Getting the latest NodeJS (14.x) is fairly straightforward for Ubuntu/Debian 16.04
$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_14.x | sudo -E bash -
References:
https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#debian-and-ubuntu-based-linux-distributions
https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/README.md
A quick one. I had previously only used my HUION H610 tablet with Windows so I was surprised to find how easy it was to set up and go in Linux.
Plugging it in via USB and the stylus worked out of the box for my Lubuntu 20.04 LTS (kernel 5.4.0) but none of the tablet buttons were working.
Here are the steps I took to fix this:
First check if it’s recognised as a tablet driver:
isaac@pipox7:~$ xsetwacom --list
If there is no output then it needs to be loaded.
List USB devices to get the tablet’s USB ID – mine had a blank name/description (256c:006e)
isaac@pipox7:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 256c:006e
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0461:4ec0 Primax Electronics, Ltd
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 046d:c534 Logitech, Inc. Unifying Receiver
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. Hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0a46:1269 Davicom Semiconductor, Inc. DM9621 USB To Fast Ether
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Now to configure the tablet input with wacom drivers I did the following:
isaac@pipox7:~$ sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/52-tablet.conf
# Inside I pasted the following:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Huion on wacom"
MatchUSBID "256c:006e"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "wacom"
EndSection
Reboot and check that it is now recognised in xsetwacom:
isaac@pipox7:~$ xsetwacom --list
HUION PenTablet Pen stylus id: 12 type: STYLUS
HUION PenTablet Pad pad id: 13 type: PAD
Finally it’s time to map the buttons. For convenience I followed recommendations to create a bash script that would run on session start to persist the mappings:
#!/bin/sh
xsetwacom --set 'HUION PenTablet Pad pad' Button 1 "key +ctrl +z -z -ctrl"
xsetwacom --set 'HUION PenTablet Pad pad' Button 2 "key e"
xsetwacom --set 'HUION PenTablet Pad pad' Button 3 "key b"
xsetwacom --set 'HUION PenTablet Pad pad' Button 8 "key +"
xsetwacom --set 'HUION PenTablet Pad pad' Button 9 "key -"
xsetwacom --set 'HUION PenTablet Pad pad' Button 10 "key ]"
xsetwacom --set 'HUION PenTablet Pad pad' Button 11 "key ["
xsetwacom --set 'HUION PenTablet Pad pad' Button 12 "key p"
And it is as simple as that. The tablet and stylus are fully functional and can be further customised to suit individuals needs.
I had pretty much forgotten about this little device when I recently uncovered it stashed away in one of my drawers. Originally purchased in early 2015 for around $100, it was hooked up to my dumb TV to make it smarter and used as a media center.
It was able to get a couple of years of use before being replaced by better 4K capable Android media players (NVIDIA Shield).
Having a lot of free time on my hands (thanks COVID) I was curious to see what else it could be used for, so I booted it up and played around a bit.
It has a genuine Windows 10 license (originally 8.1 Bing that was freely upgraded) which I was able to update to the latest patches with no issues.
With the device updated I started playing around with it by attempting to use it as a normal desktop computer. Very quickly I discovered some major downsides to the aging hardware:
I struggled to use the Pipo as a light office desktop, mainly due to the RAM limitation which modern browsers absolutely eat up.
To try and get more use out of the Pipo I wanted to install linux and after some quick googling I chose the Lubuntu distro for its supposed light-weight features. So I grabbed the latest LTS version (20.04) from lubuntu.me and created a bootable USB.
By pressing ESC or Del on startup to get into the Pipo BIOS, I configured it to boot from our USB, and here is where a major hurdle occurred:
I couldn’t get the Pipo X7 to load GRUB and boot from the Live USB. It just simply wasn’t displaying anything and would fallback to either the Windows partition or the default EFI.
After searching around, I discovered that this device and many like it are shipped with 32bit EFI firmware which is not included/supported out of the box with most distros. So I continued digging and found an awesome utility by Linuxium called isorespin.sh
Using isorespin I was able to ‘respin’ the Lubuntu ISO to include a 32bit boot loader and support for Intel Atom using the following command:
$ isorespin.sh -i lubuntu-20.04-desktop-amd64.iso --atom
After the utility has finished, a linuxium-*.iso is created and ready to be written to our installation medium (USB). Plugging in the USB and booting from it worked straight away with no issues and I quickly went through the installation steps, opting to format the entire eMMC disk.
To my joy and surprise, after installing Lubuntu 20.04 LTS everything is working out of the box. The HDMI sound output which had been an issue previously (from ~2015 forum posts) appears to have been fixed in the more recent distros.
The Pipo’s wireless speeds were never very good for me, even though the box itself does feature a wireless antenna it varies greatly between 8-20mbps.
isaac@pipox7:~$ speedtest-cli
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 10.24 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 18.61 Mbit/s
Thankfully the rear fast ethernet jack (100/10) works well and I was able to achieve decent speeds with it plugged in:
isaac@pipox7:~$ speedtest-cli
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 85.87 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 26.91 Mbit/s
Now that the network has been sorted out, I tested the web browser experience and found it to be actually worse than windows 10. The 2G of RAM (around 1.5G available) is taken up by Firefox very quickly with just a couple of tabs open (youtube, reddit etc). Once the memory is filled everything freezes and a force restart is required.
I found that setting up and enabling a swapfile (or partition) helps – I opted for a 2G swapfile, but it is still not ideal.
After looking around I found zramswap which utilises ZRam to create compressed swapfiles in memory. Installing and configuring was simple as follows:
$ isaac@pipox7:~$ sudo apt install zram-tools
I updated the default config to use 70% of RAM as zramswap:
# /etc/default/zramswap
...
# Specifies the amount of RAM that should be used for zram
# based on a percentage the total amount of available memory
PERCENTAGE=70
...
Control and enable/disable zramswap using start/stop/status:
isaac@pipox7:~$ sudo zramswap start
Check to make sure the zramswap service is enabled and running (so it will auto setup on boot):
isaac@pipox7:~$ sudo systemctl status zramswap
Check your swap/zramswap:
isaac@pipox7:~$ cat /proc/swaps
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/swapfile file 2097148 0 -2
/dev/zram0 partition 345196 109832 100
/dev/zram1 partition 345196 111300 100
/dev/zram2 partition 345196 114776 100
/dev/zram3 partition 345196 111324 100
isaac@pipox7:~$ sudo swapon --show
NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/swapfile file 2G 0B -2
/dev/zram0 partition 337.1M 107.3M 100
/dev/zram1 partition 337.1M 108.7M 100
/dev/zram2 partition 337.1M 112.1M 100
/dev/zram3 partition 337.1M 108.7M 100
With zramswap configured and enabled, I found the cpu hit was minimal and the web browsing/multitasking experience greatly improved.
An interesting little journey on installing and configuring linux for low powered/resource (ie. RAM) hardware. I hope whoever is reading this gained some insight on installing a 64bit OS onto 32bit EFI. Also setting up swap and zramswap is a crucial step for being able to use modern browsers (Firefox or Chromium) on such low amounts of RAM.
After installing Lubuntu and some tinkering, I am able to do light office work (drafted and published this post with it) and have seen a noticeable improvement in video playback capabilities which I attribute to lower resources of the OS vs Windows 10.
I can also confirm this same process to install linux works for the Ainol Mini PC Z3735F 7000mAh
The following error occurred in a recent project that required integration with Azure Blob Storage and an existing Spring Boot application:
Error Status Code 400: AccountRequiresHttps
Resolution:
Apply azure.storage.enable-https=true to your application.properties file
Resources:
Error: Unable to read database "/var/lib/vnstat/eth0": No such file or directory
This error will appear when vnstat is not configured to the correct netwrork interface. You can check what interface your device is using with ifconfig:
$ ifconfig
enp3s0: flags=4163 mtu 1500
...
And to make sure your vnstat is monitoring your identified network interface you can check for the database files located in: /var/lib/vnstat/
$ ls /var/lib/vnstat
enp3s0 wlp2s0
Now you just need to add it to your vnstat config. You could simply edit the default config file located at /etc/vnstat.conf which would apply globally. However it is recommended to create a local config for your user. Copy the global config into your home directory like so:
$ cp /etc/vnstat.conf ~/.vnstatrc
And update the default database to your selected network interface:
# default interface
Interface "enp3s0"
Save and you should be able to run vnstat and check your bandwidth stats.
$ vnstat -d
enp3s0 / daily
day rx | tx | total | avg. rate
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
07/08/2019 61.04 MiB | 6.05 MiB | 67.09 MiB | 6.51 kbit/s
07/09/2019 25.36 MiB | 152.33 MiB | 177.69 MiB | 17.25 kbit/s
07/10/2019 10.38 MiB | 2.12 MiB | 12.51 MiB | 2.38 kbit/s
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
estimated 19 MiB | 3 MiB | 22 MiB |
Resources