Four square, unpopulated purple PCBs sit in front of a tube of soldering flux on a light grey work surface. The PCBs are only 1"x1".

BeagleStamp Makes Soldering Linux Into Your Projects Easier

May 4, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 44 Comments

There are a lot of things you can do with today’s powerful microcontrollers, but sometimes you really need a full embedded Linux setup. [Dylan Brophy] wanted to make it easier to add Linux to his own projects and designed the BeagleStamp.

Squeezed onto a 1″ square, the BeagleStamp puts the power of a PocketBeagle into an easy to solder module you can add to a project without all that tedious mucking about with individually soldering all the components of a tiny Linux computer every time. As a bonus, the 4 layer connections are constrained to the stamp as well, so you can use lower layer count boards in your project and have your Linux too.

The first run of boards was delivered with many of the pins unplated, but [Brophy] plans to work around it for the time being so he can spot any other bugs before the next board revision. Might we suggest a future version using RISC-V?

Run Linux By Emulating RISC-V On A RISC-V Microcontroller

April 23, 2023 by Jenny List 7 Comments

For years it was a given that it was impossible to run a Linux based operating system on a less powerful computer whose architecture lacked a memory management unit. There were projects such as uCLinux which sought to provide some tidbits to low computing power Linux users, but ultimately they came to naught. It is achievable after a fashion though, by using the limited architecture to emulate a more powerful one. It’s been done on AVR chips emulating ARM, on ARM chips, and now someone’s done it on an ESP32-C3 microcontroller, a RISC-V part running a RISC-V emulator. What’s going on?

RISC-V is an architecture specification that can be implemented at many levels from a simple microcontroller or even a pile of 74 logic to a full-fat application processor. The ESP32-C3 lies towards the less complicated end of this curve, though that’s not the whole reason for the emulation. The PSRAM storage is used by the C3 as data storage and can’t be used to run software, so to access all that memory capacity an emulator is required that in turn can use the PSRAM as its program memory. It’s a necessary trick for Espressif’s implementation of the architecture.

Surprisingly it’s not as slow as might be expected, with a boot-up time under two minutes. It’s not what we’d expect from our desktop powerhouses, but it’s not so long ago that certain lower-power full-fat processors could be just as lethargic. For past glories, see the AVR running Linux, and the RP2040.

Before You Sudo Rm -rf /, Take Some Precautions

April 21, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 40 Comments

Maintaining or administering a computer system remotely is a common enough task these days, but it’s also something that can go sideways on you quickly if you aren’t careful. How many of us are guilty of executing a command, having it fail, and only then realizing that we weren’t connected to the correct computer at all? [Callan] occasionally has this issue as well, but in at least one instance, he deleted all of the contents of the wrong server by mistake. To avoid that mistake again, he uses color codes in the command line in a fairly unique way.

The solution at first seems straightforward enough. Since the terminal he’s using allows for different colors to be displayed for the user and hostname on the bash prompt, different text and background colors are used for each server. The only problem with this is that his friends also have access to these servers, and one of them is red/green colorblind, which led to another near-catastrophic mix-up. To ensure no edge cases are missed, [Callan] built a script which runs on every new server he spins up which selects two random colors, checks that they contrast well with each other, don’t create problems for the colorblind, and then applies them to the bash prompt.

For a problem most of us have had at some point or another, it’s a fairly elegant solution that helps ensure we’re sending the right commands to the right computer. This adds a layer of automation to the process and, while some color combinations do look similar, there are enough to help out most of us in some way, especially since he has released the source code on his GitHub page. For other helpful server administration tips, we’d recommend the Linux-Fu article about deploying your own dynamic DNS.

Linux Fu: Reading Your Memory’s Memory

April 18, 2023 by Al Williams 18 Comments

Linux users have a lot of software to be proud of. However, there is the occasional Windows program that does something you’d really like to do and it just won’t run. This is especially true of low-level system programs. If you want to poke around your CPU and memory, for example, there are tons of programs for that under Windows. There are a few for Linux, but they aren’t always as complete or handy. Recently, I had half the memory in my main desktop fail and I wanted to poke around in the system. In particular, I wanted to read the information encoded in the memory chips configuration EEPROM. Should be easy, right? You’d think.

Not Really Easy

One nice tool a lot of Windows users have is CPU-Z. Of course, it doesn’t run on Linux, but there is a really nice imitator called CPU-X. You can probably install it from your repositories. However, the GitHub page is a nice stop if for no other reason than to enjoy the user name [TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness]. The program has a gtk or an ncurses interface. You don’t need to run it as root, but if you press the “start daemon” button and authenticate, you can see some extra information, including a tab for memory.

Continue reading “Linux Fu: Reading Your Memory’s Memory” →

A Compact Camera Running Linux? What’s Not To Like!

April 3, 2023 by Jenny List 25 Comments

One of the devices swallowed up by the smartphone for the average person is the handheld camera, to the extent that the youngsters are reported to be now rediscovering 20-year-old digital cameras for their retro cool factor. Cameras aren’t completely dead though, as a mirrorless compact or a DSLR should still blow the socks off a phone in competent hands. They’ve been around long enough to be plentiful secondhand, which makes [Georg Lukas]’ look at a ten-year-old range of models from Samsung worth a second look. Why has a deep dive into old cameras caught our eye? These cameras run Linux, in the form of Samsung’s Tizen distribution.

His interest in the range comes from owning one since 2014, and it’s in his earlier series of posts on hacking that camera that we find some of the potential it offers. Aside from the amusement that it runs an unprotected X server, getting to a root shell is fairly straightforward as we covered at the time, and it turns out to be a very hackable device.

Cameras follow a Gartner hype cycle-like curve in the popularity stakes, so for example the must-have bridge cameras and compact cameras of the late-2000s are now second-hand-store bargains. Given that mirrorless cameras such as the Samsung are now fairly long in the tooth, it’s likely that they too will fall into a pit of affordability before too long. One to look out for, perhaps.

Linux Fu: Gum Up Your Script

March 29, 2023 by Al Williams 11 Comments

We often write quick bash scripts and judging by the comments, half of us use bash or a similar shell to pop out quick, useful scripts, and half of us think that’s an abomination, and you should only use bash for your command line and resort to something more like a traditional language to do anything else. If you’re in the former camp, you’re probably cursing your allegiance when you need to make your bash scripts more interactive.

Gum can help. It’s a utility that can handle your script input and output with a little flair while requiring almost no effort on your part.

The command looks simple, but it has twelve subcommands, each with myriad options. But you can break down the functions into a few simple categories. The input commands let you prompt for a line of input or a bunch of lines of input. You can also create a pick list or a yes/no type of prompt. There’s also a file picker and a filter, sort of like fzf.

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An Old Netbook Spills Its Secrets

March 27, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 35 Comments

For a brief moment in the late ’00s, netbooks dominated the low-cost mobile computing market. These were small, low-cost, low-power laptops, some tiny enough to only have a seven-inch display, and usually with extremely limiting hardware even for the time. There aren’t very many reasons to own a machine of this era today, since even the cheapest of tablets or Chromebooks are typically far more capable than the Atom-based devices from over a decade ago. There is one set of these netbooks from that time with a secret up its sleeve, though: Phoenix Hyperspace.

Hyperspace was envisioned as a way for these slow, low-power computers to instantly boot or switch between operating systems. [cathoderaydude] wanted to figure out what made this piece of software tick, so he grabbed one of the only netbooks that it was ever installed on, a Samsung N210. The machine has both Windows 7 and a custom Linux distribution installed on it, and with Hyperspace it’s possible to switch almost seamlessly between them in about six seconds; effectively instantly for the time. Continue reading “An Old Netbook Spills Its Secrets” →