March Meeting

As Debian is a fully free Operating System. This means that if your hardware has any non free firmware, the drivers may not be available during the install. There are several ways round this.

Use the non-free ISO
Create a media that has the drivers available so that the installer can scan and install the appropriate firmware drivers during install. The instructions for this are available here.

Another option is to use hardware that does not contain proprietary firmware. Some links below may be helpful.

Right to repair

Posted on 2021-01-12 by Paul Sutton

The free software foundation have released their latest animated video on the fight to maintain and get back our right to repair.

More information on the FSF website.

Annotating pdf files

Posted on 2021-01-11 by Paul Sutton

PDF files are really useful for moving documents around when you ‘need’ the recipient to be able to open in a pdf reader and see what you intended.

Unless you have access to expensive software you are usually not able to edit these files easily. While LibreOffice draw can perhaps do this, it may not be ideal for the job.

Xournal [1] is a Debian application, that while mostly aimed at touch screens, is able to annotate pdf files as the video below demonstrates.

As mentioned in the video notes, Xournal will export as a **.pdf.pdf file**, so you may want to rename it when saving. This is not even an issue for me.

Happy to discuss further on Mastodon [2] or on IRC. Please see contact page for details.

**References**

1 Xournal
2 Mastodon
3 Alternatives

Originally published 10/1/2020 on Author’s personal blog. Reproduced here by original author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Basic OS development with Visual Studio

Posted on 2021-01-11 by Matthew Lugg

Recently I came across an add-on for Visual Studio 2013 named Cosmos, which lets you use C# or Visual Basic to develop a fully independent OS. I have been working on one now for a couple of weeks. Sadly, Cosmos is still in early development stages, but it is still possible to make basic graphical OS’s. This post uses C#, but it is just as easy to use Visual Basic. My current code is:

Source code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Sys = Cosmos.System;
using Cosmos.Hardware;
using Cosmos.Hardware.BlockDevice;
 
namespace CosmosOS
{
    public class Kernel : Sys.Kernel
    {
        protected override void BeforeRun()
        {
            while (true)
            {
                Run();
            }
        }
 
        protected override void Run()
        {
            string input = Console.ReadLine();
            string input1 = input.ToLower();
            if (input1 == "shutdown" || input1 == "quit" || input1 == "exit") Shutdown();
            else if (input1 == "reboot" || input1 == "restart" || input1 == "reload") Reboot();
 
            else Console.WriteLine("Command \"" + input1 + "\" not recognized!");
        public void Shutdown()
        {
            this.Stop();
            Cosmos.Core.Bootstrap.CPU.Halt();
        }
        public void Reboot()
        {
 
        }
        public static void WriteData(byte[] aData, ulong block)
        {
            if (BlockDevice.Devices.Count &gt; 0)
            {
                for (int i = 0; i &lt; BlockDevice.Devices.Count; i++)
                {
                    var xDevice = BlockDevice.Devices[i];
                    if (xDevice is Partition)
                    {
                        xDevice.WriteBlock(block, 1, aData);
                    }
                }
 
            }
 
        }
        public static byte[] ReadData(ulong block)
        {
            byte[] aData = new byte[] { 1 };
            if (BlockDevice.Devices.Count &gt; 0)
            {
                for (int i = 0; i &lt; BlockDevice.Devices.Count; i++)
                {
                    var xDevice = BlockDevice.Devices[i];
                    if (xDevice is Partition)
                    {
                        aData = xDevice.NewBlockArray(1);
                        xDevice.ReadBlock(block, 1, aData);
                    }
                }
 
            }
            return aData;
        }
    }
}

Lets go over some of this code.

Source code

protected override void BeforeRun()
        {
            while (true)
            {
                Run();
            }
        }

This Run function is looped by default anyway, but it loops slightly faster when this code is put in BeforeRun.

Source code

protected override void Run()
        {
            string input = Console.ReadLine();
            string input1 = input.ToLower();
            if (input1 == "shutdown" || input1 == "quit" || input1 == "exit") Shutdown();
            else if (input1 == "reboot" || input1 == "restart" || input1 == "reload") Reboot();
 
            else Console.WriteLine("Command \"" + input1 + "\" not recognized!");

This is fairly trivial code for a command-line OS, simple input.

Source code

public void Shutdown()
        {
            this.Stop();
            Cosmos.Core.Bootstrap.CPU.Halt();
        }
        public void Reboot()
        {
 
        }

This is my own shutdown code. I have yet to figure out reboot, though.

Source code

public static void WriteData(byte[] aData, ulong block)
        {
            if (BlockDevice.Devices.Count &gt; 0)
            {
                for (int i = 0; i &lt; BlockDevice.Devices.Count; i++)
                {
                    var xDevice = BlockDevice.Devices[i];
                    if (xDevice is Partition)
                    {
                        xDevice.WriteBlock(block, 1, aData);
                    }
                }
 
            }
 
        }
        public static byte[] ReadData(ulong block)
        {
            byte[] aData = new byte[] { 1 };
            if (BlockDevice.Devices.Count &gt; 0)
            {
                for (int i = 0; i &lt; BlockDevice.Devices.Count; i++)
                {
                    var xDevice = BlockDevice.Devices[i];
                    if (xDevice is Partition)
                    {
                        aData = xDevice.NewBlockArray(1);
                        xDevice.ReadBlock(block, 1, aData);
                    }
                }
 
            }
            return aData;
        }

I got this code from a forum and modified it a little to make it work – it writes arrays of bytes to the hard disk. Sadly the built-in FAT fileystem can currently only read files, so you will have to make your own.

This is a fun tool to just play around with, although it is extremely limited at the moment.
http://www.nikeairmaxfreerun.com nike air max thea

Open Street Map

Posted on 2021-01-09 by Paul Sutton

Open Street Map

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.

Open Street Map is a great project that anyone can get involved with, using open data so mapping data can be used freely in accordance with the terms on the website.

Embedded maps are also interactive

View Larger Map

Links

* Open Street Map

#openstreetmap,#data,#mapping,#open,#project

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

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