As the convener for the Adelaide community of The Things Network, I am frequently setting up Multitech Conduit Gateways. Depending on your PC or notebook hardware you might have some problems with the Exar USB-UART driver on Linux.

Here are the steps to getting this unit setup from an Ubuntu (should work for any other Linux distro) machine.

lsusb

Should show something like this:

Bus 002 Device 006: ID 04e2:1410 Exar Corp. XR21V1410 USB-UART IC

Installing VirtualBox is getting increasingly painful on Ubuntu due to the problems with UEFI Secure Boot and the VirtualBox kernel modules. Another reason for an alternative is that running VirtualBox VM’s completely in the background is not as straightforward as it could be.

From the available alternatives I looked into (VMWare, Xen & KVM) it was KVM that fitted my needs (casual VM usage with mostly headless VM’s for testing purposes). Main reasons:

Since there is now a supported Raspbian version without GUI and other unneeded add-ons available as Raspbian Lite the need to use other installers (with sometimes some downsides) is now not a necessity anymore. Below is a list of steps I like to perform before using them for any purpose as my Standard Operating Environment.

Download Raspbian Lite

Download link: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

Write to SD Card

dd bs=4M if=2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/sdb

Boot RPi

Default login details are
UID: pi
PWD: rasbperry

Whilst there is a .DEB installer to download from the GoHugo sites I get all matter of warnings that the package is of bad quality and I am not comfortable to run these kinds of installers.

I rather install from sources in this case which is very straight forward since the main dependencies (largely GO) are in the Ubuntu main repositories.

Install dependencies

sudo apt-get install golang git mercurial python-pygments

One of the things that is not implemented in the Secure Shell Chrome extension is the ability to remove know_host fingerprints which alert you if the fingerprint for a specific IP address has changed.

However there are times when you upgrade a systems and this need to be done.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that a host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the ECDSA key sent by the remote host is
d6:be:12:7e:22:23:c3:e1:56:30:d6:cd:65:b7:ab:42.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending ECDSA key in /.ssh/known_hosts:7
ECDSA host key for xxxxxxxxxxxxx.yyy.au has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.
NaCl plugin exited with status code 255.
(R)econnect, (C)hoose another connection, or E(x)it?

There are plenty of sites out there that give advise on this topic, unfortunately most of them are highly ad-infested to the point of being unreadable as well as only containing single bit rather that an overall picture. This is a collection of useful links to source materials as well as steps necessary to install.

Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/) by Joe Wilcox

One of the main reasons for setting up a cloud desktop is that I tend to use a lot of different devices some of which are not very powerful.

One of my favorite devices of late has been a HP 11 Chromebook. I originally bought it for a new employee and wanted to check myself how this thing stacks up to do day-to-day computing tasks more efficiently than a standard laptop without all the headaches of running Windows (viruses, endless driver installs, bloatware, malware, …). We already have several people at work working exclusively from Chromebooks and they absolutely love them. Long story short – I ended up keeping the Chromebook for myself as it’s an absolutely great secondary device for me. I can carry it with me everywhere (doesn’t weigh much more than a tablet, roughly the same size as a tablet & has a keyboard and is so much more useful than a tablet).

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.

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

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).

I have switched most of my Social Media postings to Google+ over the last year. Despite popular opinion being that Google+ is some ‘ghost town’, I find G+ the most useful environment for my particular needs & interests (specially since the introduction of groups). It has in my experience a vastly better signal-to-noise than other social media in particular Facebook.

However I would still like to feed postings through to my Twitter stream. Unfortunately Google has (stupidly / purposely / nastily) not included RSS support to make this possible without much work. There are a few publicly accessibly services out there, but they generally are either not updated or tend to fail very frequently as they hit the API Access limits as soon as they get a few users on their services.

In my never ending quest to find the ideal text editor here is another installment. Since I have been using VIM as my default command line editor for years I thought I give it a try for basic GUI editing as well.

Install and set desktop app & icon

sudo apt-get install
vim vim-gnome
sudo wget --output-document=/usr/share/applications/gvim.desktop https://raw.github.com/leogaggl/misc-scripts/master/gvim.desktop
sudo wget --output-document=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/gvim.svg http://gfxmonk.net/images/vim-logo/vim-logo.svg
sudo update-desktop-database

Set MIME defaults

vim ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list
#add or edit the following mime type and add others as needed
text/plain=gvim.desktop;