Category Archives: Hacks

Serial console on Samsung E60 reader

Thanks to some discounts last January in France, I got a Samsung E60 reader.

A community started around the french forum (e60 – hardware.fr) and the google code (e60-open).

There are many information there especially on the serial console. I own an USB to serial adapter that uses LVTTL 3.3V signals (based on FTDI FT2232C) so I choose to connect on R232 and R233. But RXD (R232) is already connected to the MAX232 chip that shift LVTTL levels to serial levels, and it seams that this chip is styronger than my FTDI… So I removed R232 to connect me FTDI there. Remains to know on which PAD ? Luckily the first one I tried was the one: the one on the battery side.

A picture on my nice soldering:
E60 RS232 LVTTL 3.3V

That was it. I then followed the testing a kernel procedure thus loading the kernel image from the project’s SVN. And it worked ! (except that I had to unload the secbulk module, so it’s either me or it’s useless).

Next time, compiling and testing a Linux kernel.

Building xserver 1.6 for Xorg 7.5

Update: As explained in other posts, I’m no longer using this xserver version myself. So this stays here, but I’m not planning to update it in any manner.

The goal of the xserver downgrading is to run intel IEGD drivers on recent GNU/Linux distribution (debian squeese in my case). This seams to be the only maintained driver for the US15W GMA500 (poulsbo) chipset.

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Hacking zenphoto for https admin

Trying to use zenphoto I found it does not have an option to have the admin tasks in https and the gallery in regular http.

WordPress is doing this and reading Rian’s article: SSL and Cookies in WordPress 2.6
 I had a better idea on how it works.

Before coding, I also read How to Properly Provide Mixed HTTP and HTTPS Support from mikeperry’s blog.

And this is basically what I implemented.

For once the result of my work is not hosted on my blog but directly on zenphoto’s trac : The ticket with zenphoto patch to allow both http and https.

ANSI Color support for xrootconsole

Having the system log on a background transparent window on the desktop look nice and can be useful (USB key plug events, network connection events and so on).
One way is to use a terminal like aterm or Eterm for instance using the following command:


aterm -tr -bl -ib 0 -title log -name log +sb -geometry '140x16+0+791' -e bash -c "tail --follow=name /var/log/full.log | ccze" &

With the -title and -name option the window decoration can be removed at the window manager level. OK, this is nice.

But when using fluxbox desktop wheeling will not work over the log as it is a window not the desktop.

So I switched to xrootconsole, but it has no color support… not a big deal, I just hacked it in 😉

Here is a sample usage of the hacked xrootconsole, the important part is the -A parameter for ANSI to ccze as the default is to use curses:


tail -n 16 --follow=name /var/log/full.log | ccze -A | xrootconsole --wrap --bottomup -geometry 233x16+1+818 &

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netsed

An old hack (2 years old  according to my subversion db !!)

This started with my 5.1 Yamaha audio amplifier, this device has network access to listen to netradios directly ! I wanted to hack it to play a personal netradio.

I configured my dhcp to have it report my server as gateway and used wireshark to listen how it was connecting the Internet. It appeared that the menu on the device was provided by XML streams.

I first did some DNS spoofing and placed on my apache server a fake XML file, the Yamaha amplifier couldn’t tell the difference and I could play some local mp3 files.

The next step was to have both the normal radios and some personal radios. That’s here netsed becomes useful. The idea was to filter the main menu XML to add an extra item that liks to a local XML page linking to personal radio.

I never get to the step where I setup an Icecast server however I got the extra menu working.

netsed did basically the job, but for some reason it was not closing connections to the http server so it generated several timeout errors, that’s basically what I fixed in the netsed code.

my Trac page about netsed