Using Amazon EC2’s free usage tier to host your own cloud desktop is a very economical way to to have a desktop at hand anytime you can not be near one. Since I quite often use Chromebooks these days when on the road this is a particular handy way should I need a full desktop for certain tasks.

Since Ubuntu 14.05 is my default desktop on my normal hardware I obviously want to have my cloud desktop running the same underlying OS. However I don’t think running Unity as the desktop interface would be appropriate via a low-bandwidth remote desktop connection. For this reason I chose LXQT. If you need total stability you probably should go for the more mature LXDE instead, but I have already tried LXQT on an old EEE PC and was very impressed by the speed and low resource usage.

The Nokia X seems to be a nice piece of hardware for just around $125 AUD. Nothing spectacular in terms of computing power, but much better build quality than your average cheap Chinese Android clone. I have always been a fan of Nokia hardware until they decided to commit suicide by firstly adding CEO Stephen Elop and ditching all of their software for Windows Mobile.

The problem with the device out of the box is that is has a horribly butchered version of Android. And by horribly I mean way worse than the usual bloat and crapware that poor Samsung, HTC or Sony users are normally subjected to. Hopefully this is only Nokia’s first step to a more open platform, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.

If there would be an Oscar for the WORST firmware upgrade procedure (and associated drivers, documentation and general quality of software) Rikomagic should win this by a country mile !

Since all the information I found on the interwebs said Linux was not supported I ended up borrowing friends notebooks (as I don’t own any Windows machinery anymore). My main Toshiba Ultrabook seemed to have issues with picking up the USB from a Windows Virtual Machine). After not being able to get the absolute crap USB drivers that come with the firmware download with any of the machines (Vista & Win7_64) I was ready to throw in the towel and put the purchase of this unit (in hindsight I would not do it again anyway) down as a total waste.

Trying to install Google Earth on Ubuntu. You could just download the .deb file and run dpkg command, however I prefer to use it via a repo to make sure upgrades are installed as part of the system upgrades.

http://www.google.com/earth/download/ge/

Google Keys

Note: this should not be necessary if you have use the GoogleTalk plugin or similar package from the Google DEB Repo

cd /tmp/
wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub
sudo apt-key add linux_signing_key.pub
rm linux_signing_key.pub

Add Google Earth Repo

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list
#add the following line
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/earth/deb/ stable main

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install google-earth-stable

NOTE: While this should be enough on 32bit versions of Ubuntu 14.04 unfortunately it turns out that there is a dependency problem with the 64bit version

Since the upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) I have had issues running the Android SDK Tools. For example this error:

./adb
bash: ./adb: No such file or directory

Check the multi-arch architectures installed on the system.

sudo dpkg --print-architecture

Mine only showed ‘amd64’. Turns out you need to add the i386 architecture and install libc6:i386,libncurses5:i386,libstdc++6:i386 library packages.

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386
sudo ./adb

My old Asus EEE PC 900 is the oldest piece of hardware I own. With an old Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM it’s never was the fastest kid on the block (in fact I never considered the Windows XP version of the same unit usable as it was very sluggish). However after owning it for nearly 7 years I am very surprised I can still use it. Granted I only use it occasionally when I am at home, but thanks to LXDE it was still usable. I recently learned that LXDE is merging with the Razor-Qt project (great idea!) to create the combined LXQT – an ultra-low resource window manager.

Thanks to Paolo Rotolo there is now a Ubuntu Launchpad PPA for Android Studio

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:paolorotolo/android-studio
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install android-studio

Connecting securely to your home network has always been a bit of a challenge since common home ADSL routers not normally contain any VPN Servers (those which do contain such are generally PPTP servers which I would hardly call secure these days). Which is probably a good thing as they would be horribly out of date considering the firmware release policies of retail router manufacturers. You could run/maintain your own dedicated server, but for most home networks that is overkill and out of the technical depth of most hobbyists. However NAS Appliances are becoming more useful in home networks for storage and other common tasks. I have had good experiences with Synology NAS devices over a number of years and the latest iteration also has a very useful VPN Server package available based on OpenVPN (as most Synology Apps are common Open Source components).

Excellent coincidence that the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) fell into the Easter holidays. This gives me the time to install earlier than I normally have time for.

This realease being a LTS (long-term support) release means it is a fairly conservative release. There are some nice enhancements and most importantly for me the 3.13 Kernel means finally Wacom Touch devices are supported without kernel mods.

Unfortunately the mess that is UEFI Secure Boot still causes issues on some hardware. In my case it’s a Toshiba Z930 Ultrabook. I have documented the procedure to get it working here.

However it turns out that there is no ‘Trusty’ release for the boot-repair utility. The fix is relatively easy.

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yannubuntu-boot-repair-trusty.list
#change the following line from 'trusty' to 'saucy'
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yannubuntu-boot-repair-trusty.list

You can then just finish with

Apache Cordova has very nice documentation, however as so many projects it is focused on the Windows/MacOS duopolies only. Fortunately it’s not too hard to work out the differences.

Installing dependencies

Thanks to: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make ant openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk

Installing Android SDK

Please note: one of the problems I found was that I had some Android tools from the Ubuntu repos that were conflicting with the SDK install. It’s probably a good idea to remove them first. That might save you from a lot of headaches down the line (and time to troubleshoot).

Finally found some time playing with a RaspberryPi and an attached PiFace Interface board to control some garden pumps and potentially an Aquaponics setup in the near future.

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi (Model B in my case, but any will do)
• PiFace Interface board (http://www.piface.org.uk)

Base Raspian (Debian Wheezy) Install (I prefer the clean minimal install via https://githutb.com/hifi/raspbian-ua-netins).

Configure the base system as per my previous base install.