Recreation : Logitech "gamer" mouse M-U0007

I found one of these old USB "laser" mice in a thrift store for 1€50 and couldn't resist... the one I use on kid2 still has a rubber ball and is pretty old (though it still works).

Anyways, this mouse species has many more buttons and I wanted to try to customize some of them.  So I found a question with the answer at Ask Ubuntu and tried it... with this:

luc@kid2:~$ head -10 .xbindkeysrc 
# For the benefit of emacs users: -*- shell-script -*-
###########################
# xbindkeys configuration #
###########################
# PageUp / PageDown by pushing the wheel left/right.
"xte 'key Page_Up'"
b:6
"xte 'key Page_Down'"
b:7

Puppylinux full install to internal (ATA) hard disk

So as I mentioned already, I'm playing with Puppylinux on a small hard drive in kid2, my oldest (still working) desktop computer.

I'm mentioning here some difficulties I had during the install and especially to make it boot properly.  Please note that I'm a complete newbie at Puppylinux, grub4dos, and even to the grub2 configuration/customization that was required to finalize the boot process and keep both Ubuntu and Puppylinux happy, and not destroying the Windows partitions that I still have in this box too.

1. Before starting the install, you'll need the installation media.  I chose to install from a USB card reader (I have plenty of SD cards laying around but no USB stick).  The installation media for the version that I chose (7.5) came in the form of a *.iso file.  However, it turns out that these are not CD images (ISO9660) but rather they appear to be image copies of the SD card/USB stick.  The Linux file command told me that these were MBR formatted disks so I just used dd to copy the file to an SD card.
2. During the install attempt, nothing went wrong really, and I was left with a bootable "frugal" install on my 6GB Maxtor PATA disk.  So far so good.
3. I then tried to configure the Ubuntu disk loader (GRUB2) to boot Puppylinux from this disk.  This proved to be difficult, if only because of the Puppylinux SFS mechanics (layered filesystems mounted using loop(s)).  After some frustration I decided to re-do the install and make it a "full" install (in which the system is booted from a /boot directory directly, and all files are present in the root filesystem like on other distributions that I know).
4. During a first attempt at a full install, something went wrong... I didn't immediately understand that I need to have the USB installation media (still in the drive) manually (re-)mounted so that the installer could uncompress and copy everything on the "bare" root filesystem.  During my second attempt, I mounted my SD card under /mnt/cdrom so that I could select "CDROM" in the installer as the source for this.
5. After that attempt, I was still stumbling on the grub4dos configuration.  Then I understood that the initrd.gz file does contain the code to do the filesystem layering required by a "frugal" installation, and apparently required the SFS files to be present (which I didn't want, as my point was to get rid of these now that I have a "full" install).
6. So I removed the initrd command from grub4dos menu.lst : that worked.  It gave me a hint at reconfiguring also grub2 on the Ubuntu disk, so that I could use both boot loaders as backups of each other.  That part I still have to complete.  In the meantime, below is my Grub4Dos menu entry to boot Puppylinux from the Maxtor:

title Xenialpup64 7.5 (sde1/boot)
uuid abf7b3c6-246c-4189-82a2-a8d41784ba8d
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sde1 ro

(please note that there is no "initrd" command in the above menu entry definition)

kid2 role, revisited

So on the ACPI side, the BIOS+LXde settings seem to be able to suspend the system, resuming (sometimes) with a double click on the mouse.  However this is not what I'd want from a server that is supposed to do "stuff" at periodic 1-hour intervals, like backuppc or my photo posting script.  So far powernap doesn't seem to do anything for me neither, so I removed it completely.

I tested IDE HDDs that were lying around.  Seems like the 500GB and the 200GB are both dead.  I'm left with an old 6GB to play with.  Mounted it on kid2, checked that there was no data left (moved some to kid2 home).  I also moved data from the Windows partition into the home partition so that I can prepare to attempt a Windows reinstall.

On the 6GB hdd I removed the old partitioning, created a single partition, and installed Puppylinux just to play with it, and have an alternate/backup boot method for kid2.  That distro is really damn small!  But quite functional as a intetnet/word processing box.  I might try that on my old eCafé that's sitting in my drawer awaiting for better days.  The installation media could be a single SD card, 512Mb would be enough...  I think the eCafé can boot from USB so that would seem like a piece of cake.

I like the internal hardware on kid2, and the way it allows to add many more 3.5" disks in the future if I wanted to.  The base hardware (packard bell) really has only one free spot left for that.  I'm starting to think about swapping roles for these two boxes.  Both could accept the USB3 PCIe card that I've ordered...  both hardware seem to be reliable still... I wonder how the slower CPU would work in the context of rsync/gzip/network backups; we'll see when I complete the backuppc setup by adding a few more clients on kid2's backup hosts list.

kid2 recovery, continued

Upgraded to 17.10 (with intermediate steps).
Kind of works now, except the DHCP that runs at boot doesn't seem to get the DNS name resolution right.  Using
sudo dhclient -v
seems to make it work though.  I also learned not to put eth1 in /etc/network/interfaces when using network-manager to handle it.  I might remove network-manager altogether :)

I did install backuppc and powernap (willing to try this combo for possible power savings).  The install also added apache2 and I changed backuppc's htpasswd after installation.  The postfix email config is probably very wrong.

kid2 recovery

Once I hooked up everything from screen to mouse, kid2 wouldn't boot.  I juggled the RAM around a little bit, now both on same-color sockets, then it would still not boot but at least display a BIOS error message on the screen.  So I loaded the "Safe defaults" then "Optimized defaults" (whatever these are) and it worked.
The Windows partition still doesn't work (reboots when I try) but Ubuntu Wily (15.10) is still there.   I had to look a little bit around in order to find a mirror that still had Wily files but then "apt update" worked (except for some ubuntu-security stuff) and I launched "apt dist-upgrade".  That's going to keep it busy for a while.

The only thing that doesn't work right now (in addition to Windows) is the mouse (still a ps/2 ball mouse).  I need to recycle that thing.

• /dev/sda seems to be a single-partition linux disk (mounted at /home) of size 300G, by Seagate
• /dev/sdb is smaller (160 Gb Hitachi) and partitioned as follows:
• sdb1 12 Gb= Windows recovery
• sdb2 80 Gb= Windows (broken), may still contain some data
• sdb3 4,2 Gb= swap
• sdb4 38 Gb= Linux (root)
• CPU is a E2140 @ 1.60 Ghz
• There are 3 free PCI slots
• There's an (unused) IDE interface on the motherboard
• There are USB slots available, looks like 4 USB1 controllers and 1 USB2 controller
• The Realtek Ethernet controller claims Gigabit ethernet compatibility
• There is no built-in graphics card, but an AMD/ATI Radeon is on the PCIe slot

Backuppc archives timeout problem + new archive HDD medium

So I took delivery of my new Maxtor M3 2Tb USB 3 drive yesterday.  Still the server only has USB 2 ports so I know this is going to be still slow until I can upgrade that.
However I hooked the M3 and it powered up and connected without problems.
fdisk showed a single partition (1.8Gb) formatted as HPFS/NTFS.  I moved the contents to /home/luc/Texts/Manuals or somewhere like that.  It contained some backup software and the documentation apparently.  Then I reformatted using ext4, and changed the partition type to Linux 0x83 (and removed the bootable flag).
Afterthat I used the UUID (from blkid) so add a new line to /etc/auto.removable and it just worked under autofs.  created the backuppc directory and will use that in a new backuppc archive host.
But before that I'd like to fill the iomega HDD with some recent backup archives so that I can move that out of site.  I noticed my previous attempts all failed after 20 hours exactly so after googling a bit I found out about the Client Timeout setting in Backuppc.  Changed this to 48 hours and started a new archive again, from kid3 backup.
To be continued...

kid2 status

I didn't try booting but I opened the (unbranded) tower to check the motherboard model (GA-945PL-DS3) and installed memory (1Gb+1Gb+512Mb of DDR2 PC2-6400). According to the Gigabyte site, this board only supports a maximum of 2GB anyway, so I removed the 512MB DIMM.  I'll need to get a power cable and hook up a screen, power cord and mouse to try and reboot it.  I'll probably need to reset my overclocking attempts in the BIOS too.  On the other hand, I now have switches and Cat5 cables around so I will not need to play with the cheap Wifi dongle that I found back in one of the USB ports.  I didn't bother to check wich hard drives are installed (2xSATA drives are connected).  As there is an IDE interface too, I could also install some more disks in there if needed (doubtful).
I really should try and find a SBC capable of replacing base with a much smaller environmental footprint... but then I'd still need power adapters to feed the drives that I need.  So probably a dead end route.  I could also re-test the power management (powering off via cron when not in use and waking up hourly).  That was kind of fun, but unfortunately it sometimes froze and I didn't troubleshoot that to see if I could easily fix it or not.