A year and a half ago, I bought a laptop that came with a Realtek RTL8852BE wireless card.

At the time, Linux did not include its drivers, and you needed to build them with DKMS. Even Windows 11 did not work with it out of the box after formatting the pre-installed copy.

So, at the time, I ended up buying an Intel AX200, but I still kept the other card in a closet.

I am often annoyed that sharing files from my Android phone to my Linux desktop is always harder than it should be. At least Python’s http.server saves the day for the way around.

Then, today, I remembered Bluetooth, which the card I had lying around supports!

My motherboard (an ASRock B650 PG Lightning) has a m.2 slot for WiFi cards, so I decided to give it a try.

I am currently on Debian trixie with a 6.12.22 kernel. It is the current Debian testing, but it is expected to become the new stable in a few months.

To my surprise, the WiFi worked immediately without installing anything! However, I must say I already had the firmware-realtek package, as my Ethernet card was also made by Realtek. Even the hotspot functionality worked.

So, no more git cloning, DKMS, etc 🎉.

For Bluetooth, I was not as lucky. It could see my phone, but it failed to pair. And my phone could not find my PC either.

However, I also have an ancient Bluetooth USB stick based on a Broadcom BCM2045 module. Even though it is old, it immediately worked!

I still remember the old Windows XP days, when I had to install the Widcomm Bluetooth stack. Luckily, it is just an old memory 😄.

A couple of years ago, after upgrading my Orange Pi Zero to Debian bookworm, I encountered several problems, and eventually, I migrated to Alpine Linux.

Everything worked well until a couple of weeks ago, when my system died. It stopped booting, and I could not read its microSD with my computer, either. I think the cause might be the power losses, which are more frequent than I would like at home.

I have a backup, but I do not remember if it contains the final configuration. Moreover, Alpine is a rolling distribution, so I would have needed to update and possibly reconfigure in any case, and I feared this would have taken much more time than I wanted to dedicate.

So, I gave Debian another chance, but it did not end well. It worked as expected for some days. Then, at a certain point, the system started becoming unreachable after a few hours (and, of course, it broke in the worst moments).

I even tried to set up a cronjob for daily reboots and a watchdog, but I still had the problem.

At this point, I thought that maybe the Orange Pi Zero support in bookworm’s kernel (6.1.x) was not mature enough, and I hoped a newer kernel was more stable. Debian trixie is becoming the next stable this year, so I just anticipated the upgrade… and it worked! (At least for now 😄).

I kept the scheduled reboot, but I think the system would keep working also without it.

My only problem was that the upgrade removed my changes to the kernel command line in /boot/boot.cmd, so I had to restore them manually and re-create /boot/boot.scr.

Devo ammettere di essere un po’ un accumulatore.

In tanti anni, non ho mai buttato via i miei computer vecchi, pur sapendo che realisticamente non li riaccenderò mai. Soprattutto quelli degli anni ‘90, che sono potenziali bombe a causa della piaga dei condensatori. Ma alla fine ho deciso di buttare via quelli che un tempo erano stati protagonisti della categoria muletto di questo sito.

Prima, però, ho deciso di creare un’immagine dei loro dischi. E, dato che c’ero, ho deciso di avviarle con Qemu per vedere cosa avevo lasciato dentro.

Il primo computer era dotato di un Pentium MMX. Probabilmente risaliva a circa il 1996, ma non sono troppo sicuro perché mi è stato donato da una conoscente di famiglia, che altrimenti lo avrebbe buttato. Se ben ricordo, aveva 64MB di RAM, che io avevo portato a 128MB (di più non supportava). Mi sembra che proprio per comprarla fossi andato per la prima volta alla fiera dell’elettronica di Pordenone. E quella volta avevo comprato anche la scheda wireless Edimax EW-7128g, che mi aveva fatto tribolare non poco. … [Leggi il resto]

Motivation

A few years ago, I bought an Orange Pi Zero to run a Telegram bot I use to open and close my garage door.

It worked very well for several years. Then, when Debian bookworm became stable, I decided to reinstall the system, and the trouble began.

After more than one month of frequent crashes, I first tried to upgrade the kernel. However, apt was unusable, and the system reinstallation was my only choice. So, I decided to also check other distributions out.

First, I tried with OpenWrt. It was a good setup, except I could not use GPIO through /dev/mem. This was a big problem because memory-GPIO is more versatile and performant.

So, I decided to also try Alpine Linux. Before this adventure, I had used this distribution only for containers, but I felt this could also be a case in which it can shine. But the effort it took me to get it working as I wanted reminded me of the old days 😅️. It also made me appreciate how easy setting up Debian is these days. … [Leggi il resto]

A couple of months ago, Debian bookworm became stable and I decided to upgrade my Orange Pi Zero. I wanted to re-install the system with the smallest amount of physical access and that made the whole process tiresome and longer.

The new system did not work well. It often crashed, and I continuously had to reset the system by power cycling it. As stated in my previous article, physical access to that system is not easy, which made the problem even less bearable.

After one of the crashes, I managed to get some logs, and I saw they mentioned a “kernel bug”. However, I believe high temperatures were to blame, as July was very hot here. Anyway, I had a little hope that installing a more recent kernel could solve my problem, so I tried to run apt upgrade, which gave me this output:

Preparing to unpack .../base-files_12.4+deb12u1_armhf.deb ...
Unpacking base-files (12.4+deb12u1) over (12.4) ...
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_12.4+deb12u1_armhf.deb (--unpack):
 unable to stat '.' (which was about to be installed): Value too large for defined data type
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_12.4+deb12u1_armhf.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I do not have a minimal clue about what this means. It might be related to the Orange Pi being 32-bit and me having created its system from a 64-bit system. But the error is so generic that I struggled to find its cause. … [Leggi il resto]