SnackLinux update

SnackLinux now has a whopping 31 packages, which include a (somewhat) working gcc toolchain and other fun GNU utilities (vitetris included!). I was able to add Docker support as well, which is just tarballed userland. Getting a working gcc toolchain was a bit of a pain in the butt. Pain in the butt because musl doesn't play nice with every piece of software out there, since most (that I have encountered anyway) think we're using glibc. And since SnackLinux is focused on every packaging being staticly compiled, not every package plays nice with that either. For example, there is a Python 2.7.9 package in the repository that is missing quite a few modules, see below:

Setup Nagios 3 with lighttpd on your VPS

There are countless tools and software stacks out there to monitor your servers out, though some are not the easiest to setup. I went with Nagios since it's straightforward to configure and easy to setup. For reference, I used Nagios 4.0.8 on Debian 7 using Debian 7 slaves. The Nagios master node already had lighttpd and PHP set up so I'll gloss over that.

Master node

Start by downloading Nagios and Nagios plugins:

 

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nagios/nagios-4.0.8.tar.gz
wget http://nagios-plugins.org/download/nagios-plugins-2.0.3.tar.gz

 

Extract, compile and install Nagios:

Nimrod language

 I have recently discovered the Nimrod programming language. I usually don't branch out on languages because, well, stuff you don't know can be scary. I'm surprised how easy it is to get going though, it reminds me quite a bit of Python. I put up a test project on Github that fetches the weather for a given location.

Tags

Building a distro that almost works

 For the most part, SnackLinux works. I've been having problems with Busybox, so I've made packages for coreutils, binutils, sed, grep and gawk. When compiling anything, I get:


segfault at 0 ip    (null) sp bfdb1cbc error 4 in busybox[8048000+e8000]

or something along the lines of that. I used the newest Buildroot, 2013.11, to create a new toolchain and cross compile uClibc 0.9.33 for SnackLinux. I have yet to recompile Busybox yet, but I'm working on getting gcc natively working on SnackLinux. Once that is completed, I should be able to compile SnackLinux from within SnackLinux.

Getting a terminal IBM Model M to work with PS/2

 I recently bought another IBM Model M (1395660) on eBay the other day, not thinking that it is actually a terminal keyboard. I thought it has a detachable SDL cable like my current Model M (1391401). I was wrong. Turns out it has a non-removable RJ-45 plug instead, thus being a terminal keyboard. Well, aftering some researching, some were able to get it to work by using an ATMega. I was able to find a pinout of the RJ45 plug on the keyboard, and simply just wire it up to a PS/2 cable. Though apparently, the colour of wire for PS/2 is not standardized, which led to testing each pin to see what it does. I cannibalized an old Microsoft keyboard for the cable and was able to hook the wires up straight to each other.