Archive for the ‘Kuro Box’ Category

Larger, greener, quieter: Kurobox changes

320Gb just isn’t enough nowadays, for a machine-under-the-stairs packed full music in flac format, video and digital photos… so an upgrade was needed. And while the hard disk is being upgraded, I thought I’d help it spin down by putting the root filesystem on a USB stick.

Ingredients

1x Buffalo 8Gb Thumbkey
1x KURO-SATA (because the Kurobox HG only has a PATA controller)
1x Western Digital Green 1Tb hard disk

WD 1Tb hard disk, KURO-SATA and Buffalo Thumbkey

WD 1Tb hard disk, KURO-SATA and Buffalo Thumbkey

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Filed under Kuro Box, tech : Comments (0) : Jul 28th, 2009

Playing with a modem

It’s a long time since I installed a modem – at least 8 years. But I had reason to need one attached to the Kurobox, the task being complicated by the Kuro:

  1. running linux
  2. being a PPC box
  3. having no serial ports, only USB

A quick bit of research found the Zoom 3095 which, the manufacturer claims, is linux-compatible. The drivers are from the nice people at linuxant, who collectively do a fine job of providing drivers for Conexant-based modems.

One of their support chaps, Jonathan, could give no assurances that the drivers would work on my PPC box, but still found a way to encourage me to take the plunge and buy the 3095. And I’m glad he did – it works fine, as long as CONFIG_USB_ACM is included in the kernel build.

I should also add that the DGC driver is the only freely available driver of the three that Linuxant support, but I’d have happily paid for it if necessary.

I have, of course, created an entry for the Zoom 3095 at the excellent ‘Linux USB device overview’ website.

For the technically-inclined: this is a Kurobox HG/WR, running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), kernel 2.6.23.14. ‘lsusb’ identifies the Zoom 3095 as “0803:3095 Zoom Telephonics, Inc.”. I’m using version 1.03 of the DGC driver from Linuxant.

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Filed under Kuro Box : Comments (0) : Jan 24th, 2008

Gutsy Kurobox

The Kurobox has been running Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) for a few months, and I’ve been itching to upgrade it to 7.10 (Gutsy). For no particular reason, other than “just because”. Installing any O/S on the Kurobox is quite a task, so I went for the ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ route rather than doing a fresh install.

And it all went surprisingly well. Top props to the Ubuntu guys and gals who made it work.

There’s only one fly in the ointment. The source-o-matic service (formerly at ubuntu-nl.org) has gone, which is a great shame. Source-o-matic automated the creation of ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’, and is a useful convenience tool for both new installs and upgrades alike. I very much hope that source-o-matic has been just moved, not removed.

In the end, it was a no-brainer to edit ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’ and do ‘%s/feisty/gutsy/g’ – but that’s not the point. If an open source O/S is to thrive, it needs to be easy to maintain and upgrade, as well as being easy to use day-to-day. And tools like source-o-matic help.

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Filed under Kuro Box : Comments (0) : Jan 23rd, 2008

Debootstrap Ubuntu on a Kuro Box

Since nas-central wiki won’t allow the uploading of zip files, I’m uploading one here instead. It’s just the debootstrap script for Ubuntu Gutsy.

I wrote an article about how to debootstrap Ubuntu some time ago, and as a quick fix, linked to a script hosted by someone else. If you’re the owner of food.fishcracker.net, then sorry about that. This is what I should have done in the first place: hosted the file myself rather than leech off someone else.

Here’s the file.

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Filed under Kuro Box : Comments (0) : Dec 7th, 2007