Turning The PS4 Into A Useful Linux Machine

February 10, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

When the PlayStation 3 first launched, one of its most lauded features was its ability to officially run full Linux distributions. This was of course famously and permanently borked by Sony with a software update after a few years, presumably since the console was priced too low to make a profit and Sony didn’t want to indirectly fund server farms made out of relatively inexpensive hardware. Of course a decision like this to keep Linux off a computer system is only going to embolden Linux users to put it on those same systems, and in that same vein this project turns a more modern Playstation 4 into a Kubernetes cluster with the help of the infamous OS.

The Playstation 4’s hardware is a little dated by modern desktop standards but it is still quite capable as a general-purpose computer provided you know the unofficial, unsupported methods of installing Psxitarch Linux on one. This is a distribution based on Arch and built specifically for the PS4, but to get it to run the docker images that [Zhekun Hu] wanted to use some tinkering with the kernel needed to be done. With some help from the Gentoo community a custom kernel was eventually compiled, and after spending some time in what [Zhekun Hu] describes as “Linux Kernel Options Hell” eventually a working configuration was found.

The current cluster is composed of two PS4s running this custom software and runs a number of services including Nginx, Calico, Prometheus, and Grafana. For those with unused PlayStation 4s laying around this might be an option to put them back to work, but it should also be a cautionary tale about the hassles of configuring a Linux kernel from scratch. It can still be done on almost any machine, though, as we saw recently using a 386 and a floppy disk.

PinePhone Malware Surprises Users, Raises Questions

December 16, 2021 by Arya Voronova 85 Comments

On December 5th, someone by the IRC nickname of [ubuntu] joined the Pine64 Discord’s #pinephone channel through an IRC bridge. In the spirit of December gift-giving traditions, they have presented their fellow PinePhone users with an offering – a “Snake” game. What [ubuntu] supposedly designed had the potential to become a stock, out-of-the-box-installed application with a small but dedicated community of fans, modders and speedrunners.

Unfortunately, that would not be the alternate universe we live in, and all was not well with the package being shared along with a cheerful “hei gaiz I make snake gaem here is link www2-pinephnoe-games-com-tz replace dash with dot kthxbai” announcement. Shockingly, it was a trojan! Beneath layers of Base64 and Bashfuscator we’d encounter shell code that could be in the “example usage” section of a modern-day thesaurus entry for the word “yeet“.

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Linux: Coming Soon To M1 Macbooks

November 17, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 62 Comments

Regardless of the chipset or original intended use of any computer system, someone somewhere is going to want to try and run Linux on it. And why not? Linux is versatile and free to use as well as open-source, so it’s quite capable of running on almost anything. Of course, it takes a little while for the Linux folk to port the software to brand new hardware, but it’s virtually guaranteed that it’s only a matter of time before Linux is running on even the most locked-down of hardware, like the M1 MacBooks.

[Hector Martin] aka [marcan] has been hard at work getting Linux up and running on the latest Apple offerings with their ARM-based M1 processors. Since these are completely divorced from their x86 product line the process had to be worked from the ground up which included both booting Linux and modifying the kernel to include support for the hardware. [marcan] has a lot of hardware working such as the USB ports and the SD card slot, and notes that his setup is even compatible with the webcam notch included in the latest batch of MacBooks.

There are a few things still missing. He’s running Arch and doesn’t have the GPU configured yet, so all of the graphics are rendered in software. But he has put the computer through the wringer including running some computationally-intense software for nearly a full day before realizing that the machine wasn’t charging, which did not make much difference in performance. These machines are indeed quite capable with their new ARM chipsets and hopefully his work going forward will bring Linux to the rest of us who still use Macs even if they don’t want to run macOS.

Raspberry Pi Bluetooth Receiver For Your Car Stereo

June 23, 2014 by Rick Osgood 63 Comments

RasPi Car Audio

The ability to play music in your car over a Bluetooth connection is very handy. You can typically just leave your phone’s Bluetooth module turned on and it will automatically pair to your car. Then all you have to do is load up a music player app and press play. You don’t have to worry about physically tethering your phone to the car every time you get in and out of the vehicle. Unfortunately Bluetooth is not a standard option in many cars, and it can be expensive to buy an aftermarket adapter.

[parkerlreed] built his own solution to this problem using a Raspberry Pi. He first installed arch Linux on his Pi. He also had to install pulseaudio and bluez, which is trivial if you use a package manager. He then modified some of the Linux configuration files to automatically bring the Pi’s Bluetooth adapter online once it is initialized by the kernel.

At the end of the boot sequence, the Pi is configured to automatically log in to a virtual console as [parkerlreed’s] user. The user’s bashrc file is then altered to start pulseaudio in daemon mode at the end of the login sequence. This allows the Pi to actually play the audio via the Pi’s sound card. The Pi’s stereo output jack is then plugged into the vehicle’s auxiliary input jack using a standard audio cable.

The Reddit post has all of the configuration details you would need to duplicate this setup. [parkerlreed] also includes some commands you will need to setup the initial pairing of the Raspberry Pi to your smart phone. Be sure to watch the video demonstration below. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Bluetooth Receiver For Your Car Stereo” →

Full Linux Distro On A Nook Color

April 17, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

We should have included a footnote in the title. You can say that [Thomas Polasek] installed a full version of Arch Linux on his Nook Color, but there’s one caveat. It’s running on top of the Android kernel and his proof-of-concept uses a second computer to get it up and running. But there’s potential for that to change moving forward.

Unlike previous attempts to run a Linux distro on Android, this does away with using a VNC to show the desktop. [Thomas] is commandeering Android’s frame buffer so that it can be used by the X desktop without needing to set up display drivers. To start off he installed a ROM based on CM7. A couple of Android apps give him the functionality needed to get the Arch Linux distro running from the SD card. This is accomplished by tunneling into the tablet via SSH, and using the ‘chroot’ command to make it active. The hope is that this can somehow be automated by a script.

A female to female USB coupler was used to connect the keyboard and mouse to the Nook. It looks like LXDE would be useless without them; touch control is not yet implemented. Those shortcomings aside, everything seems to be running pretty fast in the video after the break.

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