Tag Archives: Linux

Running Home Assistant on Fedora with Docker

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Home Assistant is a really great, open source home automation platform written in Python which supports hundreds of components. They have a containerised version called Hass.io which can run on a bunch of hardware and has a built-in marketplace to make the running of addons (like Let’s Encrypt) easy.

I’ve been running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi for a couple of years, but I want something that’s more poweful and where I have more control. Here’s how you can use the official Home Assistant containers on Fedora (note that this does not include their Hass.io marketplace).

First, install Fedora Server edition, which comes with the handy web UI for managing the system called Cockpit.

Once you’re up and running, install Docker and the Cockpit plugin.

sudo dnf install -y docker cockpit-docker

Now we can start and enable the Docker daemon and restart cockpit to load the Docker plugin.

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Fixing webcam flicker in Linux with udev

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I recently got a new Dell XPS 13 (9360) laptop for work and it’s running Fedora pretty much perfectly.

However, when I load up Cheese (or some other webcam program) the video from the webcam flickers. Given that I live in Australia, I had to change the powerline frequency from 60Hz to 50Hz to fix it.

sudo dnf install v4l2-ctl
v4l2-ctl --set-ctrl power_line_frequency=1

I wanted this to be permanent each time I turned my machine on, so I created a udev rule to handle that.

cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/50-dell-webcam.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="video4linux", \
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", \
ATTRS{idVendor}=="0c45", \
ATTRS{idProduct}=="670c", \
PROGRAM="/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl --set-ctrl \
power_line_frequency=1 --device /dev/%k", \
SYMLINK+="dell-webcam"
EOF

It’s easy to test. Just turn flicker back on, reload the rules and watch the flicker in Cheese automatically disappear 🙂

v4l2-ctl --set-ctrl power_line_frequency=0
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

Of course I also tested with a reboot.

It’s easy to do with any webcam, just take a look on the USB bus for the vendor and product IDs. For example, here’s a Logitech C930e (which is probably the nicest webcam I’ve ever used, and also works perfectly under Fedora).

Bus 001 Device 022: ID 046d:0843 Logitech, Inc. Webcam C930e

So you would replace the following in your udev rule:

  • ATTRS{idVendor}==“046d”
  • ATTRS{idProduct}==“0843”
  • SYMLINK+=“c930e”

Note that SYMLINK is not necessary, it just creates an extra /dev entry, such as /dev/c930e, which is useful if you have multiple webcams.

Building and Booting Upstream Linux and U-Boot for Raspberry Pi 2/3 ARM Boards

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My home automation setup will make use of Arduinos and also embedded Linux devices. I’m currently looking into a few boards to see if any meet my criteria. Previously I looked at the Orange Pi One, now I’m looking at the Raspberry Pi 2 (which is compatible with the 3).

The most important factor for me is that the device must be supported in upstream Linux (preferably stable, but mainline will do) and U-Boot. I do not wish to use any old, crappy, vulnerable vendor trees!

The Raspberry Pi needs little introduction. It’s a small ARM device, created for education, that’s taken the world by storm and is used in lots of projects.

Raspberry Pi 2, powered by USB with 3v UART connected

Raspberry Pi 2, powered by USB with 3v UART connected

The Raspberry Pi actually has native support for booting a kernel, you don’t have to use U-Boot. However, one of the neat things about U-Boot is that it can provide netboot capabilities, so that you can boot your device from images across the network (we’re just going to use it to boot a kernel and initramfs, however).

One of the other interesting things about the Raspberry Pi is that there are lots of ways to tweak the device using a config.txt file.

The Raspberry Pi 3 has a 64bit CPU, however it is probably best run in 32bit mode (as a Raspberry Pi 2) as 64bit userland is not particularly advanced in ARM world, yet.

Fedora 25 will finally support Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 (although not all peripherals will be supported right away).

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Building and Booting Upstream Linux and U-Boot for Orange Pi One ARM Board (with Ethernet)

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My home automation setup will make use of Arduinos and also embedded Linux devices. I’m currently looking into a few boards to see if any meet my criteria.

The most important factor for me is that the device must be supported in upstream Linux (preferably stable, but mainline will do) and U-Boot. I do not wish to use any old, crappy, vulnerable vendor trees!

The Orange Pi One is a small, cheap ARM board based on the AllWinner H3 (sun8iw7p1) SOC with a quad-Core Cortex-A7 ARM CPU and 512MB RAM. It has no wifi, but does have an onboard 10/100 Ethernet provided by the SOC (Linux patches incoming). It has no NAND flash (not supported upstream yet anyway), but does support SD. There is lots of information available at http://linux-sunxi.org.

Orange Pi One

Orange Pi One

Note that while Fedora 25 does not yet support this board specifically it does support both the Orange Pi PC (which is effectively a more full-featured version of this device) and the Orange Pi Lite (which is the same but swaps Ethernet for WiFi). Using either of those configurations should at least boot on the Orange Pi One.

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My Custom Open Source Home Automation Project – Part 3, Roll Out

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In Part 1 I discussed motivation and research where I decided to build a custom, open source wired solution. Part 2 discussed the prototype and other experiments.

Because we were having to fit in with the builder, I didn’t have enough time to finalise the smart system, so I needed a dumb mode. This Part 3 is about rolling out dumb mode in Smart house!

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My Custom Open Source Home Automation Project – Part 2, Design and Prototype

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Update: See Part 3.

In Part 1 I discussed motivation and research where I decided to build a custom, open source wired solution. In this Part 2 I discuss the design and the prototype that proved the design.

Wired Design

Although there are options like 1-Wire, I decided that I wanted more flexibility at the light switches.

  • Inspired by Jon Oxer’s awesome SuperHouse.tv
  • Individual circuits for lights and some General Purpose Outlets (GPO)
  • Bank of relays control the circuits
  • Arduinos and/or embedded Linux devices control the relays

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My Custom Open Source Home Automation Project – Part 1, Motivation and Research

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Update: See Part 2 and Part 3.

In January 2016 I gave a presentation at the Canberra Linux Users Group about my journey developing my own Open Source home automation system. This is an adaptation of that presentation for my blog. Big thanks to my brother, Tim, for all his help with this project!

Comments and feedback welcome.

Why home automation?

  • It’s cool
  • Good way to learn something new
  • Leverage modern technology to make things easier in the home

At the same time, it’s kinda scary. There is a lack of standards and lack of decent security applied to most Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.

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Command line password management with pass

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Why use a password manager in the first place? Well, they make it easy to have strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts on every system you use (and that’s a good thing).

For years I’ve stored my passwords in Firefox, because it’s convenient, and I never bothered with all those other fancy password managers. The problem is, that it locked me into Firefox and I found myself still needing to remember passwords for servers and things.

So a few months ago I decided to give command line tool Pass a try. It’s essentially a shell script wrapper for GnuPG and stores your passwords (with any notes) in individually encrypted files.

I love it.

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Cross-compiling a PowerPC64 LE kernel and hitting a GCC bug

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Being new at OzLabs I’m dipping my toes into various projects and having a play with PowerPC and so I thought I’d cross-compile the Linux kernel on Fedora. Traditionally PowerPC has been big endian, however it also supports little endian so I wanted to build all the things.

Fedora uses a single cross toolchain that can build all four variants, whereas Debian/Ubuntu splits this out into two different toolchains (a BE and an LE one).

Install dependencies in Fedora:
$ sudo dnf install gcc make binutils-powerpc64-linux-gnu gcc-powerpc64-linux-gnu gcc-c++-powerpc64-linux-gnu bc ncurses-devel

Get the v4.2 kernel:
$ git clone https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git --branch v4.2 --depth 1 && cd linux

Successful big endian build of the kernel, using the default config for pseries:
$ ARCH=powerpc CROSS_COMPILE=powerpc64-linux-gnu- make pseries_defconfig
$ ARCH=powerpc CROSS_COMPILE=powerpc64-linux-gnu- make -j$(nproc)
# clean after success
$ ARCH=powerpc CROSS_COMPILE=powerpc64-linux-gnu- make clean
$ ARCH=powerpc CROSS_COMPILE=powerpc64-linux-gnu- make mrproper

Building a little endian kernel however, resulted in a linker problem:
$ ARCH=powerpc CROSS_COMPILE=powerpc64-linux-gnu- make pseries_defconfig
$ ARCH=powerpc CROSS_COMPILE=powerpc64-linux-gnu- make menuconfig
# change architecture to little endian:
# Endianness selection (Build big endian kernel) --->
# (X) Build little endian kernel
$ ARCH=powerpc CROSS_COMPILE=powerpc64-linux-gnu- make V=1

Here was the result:
powerpc64-linux-gnu-gcc -mlittle-endian -mno-strict-align -m64 -Wp,-MD,arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/.vdso64.so.dbg.d -nostdinc -isystem /usr/lib/gcc/powerpc64-linux-gnu/5.2.1/include -I./arch/powerpc/include -Iarch/powerpc/include/generated/uapi -Iarch/powerpc/include/generated -Iinclude -I./arch/powerpc/include/uapi -Iarch/powerpc/include/generated/uapi -I./include/uapi -Iinclude/generated/uapi -include ./include/linux/kconfig.h -D__KERNEL__ -Iarch/powerpc -DHAVE_AS_ATHIGH=1 -Wall -Wundef -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -Werror-implicit-function-declaration -Wno-format-security -std=gnu89 -msoft-float -pipe -Iarch/powerpc -mtraceback=no -mabi=elfv2 -mcmodel=medium -mno-pointers-to-nested-functions -mcpu=power7 -mno-altivec -mno-vsx -mno-spe -mspe=no -funit-at-a-time -fno-dwarf2-cfi-asm -mno-string -Wa,-maltivec -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -O2 --param=allow-store-data-races=0 -Wframe-larger-than=2048 -fno-stack-protector -Wno-unused-but-set-variable -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-var-tracking-assignments -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wno-pointer-sign -fno-strict-overflow -fconserve-stack -Werror=implicit-int -Werror=strict-prototypes -Werror=date-time -DCC_HAVE_ASM_GOTO -Werror -shared -fno-common -fno-builtin -nostdlib -Wl,-soname=linux-vdso64.so.1 -Wl,--hash-style=sysv -D"KBUILD_STR(s)=#s" -D"KBUILD_BASENAME=KBUILD_STR(vdso64.so)" -D"KBUILD_MODNAME=KBUILD_STR(vdso64.so)" -Wl,-T arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/vdso64.lds arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/sigtramp.o arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/gettimeofday.o arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/datapage.o arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/cacheflush.o arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/note.o arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/getcpu.o -o arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/vdso64.so.dbg
/usr/bin/powerpc64-linux-gnu-ld: arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/sigtramp.o: file class ELFCLASS64 incompatible with ELFCLASS32
/usr/bin/powerpc64-linux-gnu-ld: final link failed: File in wrong format
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/Makefile:26: recipe for target 'arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/vdso64.so.dbg' failed
make[2]: *** [arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/vdso64.so.dbg] Error 1
scripts/Makefile.build:403: recipe for target 'arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64' failed
make[1]: *** [arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64] Error 2
Makefile:949: recipe for target 'arch/powerpc/kernel' failed
make: *** [arch/powerpc/kernel] Error 2

All those files were 64bit, however:
arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/cacheflush.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable, 64-bit PowerPC or cisco 7500, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped
arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/datapage.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable, 64-bit PowerPC or cisco 7500, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped
arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/getcpu.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable, 64-bit PowerPC or cisco 7500, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped
arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/gettimeofday.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable, 64-bit PowerPC or cisco 7500, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped
arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/note.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable, 64-bit PowerPC or cisco 7500, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped
arch/powerpc/kernel/vdso64/sigtramp.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable, 64-bit PowerPC or cisco 7500, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped

An strace of the failing powerpc64-linux-gnu-gcc command above showed that collect2 (and ld) were being called with an option setting the format to 32bit:
24904 execve("/usr/libexec/gcc/powerpc64-linux-gnu/5.2.1/collect2", ["/usr/libexec/gcc/powerpc64-linux"..., "-plugin", "/usr/libexec/gcc/powerpc64-linux"..., "-plugin-opt=/usr/libexec/gcc/pow"..., "-plugin-opt=-fresolution=/tmp/cc"..., "--sysroot=/usr/powerpc64-linux-g"..., "--build-id", "--no-add-needed", "--eh-frame-hdr", "--hash-style=gnu", "-shared", "--oformat", "elf32-powerpcle", "-m", "elf64lppc", "-o", ...], [/* 66 vars */]

Alan Modra tracked it down to some 32bit hard-coded entries in GCC sysv4.h and sysv4le.h and submitted a patch to the GCC mailing list (Red Hat bug).

I re-built the Fedora cross-gcc package with his patch and it solved the linker problem for me. Hurrah!

Kororaa 15 (Squirt) released

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The first stable release of Kororaa 15 (codename “Squirt”) has been released and is available for download, in 32 and 64 bit with KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3.

This release includes Ubuntu’s Jockey Device Driver manager, which has replaced the Add/Remove Extras script for configuring third party drivers (such as nvidia). While I am still working on the port of Jockey to Yum, in order to release Kororaa 15 now (already a month later than I was hoping) I am using Jockey packages created by fellow Fedora Remix, Parsidora, so thanks and kudos to them!

Kororaa 15 comes with an RPM metapackage to install and configure Adobe Flash, now that Add/Remove Extras is gone. To get flash, install the flash-plugin-helper package. To remove flash, uninstall the flash-plugin package.

Upgrade
Users still on Kororaa 14 may wish to upgrade to 15 and should do so via a new install (backup your data if necessary). Users who wish to stay with GNOME 2.x should not upgrade to 15, as it comes with GNOME 3. However, Kororaa 15 does include a desktop switcher for GNOME 3, so that users can switch between the new Shell interface and the 2.x style Fallback mode.

Desktops
The GNOME 3 desktop has a custom theme available, as well as several extensions to provide an enhanced user experience (and help ease the transition from GNOME 2.x). It also comes with the GNOME Tweak Tool to allow further customisation.
Kororaa 15 desktop - GNOME

The KDE desktop has a custom layout with specific default applications, such as Firefox for the web and VLC for media, etc. It now also comes with Linphone for those wanting a SIP client.
Kororaa 15 desktop - KDE

Features
Derived from Fedora 151, this updated release comes with the usual Kororaa extras out of the box, such as:

  • Tweaked KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3 base systems
  • Third party repositories (Adobe, Chrome, RPMFusion, VirtualBox)
  • Firefox 6 as the default web browser (with integration tweaks for KDE)
  • Firefox extensions included (Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, Flashblock, Xclear)
  • Microblogging client (Choqok for KDE, Gwibber for GNOME)
  • Full multimedia support (excluding Flash, see next)
  • Installer for Adobe Flash plugin
  • Jockey device manager to handle drivers such as AMD/ATI and NVIDIA
  • Video editor (Kdenlive for KDE, OpenShot for GNOME)
  • VLC as the default media player
  • SELinux enabled (particularly worthwhile for Flash)
  • English (Australian/British) support & dictionaries
  • and more..

Major changes:

  • Add/Remove Extras script removed by default (still in repository)
  • Jockey device driver manager added
  • New Flash plugin RPM metapackage installer
  • New DownThemAll download manager addon for Firefox
  • Linphone VoIP client for KDE added
  • GNOME 3 switcher between Shell and Fallback desktops
  • Pidgin replaced with Empathy for better GNOME integration
  • KSplice has been removed by default

Feedback
We’d love to hear your feedback on the forums, so download it today and let us know! 🙂

Thanks!

Note: Kororaa is not provided or supported by the Fedora Project. Official, unmodified Fedora software is available through the Fedora Project website.