USB sound on Alix running Voyage

I thought that using a USB sound card with Linux would be easy, just plug and play, but I was wrong, it seems. Plug­ging in the Ter­ra­tec Aureon Dual USB (ID: 0ccd:0077) that I bought ren­de­red a pro­mi­sing out­put from dmesg and lsusb, and lsmod sho­wed that even rele­vant modu­les were loa­ded. The pro­blem was that mpd and other pro­grams did not find any way to actu­ally out­put sound to any device. They had the firm belief that my system was lac­king any sound card. Maybe I would need some sound rela­ted pac­ka­ges?

aptitude install alsa-base alsaplayer alsaplayer-text alsa-utils

## Keep snd-usb-audio from beeing loaded as first soundcard<br/> #options snd-usb-audio index=-2

# Fix from http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,4119,4166<br/>

1. Allow snd-usb-audio to be loaded as first soundcard options snd-usb-audio index=0
   
   Now I was at least able to get alsa­mixer to ack­now­ledge the mere existence of a sound rela­ted device, but alas it chose an input only device (most likely my Logi­tech webcam with microp­hone) as the default device even though it cal­led the Ter­ra­tec one default by name. Luc­kily for me the just men­tio­ned forum thread linked to a more sub­stan­tial thread descri­bing the pro­blem in more depth. I added myself and the mpd user to the audio group, to make sure that there would not be any pro­blems with per­mis­sions regar­ding the devices
   

   addgroup jadler audio addgroup mpd audio

   
   I was still unable to play anyt­hing (wit­hout expli­citly cho­sing what Alsa refers to as sound card 1). So I kept try­ing the stuff that had worked for the per­son repor­ting in the forum, cre­a­ting an /etc/asound.conf file with basi­cally the same con­tent as sug­ges­ted in the last thread refer­red to above, but chan­ging all refe­rences to hw:0 to hw:1, and from card 0 to card 1. Now mplayer works, but I still can’t get mpd to do its thing.
   Alix, Datorer, Embedded, English, Linux alix, audio group, configuration file, Debian, linux, mpd, problem, terratec aureon, usb sound card

2. Alix2d13 — Voyage Linux or Debian Live?

   Posted on May 12th, 2011 Johan Adler No comments

   I am not sure whet­her it is cau­sed by the Ubuntu 10.10 amd64 run­ning on my work­sta­tion or on some bug in the Emde­bian pac­kage, but I do have a hard time to get Emde­bian instal­led. I have tried Mul­tistrap, Debootstrap, and Debian Instal­ler, and I have done it on the Alix com­pu­ter using PXE boot, on my work­sta­tion (follo­wed by chroot etc), and on vir­tual machi­nes using qemu/kvm or Vir­tu­al­box, but so far no luck.

   All of this makes it less and less attemp­ting to actu­ally install any Emde­bian based Debian, and so I gradu­ally tur­ned back to Voyage Linux. When I was brow­sing the Voyage site I lear­ned about Debian Live, the system that “punkytse” uses to cre­ate the Voyage ima­ges, and also offers for down­load under tha name “Voyage SDK”. So now I am tes­ting Debian Live and try­ing to learn more about it.

   The wiki and the manual seems to be a good place to start when lear­ning about Debian Live.

   For those inte­res­ted in PC Engi­nes Alix the Alix forum may also be a good source of information.

   (I should really find a bet­ter Word­Press theme, I know…)

   Alix, Embedded, English, Linux, Wordpress alix, Debian, linux, pc engines

3. Installing Linux on PC Engines Alix2d13 (part 2.5)

   Posted on May 10th, 2011 Johan Adler No comments

   After publishing I rea­li­zed that I could have sup­plied more infor­ma­tion, and more down­lo­ads, than I did in my pre­vious post.

   Here are links to pat­ched ver­sions of Debian netboot.tar.gz (stable/Squeeze, testing/Wheezy and daily build), all down­lo­a­ded and pat­ched today, 2011-05-10:
   

   
   
   • netboot-ttyS0-stable-110510.tar.gz
   
   
   • netboot-ttyS0-testing-110510.tar.gz
   
   
   • netboot-ttyS0-daily-110510.tar.gz
   
   
   
   I have also made a diff file for the stable mod.

   What my script does, basi­cally, is this:
   

   
   
   1. Untar the tar­ball and cd to debian-installer/i386/boot-screens/ where all changes are made.
   
   
   2. In the file syslinux.cfg (which is actu­ally a file with PXELINUX con­fi­gu­ra­tions) two lines are added:
      
      
      
      1. serial 0 38400—tel­ling PXELINUX to use ttyS0 for I/O (i.e. as console).
      
      
      2. con­sole 0—do not try to use any video console
      
      
      
      
   
   
   3. In the files adtxt.cfg, rqtxt.cfg and txt.cfg sub­sti­tute any occu­rence of vga=788 for ttyS0,38400n8. This is done in order to tell the ker­nel that:
      
      
      
      1. There is no graphic/video console
      
      
      2. The con­sole that should be used is the first serial port, and with the spe­ci­fied settings.
      
      
      
      
   
   
   
   This is a simp­li­fi­ca­tion, since my script also inclu­des a vari­able for the num­ber of the serial port, in case your con­sole is not on ttyS0. I have not inclu­ded any such con­ve­ni­ence regar­ding speed and other set­tings for the serial port chosen.
   Alix, Datorer, Embedded, English, Linux alix, Debian, installing linux, netboot, pc engines, pxelinux, serial port

4. Installing Linux on PC Engines Alix2d13 (part 2)

   Posted on May 8th, 2011 Johan Adler No comments

   I have found it to be quite nice to be able to boot the Alix board over the network using PXE. Using the Debian netboot.tar.gz tar­ball and TFTP I can boot the Debian Instal­ler or a rescue system, and the for­mer lets me install Debian Linux wit­hout phy­si­cally touching the CF.

   In order to make net­boot use the serial port as con­sole I have pat­ched the Debian net­boot tar­ball, and I made a script that does all the patching, just for you…

   patch-netboot.sh

   I have tested it with the Debian stable and tes­ting netboot.tar.gz down­lo­a­ded today and it works, and also with the daily snap­shot from Debian installer.

   The script will modify the file syslinux.cfg in order to make PXE­Li­nux use the serial port, and the files adtxt.cfg, rqtxt.cfg and txt.cfg to make sure that the Linux ker­nel (actu­ally the Debian instal­ler in this case) also uses the serial port as con­sole. (Look at the script to see the actual changes. You should of course have a look at it before run­ning it, anyway.)

   Making my anci­ent Net­gear WGT634U run­ning OpenWRT serve PXE ima­ges was really a no-brainer. In the Services/Dnsmasq page I ente­red the three cho­i­ces shown below, with  the pat­ched net­boot untar­red on a USB stick mounted on /mnt/sda2.

   

   Refe­rences (other that links above):
   

   
   
   • http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s05.html.en—about set­ting up a TFTP ser­ver for netboot.
   
   
   • http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/docs/dnsmasq-man.html—as above, for dns­masq
   
   
   • http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/478—more on dns­masq
     
   
   
   • http://etherboot.org/wiki/dnsmasq—even more on dns­masq and PXE
     
   
   
   
   Some more patching lets me use pre­see­ding too, but more on that anot­her time.
   Alix, Embedded, English, Linux alix, Debian, debian installer, dnsmasq, installing linux, linux, tftp server

5. Installing Linux on PC Engines alix2d13 (part 1)

   Posted on May 3rd, 2011 Johan Adler 3 comments

   I have been wan­ting to try an Alix SBC from PC Engi­nes for some time now, and 10 days ago I finally did order one.

   

   Tho­rough as I am I chec­ked lots of sites (mostly wit­hin the EU) for pri­ces, ship­ping, avai­la­bi­lity and range of acces­so­ries. In the end I chose to place my order at Gooze.

   I had no trouble at all with my order from Gooze, they were very hel­p­ful and kind. I got a mail asking why I had orde­red anten­nas and pig­tails but no wifi card. I explai­ned that I was loo­king for a dual band card, and that I had not seen one in their web shop. Nine minu­tes later I got a reply say­ing that they had a Wist­ron DNMA-92 in stock, and that they would be able to add it to my order and still ship it the same day. Eas­ter holi­days delayed the ship­ping a bit, as expec­ted, but early mor­ning next busi­ness day the pac­kage arri­ved, and my new found fri­ends at Gooze had even mounted the board in the case, the wifi card on the board, and pig­tails and anten­nas where they should be.

   I do not hesi­tate to recom­mend Gooze for anyone loo­king for an Alix system. They also have some use­ful tuto­ri­als on their site regar­ding Alix-iana, and even more on smartcards and secu­rity. (Their site inspi­red me to order a smartcard rea­der with Linux sup­port, the Fei­tian R-310, and a blank smartcard, Fei­tian PKI, for­merly known as Fei­tian FTCOS / PK-01C.

   On a side note, I actu­ally pla­ced my order at 14:50 on Wed­nes­day  April 20. Gooze pro­mise that orders pla­ced before 15:00 will be ship­ped the same day, so when my order sta­tus had not changed the next day I wrote to them and poli­tely asked if the order sta­tus update was slow or if somet­hing else had hap­pened. I also made it clear that I was not at all in a hurry and had no pro­blem wai­ting for my stuff. Wit­hin minu­tes Jean-Michel Pouré of Gooze wrote back to me explai­ning that the entire staff had been to Lon­don for a day on a busi­ness trip. He apo­lo­gi­zed and pro­mi­sed to add anot­her smart card to my order at no extra cost. I had not expec­ted anyt­hing like that, and I would have been quite happy just to know that my order had arri­ved and would be ship­ped some day. That is really a good way to make happy (and retur­ning) customers.

   Cur­rently I am try­ing to find the “per­fect” way to install Linux on this little gem, most likely Debian in some form. I have tried Voyage, a custo­mi­zed Debian for embed­ded plat­forms with expli­cit sup­port for Alix boards (inclu­ding the three front panel LED’s and the tem­pe­ra­ture sen­sors), and I think it might be good for a system as this one I would pre­fer to know what custo­mi­za­tions are made and why. I would be more com­for­table set­ting up the system myself from the ground up.

   Gooze has a few nice howto’s on Alix stuff, and I also tested the Debian instal­la­tion sug­ges­ted. They sug­ges­ted instal­ling the net­boot tar­ball to a CF par­ti­tion, boot from this and using the Debian Instal­ler to install the latest stable ver­sion (Sque­eze). This went fine, but I ended up with a system that felt a bit too blo­a­ted, con­si­de­ring that it is embed­ded. Docu­men­ta­tion and man-pages are fine, but I feel no despe­rate need to waste a lot of flash memo­ryon an embed­ded system for it. When I need docu­men­ta­tion I can use my work­sta­tion or the web.

   A con­cept that appe­als to me more is the Emde­bian pro­ject, pro­per Debian adap­ted for embed­ded systems. The idea is right, the docu­men­ta­tion sucks (or I am not able to find it). The Emde­bian fla­vor Grip seems to be about mini­mi­zing depen­den­cies to an abso­lute mini­mum, and also strip­ping docu­men­ta­tion from pac­ka­ges. They pro­cess the actual Debian pac­ka­ges, remove unne­ces­sary parts and repack them. You would nor­mally have both Emde­bian and clas­sic Debian repo­si­to­ries, so that pac­ka­ges that are not yet Emdebianized/Grip:ed will be pul­led from the nor­mal Debian repositories.

   This sounds like the best of two worlds, the most com­mon 10 % of the Debian pac­ka­ges are avai­lable from Emde­bian, being smal­ler and having less depen­den­cies, and anyt­hing I want from the remai­ning 90 % is still avai­lable for instal­la­tion. I suspect that any vanilla pac­ka­ges that I install will be “upgra­ded” to Emde­bian style if they are con­ver­ted in the future.

   But my cur­rent self impo­sed task is to work out a good (or “per­fect”) way to install a basic Emde­bian system to use as a start for my custo­mi­za­tions. The Emde­bian site recom­mends a tool cal­led mul­tistrap, being somewhat simi­lar to but dif­fe­rent from debootstrap. It will cre­ate a basic rootfs, but there is not a lot of infor­ma­tion on how to pro­ceed to a boo­table CF image. I have found some tuto­ri­als using debootstrap, but I am not sure if they apply since the tools work in dif­fe­rent ways. I will get back about this soon, I think.

   Lastly, I tested OpenWRT too, that I have run­ning on my cur­rent router/firewall etc (an anci­ent Net­gear WGT634U). My first attempt at com­piling an image for Alix did not work out (though OpenWRT does have expli­cit sup­port for Alix), pro­bably some miscon­fi­gu­ra­tion on my side, but I tested with a plain x86 image that I down­lo­a­ded, it worked just fine, and com­pa­red to all other Linu­ces I tested this one was defi­ni­tely the fas­test! It boots in maybe 20 – 40 % of the time the others need, and system shut­down is even fas­ter rela­tive to the com­pe­ti­tion. It does not have the back­bone of the huge Debian com­mu­nity, but the sheer speed of it still makes it inte­re­s­ting as an alternative.

   Alix, Datorer, Embedded, English, Internet, Linux, VoIP Debian, router