Connecting an Amstrad PPC 640 to Linux over serial
It's fairly easy to get the PPC talking to a modern computer. This lets you do cool tricks like Toot from it by using things like https://github.com/ihabunek/toot on the host
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Mounting disk images read/write in KDE
All the advice on articles like https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/47080/mounting-iso-in-linux-kde don't work in modern KDE, or are about mounting .iso files, which is now built in, or a disk image as read only.
I needed to mount disk images read/write, which appears to be more complicated because it needs to run as root, so prompt for the password, fingerprint or what have you.
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Using a Gotek USB floppy drive with an Amstrad PPC
Recently I got around to playing with an Amstrad PPC I'd had for a while but not tried to get running. I even had the thin version of the manual, ruck sack, power supply and half the system disks.
The good news is - it's easy ! I'm not even a hardware guy :)
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Newton on Windows on Linux
If you want to know the gory details, please read https://rachaelandtom.info/content/newton-linux
You will need
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Newton with Linux
Step one: Get a serial to USB cable
- http://applenewton.co.uk/shop/ - http://applenewton.co.uk/2019/04/30/best-usb-to-rs232-cable-for-ncx-and-newtons/
You could build your own, like back in the day, or cobble bits together from Amazon or EBay, but this just takes the risk out.
Step two: Backup
NCU in VirtualBox
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The end of btrfs
Well that's the end of btrfs for me; barely a month in it's shat itself and taken my /home with it.
I've lived this long without metadata checksum and snapshot...
I was able to extract a list of trees, even though it wouldn't mount, even with the various recovery options, using
btrfs-find-root /dev/mapper/vgkubuntu-home
This will split out a bunch 'well' things. I got lucky and when I passed the number of one of those to
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Things to change on a default Linux install
O/S
/tmp as tmpfs - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/tmpfs
logs that don't go on forever - https://github.com/azlux/log2ram
systemd logs that don't go on forever /etc/systemd/journald.conf:
SystemMaxUse=50M
Faster, more responsive kernel (if stuck on an LTS for everything else) : https://liquorix.net/#install
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Monitoring Powerline speeds ( TP-Link TL-WPA8630P, TL-PA8033PKIT, AV1300)
Get or compile https://github.com/qca/open-plc-utils in particular `plcstat`
For some reason it only reports devices other than the one connected to, so you will need at least two machines to monitor the whole network, and it has to be run as root.
So I have two root crontab's that sync to the same place the results of `....plcstat -i wlan0 -t` which looks like
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Using a Sun Type 7 USB keyboard in KDE
If you look around, everyone make it complicated. It isn't.
* Settings > Hardware > Keyboard
Select the correct keyboard modal, then on the Layouts tab add a new one for your language, layout, and select the 'type 7' variant.
Move it to the top of the list so it's default.
Enable nothing in the 3rd Advanced tab
* Reboot - you should find the volume and power keys work
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