MOSLO, a short story of how is it cooked

Well, MOSLO has been OUT for some time now, and I was thinking it might be time for me to explain more about it!

First, for those not knowing it yet, it is available here: http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N950. The MOSLO was done to support multiple OS loading on the N9/N950 devices from Nokia.

The basic "architecture" or flow is this:

1. Bootloader launches the kernel
2. The kernel boots from rootfs
3. Rootfs contains the scripts to either:
1. export USB to the Host PC so that the developer can put another kernel (in the boot/bzImage) and rootfs or
2. load the boot/bzImage from the "exported USB" image if there is such kernel

Another thing about MOSLO is how to install it. Here we need to understand a bit about the role of the Harmattan flashing architecture. The design is to load into the device the right software that will do the work of flashing MOSLO. For that, we can use any Harmattan image (or "fiasco.bin") that is released with the One Click Flasher (or OCF).

Once we have the right image loaded, we can send the MOSLO to be flashed. As such, MOSLO comes packaged for N950 or N9.

Ubuntu, extra repositories (ppa's) and living on the edge...

For those that are using launchpad, the term PPA should be quite familiar. This short entry is for them. I have been using PPA since 4-5 years ago. Before, I used to have my own repos in: packages.antoniac.name. Then, something changed and Ubuntu guys, through launchpad.net, started allowing personal package archive access (or PPA) and builds. Now, the trouble with them is the conflicting of packages (you might think). However, behind the PPA submission of packages is a clever name convention and ultimately you have quite a good control of where the package comes from. Now, to add more honey to the sweet thing, you could use several commands to automate inclusion and removal of the ppa's:

sudo aptitude install ppa-purge # To be able to remove it later (if you don't have it)
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:pan1nx/ppa
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade # or install new packages
sudo ppa-purge ppa:pan1nx/ppa # To remove the packages and install the original

Hope this help some of you handle the ppa's in a friendlier way...

Console rulez (as in linux console)

Yep, once again I find myself dragged into blabbing about the beauty of the consoles. I had some troubles with the network and the only way to work in the servers room was, you guessed, console.

Now, I want to briefly share some goodies with you:

wavemon

Awesome tool for helping you with debugging the wifi signal at the server (if you have such thing at the server)

iperf

Another good tool to test the performance between two points on the network

nload

Comes very handy if you need a graph showing the bandwidth. There are other tools here, like iptraf, etc. I just like this one...

Hack, I should expand this article later when I remember other goodies like this...