Wednesday, October 30, 2013

fix for message in kernel on wandboard (silences it anyway)

 to get rid of messages about voltage changes

COULD NOT SET SOC VOLTAGE BACK!!!!


echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

http://forums.wandboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=97

Hello There,

I am using 12.04.2 LTS, and I keep getting this error on console "COULD NOT SET SOC VOLTAGE BACK!!!!", it is flooding the logs.

Any idea what it is, and how to stop?

-Yogesh
yogeshj
 
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Oct 03, 2013 6:49 am

Re: Keep getting error on console COULD NOT SET SOC VOLTAGE BACK

Postby Tapani on Thu Oct 03, 2013 9:19 am
An unfortunate "bug" in the kernel. It is not dangerous, just someone at freescale making unexpected behaviour sound worse than it is.

Try changing the scaling governor, that usually makes it quiet:
Code: Select all
echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

Saturday, October 26, 2013

ffmpeg transcode of h.264 and ac3 encoded files to play on more devices

many devices won't play ac3 coded media.  this a discussion of recoding

Its been done, and you don't even need to whitelist your chromecast, you just have to enable 'developer mode' in the Google Cast extension. The guy even made a VLC transcoding option, but I just quickly repackage my files with FFmpeg if needed before playback.http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2398804

I would first use mediainfo to see what your file is already, and check against the list of supported codecs for the Chromecast.
Assuming that you do need to convert, you need to figure out what exactly. For example, a lot of scene(aka pirate) releases that are in MKV are H.264 video(which works just fine on the Chromecast) and AC3 audio(which does not work on the Chromecast). So in a lot of cases, you will just be repacking the audio.
Depending on your FFmpeg, you will have different encoding and decoding libraries. The most surefire way is to just build it yourself - but I think if you're on Ubunut you can install packages for encoders.
But generally, what I do is repack the video(no conversion), and convert the audio to either AAC(preferred), or MP3(a better fallback option if you're using Windows).
I do:

ffmpeg -i <input file> -c:v copy -c:a libfdk_aac <output file>
 
if converting to MP3 audio, you need to specify a specific bitrate:

ffmpeg -i <input file> -c:v copy -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 320k <output file>
 
And lastly, if you video didn't come in H.264 to begin with, go ahead and just re-encode like this:

ffmpeg -i <input file> -c:v libx264 -c:a libfdk_aac <output file>
 
Hope this helps!
Edit: If you convert from a non-H.264 file, the audio may already be in MP3, and then you would only need to convert the video, like so:

ffmpeg -i <input file> -c:v libx264 -c:a copy <output file>
 

chromecast discussion

comment in thread about vlc stream to

It's actually not very hard, since VLC already supports transcoding and streaming to a socket. I found a Java project that was experimenting with it, but I don't have the link available at the moment. I tested it out by running VLC like this:

vlc -Irc --sout="#transcode{vcodec=VP80,vb=1000,width=500,acodec=vorb,ab=128,audio-sync,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:http{mux=webm,dst=:8000/cast.webm}"
 
 
And then told my Chromecast to stream  
http://machine-running-vlc:8000/cast.webm
(you need to write a custom app for that part), and it mostly-worked. I was having problems with video/audio sync, but that might be something I did wrong, I didn't spend very long on it. I imagine once we can release apps somebody will write a simple one that takes a URL and tells the Chromecast to stream it, and that's really all you need

Friday, October 4, 2013

snow leopard on virtual box 4

from:
http://virtualbox-snow-leopard.blogspot.com/

Guide

Prerequisites:
1) VirtualBox 4
2) iBoot and Multibeast.
3) An ISO of Snow Leopard retail version.
4) The DMG of the latest (10.6.6) combo updater.

Instructions:
1) Make a new OSX Server image in Virtualbox, call it "OSX", use all the defaults except make a bigger disk than 20GB - 40GB is a better number.
2) Go to settings and untick the "Enable EFI setting" in the System pane.
3) Mount iBoot.iso and boot from CD drive (you might have to press F12, then 'c').
4) Unmount iBoot, mount Snow Leopard ISO.
5) Press F5, then Enter. It will launch the SL installer.
6) Open Disk Utility. Partition your disk - GUID, Mac OS Journaled. Close Disk Utility. Select the new drive partition you made, and let the install continue.
7) After installation, mount iBoot.iso again and this time choose your new SL installation which will boot.
8) Run the 10.6.6 combo updater, do not allow it to reboot.
9) Run Multibeast, select EasyBeast and the System Utilities. Install it.
10) Unmount the iBoot iso in Virtualbox and reboot into Snow Leopard. iBoot is now no longer required.

Optional Virtualbox settings:
1) Raise the Video memory to 128MB and enable 3D acceleration.
2) Raise the main RAM to 2GB or more if you can spare it.
3) Install the Virtualbox Extension Pack to enable USB device support.

Known issues:
1) "About This Mac" will crash the Finder. System Profiler works properly when invoked directly.
2) Shut down/restart etc. will always kernel panic.
3) There is no choice of resolutions in the Display settings. Use the Virtualbox command line to do e.g. VBoxManage setextradata “OSX” “CustomVideoMode1″ “1600×960×32”
4) Shared Virtualbox folders can't be used due to there being no Virtualbox Guest Additions for Mac (yet?)
5) Sometimes fails to boot and sits on the Apple splash screen spinner forever. Just reset it.
6) Spotlight sometimes hangs, and sometimes has to do a full reindex for no apparent reason.

Links:

http://www.virtualbox.org
http://tonymacx86.com/
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A
http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1349


****************************************
version 2
Prerequisites:
1) Virtualbox 4 with the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack installed.
2) Snow Leopard retail DVD or ISO.

Instructions:
1) Make a new OSX Server image in Virtualbox, call it "OSX", use all the defaults except make a bigger disk than 20GB - 40GB is a better number.
2) Go into the settings.
3) If you have enough RAM, change the RAM to 2048MB, but no more.
4) Change the Video RAM to 64MB, and enable 3D Acceleration.
5) Make sure that the Audio is set to Intel HDA, and make sure that the DVD is ahead of the Hard Disk in the boot device order.
6) In the Storage tab, either mount the Snow Leopard ISO, or direct it to your physical DVD drive with the Snow Leopard disk in it.
7) Quit the Virtualbox manager.
8) Open a command prompt and 'cd' to your Virtualbox install directory (Probably "c:/Program Files/Oracle/Virtualbox".
9) (The following step might not be necessary, or actually do anything. Unconfirmed)... If you are on a 64 bit host type: VboxManage modifyvm "OSX" --firmware efi64
10) Type: VBoxManage setextradata "OSX" VBoxInternal2/EfiGopMode 4
Alternatively use 0, 1, 2 or 3 to set the video resolution according to:
0 - 640x480
1 - 800x600
2 - 1024x768
3 - 1280x1024
4 - 1440x900
11) In a text editor, edit the OSX.vbox file found in ~USERNAME/VirtualBox VMs/OSX/
12) Find the line that says ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal2/EfiGopMode" value="4"/
13) Below this line, paste the following (exactly, all on one line, inside angled quotes as with the other entries*)
ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal2/SmcDeviceKey" value="ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc"/
14) Save the file and close your text editor.
15) Double click on the OSX.vbox file to launch the virtual machine.
16) After a little while, the Snow Leopard installer will start.
17) Open Disk Utility. Partition your disk - GUID, Mac OS Journaled. Close Disk Utility. Select the new drive partition you made, and let the install continue.
18) Optionally customize your install to remove language support, X11 support, printer drivers etc.
19) At the end of installation, it may crash when trying to reboot. In any case, unmount the DVD or ISO before either rebooting or resetting the Virtual machine.
20) Snow Leopard will boot from hard disk, go through the initial setup steps such as choosing timezone.
21) Run Software Update and bring everything up to date.
22) Take a backup of the OSX.vbox file in case Virtualbox manager later makes a change to it that causes your installation not to boot (e.g. removing the SmcDeviceKey line).

After installation (optional, maybe risky):
1) If CPU usage is always 100%, delete /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext and run 'sudo kextcache -system-caches' and reboot.
2) Edit the OSX.vbox file and raise the VRAM to 128MB.
3) If you deleted the kext above, you can add an extra CPU in Virtualbox manager.
4) EpiGopMode 5 is 1920x1200 if you have a big enough monitor.
5) Enable 64 bit Kernel by editing /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist
Change
Kernel Flags

to
Kernel Flags
arch=x86_64

Known issues:
1) Bootup is a verbose textual process rather than the Apple logo and spinner. Seems to be due to '-v' being hardcoded as a boot option in the emulated NVRAM.
2) Shared Virtualbox folders can't be used due to there being no Virtualbox Guest Additions for Mac (yet?)

* Blogspot won't let me enter things that look like raw HTML/XML.

Monday, September 30, 2013

mac os command line tricks

various command line tricks for macos

cpu type

sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string
system_profiler | grep Processor

disk info / mount umount

diskutil list
diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s2
diskutil mount /dev/disk1s2

user control

pkill -u username
ps -u username   

Mountain Lion X system XQuartz
http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

Time machine backup (use on ssh to remote

tmutil startbackup
tmutil stopbackup

shell history incantation

history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head -15

ruby installs utilities / packages







notifier

sudo gem install terminal-notifier

use case

terminal-notifier -message "Hello, this is my message" -title "Message Title"

flags changing

chflags nohidden /path/to/hide/file.txt

download history:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEventsV* 'select LSQuarantineDataURLString from LSQuarantineEvent'

sqlite3 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEventsV* 'select LSQuarantineDataURLString from LSQuarantineEvent' | sort

force time update

sudo ntpdate -u time.apple.com

   

Sunday, September 29, 2013

vmware usb mount esxi5

here is a note on how to mount a usb key or get it recognized by the hypervisor system (esxi system) and not use it to passthru to a guest on the system.

bad news, it only works with FAT16 file systems.

http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/03/how-to-access-usb-storage-in-esxi-shell.html

only USB storage devices formatted with FAT16 can be accessed in the ESXi shell and is applicable to both ESXi 4.1 and 5.0. 

Step 1 - Login to ESXi Shell via SSH and disable the USB Arbitrator service (this is automatically enabled by default to allow pass-through of USB devices to your VMs) using the following command: /etc/init.d/usbarbitrator stop
Step 2 - Plug-in your USB device to your ESXi host and you can verify by using the two ESXCLI commands: verifying the storage device using the command: esxcli storage core device list | grep -i usb or viewing the mounted filesystems using the command: esxcli storage filesystem list
Step 3 - Lastly, after you verify the USB device can be seen by the ESXi host, you can of course browse and access your USB device by looking under /vmfs/volumes/

Te re-enable pass-through of USB devices to your VMs, you just need to start the usbarbitrator service. - See more at: 

http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/03/how-to-access-usb-storage-in-esxi-shell.html#sthash.GBWjrX7X.dpuf


Sunday, September 15, 2013

expired certifications on mac os packages

Apparently Apple leaves up packages with fairly early cert expirations hanging around, and you get mysterious crap problems trying to load them.

I found two approaches. 

One is to set the time on your system to a date when the cert has not expired.  this will be okay if the certs created during install do not also expire.  That approach worked fine for this problem, installing xcode 3.6.2 on 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.

A second approach is to fix the certs.  Two postings from "manageingosx" are copied explaining the problem and a fix.

stackoverflow   fix
------------------
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10002393/instaling-xcode-3-2-5-on-osx-10-6-8-produces-the-error-the-operation-couldnt

11 down vote accepted
I also had the problem installing the downloaded version of XCode 3.2.6 from Apple, checked the log and got the "untrusted" error and found my way here to discover the Package Signature issues. Some of those tools only work on Lion though, and much of this is catch 22 for people as we are using 10.6 and so have to use Xcode 3.2.6...
Anyway, to cut a long story short, change the system date back to Feb 2012 (before the certs expired in March 2012) and then install.... worked fine for me, such a simple solution - far too long to get there though...
EDIT : Sorry, only just clicked though to see your link about the date/time, I went straight to the repackager. If it's okay, I'll leave this here as it gives a direct answer to the question for people like me who have just found this on Google etc

------------------


http://managingosx.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/package-apocalypse/

http://managingosx.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/fixing-packages-with-expired-signatures/


Package Apocalypse

Earlier this week a certificate Apple had used to sign flat packages over the last couple of years or so expired. This caused Apple to have to reissue a lot of update packages. This greatly affected sites running an Apple software update server, either Apple’s flavor, or the open-source Reposado replacement. See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5198 for more info on how this affects Software Update.
This also affects some update packages you might have downloaded from http://support.apple.com/downloads. If they are flat packages, it’s possible they may also be signed with an expired certificate. Such packages can be manually installed – Installer.app will display a warning, but you can choose to ignore the warning and proceed.
But if you have a mechanism that uses Apple’s command-line installer tool, these packages will fail to install. This will affect popular tools like InstaDMG, DeployStudio, Apple’s System Image Utility, and any software distribution mechanism that makes use of the command-line installer tool. Some examples include Munki, Casper, and AbsoluteManage.
Worse, this problem affects at least one software package originally distributed on DVD: iLife ’11. If you’ve imported the packages for iLife ’11 into your software distribution mechanism, they may now fail to install because of the expired certificate.
I am working on a tool to fix affected packages. (UPDATE: see this post.) But in the meantime, if you want to get an idea of how many packages you have that are affected by this issue, you might want to make use of a tool I wrote. It will scan a directory of packages or disk images containing packages and print information on any packages with bad or expired certificates.
Get it here.
The tool relies on a pkgutil option introduced in Lion, so you’ll need to run this on Lion!
An example of checkPackageSignatures.py in use:

./checkPackageSignatures.py /Volumes/LaCie/InstaDMG/pkgs-10.6.8/

/Volumes/LaCie/SIU/Snow Leopard/pkgs-10.6.8/Install iTunes.pkg:
Package "Install iTunes":
Status: signed by a certificate that has since expired
/Volumes/LaCie/SIU/Snow Leopard/pkgs-10.6.8/JavaForMacOSX10.6Update4.pkg:
Package "JavaForMacOSX10.6Update4.pkg":
Status: signed by a certificate that has since expired
/Volumes/LaCie/SIU/Snow Leopard/pkgs-10.6.8/MacOSXUpdCombo10.6.8.pkg:
Package "MacOSXUpdCombo10.6.8.pkg":
Status: signed by a certificate that has since expired

Use this tool to scan any collection of packages you have to see which are affected by this issue. If a replacement package is available from Apple, you should replace it. If there is no replacement, there is hope. Keep checking back here for an update soon.

-----------

Fixing packages with expired signatures

In my previous post, I provided a tool to enable you to check your collection(s) of packages to determine if any are affected by the Package Apocalypse.
But what to do once you’ve found packages with expired signatures? If Apple has provided an updated replacement package at http://support.apple.com/downloads/, it’s probably best to replace the package with the expired signature with the updated one.
But that might not always be possible — Apple has not provided replacements for every package that has been affected, or the replacement might not be practical to use.

For example, the packages included in the iLife ’11 Install DVD have expired signatures. The only “replacement” available would be the Mac App Store versions of the iLife 11 apps. Not all iLife ’11 apps from the DVD have App Store equivalents, and distributing the App Store versions is a whole different set of issues.
So the ideal solution here is to somehow fix the packages with expired signatures so they will work with your software distribution mechanism. It turns out that you can do this with an Apple-provided tool — pkgutil.

pkgutil --expand SomeFlat.pkg /tmp/SomeFlat.pkg
pkgutil --flatten /tmp/SomeFlat.pkg SomeFlatFixed.pkg

Expanding and reflattening a flat package has a side-effect of removing the package signing. the command-line installer tool will happily (at least as of this writing) install unsigned flat packages.
So there you have it — a way to fix packages broken by the Package Apocalypse. But it’s a tedious process. To help, I offer yet another tool — flatpkgfixer.py.
This tool will remove package signing either from a single flat package:

./flatpkgfixer.py /path/to/expired.pkg /path/to/new_fixed.pkg

or can fix up an entire disk image containing packages:

./flatpkgfixer.py /path/to/iLife11.dmg /path/to/iLife11_fixed.dmg

This tool is brand new, and could very well have bugs, but I hope it’s useful to some!