LCD Perl Program, new feature plus cleanups.

[Davesworld]

One of the forum members here, Smartmlp took the lcd-0.8.1-cobalt here and added a text feature that behaves exactly as the Cobalt Panel Utilities /sbin/lcd-write does. Rather than lcd -text  and making sure you have something to fill the 16 characters, the command is lcd "first line" "second line" and any combination of spaces before or after the word will work as long as you do not exceed 16 characters and or spaces per quotation. Beyond what he did, I stripped the ixui and dsl subroutines out of it as well.

One of the benefits of the perl driver versus the Cobalt Panel Utility binaries is that it will allow text to be written very early in the init process whereas the Cobalt lcd-write binary will not text until the last services are being started. Also, with the perl program you can also text all the way down to halt with text telling you when to shut off power or that you are rebooting.

Next I'll likely prune the non working 4 bit functions as they were never completed and never worked as well as the fact that Cobalt lcd's are all 8 bit winamp wired parallel. It's a bit easier to read the file with things pruned out that don't work or are not used.

Still to do, buttons.

[karldonteljames]

Hi there, j ust out of curiousity, have you managed to get the buttons working? also, is 1.4.21 the latest version of raqcop?

Cheers.

Karl

[Davesworld]

Hi there, j ust out of curiousity, have you managed to get the buttons working? also, is 1.4.21 the latest version of raqcop?

Cheers.

Karl

I haven't really tried going further in getting the buttons working nor has anyone shown that much interest in getting them working. SmartMLP helped out a lot with his text rendering improvements. When it comes to an edge security appliance, there is a question as to how much control would be allowed from the buttons if any at all. The stock Cobalt panel utilities had the option to lockout the front panel control.

1.4.21 is the latest non beta version of Raqcop in parallel to IPCop 1.4.21 since Raqcop is an IPCop adaptation to run on Cobalt hardware plus integration of the System Information addon. The minor improvements in -2 and -3 are not in any way related to it's effectiveness as a firewall/router. -2 is where I started using TMPFS (borrowed from IPCop 2.0 Beta) for flash installs rather than stick with IPCop's RD filesystem (TMPFS is superior in a few ways and inferior in none) plus some cleanups in sysinit which only pertain to eliminating bogus errors due to this being a headless device which cannot have pseudo terminals tty1 through tty6 so they are commented out to prevent sysinit from looking for them. Also Brian's Raqcop GUI skin began being offered on -2 flash installs and -3 it was on all builds as well as final cleanups in sysinit to remove the remaining bogus (to a headless device) errors and LCD texting during bootup was cleaned up a bit more and shutdown has text to show what is happening as well as when to shut off the machine.

As far as beta versions which are decidedly much newer than 1.4.21, I upload periodic SVN builds of IPCop 2.0 Beta adapted to run on Cobalts. It's still up in the air as to whether there will be an official Cobalt build from IPCop or not. Should the developers decide not to, then I will offer Raqcop 2.x. Some changes such as the Cobalt Info section of System Information and starting udev at the early part of sysinit if it does not already exist (it would only exist on standard pc's using initrd) are incorporated into the SVN head already and do not need to be done by me on my builds. The latest upload now gives testers the option to run flash raid on the Cobalts with two 512MB or larger flash drives in IDE adapters. The rom supports raid, IPCop 2.0 beta supports RAID so I do now as well. I recommend trying the beta builds on spare Cobalt hardware to start with. 2.0 which is at pre 1.9.19 beta as of now is really starting to shine. Some addons to 1.4 such as System Information (I incorporated it into Raqcop as part of the build as of 1.4.21) and advanced proxy are standard now. The web GUI on 2.0 is much nicer than the stock 1.4.x. For Cobalt builds it would be nice to have Cobalt Blue replace the black with the nice "C" logo in the left part of the header plus something saying, "IPCop For Cobalts" but the gui is pretty and clean as is.

Since it IS possible to change CPU's and run the 3000 series at 600mhz plus use a gig of ram, I see these being useful for years to come, especially replacing blown caps with solid caps if you get bulging and or leaking caps. I often wonder why people try to run 3000 Cobalts as servers rather than edge appliances.