Set up the Arduino IDE

Many packages required for Arduino development were recently removed from Debian’s testing repositories. At the time of writing, they are being held in sid, waiting on a some issues before being migrated.

In the mean-time, you can download pre-built binaries from the arduino.cc download page is pretty simple. I downloaded version 0022 for 64-bit Linux. You just unpack this in to a directory and run the arduino script. You’ll need to have Java installed.

Next, you have to get the Arduino device to be detected. This works ok on Wheezy. Plug it in and look in your kern.log. It should show up as a serial device (my Ardino Uno shows up as /dev/ttyACM0).

So far so good.

Get the AVR C++ compiler working

You need to get the AVR C++ compiler and C-library. Unfortunately, the newer versions of the required packages in sid don’t work (which is why they’ve not been migrated). Fortunately, the ones in squeeze work fine. Download the following packages from squeeze

• gcc-avr (the compiler)
• avr-libc (the C-library)
• binutils-avr (tools to work with AVR binaries)

And install them

This way, when they are finally migrated to wheezy, they should just get upgraded normally.

Test the set-up

1. Open up the Arduino IDE.

2. Go to Tools -> Serial Port and select the serial port your Arduino is appearing as.

   If you can’t see it, there is a problem with the device being detected. If you opened the IDE before the device was plugged in, try closing it and re-opening it.

3. Go to File -> Examples -> Basics -> Blink. Then go to Sketch -> Verify / Compile.

   If there are compiler errors, you have a problem with the set-up of the AVR C++ compiler or the C-library.

4. Finally, go to File -> Upload to I/O Board. You should see the board’s serial TX/RX LEDs flicker, and then you should see the LED next to pin 13 blinking on and off. Congratulations.

Suspend (to RAM)

This didn’t work. The screen turns off (I think the laptop is wired this way), but the fan doesn’t power off and the machine doesn’t power down.

Eventually, I found this in the syslog:

The USB device referred to is the built-in webcam. After quite a bit of googling I came across a kernel bug that explained it all (and turned out not to be a kernel bug). The built-in webcam (lsusb says it is: “ID 0402:5602 ALi Corp. Video Camera Controller”) resumes immediately after being suspended, causing the suspend procedure to fail.

To fix it, I added the following script to /etc/pm/sleep.d (don’t forget to chmod +x it):

Flash

Yes, flash again. :o(

The Acer Apire 3690 is not a powerful machine, but it is easily capable of playing video. Unfortunately, the latest version of Adobe’s proprietary flash plugin at this time, 10.0.45.2, which ships with Lucid, can run away with the CPU and bring the browser to a crawl. The BBC iPlayer is the worst culprit. Sometime between 30 seconds and 5 minutes in to a video, CPU usage jumps to 98% and firefox becomes unresponsive.

I haven’t fixed this entirely, but I have managed to alleviate the problem slightly. A pre-release version of flash player 10.1 handles flash movies that have gone awry much better. Update: flash player has been updated to 10.1 in Lucid now. It pops-up a message box to let you know that some actionscript is causing the flash player to run slowly.

Obligatory tweaks

There are also the little gripes.

Despite there being an overwhelming user preference to keep the window buttons (minimise, maximise and close) on the left of the window, as they always have been in Ubuntu, it was decided that they would be moved to the right. You can move them back again by following instructions in this post.

I also removed all traces of Canonical’s little cloud facilities which are unnecessarily installed by default. The following command did the trick:

What they do offer for 64-bit users (of Linux, or Windows for that matter) is a source code tar-ball and a some build instructions. The build instructions require you to first build part of Thunderbird before tackling Enigmail. Seems like a lot of effort to expect your average Joe-user to spend.

I spent that effort anyway, and here is what I did:

First, download any packages required to build Thunderbird:

Then, make a new directory somewhere, download the Thunderbird source and build it:

This will take a while. Really. Go and make a cup of tea.

When it’s done, you need to download Enigmail and unpack it in to the right place. Note that your “thunderbird-2.0.0.17+nobinonly” directory might be called something slightly different. Also note that I’m using Enigmail 0.95.7, but you should check for the latest version.

Next, you need to create a config file:

Then build Enigmail and make an XPI:

The resulting XPI file is stored in the “dist/bin” directory you’re now in. To install the extension, you have fire-up Thunderbird, go to Tools->Add-ons->Extensions, click “Install…” and go and find it.

…appear to be tampering with network packets if they detect you are using a router on your network.

…are monitoring and policing the data you send through your internet connection and have begin sending threatening letters to it’s customers on behalf of the record industry; entirely of their own volition.

…believe that net neutrality is, “a load of bollocks“.

…are participating in Phorm (see here for info about Phorm).

We should boycott them. Sadly, it’s our only option as consumers. Fortunately, it’s also the language shoddy, money-grabbing companies like Virgin Media understand.

Update: The ASA have upheld complaints that advertised claims about Virgin Media’s broadband speeds are misleading.

Update: Since BT are now also on the bandwaggon,  my advice to anyone looking for an internet conneciton would be to get a BT phone line but go with 3rd party broadband. I’m currently with Be and I can definitely recommend them.

The requirements were simple. It had to be easy to configure for whatever kind of project I was currently working on and It had to be fully featured. I immediately started scouring the web for one, expecting to find hundreds, and was fairly surprised when I couldn’t find any! So I decided to put together a simple general-purpose Makefile of my own.

Many revisions and a complete rewrite later, I have something that other people might find useful, so I thought I’d share it.