Fladi.at

There is this bug filed against Eclipse: #319514

Photo by James JordanAt first it looks like a stupid thing for Eclipse to look at a property defined in the java.exe file to determine the vendor. A lot of people are currently complaining that Eclipse should use the java.vendor and java.vm.vendor properties available from within the running JVM.

But, wait a second: once the JVM is already running, it’s no longer possible to set the necessary MaxPermSize start-up parameter to the JVM. So, in order to identify to JVM vendor there are only the java.exe properties left. This brings it down to a typical chicken-or-egg problem.

For *nix installations of Eclipse this has no impact because all start-up parameters are read from a single eclipse.ini file, regardless of the type of JVM used.

On Sunday, August 22nd 2010 there will be a outage of the mailsystem from 13:00 to 17:00. The reason is the installation of a new SMTP system. I ‘am migrating from Courier-MTA to Exim4, ultimately bringing some new features to the mail system like Sieve, greylisting and two-stage-spamassassin-checks.

Downtime is intended to be kept at a minimum and retrieval of mails through IMAP/Webmail will be unaffected. Incoming and outgoing mails will be delayed though.

Some pictures of me taking a flight in a gyrocopter near Weiz/Austria.

Behold the hilarious result of my latest attempt to install Windows7 x86_64:

It’s clearly superior to Vista!

I wanted to upgrade the BIOS of my desktop at work which is a Dell OptiPlex 960. Dell provides some minor help on flashing a new BIOS version under GNU/Linux but as of today it’s outdated and unusable. Sadly they do not provide images for use with flashrom either, so one is stuck with their crappy .EXE files.

The OptiPlex 960 does no longer have a floppy drive (which is a good one … Floppy is dead) so I had to come up with another way to boot a FreeDOS environment where I could run the .EXE provided by Dell.

I’m running GRUB2 so I’ll use a method to automatically add images in the /boot/images/ folder to the boot-loader menu and run them.

I started by creating a suitable large file of let’s say 10MB which has to reside in a separate folder on the partition GRUB2 uses for boot, usually /boot/:
mkdir /boot/images/
dd if=/dev/zero of=/boot/images/freedos.img bs=1M count=10

Now the image need to be made accessible as a loopback block-device:
losetup -f /boot/images/freedos.img

If you have no other loopback devices active you should have the image set up as /dev/loop0.
Now we need to download some boot-strapping files for our new FreeDOS environment and extract them:
mkdir /tmp/freedos/
cd /tmp/freedos/
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/commandx.zip
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/kernels.zip
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/substx.zip
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/unstablx.zip
for ZIP in *.zip; do unzip $ZIP; done

Next we create the filesystem for our new boot image and populate it with a FreeDOS system:
mkdir /tmp/fs-root/
cp ./bin/command.com /tmp/fs-root/
cp ./bin/kernel.sys  /tmp/fs-root/
cp <path/to/bios/upgrade.EXE> /tmp/fs-root/

Call makebootfat to write the boot-straping sector and populate the image:
makebootfat -o /dev/loop0 -E 255 \
-1 /tmp/freedos/source/ukernel/boot/fat12.bin \
-2 /tmp/freedos/source/ukernel/boot/fat16.bin \
-3 /tmp/freedos/source/ukernel/boot/fat32lba.bin \
-m /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin /tmp/fs-root/

Afterwards we can remove the loopback device:
losetup -d /dev/loop0

To boot the image you need the memdisk loader from syslinux present at /boot/ so it can load the image at boot time:
cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/

That’s it, the image should be ready for action. We just need to configure GRUB2 to automatically detect images in /boot/images/. Just copy the file from my Subversion repository and place it in /etc/grub.d/ and run `update-grub2`.
This should output something like this:
Found memdisk: /memdisk
Found floppy image: /images/freedos.img

Now reboot your machine and select the “freedos” option in the GRUB2 selection. Wait for the C: prompt and start upgrading your BIOS by running the .EXE provided by Dell.