Linux WiFi on HP Pavillion AIO

I bought a HP24 B110D all-in-one desktop PC from HP. I decided to run Ubuntu MATE LTS 16.04 on it. It’s a pretty nice machine and nearly everything works right out of the box, with Linux. Unfortunately, one thing that randomly failed regularly, was the WiFi connection. The kernel module would crash rather spectacularly.

After some investigation, I attempted various fixes that didn’t work. I tried to turn of 802.11n, which resulted in the WiFi connection running a little longer before it crashed spectacularly. I also tried to install the latest firmware for the driver from Intel, which didn’t have any discernible affect on the system.

In the end, the actual fix needed was to disable the HP WMI driver. So, all I had to do was to add in the appropriate blacklist to modprobe.

blacklist hp-wmi

That did the trick and now my desktop works like a charm.

WolfSSL Server on the Galileo

Intel has been kind enough to show us how to use WolfSSL on the Galileo board, but only in a client mode. Turns out that, there are some issues that will be encountered when running a WolfSSL server on the Galileo with the EthernetServer mode.

I’ve had to learn this the hard way.

Date

The EthernetServer will fail to load the server certificate as the internal clock is stuck in the past. Therefore, we need to set the system date of the Galileo board to the present. Since there is no NTP client built into the Galileo 2 board, we are forced to use rdate instead.

So, telnet into the Galileo board and run the following command:

$ rdate tick.greyware.com

I suppose that the best way to do this is to incorporate a system() command into the setup() code of the Arduino sketch to automatically synchronise the date.

ECC Support

WolfSSL has removed static key based cipher-suites since 3.6.6. Therefore, it needs to be configured to support say, ECDHE based cipher-suites. Unfortunately, this is not automatically enabled during library configuration unless you’re using x86_64, which the Galileo board isn’t.

Therefore, the solution is to configure the library with the –enable-ecc option enabled.

$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/wolfssl/ --target=i586-poky-linux-uclibc --host=i586-poky-linux-uclibc --enable-ecc

Otherwise, we will face the inability to communicate with the Galileo board when debugging using OpenSSL with the Galileo board complaining that there are no matching cipher suites right after receiving a Client Hello. The Galileo board then teminates the handshake without sending a Server Hello.

PHP-MCRYPT and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

There is a weird problem with a default Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server installation. For some reason, php-mcrypt couldn’t run when running under FCGI mode using spawn-fcgi. It was correctly installed and configure but it is not detected correctly even under phpinfo();

However, everything seems to be work right after switching over to php-fpm instead of fcgi mode. I don’t know why.

iFlix on Ubuntu LTS

Screenshot - Khamis 04 Jun 2015 - 10:08:23 MYT.png

If you are interested to use the new iFlix service on Ubuntu, you will need to install pipelight, since iFlix has decided to use Silverlight instead of HTML5 for it’s video streaming platform.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends pipelight-multi
sudo pipelight-plugin --update
sudo pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight
touch $HOME/.config/wine-wininet-installer.accept-license

After that, do an about:config on Firefox and the silverlight plugin should show up. It works fairly well on Firefox. However, there are some issues. For one, the player does not position itself properly when the window is resized. As a result, I cannot watch it in a small window.

Issues

  1. I would like to see a popup-window option enabled for iFlix as I like to watch my videos in a small window in the corner while I do my work on the laptop. Hulu had this great feature. As it is, iFlix requires me to either watch a show or work. It does not allow me to multi-task.
  2. They spelt capacity wrong – as “capasity” – on the player settings. This appears when I try to adjust the streaming quality.
  3. Quality wise, it is quite obviously heavily compressed. Both the audio and video quality isn’t great even on the “High” settings.

As this is my first 30 mins of using the system. I shall reserve judgement until I get to try it out more extensively. However, for RM8/month, I think that I will most likely subscribe assuming that they can supply me the latest shows.