距离上次写与Chrome OS/Chromium OS相关的帖子又有一段时间了。之前提到了怎么用Brunch项目来运行原味的Chrome OS,奈何Brunch的内核和我的新笔电(Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360)一直不是很兼容,主要两个痛点:
- 声卡和麦克风识别时有时无
- 笔电折叠后不会自动切换到平板模式
网上有人提到了FydeOS,于是这个周末抽了点时间来试试。剧透一下,感觉真不错!
Continue reading “FydeOS上手体验”Code can be lovely
距离上次写与Chrome OS/Chromium OS相关的帖子又有一段时间了。之前提到了怎么用Brunch项目来运行原味的Chrome OS,奈何Brunch的内核和我的新笔电(Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360)一直不是很兼容,主要两个痛点:
网上有人提到了FydeOS,于是这个周末抽了点时间来试试。剧透一下,感觉真不错!
Continue reading “FydeOS上手体验”My old ODROID-U3 has been giving me quite some headaches. Its old USB 2.0 ports and 100Mbps Ethernet port are also very limiting in 2023. Its power supply is not the best (not an uncommon issue with HardKernel’s products, certainly not uncommon among the older generation of single board computers). A hardware upgrade is therefore necessary.
I don’t really use it for anything else other than a humble home server to stream videos, music, and sometimes photos. Generally used as a private file share system at home. I already bought an 1 TB USB 3.0 HDD, so I definitely need a device that supports USB 3.0 at least. To not have a limiting network I/O, it should also have 1Gbps Ethernet port.
Why not buying a popular Raspberry Pi 4? Well, I tried, but it’s out of stock everywhere. That’s why I turned to its alternatives, initially I was going to buy another HardKernel’s ODROID product, but its pricing in Europe is just way too high than the price on its website. Unfortunately, (not sure if this has anything to do with Brexit), there is a minimum order requirement to ship to the UK. I’m building a cluster or something, so looking again…
Ta-da! I found Banana Pi, the name is a bit.. knock-off, and the manufacturer is in China, I’ll let you connect the dots. Banana Pi M5 is not the newest model, but it’s comparable to Raspberry Pi 4 and ticks all of my boxes. Long story short, I bought it from Ali-Express where it’s much cheaper than Amazon or other local retailers here. They were also running some sales on bundles, so I ended up buying it with a metal case, yet paying less.
On paper, it provides even better performance than Raspberry Pi 4! More importantly, it’s readily available! One thing I did pay extra attention to is the availability of upstream Linux images, having suffered quite a bit there with HardKernel’s products. Thankfully, Banana Pi has Armbian support (rated platinum for Banana Pi M5, whatever platinum means). To save even few more pennies, it comes with an onboard 16GB eMMC storage!
It’s been faithfully serving its purpose on the shelf next to the router for a couple of weeks now. Reliable little machine that’s fast and responsive! If you’re thinking of buying a single-board computer like Raspberry Pi, but couldn’t find available stocks, Banana Pi might fit in.
So I installed the great brunch framework on my laptop after a hiatus of a couple of months. I still dislike the fact that the Linux containers are running under a VM on Chrome OS. Sure it is more secure as the containers won’t be able to access the host hardware directly etc. It is also slightly inefficient. So I tried both chromebrew and brioche. Note that brioche only supports brunch (thus half of this post won’t apply to official Chrome OS builds).
Continue reading “Chrome OS, Linux Containers and Application Launchers”TL; DR. https://termux.librehat.com is a new Termux packages mirror! Maintained by me, synchronised every six hours, located in the United Kingdom, hosted by Oracle Cloud.
In the full article below, I’ll write up how to set up a Termux mirror (or in general, a Debian packages repository mirror).
Continue reading “A New Termux Mirror”This is by all means, not the first blog post about Termux. It serves as a journal for myself, as well for anyone who’s interested in cross building Qt or Qt-related projects for Termux (which is a native Linux environment for Android) from their x86_64
machines.
We already have @xeffyr who has done a great amount of work on building Qt for Termux. The work I’ve done recently would be 10 times harder, if not for what’s achieved by them already.
If you’re new to cross building for Termux, I recommend you to start with Developer Wiki.
Continue reading “Building Qt for Termux Android”I know some of you geeks have already done something like that, running a GNU/Linux distribution on top of an Android device. It’s an interesting time, with projects like proot
we don’t need root
privilege on our Android devices to run a containerized Linux environment. Here in this post, I’ve written down the steps that I’ve taken to have a usable desktop environment up running on my Galaxy Tab S5e (this blog post has been written up purely within such environment).
自从几年前卖掉华硕的一台小Chromebook后,看到Android和Linux应用程式的支持增加,又开始有点馋涎Chromebook……不过因为今年疫情全球大爆发,电子产品(尤其是适合居家办公和学习的)价格一路上扬(或者缺货)。Chromebook今年出货量增长更是迅猛(Windows PC, MacBook, Chromebook分类中增长幅度最大)。问我这台2015年买的老笔电尚能饭否?答曰:Brunch。
出厂预装的Windows 10早被我卸载干净了,单Linux系统(OpenSUSE)用了有一年多了,看到Brunch这个项目能在自己笔电上体验Chrome OS变身Chromebook,赶紧试验了一把,没想到效果出奇地好!这里特意用中文记载一下Linux下安装Chrome OS和后续升级的办法以供中文网络世界的朋友参考。
Continue reading “来份Brunch笔电瞬间变身Chromebook”This is the year 2020, Odroid-U3 is far from a powerful ARM development board in today’s standard, but it is still more than capable! Quad-core ARMv7 CPU and 2GB RAM, which means I can still run some light services and test my toy projects without paying any fees to AWS or Azure. The year 2020 also means that this little device can be powered by the mainline Linux kernel without many troubles (if any)! Better than that, the process is ridiculously straightforward!
In this post, I put together the steps I did to build the Linux kernel using upstream mainline source code natively on Odroid-U3. If you’re interested in cross-building from your x86 machines, you can find plenty of tutorials on that on the Internet.
Continue reading “Building Linux Kernel on Odroid-U3”I wouldn’t believe that I will be writing this 10 years ago. It’s 2020 though. Microsoft has improved a lot of services for Linux, ranging from developer tools like Visual Studio Code, to the protagonist today: Azure (cloud computing). Azure has steadfastly become a real credible alternative to Amazon EC2 (or AWS in general). Today, I want to share my experience of using a virtual machine on Microsoft Azure cloud. To be more specific, it is a Linux desktop virtual machine (SLES 15).
Continue reading “Virtual Linux Desktop Experience in Azure”Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a new plasmoid (KDE Plasma Applet) that provides a simple interface to monitor stocks. The first version was rather basic, being able to show the current market price only. Now it’s time to announce the availability of the second iteration of YapStocks (Yet Another Plasma Stocks Applet). I’ve recorded a short video clip showcasing all the features it has, ranging from the information summary to the historical price chart.
Continue reading “Announcing YapStocks 2.0”