Categories
FLOSS Linux open source

My favorite free and open source software

I’ve been writing about free and open source software (FLOSS) for several years now. Not only is this software free as in free beer but it also means freedom for me to use the software as I deem fit. I can install it on any system I like, copy it, distribute it and even study the source code, change it and perhaps create my own version if I want to.

Over the years I’ve become attached to the FLOSS programs that I often use. I often discovered them reading articles mostly on blogs about FLOSS or on the Fediverse where people love to share their experience with FLOSS. Below I’ll go through my list of favorite FLOSS. I’ve created the list ordering the programs in the following categories: operating system, office, games, social, music, video, browser, graphics, 3d cad and cloud. So here it goes.

Operating System: MX Linux

There are plenty of Linux distros and I tried several but MX Linux has been my daily driver for several years now. It’s stable, pretty light weight, well maintained and I allows me to easily install all the software that I need.

Office: LibreOffice

From LibreOffice I use the LibreOffice Calc part the most. For our personal accounting something like GNUcash is a bit too much so I’m using LibreOffice Calc for that. Importing our financial transactions as a .csv file, using pivot tables to sort the current accounts and sum the amounts. Lastly I add a category per current account and filter.

Games: Beyond All Reason

My favorite game was Mindustry for a while but now it’s Beyond All Reason (BAR). BAR is the spiritual successor of Total Annihilation, an old RTS game, but it has become so much more. Like Starcraft 2 it’s used for competitive gaming which makes it also fun to watch.

Social: Lemmy (Beehaw server)

Currently I’m using Beehaw which is a very good moderated Lemmy server. Lemmy is the federated version of Reddit but the main Lemmy servers are radical to the point that it’s becoming unbearable (although I do believe that lemmy.ml has cleaned up their act recently). Beehaw has plenty of users with good links and discussion without the toxicity that seems indigenous on almost all social media.

Music: Squeezebox

I’m still using Squeezebox, a complete home audio streaming system. I’m running my own Squeezebox server where I uploaded my music to. It also contains my favorite radio stations and podcasts. Squeezebox is no longer produced by Logitech but since everything is FLOSS even the hardware can be made from off the shelf components.

Video: Invidious

All YouTube videos from an Invidious server (Yewtu.be). With all the content YouTube is hard to avoid but at least with Invidious I’m no longer served with ads and the relentless data mining from Google has stopped.

Browser: Firefox

I’ve been using Firefox for many years now. It’s the last FLOSS browser with a decent, although shrinking, market share and offers good privacy, speed and stability. And it’s not Google.

Graphics: Inkscape

I’m using Inkscape for many years now for all my vector graphic design work. As with all vector illustration design programs it’ll take some time to get used to but once you do it’ll allow to get the most out of your 2d graphic designs. It’s unbelievable how it has grown over the years and is able to compete with the proprietary and expensive Adobe Illustrator.

Cloud: Nextcloud

During my quest to get away from Google I needed cloud storage to replace Google Drive. I discovered NextCloud a couple of years ago and setup my own home server (a Nuc) with NextCloud. It’s great to sync photos from my smartphone and to exchange documents. I never looked back.

3D CAD: OpenSCAD

Perhaps a bit of an oddity for some people but I do 3d printing as a hobby and although I also use Solvespace or FreeCAD if I need a more functional part, OpenSCAD holds a special place since it allows me to make more creative designs. Some people might be put of by the UI and the fact that every 3d model needs to be programmed instead of drawn.

And that concludes my list of my favorite FLOSS programs. I use plenty more FLOSS. In fact none of the programs that I use for the PC are proprietary (with the exception of proprietary blobs).

Categories
Linux open source PC

Peeling the onion

About five years ago I got interested in free and open source software (FLOSS) and online privacy in general. The problem was that almost all software that I used at that time was proprietary. I had an iMac with OSX and besides that I worked a lot with Google apps (Gmail, Blogger and Google Docs most notably). From that point it felt as pretty daunting task to switch completely to FLOSS. Where to start? Just installing Linux on my iMac seemed far to large a step. How to migrate all my documents and learn to work with a OS and all these apps that were new to me. Instead I decided a to gradually replace my apps with FLOSS alternatives until I finally reached a point where I could easily replace the OSX operating system with Linux.

I started with the low hanging fruit and the lowest hanging of them all is the web browser. So Chrome was replaced by Firefox. Next was the mail client so I replaced Mail with Thunderbird. At that time I started to work with graphical applications so I chose Inkscape, GIMP and for my 3D CAD work Solvespace, FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I installed these apps on my iMac still running OSX and took my time to get familiar with them.

For my simple video editing tasks I kept lazily working with iMovie for a long time. I tried OpenShot but it kept crashing but after I while I discovered Shotcut which I found a better replacement. More recently I discovered Avidemux which is simple and works on lightweight systems. Next was Darktable instead of Photos to organize the thousands of photos that I have.

To replace Google proved to be even more difficult. Google is everywhere. The easiest one is Google Search. I first replaced it with DuckDuckGo. DDG is not FLOSS but at least it’s not Google. Currently I’m experimenting with MetaGer which is free and open source software. Google Maps was replaced by Openstreetmap and to upload my content I exchanged YouTube for PeerTube. This was all pretty simple. Next was Google Drive and this proved to be more difficult. I figured the best was to replace Google Drive with NextCloud. But instead of having someone else running NextCloud for me I found it appealing to have my own server. But I don’t know anything about installing and maintaining a server. Then someone mentioned Yunohost to me. Yunohost is an operating system that allows an idiot like me to setup and manage a server in a very simple way. Installing it went flawless and installing NextCloud on top of Yunohost encompassed little more than a few mouse clicks. After this I could say bye bye to Google Docs.

In the mean time I felt confident enough to replace OSX with Linux. With all the preparation that I had done it was an almost painless transition. I downloaded a Linux distro, put on a USB drive and installed it on a PC (not the iMac). Next I could install all the FLOSS apps that I was already familiar with and I was up and running in no time.

I’d like to call this method Peeling the Onion. Where the onion is the problem. Remove the outer most peel first and working my way to the inside. I work pretty much exclusively with FLOSS now and I couldn’t be happier with the result. I feel more in control of the software and and my data which is a very satisfying experience. Yes, some of the software is little bit rough around the edges and not as smooth as some of the proprietary software I was used to but I feel that I’m at the helm of my PC without a giant cooperation driving me into a direction that I don’t want.

Categories
Linux open source PC

Linux on a 17 year old laptop

My laptop is a Thinkpad T40 from 2003 with 1GB of RAM and a 30GB HDD (Yes, you can laugh now). I bought it second hand many years ago, it had Windows installed and it was slow as molasses. It was also a time that I got interested in FLOSS. So I looked for a suitable Linux distro and I found Puppy Linux (Slacko and later the TahrPup release). It turned my unusable laptop into a fast and very capable computer. I’ll never forget the amazement when I booted Puppy for the first time and saw how fast it was.

I’m not much of a distro hopper but last year I switched to AntiX because I felt that development of Puppy had slowed down. AntiX does more or less the same as Puppy in that it brings life to an old computer. Both are very lightweight but at this moment I find AntiX definitely more polished with JWM, FluxBox and IceWM as window managers to choose from.

Both Puppy and AntiX contain, as do most of the other Linux Distros, proprietary bits and pieces (e.g drivers and it’s possible to install proprietary programs from the Snap store or PPM) but are mostly FLOSS and are available thanks to many volunteers that dedicate so much of their time to these operating systems. So I think it’s fair to contribute back e.g by donating to the developers that make this possible.

Link to the Antix website.

Link to the Puppy Linux website.

Categories
Linux open source Raspberry Pi

Maintaining the Raspberry Pi Squeezebox server (aka Logitech Media Server)

I wrote earlier about the Logitech Media Server (LMS), open source software that I’ve used to turn a Raspberry Pi into a music server for my Squeezebox devices. I’m using my Raspberry Pi based Logitech Media Server a couple of months and I’ve grown very fond of it. What started as an experiment now has become a device I’m starting to rely on. I guess that eventually I have to replace the USB-HDD that I connected to the Raspberry Pi with a better one. In the meantime however I do need to maintain the LMS. In this blogpost I’ll explain how I add and remove music files from the LMS and create a simple backup of your music files. Finally I provide a tip to debug problems with the Logitech Media Server. All software that I used for this project is free and open source.

Adding, changing and deleting music files

When I buy a new CD I want to add it to my LMS. All the ripping is done using Asunder, a low resource ripper for Linux. Asunder has a simple interface but it has many options can encode to many different formats. It can also tag the files using CDDB but I use MusicBrainz Picard because does a much better job when it comes to tagging (in addition MusicBrainz can organize your digital music library). The tagger completes the metadata on the music files which is very convenient when uploading the files to the LMS. A simple example is that album art is added to the file.

Now about moving the encoded files to the LMS. At first I unmounted the USB hard disk from the LMS, removed it and connected it to the laptop and copied the albums. For adding new albums this proved to be be a clumsy method and I quickly found myself looking for an alternative.

I decided to use FTP to transfer files over the network to the Raspberry Pi. FTP is a network protocol to transfer files between a client and a server. The software that I’m using is either FileZilla or gFTP. They have basically the same functionality but gFTP is not available for Windows while FileZilla is available for GNU/Linux, OSX and Windows. Working with both is easy enough.

Later I also used the scp command (Linux, OSX) in the terminal and simply copy the music files on my PC to the music folder on my Raspberry Pi powered LMS.

Read this if you (like me) run into problems with file ownership on your Raspberry Pi. In the past I couldn’t set the ownership for the USB hard disk on the Raspberry Pi. Only root was able to write to the disk. The reason is a bit technical and maybe confusing but I had used the Windows FAT filesystem for the USB hard disk and when I mounted it on my Linux laptop (Puppy Linux distribution), ownership of all files was changed by Puppy Linux to root. At this point it was impossible to change ownership and permissions with chmod and chown from the media server. To solve this problem I had to first unmount and mount the USB hard disk. To mount the hard disk use the following general command is used:

mount device mount-point -o uid=foo -o gid=foo

or in my specific case

sudo umount ~/media/usb-drive

and then mount

sudo mount /dev/sda1 ~/media/usb-drive -o uid=pi -o gid=pi

This command sets the ownership of all files on the USB hard disk to pi instead of root enabling me to use FileZilla and gFTP to copy files from a remote PC to the Raspberry Pi.

Adding Podcasts to the server

Podcasts can be easily added to the Logitech Media Server and there is no need to subscribe to a service. First the Podcasts app must be added to myApps on the Squeezebox player or players. Next to add podcasts to the list a plugin needs to be installed. To do this open the web interface in your browser and type:

<your_Raspberry_Pi_ip_address:9000> (in my case 192.168.178.69:9000)

Choose Settings at the bottom right of the web browser and then choose the Plugins tab. Now enable the Podcasts (v2.0) plugin and reboot the Raspberry Pi for the changes to take effect. The Podcasts plugin is now active and can be entered through a new tab in the Settings menu. In this tab new feeds can be entered that will immediately be available on the Squeezebox players. To find a certain feed look for the rss feed of your favorite podcast and copy the link into ‘add a new feed’ in the podcast tab of the Settings menu mentioned above (e.g. http://feed.thisamericanlife.org/talpodcast for This American Life).

Creating a backup of the music collection

I invested a lot of time in ripping my CD collection so it would be a shame if I lost my music files due to a hard disk crash. I therefore use a very simple backup method, largely copied from the Raspberrypi.org website to ensure that my files are safe. First make sure that there’s enough harddisk space available with df -h. Next do:

tar -cvf backup.tar.gz ~/media/usb-drive

This creates a file ‘backup.tar.gz’ that contains files in /media/usb-drive, the mounting point of my USB drive and places it in the same map. Next I use (again) Filezilla to move the backup file to my desktop computer. Alternatively the ripped files on the PC they were ripped on can serve as a backup.

Debug problems with the Logitech Media Server

I didn’t encounter much problems with the LMS but if you do take a look into the log file of the server. This can be done opening a terminal on your PC and login into the Rasperry Pi with:

ssh pi@<your_network_ip_address_of_the_server>
cat /var/log/squeezeboxserver/server.log

The sudo ssh command prompts for the password of the Raspberry Pi. Now look for anything suspicious in the log, copy it and do an internet search with your preferred search engine. You’ll probably end up on https://forums.slimdevices.com. Chances are someone already encountered the same problem and it was solved with help of the community.

Alternatively, you can use the interface for the web browser. In the web interface choose Settings and then Server (CTRL-E), select Logging in the pull down menu and open the highlighted link to the server.log file.

Web interface with Material Skin. Logging is selected in the pull down menu of the Server setting tab.
Bottom part of my server.log file.
Categories
Linux open source Raspberry Pi

Creating a Raspberry Pi Squeezebox Server

If you, like me, own one or more Squeezebox players you can either choose between the service mysqueezebox.com, that streams music from the internet, or set up the Squeezebox Server on your own network. The Squeezebox Server software (aka Logitech Media Software, aka Slimserver) being free and open source software guarantees that you’ll take control of your Squeezebox players and the music that you’re streaming.

There many hardware options for the Squeezebox Server software but I decided to use the Raspberry Pi 2 that I had lying around because of it’s small footprint and massive support for the Pi. Within a couple of hours I had the Logitech Squeezebox Server up an running with my music playing.

Below I’ll show how to set up the Logitech Squeezebox Server on a Raspberry Pi in five steps. I got some important steps from the Variax Firmation website but I tested everything successfully.

Raspberry Pi 2 with a USB-harddrive connected to my network with a (yellow) ethernet cable.
Raspberry Pi 2 with a USB-harddrive connected to my network with a (yellow) ethernet cable.

Step 1: Ripping CD’s and writing them on an HDD (choosing an audio format)

For this project I used a small USB-HDD that was also lying around. I formatted the HDD. Next I collected all my music CD’s and ripped them. As ripping software I used the Asunder software on my Linux laptop but I guess that there are good alternatives (fre:ac appears to be an free and open source alternative that is also available for OSX and Windows). As audio format I choose MP3. If I buy a larger drive I’ll probably move to FLAC.

Step 2: Installing Raspberry Pi OS

Next install Raspberry Pi OS (previously called Raspbian) on the Raspberry Pi by first downloading the image and writing the image to the micro SD card using these instructions for OSX (or these instructions for Windows and Linux). I chose the Lite version of Raspberry Pi OS because I don’t need the desktop software and it makes the server as lightweight as possible. I had no problems booting the Raspberry Pi and connecting it to my network using Ethernet. To avoid potential problems connect the Pi to a monitor with an HDMI cable and make sure that it boots properly.

NOTE: If you do install the Lite version of the OS make sure to enable SSH via raspi-config. This enables you to access the Pi remotely later on.

Step 3: Mount the HDD on the Raspberry Pi

Now with Raspberry Pi OS installed I mounted the HDD that we prepared in step 1. For this first connect the HDD to the Raspberry Pi (in my case I connected the HDD through a USB port of the Raspberry Pi), login remotely and retrieve the name of the drive. To login remotely we need another computer (Windows, Linux or OSX). Open a terminal (Windows users either need to install Putty or for Windows 10 users enable the SSH client) and type:

sudo ssh pi@Raspberry_Pi_ip_address (in my case 192.168.178.69)

The default password is raspberry. Then type:

sudo fdisk -l 

Then look for the HDD that is just connected. This was /dev/sda1 in my case (but this may differ in yours). To make the files on the HDD accessible to the Raspberry Pi we need mount the drive. But before that we need to make a mounting point (in this example at ~/media/usb-drive).

sudo mkdir ~/media/usb-drive 

and mount

 sudo mount /dev/sda1 ~/media/usb-drive

You should hear some HDD activity. Now type:

cd ~/media/usb-drive && ls -l

and a list of your music should be visible.
To unmount the HDD do:

sudo umount ~/media/usb-drive
 The list of folders with albums that I ripped. In this stage I only ripped a few albums to test the system.
The list of folders with albums that I ripped. In this stage I only ripped a few albums to test the system (click to enlarge).

Step 4: Installing Logitech Media Server on the Raspberry Pi

First we need to install a library to play audio files. Since you want mp3 only do:

sudo apt-get install -y libsox-fmt-all

This installs SoX, a command line utility that, among other things, plays various types of audio files. If you want to add flac support you’ll probably need to do this

sudo apt-get install -y libsox-fmt-all libflac-dev

Now with the audio libraries in place the Logitech Media Software can be downloaded. We want the latest version which at the moment of this writing is 8.3.1.

wget -O logitechmediaserver_all.deb $(wget -q -O - "http://www.mysqueezebox.com/update/?version=8.3.1&revision=1&geturl=1&os=deb")

Now install the server software with:

sudo dpkg -i logitechmediaserver_all.deb

And reboot. With all the software installed we’re ready to go.

NOTE: with a recent fresh install of both Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) and Logitech Media Server a problem occurred. Apt complained about some unmet dependencies. However after apt –fix-missing update all problems were solved and after a reboot the server worked as before.

Step 5: Working with Logitech Media Server

To enter the web interface of the Logitech Media Server on the Pi we need a computer and a browser. In the browser URL we type:

<your_Raspberry_Pi_ip_address:9000> (in my case 192.168.178.69:9000)

The Logitech Media Server is started for the first time and a script is started to set it up. Important is that the mounting point of the HDD (in my case ~/media/usb-drive) is entered. This way the Media Server is able to retrieve all the music files. This is done in the web interface by entering the path of the mounting point under Media Settings under Media Folders.

The Media Settings page of the web interface. Enter the path of the mounting point under Media Folders.
The Media Settings page of the web interface. Enter the path of the mounting point under Media Folders (click to enlarge).

The Logitech Media Server is now ready and every time the Raspberry Pi boots the Logitech Media Server is automatically started however the HDD is not automatically mounted so we need to change that. This is done by editing (with nano) the fstab system configuration file that can be found at /etc/fstab

sudo nano fstab

and add the following line

/dev/sda1 /media/usb-drive vfat& defaults 0

Save the file and exit nano. Reboot the Raspberry Pi. Now the installation is complete.

The music can be controlled from the web interface (see above), with the remote controls that come with the Squeezebox devices, with apps for Android, such as Squeezer, or with iPeng for iOS. The Squeezebox Radio and the Squeezebox Boom also have controls on the device to play the music. So, plenty of options.

Webinterface of the Logitech Media Server (click to enlarge).

Step 6: Change the web interface to Material Skin (optional)

The default web interface of the Logitech Media Server looks outdated. Luckily, thanks to the plugin architecture, the server and its user interface are highly customizable. In the list of third party plugins of the default web interface you’ll find the Material Skin plugin (an excellent community effort led by CDrummond). Enable this plugin, select it and voila the web interface looks awesome.

Logitech Media Server with the beautiful Material Skin (click to enlarge).

What’s next

In a future blog entry I’ll explain how to maintain the Logitech Media Server e.g how to add music to the server remotely.

Categories
Linux PC

Give your old PC a new life

When I came home the other day my neighbours were loading electronics on their bicycles (I live in the Netherlands you know) to dispose of them. Among all the stuff was a desktop computer that looked in pretty good shape. It was a Packard Bell iMedia S1800. I informed why they would dispose of the PC and they told me that according to their daughter it had become unusable. They are very nice people so I asked them if I could have the PC. They agreed to it and I took the desktop with me.

Back home I took another look at the computer and it was even nicer than I expected. It didn’t have a scratch and when I opened it it looked clean. That night I booted the PC and quickly found out it had Windows 10 running. The PC was slow as molasses and it was very noisy. I felt I had already found the cause of the daughter complaining, Windows 10. I had no intention to run Windows so I took out my Puppy Linux disk (Xenial Pup 7.5) and rebooted the PC.

The difference couldn’t have been greater. Puppy Linux booted fast and ran even faster. I got the idea to make this a general purpose workstation that, if goes well, can replace my iMac. How much I love Puppy Linux I don’t think it’s suitable for my purpose. Besides all the usual tasks I use my iMac for light 3D CAD work (for 3D printing), web design and video editing. I also like to have access to a broad software repository because I like to test new software and to replace the workflow I have on the Mac. In this department Puppy Linux can be lacking due to the Puppy Package Manager which differs from the mainstream package managers.

I therefore decided to give Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) a spin. My son already runs Ubuntu so I’m familiar with it and the MATE desktop is relatively lightweight (Gnome 2). Installation from a USB drive went flawless (overwriting W10 in the process). The desktop looks very clean and the software suite is great. I can add software through the new Software Boutique and if it isn’t there I have access to the Ubuntu repository (through apt). For a full review of MATE 18.04, read this.

So here I am. A nice Packard Bell is sitting on my desk instead of having become e-waste. If you read this don’t throw away your old PC because Windows 10 made the experience a nightmare. Install Ubuntu MATE or any other Linux distro you like and enjoy. In the mean time you’ll be doing the environment a favour. Cheers.

Categories
Linux PC

Puppy Linux Tahrpup on my Thinkpad T40

Introduction

In November last year I decided to revive my very old (2003) Thinkpad T40 with Puppy Linux. Back then I was thrilled by the ease of installation and the speed of this Linux distro on this ancient laptop. Now eight months later I’ll give an update on Puppy Linux on my PC. Am I still happy with Puppy Linux?

Both Puppy Linux Slacko 5.7, which I had installed initially, and Puppy Linux Slacko 6.3 have been very stable on my T40 and I loved Puppy Linux because of it’s speed. However both of these Slacko distributions are based on Slackware. The one problem with this distributions is the lack of software. Some programs that I needed are just not available in the repositories. I could install software myself but only if I was able to find the right pet or sfs file (I cowardly didn’t try to compile the source files).

The standard TahrPup desktop with the beautiful stylized Ardis icons.

Tahrpup 6.0

To solve the problem with the software I decided to install Puppy Linux Tahrpup 6.0. This operating system is based on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. I liked it the minute I installed it. The look and feel are the same as with Slacko with the JWM as window manager and ROX-Filer file manager and all the helpful shell scripts (a lot of them written by Barry Kauler, the original creator of Puppy Linux). Also a lot of the pre-installed programs are the same such as Abiword, Geany and pfind, a file finding program MtPaint and Sylpheed, a mail client. They’re also notable differences. The default browser for Tahrpup is Palemoon instead of Firefox and the Simple Screen Recorder (I forgot the name of the default Slacko screen recorder but I never got it to work). The system is still very fast, exactly the reason why I chose for Puppy Linux in the first place.

Easily create your own operating system

Puppy Linux (and Linux in general) not only let’s you create your own desktop environment, where just about everything is customizable, it even lets you customize the whole operating system. If you, for instance, don’t like the window manager or the file manager, you can change it. Try doing that on Windows or OSX. This way you can create your very own system doing honor to the acronym PC. TahrPup even has an option to easily change the Linux kernel, something that I couldn’t do with Slacko. With Remaster Puppy live-CD a copy of the personalized operating system can be written to either a USB drive or CD. For the latter a CD burner is needed of course. This copy of the personal operating system with all the favourite programs can be used to boot on any PC elsewhere e.g. on holiday or in school. On the Puppy Linux discussion forum many examples can be found of unofficial Puppy Linux distros such as Tahr NOP (Xfce desktop environment), Ami-Pup (an Amiga like interface) or Fatdog64 (a not so slim 64bit version).

Programming

Even with little experience in programming, additions can be made to the operating system using shell scripts. In fact plenty of programs that come with Puppy Linux are shell scripts. Pfind and pmount are good examples of this. Although this is not for beginners, shell scripts are relatively easy to write. An intermediate user should be able to improve existing scripts or write new ones. A script can be shared on the Puppy Linux forum as a contribution to the operating system and the community. This is a good start for programming for Puppy Linux. It’s also possible to use C or C++ as programming language for Puppy Linux but this is more complex and outside the scope of this blog entry. A good starting point for programming for Puppy Linux is this link.

Puppy Linux with the setup shell script opened in Geany. Programming in Puppy Linux is easy using shell scripting and GTKDialog.

Tahrpup drawbacks

The only drawback so far is that the new Puppy Package Manager v2 (PPM) seems a bit slower on my old laptop than with Slacko. PPM is the equivalent of the Ubuntu Software Center or Pacman for Arch Linux and provides access to the repository with all the available packages for Puppy Linux. The numerous packages in Tahrpup are possibly the reason for this slower behaviour.

Conclusion

Eight months later my Thinkpad T40 is still very much alive thanks to Puppy Linux. With Tahrpup I gained easy access to a huge amount of programs satisfying my increasing PC needs. The best feature about Puppy Linux (and Linux in general) is that it feels like my very own operating system. It’s easy to get involved into Puppy Linux thanks to it’s open nature and the vivid community. A feeling that I’m severely missing in the proprietary OSX on my iMac, my primary computer. In fact, if not for my wife who is still attached to the iMac and OSX, I would exchange my iMac for a (Puppy) Linux PC without hesitation.

My T40 with Tahrpup background image and the JQBrased icons.
Categories
amplifier electronics Linux Raspberry Pi

Adding radio streams to the cooler with a Raspberry Pi

Introduction

In my previous blog post I finished my audio cooler. It’s a small cooler with a tiny audio system that nevertheless sounds good. The only way to control the audio is through a wired connection. It would be a nice addition to have some kind of remote control either by WiFi or Bluetooth. While testing the cooler I’ve got the idea to connect a Raspberry Pi A+, that was still unused, to the cooler and stream audio over WiFi to the Pi.  This could be useful for a garden party or BBQ where WiFi is available and I don’t want to attach the smartphone to the cooler. In this blog post I’ll share my experience with installation and operating the software needed for this project on the Pi.

P1020957
Raspberry Pi A+ (in it’s Pimoroni Pibow case) connected with the headphone jack to the cooler. The Pi has a small Edimax Wifi adapter.

Installing music software on the Raspberry Pi

Since I run the Raspberry Pi headless I use SSH login to the Pi. SSH is available for most operating systems with the notable exception of Windows. I already had Raspbian installed on the Pi so first I updated the OS.

Categories
Linux PC

OpenELEC maintenance

IMPORTANT: OpenELEC has been discontinued since 2017. Instead of OpenELEC I can recommend LibreELEC.

Introduction

last year I built a PC especially for OpenELEC. For those of you who don’t know, OpenELEC is a Linux based system with the sole purpose to run Kodi, the all-in-one solution to play all media you throw at it. Because of this sole purpose OpenELEC is very fast, especially on the Intel based system that I built, and very reliable. Over time however some maintenance of the system is necessary to keep the system up-to-date and fully functional.

Categories
Linux PC

Ancient laptop with Puppy Linux

The burglar that “visited” our house a couple of weeks ago took our laptops and tablets. Luckily our desktops were left alone (probably to heavy). Also a very old IBM Thinkpad T40 was left behind. The burglar probably thought it didn’t have any value. That was a bit of luck for me because with a little effort this 12 year old laptop is still very usable. After all these years the only thing that failed in this laptop was the battery. Everything else is still in excellent condition. These Thinkpads were (are?) very sturdy. On top of that they are very modular. Almost every component is easy accessible with just a screw driver. Very different from modern laptops that are almost impossible to open without special equipment.

The twelve years old IBM Thinkpad T40. Is it worth reviving it?

With a 1.4GHz Pentium M inside the T40 is, I suspect, hardly faster than the Raspberry Pi 2. I therefore needed an Operating System that isn’t a burden for this hardware. Since Windows XP isn’t an option any more I looked at Linux and decided to give Puppy Linux 5.7 Slacko a spin.

Puppy Linux is very small and it loads into the ramdisk and is therefore very zippy , even on old machines. Installing it on the Thinkpad T40 was easy. It recognized all hardware even the Wi-Fi (which can be a problem with other distro’s). Unfortunately I can’t use the Wi-Fi chip inside the T40 because the WPA2 security protocol that I use in my network is unknown to this chip. This was easily solved with a Wi-Fi USB-stick.

Now I’m typing this blog from the T40. Firefox (version 17 ESR) works fine. I can access Google+, YouTube and other sites without problems although the rendering of some sites isn’t perfect. With Geany I can create html/css pages and code Python. Wordprocessing is done with Abiword and spreadsheets with Gnumeric.

Do I want my laptops and tablets back? Of course but in the mean time I thank Barry Kauler and Co for this wonderful distro.

Puppy Linux Slacko 5.7 runs fine on this very old laptop.
Typing my blog on the T40 without a problem.

I later updated the T40 to Puppy Linux Tahrpup. Here is a link to the article: https://homehack.nl/puppy-linux-tahrpup-on-my-thinkpad-t40/