smackeyacky

I have, on and off, tried getting an acceptable Linux distribution on this laptop (Acer Nitro 5, 8th gen i7 and an Nvidia GT1060). While Debian Buster installs and works, I have been tearing my hair out trying to get a 2nd monitor working. I figured a more "user friendly" distro was worth trying to see what would happen. I put it off until today, when Microsoft Word decided to give me some ridiculous "LinkedIn" resume helper while I was updating my resume. I don't recall asking for the LinkedIn resume assistant to be loaded (I gather it's been a thing for a few years) but it set me off. I really don't care for LinkedIn, it's a stupid fantasy world of happiness, people "living their best lives" and has lately descended into Minion memes and flat out garbage The Endless September will never go away apparently. Rant over, onto distro hopping... Laptop setup Once Windows 11 gets ahold of your machine, it gets increasingly hard to do th...

I have one piece of hardware that has stubbornly resisted the permanent move to Debian in my office, an old Texas Instruments CC2540 USB dongle that has Bluetooth Low Energy packet sniffing firmware installed on it. If you're doing anything out of the ordinary with a BLE device, such as fiddling with the advertisement data or trying to troubleshoot a GATT issue, you will eventually end up with a packet sniffer of some kind. When I originally bought it, the machine I plugged it into was running Windows Server 2016 and it worked fine. However, after I had upgraded that box to Windows Server 2019 the drivers stopped working. I had no further use for it at that stage so I put the CC2540 away. The need for a packet sniffer has returned, hence out it came again. Only now, that machine that was running Windows Server is running Debian and it appears there is no way to directly get something like Wireshark to talk to it. QEMU to the rescue (again) I do keep a Windows 10 virtual mac...

Attempt two at getting it working The SmartShepherd devices are based around a Texas Instruments bluetooth low energy chip: the CC2640R2F. I have been using Ti's "Code Composer Studio" to build the firmware for the device. It is not my favourite tool but it does get the job done (eventually). Previously I have upgraded my main Windows build to Code Composer Studio 10 so I know (in theory) it should work on Debian as the system is available for Ubuntu. I tried to get this working on day 1 but failed to get the setup to do anything sensible with my project. Partly because Code Composer Studio is...hard to use. Partly because all the setup is dependent on windows paths when you start a project on Windows and it's tough to find all the places you need to make changes. I mean, it's almost impossible to move a CCS project to a different directory on the same machine, so shifting it to a different operating system is a lot more work than I had planned for. Ins...

Return of the Living Dead I don't want to be disparaging about this product, it was my favourite development environment for a long time. It could be astonishingly productive or completely, brutally time wasting depending on the programmer. After writing about it in the last post I figured I would see what it's like now and how it stacks up to modern environments like Android Studio or Visual Studio Code Now, you can't just go and grab a copy of VisualWorks (I think, for a brief period in the 2000s they offered the community download no questions asked, but they don't any more). You make a polite request on their website , part of which I think is some vetting required for US export customers, not so different to downloading some of the embedded tools from Texas Instruments but still, it's some friction. I was allowed access to the download links (which were emailed to me) after 24 hours. It...it hurts to be dead? The download isn't an installer exactly,...

Can I make this switch? Part of this post was motivated by frustration - I have an ancient (as of 2021) Sony Vaio E 11" notebook that became unusable with the later versions of Windows 10. This isn't surprising, it's specifications are a little short of modern expectations. Since I don't use it for development and I can access Microsoft Office 365 over the web I was free to throw Debian Buster on it. It's a fine little machine and Debian sparked it right back up to the performance it had when I bought it. Background Normally for development I have two machines - in my study is an Acer Nitro 5, with two SSDs, a big external monitor, 32gb of memory and an Intel Core i7 processor. It's easily the fastest thing I have ever owned. Running on here is Windows 10 Pro, Android Studio, Visual Studio (for .NET core development), Docker Desktop using WSL2, Texas Instruments Code composer studio for embedded development and Heidi SQL for database maintenance. Ups...