You might be surprised at how much you have to make to correctly build arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi config based toolchain with crosstool-ng. As you can see examples of many open source projects, the man’s work is a rare resource. The result of this economic fact is that the attempt to build configuration arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi is not a simple task and during an operation you can come across many problems. Although I am not afraid of problems and effectively try to fight them and of course sharing the results of my work....

Categories: app-dev os-dev


Splitting my personal repository

Published at March 14, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

After writing a few posts in which my workspace scripts could be useful, I realized that I should split blog works from the scripts that can be useful to others. From now materials related to the blog I will track in a separate repository and I’ll add them as submodule into my environment. This implies that if we intend to deliver something to a broader audience this should include only those things which the recipient is expected and which we say that we provide....

Categories: miscellaneous


Debugging coreboot in qemu environment - part 1

Published at March 12, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

First of all I use testing version of Debian - wheezy. Clone coreboot repository: 1 2 git clone http://review.coreboot.org/p/coreboot cd coreboot; make menuconfig Configure FILO as apayload and use its latest version: 1 Payload -> Add a payload -> FILO Payload -> FILO version -> HEAD Add verbose debugging messages: 1 2 3 Debugging -> Check PIRQ table consistency Debugging -> Output verbose malloc debug messages Debugging -> Output verbose ACPI debug messages Debugging -> Enable debug messages for option ROM execution Debugging -> Built-in low-level shell Debugging -> Trace function calls Try to build:...

Categories: firmware


Hostname generator

Published at February 20, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

Many times happened that I spend time, during the installation of the new system, whether it be a virtual physical machine, wondering about it’s hostname. One day I asked myself the trouble searching for host name generator. Best I could find (currently second in the results of google) is rospo.net. It gives you the choice of category for the host name. My favorite, as a fan of fantasy is “Characters from Tolkien”....

Categories: miscellaneous


Improve productivity by tracking work environment with git - vim

Published at February 20, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  3 min read

In this post I try to describe my vim configuration procedure and how it is connected with git. The whole concept is based on keeping all the configuration files in a separate directory. These files are connected using symbolic links in places where system or application requires it....

Categories: miscellaneous


Improve productivity by tracking work environment with git - preparation

Published at February 19, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

Update: My repository is available here. Below is first post from series in which I want to describe my experience gained in attempt to enhance my productivity by using git to control the contents of some files in my home directory. The first step to improve the productivity is good organization of working environment. It happens very often that I work on multiple machines both physical and virtual. Therefore I need a good mechanism to share knowledge, experience, code, configuration and many other things....

Categories: miscellaneous


Set irssi under debian to use freenode server

Published at February 15, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

Very short manual on how to set up irssi to work with freenode servers. First, install irssi: 1 sudo apt-get install irssi Run: 1 irssi For freenode write: 1 /connect holmes.freenode.net Send register command for your {nickname} and add information about your {e-mail}: 1 /msg nickserv register {nickname} {e-mail} Copy and paste line, which you get from freenode registration server to your mailbox, to irssi....

Categories: miscellaneous


arbtt as productivity improver for Linux environment

Published at February 6, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  3 min read

As I mentioned in previous post I work a lot on improving my productivity. After FreeMind it is time for arbtt. This is small tool which tracks active windows during your work. It is delivered with distro that I’m currently using (Debian wheezy). So all I had to do was: 1 sudo apt-get install arbtt Below I try describe how I configure arbtt to work with some apps that I use (Google Chrome, FreeMind, gnome-terminal and screen)....

Categories: miscellaneous


First steps to improve work productivity in Linux environment

Published at February 5, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

The problem encountered on several occasions over several months. Now it is time to deal with it. How did this happen? As always, resources were not sufficient, and if we can not increase the amount of resources we must strive to optimize their use.In this case, it was about time. While reading my last acquisition, once again I faced the problem of re-configure Linux account. Every time when I need new account for some reasons I need to configure some things manually....

Categories: miscellaneous


UEFI from Linux enthusiast perspective

Published at January 15, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

Another interesting topic with which I am dealing with recently is the UEFI. As we read on wikipedia: “The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware.". The purpose of this specification is to create something what in the future fully replace the BIOS. Of course, as always in such a situation, I wonder what OpenSource and Linux gurus have to say....

Categories: miscellaneous


flashrom and Shuttle AV18E2

Published at January 6, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

During Christmas break I found an old unused motherboard in my home, right away I thought that it maybe useful as learning environment for coreboot. First you need to do with this kind of board is to check if it is possible to flash its BIOS with user space tool called flashrom List of supported hardware can be found here. All you need to do is go through this HOWTO. Be aware that these operations can cause you will not be able to run your motherboard if something goes wrong....

Categories: firmware


Tmux as screen replacement and productivity accelerator

Published at January 6, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  5 min read

As I wrote in previous post I switched from GNU screen to tmux. I use it for a few moths and have to said that I’m really impressed by simplicity, performance and community support in this project. In this post I want to discuss my configuration and useful additions for it like tmuxinator, session logging, colors or status bar configuration. Basics Debian contain tmux package but for stable and testing release it is pretty old version....

Categories: miscellaneous


How to begin with coreboot

Published at January 6, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  1 min read

About a month ago I started my adventure with coreboot. As coreboot home page says “coreboot is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) found in most computers”. Although I read the majority of materials from mentioned page I still suffered from a lack of basic information that would help me to arrange everything in my head. Therefore, I decided to write a series of posts described my actions associated with this interesting project....

Categories: firmware