Getting Root On A Sony TV

June 20, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 139 Comments

The Sony Bravia series of HDTVs are a great piece of kit; they’re nice displays that usually have enough inputs for the craziest home theatre setups. These TVs also run Linux, but until now we haven’t seen anything that capitalizes on the fact these displays are wall-mounted Linux boxen. [Sam] sent in an exploit to root any Bravia TV – hopefully the first step towards replacing our home media server.

The exploit itself is a regular buffer overflow initialized by a Python script. The script sets up a Telnet server on any Sony Bravia with a USB port, and provides complete root access. [Sam] was able to get a Debian install running off a USB drive and all the Debian programs run correctly.

If you have a Bravia you’d like to test [Sam]’s script on, you’ll need a USB network adapter for the TV and a Telnet client to explore your TV’s file system. Right now there’s not much to do with a rooted Bravia, but at least now running XMBC or other media server on a TV is possible.

If anyone would like to start porting XMBC to a Bravia TV, [Sam] says he’s more than willing to help out. We’re not aware of any HDTV modding communities on the Internet, so if you’re part of one post a link in the comments.

Embedded Linux Meets Arduino With The Rascal Micro

June 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Behold the Rascal Micro. It’s running embedded Linux and has a dual-row of pin headers which probably seem pretty familiar. The idea here is to bring Arduino hardware (ie: shields) to a party with a powerful web server.

The image above is the beta version of the hardware. What’s being shown off in a recent Engadget demo is a version that slides two USB ports in between the barrel jack and the NIC. This makes it easy to jump over to wireless with the use of a USB dongle, or you can figure out what other peripherals you want to include in your project.

The novelty here is that the web server included a built-in editor. So not only can it serve you a webpage to control hardware or display sensor status, but it will let you edit the interface without needing to reflash anything.

The price rings in somewhere around $100-150, and like the popular Raspberry Pi board, you can’t get your hands on it right now.

Free Linux Computer From A Printer’s WiFi Card

June 9, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

Whether it’s building a 3D scanning system with a Kinect, or using a USB TV tuner dongle for software defined radio, there are a lot of interesting off-schedule uses for commodity hardware. The latest comes from the fruitful mind of [sjMoquin] and a Lexmark N2050 WiFi card that runs Linux.

This build started off with a Lexmark X6570 all-in-one printer available for about $100 USD on eBay. This printer comes packaged with a Lexmark N2050 WiFi card running BusyBox. After soldering a few wires to the USB/UART pins on the N2050, [sjMoquin] had a very cheap but highly useful single board computer running Linux.

There is still a little more work to be done – the WiFi and USB on the N2050 aren’t currently supported. [sjMoquin] and [Julia Longtin] are working on that, so a fully functional embedded Linux board based on a printer’s WiFi card should be available soon. It might be time to hit up eBay for a few of these cards, you know.

Teaching BeagleBone To Play With LIDD Displays

May 18, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

[Chris] hasn’t managed to get his hands on a Raspberry Pi yet, so he ordered a BeagleBone and got down to business. He was surprised to find that there isn’t much info out there about using LIDD type displays with the hardware. This protocol is used in many of the 320×240 smart LCD modules on the market, so he hammered out his own drivers and is sharing the details.

The system is designed to run a Linux kernel and [Chris] has chosen to go with Angstrom. His journey started by working out how to compile and patch the kernel himself. From there it was just a matter of getting the pin mapping right, and compiling a driver (it sounds way too simple when put like that).

Apparently he’s pretty close to getting the X desktop environment up and running. No idea what he plans for the hardware, but we’re all for people sharing their work to make it easier for others. Thanks!

Accessing An SD Card Through A Parallel Port, Just Because

May 13, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

[Vinod] sent in a very cool build he says is somewhat of a ‘mad project’: he mounted an MMC and SD card under Linux using the parallel port on his computer. Even though parallel ports are getting rarer these days, we absolutely love [Vinod]’s dedication and willingness to dig around the Linux kernel.

The hardware portion of the build is very simple – just an SD/MMC header and a few resistors wired up to a parallel port. The software side of the hack gets pretty interesting with [Vinod] building a kernel module, something we rarely see on Hackaday.

We’d have to agree with [Vinod]’s ‘mad project’ sentiment, if only because of the terrible throughput of [Vinod]’s adapter; it takes him more than a minute to transfer a 1.5 MB file onto the SD card – terribly slow, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, we’ve got to respect [Vinod] for pushing the limits of uselessness and still building something cool in the process.

[Linus] Wins The Millennium Technology Prize

April 20, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

[Linus Torvalds] pumped out Linux roughly 20 years ago and has now won some pretty major recognition for his contributions. We’ve seen different flavors of Linux installed on virtually everything you can think of, even on a dead badger. This prize is being compared to the Nobel Peace Prize, since there isn’t a Nobel prize for technology(why not?).

While some might be wondering what the big deal about Linux is, consider this quote from the ZDnet article for a moment.

Is it deserved? Well, judge for yourself. Since Torvalds created Linux in 1991, it has become the world’s most ubiquitous operating system it powers the popular Android phones and eight out of 10 financial trades; it runs Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major web networks. It is the dominant OS for supercomputers, supporting nine of 10 of these major systems, and is the preferable platform for cloud computing.

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.

Continue reading “Full Linux Distro On A Nook Color” →