Linux – Librehat的部落格

FydeOS上手体验

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！

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.

Chrome OS, Linux Containers and Application Launchers

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).

Building Qt for Termux Android

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.

Fedora Linux with MATE Desktop on 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).

Building Linux Kernel on Odroid-U3

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.

Announcing YapStocks 2.0

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.

Category: Linux