Tux

Qubes OS: Connect to Wi-Fi or Ethernet or another network 1

 in GNU/Linux  tagged Dom0 / ethernet / network / qubes / qubes-os / sys-net / wi-fi / wifi by

A couple of days ago we decided to give Qubes OS a go and see what it could do for a regular user. The installation was easy as it uses the same installer as Fedora, so we just created a live USB and formatted a laptop that had built in Wi-Fi.

To our surprise, we could not figure out how to change the network settings and activate an internet connection! Going to the NetworkManager (nm), even with root, would show us all fields as disabled when trying to create any new connection!

Some time passed before we realized that the NetworkManager of XFCE4 was not the way to go. After inspecting the Virtual Machines on the Qubes VM Manager, we saw that the sys-net VM was the only one that had in its hardware settings to access the Ethernet and Wi-Fi modules. So we got the hint, we needed to modify sys-net in order to connect the entire OS with its VMs to the network.

To modify the settings of the sys-net VM we needed access to the Settings Application, which was not available in the application menu. So the first thing we did, was to use the sys-net: Add more shortcuts... option under the group ServiceVM: sys-net to enable the Settings application shortcut.

In the [Dom0] Settings: sys-net window, we went to the Applications tab, on the left list we scrolled down to find the Settings option.

After selecting the Settings option, we clicked on the > button to move the Settings option to the right list.

Then we clicked on the OK button to apply the changes.

Going back to the application menu and the group ServiceVM: sys-net we could see the new option for sys-net: Settings.

Clicking on the sys-net: Settings showed us the usual settings manager for Gnome.

From there on, our job was easy, we just clicked on the Network option that gave us the window to modify all network settings. Then we selected the Wi-Fi network that we wanted to connect to, which worked without a hitch!

Finally, we had to test if the configuration was working as expected. From the application menu, under the group Domain: personal, we selected the option personal: Firefox to start the Firefox application on the personal VM.

Once Firefox started we could see that internet connection was active and everything was working as expected!

Fedora Configure Hardware Acceleration for the Android Emulator 1

 in Android  tagged acceleration / Android Studio / emulator / fedora / hardware / KVM / kvm_amd / kvm_intel / qemu by

While setting up Android Studio on a Fedora 27 x64, we got the following message from the Android Studio Setup Wizard:

We have detected that your system can run the Android emulator in an accelerated performance mode.
Linux-based systems support virtual machine acceleration through the KVM (Kernel-mode Virtual Machine) software package.

Search for install instructions for your particular Linux configuration (Android KVM Linux Installation) that KVM is enabled for faster Android emulator performance.

After going through the website mentioned in the message we noticed that there were no instructions for Fedora so we decided to write our own.

Below are the steps we followed to enable hardware acceleration for the Android emulator.

Step 1: Verify that your CPU has virtualization extensions.

Execute the following in a terminal:


egrep '^flags.*(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo;

if you get ANY output then it would mean that your CPU supports either VMX or SVM which is good.
If it does not print anything then the emulator will fall back to software virtualization, which is extremely slow.

Step 2: Install the virtualization packages


sudo dnf group install --with-optional virtualization;

Step 3: Start the service


sudo systemctl start libvirtd;

Step 4: Automatically start the service on boot:


sudo systemctl enable libvirtd;

Step 5: Verify that the kvm kernel modules were loaded


lsmod | grep kvm

If the above command does not print kvm_intel or kvm_amd, it would mean that KVM is not properly configured.

Compiling openbts-umts on Ubuntu 15.04

 in Applications  tagged openbts-umts / ubuntu by

Below are the steps we followed to compile OpenBTS-UMTS on Ubuntu 15.04.
There could be a chance that we installed a couple of extra system packages while troubleshooting the installation but it works and we did not include some heavy system service as well so it should be OK.


sudo apt-get install build-essential libuhd autoconf libtool libdevel libzmq-dev libzmq libzmq-dev libzmq-dev libosip2-dev libortp-dev libusb-dev libusb-1.0 libtool-bin libsqlite3-dev libboost-dev libreadline-dev;
git clone https://github.com/RangeNetworks/OpenBTS-UMTS;
cd OpenBTS-UMTS/;
git submodule init;
git submodule update;
#First we need to setup ASN1C compiler
tar -xf asn1c-0.9.23.tar.gz;
cd vlm-asn1c-0959ffb/;
./configure;
make;
make check;
sudo make install;
cd ..;
#Finally, we can proceed with compiling openbts-umts
./autogen.sh;
./configure;
make;
sudo make install;

Perform diff on two folders

 in Bash  tagged diff / recursion by

To perform a recursive diff on all the files of two folders we just need to add the -r (or --recursive) parameter that recursively compares any subdirectories found.

To avoid needless messages from the tool, we can also use the -q (or --brief) parameter that reports only when files differ.

Example of performing diff on two folders recursively while preventing needless messages.


diff -rq aFolder someOtherFolder;