Jeff Epler's blog

20 years of computers

During some downtime, I made a list of all the computers I could remember owning. The list is surprisingly long, and goes back to 1992 (before which I had a Commodore 64 but that barely counts, does it?) I came up with 10 desktops and 7 laptops, or a new machine nearly every year. The last 5 years have only seen 3 new machines, though, so the pace at which I buy computers may be slowing.

Linux RAID Misdetection (and fix)

Earlier this year, I began using a setup with LVM inside of a RAID5. RAID5 gets me 2TB of storage from 3 1TB drives, with redundancy in the case of the failure of a single disk, while LVM gets me the ability to allocate and resize individual filesystems at will. However, I had a problem that prevented my system from booting unattended, which became a big problem when there was a storm-related power failure while I was out of town.

qq: quick & dirty terminal

qq is a quick and dirty terminal application for beagleboard. It's written in Python and requires python-serial. I didn't like cu (no CLOCAL that I could find) or minicom (terminal emulation, keyboard shortcuts and configuration got in the way of real work)

Except for tilde-specials (similar to rsh, ssh and cu), qq just copies data between the local terminal and the given tty. Two tilde specials are defined:

    <CR>~.: quit
    <CR>~b: send break (useful for "alt-sysrq" actions on beagleboard)

Files currently attached to this page:

4.0kB

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

New hardware

Last week my GIGABYTE GA-M51GM-S2G-based system bit the dust (capacitor plague?). I'll be updating this blog entry through the weekend with progress setting up the replacement hardware, which arrived Friday.

DAT-160 USB tape drive on Linux

I recently decided to replace my DLT-IV backup system with DAT-160, mostly because of the greater capacity (80GB native vs 35GB native). I wasn't able to find a lot of information online about Linux compatability, but I took the plunge and bought Quantum's CD160UH-SST, an internal USB tape drive.

New Laptop

I recently got a Dell D830 laptop. I'm reasonably satisfied with it so far. Read the link for more of my impressions.

Pluto_Servo has landed

I'm excited to announce that pluto_servo is now in the CVS HEAD of emc2. There's documentation and a manual page with all pin names listed.

Pluto-Servo: EMC2 Servo Controller

Pluto_servo is an emc2 driver and associated firmware that allow the Pluto-P board to be used to control a servo-based CNC machine. The Pluto-P is an inexpensive ($60) FPGA board featuring the ACEX1K chip from Altera. Pluto_servo will be released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2. The pluto_servo system is suitable for control of a 4-axis CNC mill, a 3-axis mill with PWM spindle control, a lathe with spindle encoder, etc.