How do I re-install all the deb’s I had from an existing Debian/Ubuntu install?

Mostly because I’m an idiot, but at least I had a backup in hand.

the debs are kpe tin /var/cache/apt/archives

So a simple script like this:

ls -l *.deb | awk '{print $9}' | sed -e 's/_/\ /g' | awk '{print "apt-get install "$1}' > /tmp/missing

Will go ahead and prep a simple script to re-add everything. Obviously I don’t pass it into a sudo’d bash, but heh it works.

Probably one of my quicker recoveries, since I had all the data & config’s just lost the OS.

pptp always ignoring localip on Ubuntu

I don’t know how the other various linux distros handle this but I found this by accident:

Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb pppd[4943]: Using interface ppp0
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb pppd[4943]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/0
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb pptpd[4942]: GRE: Bad checksum from pppd.
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb systemd-udevd[4944]: Using default interface naming scheme 'v249'.
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb pppd[4943]: peer from calling number 1.1.1.1.1 authorized
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb pppd[4943]: MPPE 128-bit stateless compression enabled
Nov 17 12:04:27 ukweb systemd-networkd[592]: ppp0: Link UP
Nov 17 12:04:27 ukweb systemd-networkd[592]: ppp0: Gained carrier
Nov 17 12:04:27 ukweb pppd[4943]: found interface br0 for proxy arp
Nov 17 12:04:27 ukweb pppd[4943]: local  IP address 192.168.0.1
Nov 17 12:04:27 ukweb pppd[4943]: remote IP address 192.168.23.10
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb systemd[1]: Stopping PoPToP Point to Point Tunneling Server...
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb pppd[4943]: Terminating on signal 15
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb pppd[4943]: Connect time 1.1 minutes.
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb pppd[4943]: Sent 0 bytes, received 6937 bytes.
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb systemd-networkd[592]: ppp0: Link DOWN
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb systemd-networkd[592]: ppp0: Lost carrier

With the emphasis on “local IP address 192.168.0.1”. Which is *NOT* in my config. I went as far as adding a bridge to satisfy the proxy arp! Netplan is some yaml thing and yeah not a big fan.

    ethernets:
        eth0:
            addresses:
            - PUBLICIP/24
            gateway4: GATEWAY
            match:
                macaddress: AA:BB:CC:00:00:01
            nameservers:
                addresses:
                - 1.1.1.1
                - 8.8.8.8
    bridges:
      br0:
        dhcp4: no
        addresses: [192.168.23.1/24]
    version: 2

my /etc/ppp/pptpd.conf had the options set, but no matter what it *ALWAYS* went to 192.168.0.1

option /etc/ppp/pptpd-options
logwtmp
localip 192.168.24.1
remoteip 192.168.23.30-250

And then I found it after doing what i should have done, and grep around to find out that pptpd.conf should actually live in /etc

Yeah that’s right, there is 2 of them although they should be the same. A symlink and a restart later, and now I get this:

Nov 17 12:19:56 ukweb kernel: [  112.718861] PPP MPPE Compression module registered
Nov 17 12:19:56 ukweb pppd[1002]: MPPE 128-bit stateless compression enabled
Nov 17 12:19:58 ukweb systemd-networkd[599]: ppp0: Link UP
Nov 17 12:19:58 ukweb systemd-networkd[599]: ppp0: Gained carrier
Nov 17 12:19:58 ukweb pppd[1002]: found interface br0 for proxy arp
Nov 17 12:19:58 ukweb pppd[1002]: local  IP address 192.168.23.1
Nov 17 12:19:58 ukweb pppd[1002]: remote IP address 192.168.23.10

MUCH much better. I don’t know if this is anything worth wriging about, but if I can save someone else an hour of wondering why the config isn’t working and why their pptp is always defaulting to 192.168.0.1 and why it’s wreaking havoc with any default home router, where here it is.

Revisiting AIX 4.3 on Qemu

I had gone over the install a while ago, but I wanted to re-install on a newer machine. And going from GCC 7 to 11, well a number of things changed. And I found with experience that letting Qemu select as much as it wants leads to numerous dependencies that end up being problematic.

[email protected]:~/atar-boot/qemu/ppc-softmmu$ objdump -p qemu-system-ppc | grep NEEDED
NEEDED libvdeplug.so.2
NEEDED libncursesw.so.6
NEEDED libtinfo.so.6
NEEDED libz.so.1
NEEDED libxml2.so.2
NEEDED libpixman-1.so.0
NEEDED libutil.so.1
NEEDED libnuma.so.1
NEEDED libnettle.so.6
NEEDED libgnutls.so.30
NEEDED libfdt.so.1
NEEDED libgthread-2.0.so.0
NEEDED libglib-2.0.so.0
NEEDED librt.so.1
NEEDED libstdc++.so.6
NEEDED libm.so.6
NEEDED libgcc_s.so.1
NEEDED libpthread.so.0
NEEDED libc.so.6

So using the same atar qemu git dump, I found the newer config string a bit more refined:

./configure --target-list=ppc-softmmu --disable-sdl --disable-vnc --disable-gtk --disable-gnutls --disable-nettle --disable-gcrypt --disable-spice --disable-numa --disable-libxml2 --disable-vde --disable-werror --disable-seccomp --disable-capstone --disable-vhost-net --disable-vhost-crypto --disable-vhost-scsi --disable-vhost-vsock --disable-vhost-user --disable-tpm --disable-live-block-migration

Another fun think is that there is submodules from other servers, and it seems their certs have expired.. Which also means it’s inevitable at some point this will become impossible to build. Be sure to set this environment variable in order to build:

export GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY=true

As always Qemu will try to sneak a few things in there that we don’t need like audio support. As an example here is what I trimmed from config-host.mak:

$ diff -ruN config-host.mak config-host.mak-cutdown
--- config-host.mak 2022-11-08 09:37:41.104441392 +0000
+++ config-host.mak-cutdown 2022-11-08 09:37:25.084441253 +0000
@@ -27,8 +27,8 @@
CONFIG_SLIRP=y
CONFIG_SMBD_COMMAND="/usr/sbin/smbd"
CONFIG_L2TPV3=y
-CONFIG_AUDIO_DRIVERS=oss
-CONFIG_AUDIO_OSS=m
+CONFIG_AUDIO_DRIVERS=
+CONFIG_AUDIO_OSS=n
ALSA_LIBS=
PULSE_LIBS=
COREAUDIO_LIBS=
@@ -72,7 +72,6 @@
HAVE_STRCHRNUL=y
CONFIG_BYTESWAP_H=y
CONFIG_TLS_PRIORITY="NORMAL"
-CONFIG_TASN1=y
HAVE_IFADDRS_H=y
HAVE_FSXATTR=y
HAVE_COPY_FILE_RANGE=y
@@ -164,7 +163,7 @@
DSOSUF=.so
LDFLAGS_SHARED=-shared
LIBS_QGA+=-lm -lgthread-2.0 -pthread -lglib-2.0
-TASN1_LIBS=-ltasn1
+TASN1_LIBS=
TASN1_CFLAGS=
POD2MAN=pod2man --utf8
TRANSLATE_OPT_CFLAGS=

And this cuts down the needed dll’s to:

[email protected]:~/atar-boot/qemu/ppc-softmmu$ objdump -p qemu-system-ppc | grep NEED
NEEDED libncursesw.so.6
NEEDED libtinfo.so.6
NEEDED libz.so.1
NEEDED libpixman-1.so.0
NEEDED libfdt.so.1
NEEDED libglib-2.0.so.0
NEEDED libm.so.6
NEEDED libgcc_s.so.1
NEEDED libc.so.6

which is a bit better. I’m still annoyed at it’s reliance on pixman despite not having any framebuffer support, I’m guessing I could amputate it if I looked further.

AIX 4.3 booted!

Since nothing has fundamentally changed, I can still use my original bootflags:

./qemu-system-ppc -M 40p -bios q40pofw-serial.rom -serial telnet::4441,server -hda disk0.vmdk-post-install -vga none -nographic -net none -cdrom /mnt/c/temp/xlc13-gzip.iso

And for the heck of it, this is the steps I used to get xlC 1.3 up and running:

restore -f /tmp/xlc/xlccmp2
restore -f /tmp/xlc/xlccmpmE2
chmod +x /usr/bin/xlc
chmod +x /usr/lpp/xlc/bin/xlcentry
chmod +x /usr/lpp/xlc/bin/dis
cp /usr/lpp/xlccmp/inst_root/etc/xlc.cfg /etc
cp /tmp/xlc/cpp /usr/lib/cpp
chmod +x /usr/lib/cpp

and with that all in place we can compile a simple hello world!


# cat mt.c
#include <stdio.h>
void main(){
printf("hi from C\n");
}
# xlc -v mt.c -o mt
exec: /usr/lpp/xlc/bin/xlcentry(xlcentry,mt.c,mt.o,mt.lst,-D_ANSI_C_SOURCE,-D_IBMR2,-D_AIX,-D_AIX32,-qansialias,NULL)
exec: /bin/ld(ld,-H512,-T512,-bhalt:4,-o,mt,/lib/crt0.o,mt.o,-lc,NULL)
unlink: mt.o
# ./mt
hi from C
#

xlC is also capable of building a running GNU Chess. And I updated the git so that book building works. Not that I expect anyone to care.

Chess
book
Compiling book, please wait…
186 games added, 3384 positions added, 3383 total positions in book

It has the same desire to move pieces back and forth for thousands of moves, but it’s doing a heck of a lot more than any modern C compiler.

Since we don’t have any networking, Everything is on the console. I’ve found making CD-ROM images being a much easier way to get data in, and I’m still using uuencode to get data out from the console. I guess I should setup Z-modem at some point but that’s very futuristic. Or just break down and learn how to use C-kermit.

My go to quality of life startup is:

export TERM=vt100
stty erase ^?
export LIBPATH=$LIBPATH:/usr/lib
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Sure not perfect but it makes it slightly more usable. As a follow on, I got networking working here: Networking on AIXI 4.3

Linus DECUS ’94 talks found!

As I’m sure this will be making the rounds from Facebook (yes how tragic it’s on that thing of all things), and YES you have to login as King Zuck-my-users-are-idiots-erberg demands to know if you are reading this.


This is written by Jon “maddog” Hall

This is the long-promised Christmas present to all those good little girls and
boys who love GNU/Linux.

It was November of 1993 when I received my first CD of what was advertised as "A
complete Unix system with source code for 99 USD".   While I was dubious about
this claim (since the USL vs BSDi lawsuit was in full swing) I said "What the
heck" and sent away my 99 dollars, just to receive a thin booklet and a CD-ROM
in the mail.   Since I did not have an Intel "PC" to run it on, all I could do
was mount the CD on my MIPS/Ultrix workstation and read the man(1)ual pages.

I was interested, but I put it away in my filing cabinet.

About February of 1994 Kurt Reisler, Chair of the UNISIG of DECUS started
sending emails (and copying me for some reason) about wanting to bring this
person I had never heard about from FINLAND (of all places) to talk about a
project that did not even run on Ultrix OR DEC/OSF1 to DECUS in New Orleans in
May of 1994.

After many emails and no luck in raising money for this trip I took mercy on
Kurt and asked my management to fund the trip.   There is much more to this
story, requiring me to also fund a stinking, weak, miserable Intel PC to run
this project on, but that has been described elsewhere.

Now I was at DECUS.  I had found Kurt trying to install this "project" on this
stinking, weak, miserable Intel PC and not having much luck, when this nice
young man with sandy brown hair, wire-rim glasses, wool socks and sandals came
along.  In a lilting European accent, speaking perfect English he said "May I
help you?" and ten minutes later GNU/Linux was running on that stinking, weak,
miserable Intel PC.

I sat down to use it, and was amazed. It was good. It was very, very good.

I found out that later that day Linus (for of course it was Linus Torvalds) was
going to give two talks that day.  One was "An Introduction to Linux" and the
other was "Implementation Issues in Linux".

Linus was very nervous about giving these talks.   This was the first time that
he was giving a talk at a major conference (19,000 people attended that DECUS)
to an English-speaking audience in English.   He kept feeling as if he was going
to vomit.   I told him that he would be fine.

He gave the talks.  Only forty people showed up to each one, but there was great
applause.

The rest of the story about steam driven river boats, strong alcoholic drinks
named "Hurricanes", massive amounts of equipment and funding as well as
engineering resources based only on good will and handshakes have been told
before and in other places.

Unfortunately the talks that Linus gave were lost.

Until now.

As I was cleaning my office I found some audio tapes made of Linus' talk, and
which I purchased with my own money.  Now, to make your present, I had to buy a
good audio tape playback machine and capture the audio in Audacity, then produce
a digital copy of those tapes, which are listed here.  Unfortunately I do not
have a copy of the slides, but I am not sure how many slides Linus had.  I do
not think you will need them.

Here is your Christmas present, from close to three decades ago.   Happy
Linuxing" to all, no matter what your religion or creed.

An Introduction To Linux
Linux Implementation Issues In Linux

I’ve also archived the slides & audio files on archive.org.

Installing Debian Linux 5.0 on the Qemu Dec Alpha

Years ago I’d written this terribly vague, and generic quickie post that Debian 5 will in fact boot inside of Qemu. I didn’t really want to get into it as it’s a little complicated and a lot painful. People have cried out over the years, but I figured I’d help people.

Linux for the Dec Alpha

For operating system tourists, I’ll save you the story, just go here, and download qemu-2.2.50-DecAlphaDebian.7z. You’ll quickly find out it’s borderline useless, and go onto your next thing. You’re welcome.

First thing this was running in 2014, and newer Qemu’s seem to behave… strange. So I stuck with a late 2014 build of Qemu. If you deviate from here , you are on your own. I did dig up quite a few other Dec Alpha AXP emulators and put them on archive.org. -But that’s totally up to you, again I’m sticking with 2014’s Qemu.

The BIOS/Pal on Qemu’s Alpha is far from complete and cannot read disks, so no boot sectors, boot loaders, no on disk kernels. All is not lost, you can inject a kernel and initrd, however this is where the fun is. Obviously to install you need to extract both from the ISO file. Also make sure the kernel is decompressed, add a .gz extension and de-compress it, as it should be around 6MB.

qemu-system-alpha.exe -net nic -net user -drive file=alpha.vmdk,if=ide,media=disk -drive file=debian-5010-alpha-netinst.iso,if=ide,media=cdrom -initrd initrd.gz -kernel vmlinux

This is vaguely how to boot up the installer. Partition, make sure hda1 hda2 hda3 etc are created and all is fine.

Now the next amount of fun is that you need to extract the created initrd as the installer initrd always launches the installer. The busybox cannot create tar files, there is no ftp or scp, also I couldn’t get it to even try to mount NFS images.

However on Windows 10 with WSLv2 or a Linux machine you can mount the disk image (keep it raw? or convert it?)

losetup /dev/loop0 myimage.disk 
partprobe /dev/loop0
mount /dev/loop0p1 /mnt/myimage

These three steps will let you mount the disk in this case /dev/loop0p2 which is the root filesystem. Debian didn’t have partprobe installed so I had to apt-get install parted

Now that you can mount it, you can copy the boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-alpha-generic file.

We do need to tell Linux where the root filesystem is so to finally run Qemu it’s like this:

qemu-system-alpha.exe -net nic -net user -drive file=alpha.vmdk,if=ide,media=disk -initrd initrd.img-2.6.26-2-alpha-generic -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-alpha-generic -append "root=/dev/hda2"

Obviously this was a lot more time consuming than it should be, but now I can do useful things.

Also sometimes Qemu just sits there with a black screen. the UI is waiting for something ,not sure what. It’ll either come to life on it’s own or you got to bang it.

A mildly annoying 32bit adventure, also happy 30th PGP!

It’s been 30 years since the initial launch of PGP! Hard to believe what a firestorm it ignited i the 1990’s and the real pity of how the crypto field is just as baffling and confusing to people today as it was back then.

It’s crazy how crypto went from being an obtuse tool, to suddenly being in the hands of normal people with a public web of trust, and widely available source. And of course it was that widely available source that led to the first real people of trying to geofence on the internet, and it was naturally impossible to contain, even in the era before VPN’s people were able to circumvent any and all “protections” and download away. Strong cryptography went from being something considered ‘weapons grade’ and thusly requiring a munitions license to produce and distribute to suddenly being available to the world at large.

Investigations were launched, agencies contacted, and in spite of it all people had signing parities to exchange public keys, and sign the trust building the web. Try as some people may have demanded ‘back door access’ or black box crypto chips, the cat was out of the bag, and all you needed was a C compiler and a zip file small enough to easily fit on a low density 5 1/4″ diskette. It is 1991 after all, and there is still a sizable amount of XT/AT class machines out there, along with the 68000 Amiga/Atari/Macintosh (upgraded QL’s? 128kb really isn’t enough).

PGP 1.0 is from another era, originally written in the late 80’s cleaned up and released in 1991 where mass produced 64bit machines were still a bit off, and thusly PGP 1.0 really supports 16bit & 32bit OS’s. For the purpose of this ‘revival’ I went with the Unix port, the aptly named unix_pgp10.tar.gz. And from the MS-DOS version I extracted the test data to make sure it works in the file pgp10-test-data.tar.gz

$ file pgp
 pgp: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=cd9ecbf51fab24abbb7153a2cc04bb01bbf2ae91, not stripped
$ ./pgp testfile.ctx
 Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 - RSA public key cryptography for the masses.
 (c) Copyright 1990 Philip Zimmermann, Phil's Pretty Good Software.  5 Jun 91
 File is encrypted.  Secret key is required to read it.
 Key for user ID: Bond, James (007)
 288-bit key, Key ID A27A1F, created Sat Oct 19 23:56:24 3006391
 You need a pass phrase to unlock your RSA secret key.
 Enter pass phrase:

While it was simple enough to build, sadly on x64 WSL instance it doesn’t work. There is no pass phrase for the test data.

Normally I have one of usual two choices a) try to fix PGP to be 64bit friendly or b) run it under a 32bit environment. Normally I would do b, but I went digging into some porting strategies for the a choice and ran into this totally underused tech x32.

Long story short you keep your 32bit integers, you run like it’s a 32bit process but you are mapped into a 64bit address space. Even better -static works!

On Debian 10 the environment can be installed with the following:

apt-get install gcc-7 lib32gcc-7-dev libgcc-7-dev libx32gcc-7-dev gcc-7-multilib

Then to invoke it, use gcc-7 -mx32 . It’s that easy.

WSLv1 vs WSLv2

$ ./pgp
 -bash: ./pgp: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error
$ file pgp
 pgp: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (GNU/Linux), statically linked, BuildID[sha1]=2aa5f030603018ca1dc6c5c10aa979751b006aca, for GNU/Linux 3.4.0, not stripped

Notice it is now a 32-bit LSB executable, but also in the x86-64 address space! However under the WSLv1 environment it won’t work. Time to update to v2

   wsl --set-version Ubuntu-20.04 2
   Conversion in progress, this may take a few minutes…
   For information on key differences with WSL 2 please visit https://aka.ms/wsl2
   WSL 2 requires an update to its kernel component. For information please visit https://aka.ms/wsl2kernel 

And now with the instance converted:

$ ./pgp
 Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 - RSA public key cryptography for the masses.
 (c) Copyright 1990 Philip Zimmermann, Phil's Pretty Good Software.  5 Jun 91
 For details on free licensing and distribution, see the PGP User's Guide.
 For other cryptography products and custom development services, contact:
 Philip Zimmermann, 3021 11th St, Boulder CO 80304 USA, phone (303)444-4541
 Usage summary:
 To encrypt a plaintext file with recipent's public key, type:
    pgp -e textfile her_userid      (produces textfile.ctx)
 To sign a plaintext file with your secret key, type:
    pgp -s textfile your_userid     (produces textfile.ctx)
 To sign a plaintext file with your secret key, and then encrypt it
    with recipent's public key, producing a .ctx file:
    pgp -es textfile her_userid your_userid
 To encrypt with conventional encryption only:  pgp -c textfile
 To decrypt or check a signature for a ciphertext (.ctx) file:
    pgp ciphertextfile [plaintextfile]
 To generate your own unique public/secret key pair, type:  pgp -k
 To add a public or secret key file's contents to your public
    or secret key ring:   pgp -a keyfile [keyring]
 To remove a key from your public key ring:     pgp -r userid [keyring]
 To view the contents of your public key ring:  pgp -v [userid] [keyring]
$

And we are in business! Now we can run the example crypto test:

$ ./pgp testfile.ctx
 Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 - RSA public key cryptography for the masses.
 (c) Copyright 1990 Philip Zimmermann, Phil's Pretty Good Software.  5 Jun 91
 File is encrypted.  Secret key is required to read it.
 Key for user ID: Bond, James (007)
 286-bit key, Key ID A27A1F, created (null)
 Advisory warning: This RSA secret key is not protected by a passphrase.
 Just a moment-- .
 File has signature.  Public key is required to check signature. .
 Good signature from user "Smart, Maxwell (86)".
 Signature made Thu Jun  6 05:28:52 1991
 Plaintext filename: testfile

And there we are!

PGP 1.0 suffers from 2 real defects of the era the first being the home brew bassomatic that is apparently full of all kinds of flaws, and the second lurking in rsalib.c

 The RSA public key cryptosystem is patented by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S. patent #4,405,829).  Public Key  Partners (PKP) holds the exclusive commercial license to sell and  sub-license the RSA public key cryptosystem.  The author of this  software implementation of the RSA algorithm is providing this  implementation for educational use only.  Licensing this algorithm  from PKP is the responsibility of you, the user, not Philip Zimmermann, the author of this implementation.  The author assumes no liability for any breach of patent law resulting from the unlicensed use of this software by the user. These routines implement all of the multiprecision arithmetic necessary for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) public key cryptography.

And it ignited so much of a war about licensing the RSA cryptography base. It wasn’t until 1992/1993 that the RSA released their own aptly named rsaref that at least clarified and addressed their licensing restrictions. As we found out later it wasn’t the DOJ shutting down encryption, nor wild acts of congress instead it was US Patent 4,405,829 which finally expired in Sept 21, 2000, along with US patent 4,200,770 Hellman Diffie Merkle, public-key cryptography which expired in September of 1997. So in the end it was the lawyers who were to be feared, not the the US Government.

Another source of annoyance was the public/private key files are stored in a binary format (hence the 16/32/64 issues I’m sure!).

C:\temp>pgp -v jason.pub
 Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 - RSA public key cryptography for the masses.
 (c) Copyright 1990 Philip Zimmermann, Phil's Pretty Good Software.  5 Jun 91
 Key ring: 'jason.pub'
 Type bits/keyID   Date     User ID
 pub  990/F7CAD5 12-Jun-21  Jason Stevens
 1 key(s) examined.
 C:\temp>type jason.pub
 °ü½╟╓iº½t↕Hï╜Æ(↑ªα&E☼lKL$*⌠=└¥╒[׊s,â•”kÃ¥r~▐MFBv≥≡╫E┴╟Tÿ║µó â•¨6,♣â—„Ermo▼æ▄;± ùî
 C:\temp>

So naturally you have to use uuencode which led to MIME collisions and other fun stuff down the road. yay!

begin 666 jason.pub
MF9,`$!C$8`U*87-O;B!3=&5V96YSW@/5RO>TFV)_9@%49RW3NYGD<8*H`3X1
MZ>D'/F/D7$)OKD9&K+>A<@4<,$RV.+M?9VR;17)M;Q^1W#OQ()>,#?B!J\?6
M::>K=!)(B[V2*!BFX"9%#VQ+3"0J]#W`!YW56]>*<RS):X9R?MY-1D)V\O#7
/1<''5)BZYJ+_T#8L!0`1
`
end

Even though today we have widespread SSL, and all kinds of apps that encrypt by default, but Operation Trojan Shield shows that that an app is simply not enough, and you cannot trust anything.

Though Enigma had some cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was German procedural flaws, operator mistakes, failure to systematically introduce changes in encipherment procedures, and Allied capture of key tables and hardware that, during the war, enabled Allied cryptologists to succeed and “turned the tide” in the Allies’ favour.[15][16]

-Wikipedia

And just like the spy movies good crypto is tedious, bulky and rarely used properly*.

Yes please don’t seriously rely on pgp 1.0!

Pinebook Pro first impressions

Pinebook Pro

So yes, it’s most certainly built from a MacBook Air looking frame. But it’s not the same build materials, which of course is to be expected as these are far cheaper. Unlike the other ARM book I have, this one doesn’t have a GPRS modem, and as of this moment doesn’t natively run Windows. Which with it’s paltry 4GB of RAM and 64GB of disk space is just as well.

adding a 32bit runtime

Just as the MIPS64 had it’s weirdisims, the ARM64 is in the same seat. I didn’t see anything all that clear on Manjaro, and 32bit, at the same time debootstrap is available in the repo, allowing you to quickly install a 32bit Debian userland to chroot into. It’s pretty much the same steps as before, with the only real change being to use the armhf processor family giving a 32bit tree.

Maybe it’s my overall familiarity with Debian, but I find the environment far easier to deal with. Well that and of course many things just build so much nicer in 32bit mode, than 64bit mode sadly. It’s a shame that many distros don’t seem to include a matching 32bit/64bit libset but here we are.

Another plus is that Debian has far more robust mirrors world wide, and downloading components and updates is FAR faster than Manajro.

Loose clips?!

In the first week however disaster struck as I had it ‘sleeping’ one night and plugged in to charge, and when I opened the lid, I got nothing. The charging led showed RED for some reason like it was still charging, and no matter what I tried on the keyboard it just would not turn on.

Searching online didn’t give me much other than people saying that they were replacing the built in flash and didn’t seat it correctly. Did my kids or cat knock it over when I wasn’t looking? Was it on the edge of not being seated from shipping? I have no idea.

Lid off!

Well as much as I love opening new stuff, it was acting dead so I guess nothing to lose. That said the screws come off pretty easily but there is 2 sizes as the ones up front are super short. With the lid off you can see that the battery is 2x the size of the motherboard. And yeah of course it being ARM, its very raspberry pi – ish. And I guess it’s really no surprise.

The mainboard

On the mainboard there is 2 push buttons, and 2 sliding jumpers. One is hidden beneath the black tape. I hit the reset button, and slid both sliders up and down and then pressed down on the 64GB chip. I flipped it over to see if that did anything, and surprisingly it’d turn itself on!

I quickly shut it down, and screwed it back together. And I’ve been using it daily over the last week without any further issues with it powering on. Again I have no idea what was wrong but at least it seemed easy enough to open up and hit some buttons. Which brings me to the overall feel:

Build quality

It’s really hard to slam the PineBook Pro. It has incredibly lofty goals, and for the pricepoint it’s absolutely insanely good value. The body has been molded from what at best could be called an ‘inspired by the Mac Book Air’ but it’s the keyboard and trackpoint where it falls short. The keys have too much travel for their own good, and seem to twist a little giving a klunk as they don’t depress quite right. I have had issues with the arrow keys trying to play DooM via DOSBox. And I’ve become so spoilt with backlit keys, that although I know how to touchtype I still look from time to time.

The trackpoint is miserable, it’s constantly jumping the mouse (no palm detection)? and it just doesn’t glide or click ‘right’. But I know I’m being 100% unfair as I’m comparing this to a laptop that is 5x the price. I’ve written this and other stuff on the laptop and it’s just been so jumpy at times for seemingly no reason when I type it’ll jump and click at the worst possible moments.

The flip side is that FPS stuff is impossible as the keyboard and trackpoint won’t deliberately work at the same time. And I have no idea how to go about dealing with that. I guess use an external mouse.

Another stupid low point is the speakers. They are so tinny which I guess is to be expected, but they are so quite. I guess I should play test tones, and get some app to measure dB, but comparing it to anything else again just seems so unfair.

That said the screen is AMAZING. I had worried that the screen was going to be terrible, but no the screen is an absolute high point of the machine.

Battery life has been pretty good, and from opening it up, it’s no surprise as it does have a massive battery. They do include clips to bypass the battery all together if you want to run it from DC mains 100%. The only issue I have had with battery life is that Manjaro doesn’t seem to have hibernation support. And many times I put it to sleep when I go to sleep it’ll wake up with zero percent remaining. I don’t see that as a fault of the physical build, rather the OS.

Software and FSF flailings?

I don’t know much about Manjaro but it’s default setup sure feels a lot like the way Debian felt when they were under pressure to keep all non-free stuff segregated and partitioned away from users. The problem as it’s always been is that popular software has almost always been commercial, especially for normal uses. Turning on Community and Contributions should really be the default setting with people who want to be FSF pure having to click the button giving normal people the best possible experience. As an old person who’s been hearing about the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ is at hand back in 1997 (Va Linux et al), and been an on and off user since SLS, it’s always about the users. All the plugins and bookmarks and shared data stuff I have is on Chromium and having to hunt down how to turn it on sucked, as I was moments away from just doing the usual ‘user’ thing of wiping the install because I can’t find an app.

Distro shopping has been the worst thing to plague Linux since it was apparent that Linus wasn’t going to bless us a userland, unlike BSD. I know some see it as a strength but it’s always been such a critical weakness for the user. Oddly enough the circle has come around to bite enough people that Docker is a thing to deal with dependency and distro hell.

Games!

Well without a doubt visit astr0baby’s blog and enjoy some good hand holding to get a bunch of open stuff built. It’s toally worth it. And incredible to play 64bit Duke Nukem 3D!

Is it worth it?

Well if you want non x86 on the go, the price simply cannot be beat. However the default Linux install is alien to me, but I’m trying to learn to deal with it. And of course the weird power on issue really precludes this from normal people. I’d recommend it to anyone comfortable with Linux and a screwdriver. If you are 100% hardware focused it’s a laptop, no GPIO so it’s going to be a little bit of a bummer. If you are scared of opening it up, you may find like I did that you very well might have to. However for anyone in the middle absolutely.

“Normies” this isn’t the laptop you want. .. I’d say “yet” as I’m sure that build quality will only improve, just as software will hopefully get a bit more friendly for adding stuff like Chrome (what a mission to get it installed!).

Final ramblings

Years ago in college we joked that 30 years in the future you could get a quad processor Dec Alpha as a bundle in with a box of cereal. That a computer would be an impulse purchase at the supermarket. It seemed so laughable but a given as manufacturing and acceptance of that internet thing was a given. But that was the future from 30 years ago.

The future is now!

GCC 2.5.8 failure on 32bit ARM

This is really nothing more than a placeholder for me… Unless someone else knows the answer, then it’s really ‘how not to cross compile GCC’.

First I’m using the EMX’ified version of GCC from my MinGW to EMX cross. It didn’t require that much massaging to get it to build, the usual unzip as ascii to convert text, and in no time I can build cc1.


[email protected]:/src/emx/src/gcc-2.5.8# file cc1
cc1: ELF 32-bit LSB pie executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=42c0c8de7175edade7614dc92d5d13e4421e0e6f, with debug_info, not stripped

and it crashes in what has to be a 2020 most unfortunte name

Reading symbols from cc1...done.
(gdb) r
Starting program: /src/emx/src/gcc-2.5.8/cc1 

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x004f6b84 in rtx_cost (x=<error reading variable: Cannot access memory at address 0xff7efff0>, 
    outer_code=<error reading variable: Cannot access memory at address 0xff7effec>) at cse.c:667
667     {
(gdb) 

Yes, it really crashes in rtx_cost. Good thing there isn’t a super popular card from Nvidia that is currently being short squeezed by crypto miners right now called the RTX where everyone is looking for a good price. 😐

I had then been thinking perhaps it’s because I’m using GCC 8.3.0, maybe it’s introducing some new and exciting bug? So I cross compiled GCC 4.1.2 as follows:

./configure --target=armeb-linux --host=armeb-linux --build=armeb-linux

Keeping in mind that my knowledge of ARM is pretty much nill, especially on Linux. The compile went mostly okay, just have to remember the gnu inline macro’s as needed from back in the day (-fgnu89-inline) and while it builds, it is insisting on using collect2 which of course is screwing things up. And of course I don’t want it as my system compiler. As a hack I found system gcc 8 can link things fine as I didn’t want to spend all day messing with GCC/collect2

I copied xgcc, cc1 and cpp from 4.1.2 into a /412 directory, and rebuilt 2.5.8 with the following shell:

make CC="/412/xgcc -B/412 -g -O0  -I. \
-I./config \
-I/usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/8/include \
-I/usr/local/include \
-I/usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/8/include-fixed \
-I/usr/include/arm-linux-gnueabihf \
-I/usr/include" cc1

As you can see the cross wasn’t picking up the right include paths, so I just cheated, and dumped them from 8, and just copied them into this script. I re-ran the build and had 2 issues,

/412/xgcc -B/412 -g -O0  -I. -I./config -I/usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/8/include -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/8/include-fixed -I/usr/include/arm-linux-gnueabihf -I/usr/include -c  -DIN_GCC   -g -std=gnu89     -I. -I. -I./config local-al.c

....

/tmp/ccMguyhs.s: Assembler messages:
/tmp/ccMguyhs.s:5001: Error: selected processor does not support `fltd f1,r3' in ARM mode
/tmp/ccMguyhs.s:5025: Error: selected processor does not support `fltd f0,r3' in ARM mode
/tmp/ccMguyhs.s:5026: Error: selected processor does not support `dvfd f1,f1,f0' in ARM mode
/tmp/ccMguyhs.s:5027: Error: selected processor does not support `ldfd f0,.L489' in ARM mode
/tmp/ccMguyhs.s:5028: Error: selected processor does not support `mufd f0,f1,f0' in ARM mode

and so on. Also failing was global.c Again the same weird instruction/asm mix being triggered. Other than those two, cc1 will build, but unsurprisingly:

Reading symbols from cc1...done.
(gdb) r
Starting program: /src/emx/src/gcc-2.5.8/cc1 

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x004f6b84 in rtx_cost (x=<error reading variable: Cannot access memory at address 0xff7efff0>, 
    outer_code=<error reading variable: Cannot access memory at address 0xff7effec>) at cse.c:667
667     {
(gdb) 

Well, at least it’s consistent?

Or a fun way to kill a couple hours.

**EDIT I went ahead and looked in the 4.1 source for ARM stuff..

[email protected]:/src/gcc-4.1.2# grep arm config*|grep linux
grep: config: Is a directory
configure:  arm*-*-linux-gnueabi)
configure.in:  arm*-*-linux-gnueabi)

it didn’t like the gnueabihf stuff one bit.

I tried to rebuild as linux-gnueabi

./configure --target=arm-linux-gnueabi --host=arm-linux-gnueabi --build=arm-linux-gnueabi

make LANGUAGES=c HOST_CFLAGS='-fgnu89-inline' CFLAGS='-fgnu89-inline'

And then re-built GCC 2.5.8 with the same error, but slightly further into the program:

Starting program: /src/emx/src/gcc-2.5.8/cc1

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x004f2a20 in rtx_cost (x=0x41, outer_code=PLUS) at cse.c:679
679       code = GET_CODE (x);
(gdb) bt
#0  0x004f2a20 in rtx_cost (x=0x41, outer_code=PLUS) at cse.c:679
#1  0x004f2e20 in rtx_cost (x=0x60c3f8, outer_code=SET) at cse.c:736
#2  0x004ac2dc in init_expmed () at expmed.c:87
#3  0x0045ae28 in compile_file (name=0x5c96ec "stdin") at toplev.c:1648
#4  0x0045f6fc in main (argc=1, argv=0xfffefd04, envp=0xfffefd0c) at toplev.c:3569
(gdb)

The positive thing is that there was no weird register errors while compiling, and it built 100% normally…? “arm-linux-gnueabihf” almost seems right, specs needs fixing to point to “/lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3” instead of “/lib/ld-linux.so.3” along with the linker target.

Fun with Caldera WABI

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki / Tenox)

In the previous post about SCO Merge I briefly mentioned WABI, which is a Windows ABI emulator for Unix. Initially released by Sun Microsystems, it’s believed that it came with acquisition of Interactive Systems Corp (ISC) and Interactive UNIX. It was available for SPARC, x86 and PowerPC Solaris as well as IBM AIX. Around 1997 it was released for x86 Linux by Caldera. This article will focus on Caldera’s version specifically.

Although entirely possible to install WABI on another RPM based distribution such as Red Hat, I’m a purist and wanted to try it on Caldera Open Linux. The install is pretty straightforward you mount the iso file and run install script. In a next step you need to install an update to version 2.2D. This is done by replacing /opt/wabi/bin/wabiprog with extracted version of this file. Thanks to readers of this blog post for sharing these.

When launched for the first time, you will be prompted to provide copy of Windows 3.1. This the main difference with WINE which specifically does not require copy of windows to run apps. I have noticed that WABI is rather picky about lower vs uppercase when installing software. There is an utility called wabimakelower to help there. You can also add an icon to one of Caldera Linux / Looking Glass program groups.

Once you run it, it’s Windows 3.1 as usual:

WABI was designed for running productivity apps such as Office:

You can even run Visual Studio:

Curiously WABI is not a MS-DOS emulator. In order to run DOS apps you need to install such and configure it in WABI Control Panel:

For the lazy, a readily preinstalled version is available as OVA and 86box. Root password is “caldera”.

There also is a User Guide in PDF.

Have Fun with Virtualization!

Minecraft on the loongson-3A4000 / Lemote A1901

It runs!

This was a bit more work than I had anticipated. However flygoat had done much of the legwork for me. The first thing to get is flygoat’s mc-loongson.zip. I made a local download as I suspect many will not have QQ or WeChat (Or don’t want to admit to the government that you are downloading this…).

I’m not sure if it’s a MIPS thing or a UOS thing, but it had Java 11.0.4 in by default, which is CRAZY slow

$ /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.11.0-openjdk-mips64el/bin/java -version
openjdk version "11.0.4" 2019-07-16
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 11.0.4+11-post-Debian-1deb10u1)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Zero VM (build 11.0.4+11-post-Debian-1deb10u1, interpreted mode)

I installed version 8, but they are ‘in parallel’ in different directories… I guess it’s the .net hell drift all over again. Although to be fair I’ve only dealt with vendor installed java on Linux where it’s all fixed to single versions.

/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.11.0-openjdk-mips64el/bin/java --module-path /usr/share/openjfx/lib --add-modules=javafx.controls,javafx.fxml,javafx.base,javafx.media,javafx.web,javafx.swing -jar HMCL-3.2.139.jar

One annoying thing is that it cannot find JavaFX over and over despite it being installed, so I had to manually add the ‘module-path’. This is the syntax for version 11, I’m not all that sure on the version 8 syntax.

$ /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-mips64el/bin/java -version
openjdk version "1.8.0"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (Loongson 8.1.3-mips64r2-uos) (build 1.8.0-1.8.0.212-2deepin-b00)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.71-b00, mixed mode)

I changed the /etc/alternatives/java to point to version 8, which although causes the launcher to crash launching the actual exe, it’s trivial enough to change it to version 8. Although the command is… unwieldy but save it to a shell script.

I’m sure it won’t paste well, but here we go.. and it’s in my homedir sooo here we go!

/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-mips64el/bin/java “-Dminecraft.client.jar=.minecraft/versions/1.15.2/1.15.2.jar” “-Duser.home=null” -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseG1GC “-XX:G1NewSizePercent=20” “-XX:G1ReservePercent=20” “-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=50” “-XX:G1HeapRegionSize=16M” -XX:-UseAdaptiveSizePolicy -XX:-OmitStackTraceInFastThrow -Xmn128m -Xmx7936m “-Dfml.ignoreInvalidMinecraftCertificates=true” “-Dfml.ignorePatchDiscrepancies=true” “-Djava.library.path=/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/versions/1.15.2/1.15.2-natives” “-Dminecraft.launcher.brand=HMCL” “-Dminecraft.launcher.version=3.2.139” -cp /home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/patchy/1.1/patchy-1.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/oshi-project/oshi-core/1.1/oshi-core-1.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/net/java/dev/jna/jna/4.4.0/jna-4.4.0.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/net/java/dev/jna/platform/3.4.0/platform-3.4.0.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/ibm/icu/icu4j/66.1/icu4j-66.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/javabridge/1.0.22/javabridge-1.0.22.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/net/sf/jopt-simple/jopt-simple/5.0.3/jopt-simple-5.0.3.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/io/netty/netty-all/4.1.25.Final/netty-all-4.1.25.Final.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/google/guava/guava/21.0/guava-21.0.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/commons/commons-lang3/3.5/commons-lang3-3.5.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/commons-io/commons-io/2.5/commons-io-2.5.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/commons-codec/commons-codec/1.10/commons-codec-1.10.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/net/java/jinput/jinput/2.0.5/jinput-2.0.5.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/net/java/jutils/jutils/1.0.0/jutils-1.0.0.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/brigadier/1.0.17/brigadier-1.0.17.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/datafixerupper/4.0.26/datafixerupper-4.0.26.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/google/code/gson/gson/2.8.0/gson-2.8.0.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/authlib/1.6.25/authlib-1.6.25.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/commons/commons-compress/1.8.1/commons-compress-1.8.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/httpcomponents/httpclient/4.3.3/httpclient-4.3.3.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/commons-logging/commons-logging/1.1.3/commons-logging-1.1.3.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/httpcomponents/httpcore/4.3.2/httpcore-4.3.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/it/unimi/dsi/fastutil/8.2.1/fastutil-8.2.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/logging/log4j/log4j-api/2.8.1/log4j-api-2.8.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/logging/log4j/log4j-core/2.8.1/log4j-core-2.8.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl/3.2.2/lwjgl-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-jemalloc/3.2.2/lwjgl-jemalloc-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-openal/3.2.2/lwjgl-openal-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-opengl/3.2.2/lwjgl-opengl-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-glfw/3.2.2/lwjgl-glfw-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-stb/3.2.2/lwjgl-stb-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-tinyfd/3.2.2/lwjgl-tinyfd-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/text2speech/1.11.3/text2speech-1.11.3.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/ibm/icu/icu4j-core-mojang/51.2/icu4j-core-mojang-51.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl/3.2.2/lwjgl-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-jemalloc/3.2.2/lwjgl-jemalloc-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-openal/3.2.2/lwjgl-openal-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-opengl/3.2.2/lwjgl-opengl-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-glfw/3.2.2/lwjgl-glfw-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-stb/3.2.2/lwjgl-stb-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-tinyfd/3.2.2/lwjgl-tinyfd-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/versions/1.15.2/1.15.2.jar “-Djava.library.path=/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/versions/1.15.2/1.15.2-natives” “-Dminecraft.launcher.brand=HMCL” “-Dminecraft.launcher.version=3.2.139” -cp /home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/patchy/1.1/patchy-1.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/oshi-project/oshi-core/1.1/oshi-core-1.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/net/java/dev/jna/jna/4.4.0/jna-4.4.0.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/net/java/dev/jna/platform/3.4.0/platform-3.4.0.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/ibm/icu/icu4j/66.1/icu4j-66.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/javabridge/1.0.22/javabridge-1.0.22.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/net/sf/jopt-simple/jopt-simple/5.0.3/jopt-simple-5.0.3.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/io/netty/netty-all/4.1.25.Final/netty-all-4.1.25.Final.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/google/guava/guava/21.0/guava-21.0.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/commons/commons-lang3/3.5/commons-lang3-3.5.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/commons-io/commons-io/2.5/commons-io-2.5.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/commons-codec/commons-codec/1.10/commons-codec-1.10.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/net/java/jinput/jinput/2.0.5/jinput-2.0.5.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/net/java/jutils/jutils/1.0.0/jutils-1.0.0.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/brigadier/1.0.17/brigadier-1.0.17.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/datafixerupper/4.0.26/datafixerupper-4.0.26.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/google/code/gson/gson/2.8.0/gson-2.8.0.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/authlib/1.6.25/authlib-1.6.25.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/commons/commons-compress/1.8.1/commons-compress-1.8.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/httpcomponents/httpclient/4.3.3/httpclient-4.3.3.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/commons-logging/commons-logging/1.1.3/commons-logging-1.1.3.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/httpcomponents/httpcore/4.3.2/httpcore-4.3.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/it/unimi/dsi/fastutil/8.2.1/fastutil-8.2.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/logging/log4j/log4j-api/2.8.1/log4j-api-2.8.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/apache/logging/log4j/log4j-core/2.8.1/log4j-core-2.8.1.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl/3.2.2/lwjgl-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-jemalloc/3.2.2/lwjgl-jemalloc-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-openal/3.2.2/lwjgl-openal-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-opengl/3.2.2/lwjgl-opengl-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-glfw/3.2.2/lwjgl-glfw-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-stb/3.2.2/lwjgl-stb-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-tinyfd/3.2.2/lwjgl-tinyfd-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/mojang/text2speech/1.11.3/text2speech-1.11.3.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/com/ibm/icu/icu4j-core-mojang/51.2/icu4j-core-mojang-51.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl/3.2.2/lwjgl-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-jemalloc/3.2.2/lwjgl-jemalloc-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-openal/3.2.2/lwjgl-openal-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-opengl/3.2.2/lwjgl-opengl-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-glfw/3.2.2/lwjgl-glfw-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-stb/3.2.2/lwjgl-stb-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl-tinyfd/3.2.2/lwjgl-tinyfd-3.2.2.jar:/home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/versions/1.15.2/1.15.2.jar net.minecraft.client.main.Main –username USERNAME –version “HMCL 3.2.139” –gameDir /home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft –assetsDir /home/neozeed/mc-loongson/.minecraft/assets –assetIndex 1.16 –uuid UUID –accessToken TOOOOKENNNNNN –userType mojang –versionType “HMCL 3.2.139” –width 854 –height 480

Naturally you’ll need your own username, token, uuid..

One thing is for sure, setting the graphics to higher details gives better performance. I suspect that it’s a matter of pushing more of the rendering to hardware, out of software mode.

I have it set to Fabulous! graphics, render distance of 25 chunks, no vysnc, clouds fast, mipmap level 2.

While it does take a while to load up, join the server, and do the initial world loading, you can watch all 4 cores run at 100%, but once it’s loaded in, it’s down to a single core at 100%, and the other 3 are hovering around 10-25%. So once jit’d and loaded in it seems to run okay.

They are jackhammering downstairs and I could make this 1 minute clip in a brief moment of peace. This is before I figured out that the more acceleration you give Minecraft, the faster it runs with the GPU doing the heavy lifting (I think).

Is this the machine for the Minecraft enthusiast? Hardly, but Minecraft is the Java success story, where a platform like this, a fringe non mainstream platform will run a commercial app. This is where the real portability of binutils/gcc/libc and Linux prove to be the winning platform.