If you have a little trouble enabling the WLAN card on your Cloudbook, you can use this binary to activate the power button for it.

Copy it into /usr/bin, then create a script to activate the button at system boot:

Put the following script here: /etc/init.d/wifi_power

#! /bin/sh
setkeycodes 6d 112
nohup /usr/bin/wifid &
exit 0

now run this command
update-rc.d wifi_power defaults

Now, the power button for your WLAN card will work.

Here’s the wifid binary from the Cloudbook gOS recovery ISO.

Alternatively, you *could* just download the ISO from Everex…

Hi all-

Just in case your Cloudbook has been a $400 paperweight ever since wiping it to install Ubuntu, I finally have a working kernel config file.  It includes working cpu frequency scaling (1200mHz! w00t!), and functional sound through the SND_HDA_INTEL alsa driver.

This does not address the ‘squirrelly’ nature of the WLAN card, but I don’t need to use the WLAN for connectivity.. That’s not why I wanted a rtl8187.  ;)

Download the Cloudbook Kernel Config for Ubuntu-8.04

 

Uncle Sam recently decided to task me with spending some of his money, in an effort to stimulate the economy. Being thusly stimulated, I felt it my national duty to spend it. So, I bought an Everex Cloudbook.. Don’t laugh.. The WLAN adapter uses an RTL8187 chipset, perfect for breaking encryption on wireless networks. (and *quickly*)  I booted the factory-installed gOS, and clicked around in it for about 10 minutes before wiping it. (first mistake)  However, installing alternate OSes on it seems to be quite a feat. There’s no optical drive, so your choices are to boot to an external CD/DVD, USB device, or PXE netboot.

For this, I choose to PXE netboot. (I have a few OpenBSD servers around, and all you really need to netboot something is a DHCP server and a tftp server. Both of which are built in to every OpenBSD base install.)

Apparently, because the wireless card is a USB device, you need the “wifid” binary from the default OS to activate the power button to turn it on. So, after wiping it, the only connectivity I had available was via patch cable.  The *good* news was that Everex offers a download of the Cloudbook ISO. The bad news is that it’s about 1 GB.  I downloaded it, and mounted it with <code> # mkdir /media/cloudbook && mount -o loop Cloudbook.iso /media/cloudbook </code> I then copied the wifid binary to my laptop, and then to a USB flash drive. I also downloaded the netboot installer for the Ubuntu 8.04LTS release, and placed it into the tftp root on my DHCP server. I altered the dhcpd.conf to include the MAC address of the Cloubook and name of the kernel to boot. Installing Ubuntu 8.04LTS via netboot was really fast on the LAN, and finished in about an hour. (without CPU frequency scaling built into the generic kernel, the Cloudbook’s VIA C-7M processor will only run at 600mHz)

After recompiling the kernel, the CPU now runs at 1.2 gHz. The CPU frequency scaling governor is set to “ondemand” by default, so I manually turn it up when connected to AC. <code> # cpufreq-selector -g performance </code>

Oops, when recompiling the kernel, I forgot to enable the sound card. Back to compiling the kernel..

Anyway, if you get stuck, there’s a great forum with lots of helpful information regarding the Cloudbook here: http://www.netbookuser.com . Props to Dimethoxyhead for the CPU scaling information.

While I downloaded Asterisk@Home-2.5, I assembled the machine that was to run it. It’s an old Compaq Deskpro PIII 450, with 256mb of PC100 RAM and a 6gb drive. A modest workstation at best. We’ll see how it goes…

Installing the operating system (CentOS 4) took around an hour, and went very smoothly.
Installing Asterisk took *considerably* longer, as everything is auto-configured and built from source.
However, in spite of seeing some errors fly by, and prompts to change passwords fly by, everything seemed to build, install, and succeed. For such a long build and install process, it’s impressive that it worked without any real help.
It automatically found and configured my cheap WildCard X100P clone, and prompted me to change my passwords. Upon reboot, everything seemed to work fine until I used “yum” to update CentOS. Upon rebooting after the yum updates, it kernel panicked and froze. Fun. *dammit*

Upon closer inspection, yum updated udev and obliterated the zaptel modules.
So, I cd’d to /usr/src/zaptel, and re-built and re-installed like so:

# cd /usr/src/zaptel
# make && make install && make install-udev
# shutdown -r now

When the system came back, everything was fixed and functional.
The web interfaces are intuitive, (although I would like to see a single admin login for all web interfaces)
and the CDR reporting features are great. There is a mailbox-like web interface from which your users can check and listen to their voicemail, An awesome graphical interface to the trunks, as well as direct access to editing the config files by hand.
The following phones registered on the first try:

• sipura SPA-841 with a Linksys wireless G bridge
• snom 190
• xten-lite for MacOS X
• Grandstream Budgetone

You really should be downloading this already…

For those of you that really missed Netscape Communicator, this will be a welcome addition to your arsenal. Seamonkey 1.0 has it all, a web browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple — all your Internet needs in one application. Basically, all the great tools Communicator had, with some new bells and whistles from the fine folks at Mozilla.org. You can get your copy here.

I have a fully functional Postfix server running Apache and MySQL.
As RoundCube’s webmail requires IMAP, I also installed the Dovecot IMAP server from the OpenBSD ports tree. Then, I unzipped RoundCube’s webmail package to my webroot, and in 5 minutes it was running and working properly on an OpenBSD-3.8-STABLE server. Check it out at RoundCube’s website.
This is a must-have webmail interface. (even tho it’s kinda RedHat-ish, I still like it!)
Plus, it’s completely skinnable with XHTML and CSS2.

To support https transactions in Apache, you will need to generate an RSA certificate.

# openssl genrsa -out /etc/ssl/private/server.key 1024

Or, if you wish the key to be encrypted with a passphrase that you will have to type in when starting servers

# openssl genrsa -des3 -out /etc/ssl/private/server.key 1024

The next step is to generate a Certificate Signing Request which is used
to get a Certifying Authority (CA) to sign your certificate. To do this
use the command:

# openssl req -new -key /etc/ssl/private/server.key -out /etc/ssl/private/server.csr

This server.csr file can then be given to Certifying Authority who will sign the key.
You can also sign the key yourself, using the command:

# openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in /etc/ssl/private/server.csr -signkey /etc/ssl/private/server.key -out /etc/ssl/server.crt

Need to find an ethernet port on a very populated switch?
Run this on your powerbook, plug into the jack, and Voila!
The port on the switch will flash, allowing you to find it without
replacing the dead batteries in your toner and tracker.

#!/bin/sh

while true; do
sudo ifconfig en0 down
sleep 1
sudo ifconfig en0 up
sleep 1
done