On The Bench – LearnByDoingIT

Solved HDMI not working on Raspberry Pi 3 for Vizio P-Series

There is the theory that the HDMI output of the Raspberry Pi is only initialized if a monitor/television is connected and powered up before a Raspberry Pi 3 is turned on.
Yet when I connect my Raspberry Pi 3 to a old Panasonic Plasma display the Raspberry Pi actually turns on the device and the screen activates every time.
Not so with the Vizio P series I just hung on the wall.

Aside: some of the Panasonic HDMI ports were damaged in a painting disaster…never use a 20lb weight to hold a tarp.

With the Vizio, whether the monitor is on or off and the correct HDMI port is selected or not, the Raspberry Pi 3 simply never brings up HDMI output.

Edit the /boot/config.txt file and uncomment these two lines

#hdmi_force_hotplug=1

#hdmi_drive=2

And the device works every time from every state. The first line is as it appears, the second activates HDMI and enables sound rather than DVI mode which does not.

I did like that the Vizio takes edits the HDMI connection in its table to Raspberry

On The Bench: Google AIY Voice & Raspberry Pi

Setup my recently arrived Google AIY/Voice Project and am busy going about customizing the interface. Short a MicroSD card but Amazon will fix that soon enough.

https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/

Note: Enjoying the Linux nature of Raspberry Pi as well as all the Python tools and use. Clearly a Confluence Project.

On The Bench: DNSMasq as a DNS Forwarder and DHCP Server

I have been pondering DNS resolution on small networks to solve problems that I am having with resolving name requests. I wanted something simple, lightweight, tested, opensource. I have dd-wrt and it uses DNSMasq and I find that will service my DHCPd needs, give me a dynamic naming interface, is well aware of the Windows and Samba naming resolution issues; however, I want my primary server to function in this capacity so I have setup DNSMasq and am testing it.

I will be rolling this solution to my school network where I expect that it will solve a great number of the naming request issues that I experience inside my lab. Sweet to begin getting experience on this commonly deployed solution. Even better to work with something that works with my favorite router software.

Well I am using it already and it does solve my number one problem, that of having a FQDN resolve to the internal address of a machine and not the external address. This feature alone will be a tremendous increase in speed for my students using my Moodle and Student Web servers which are dual-homed.

Ubuntu 11.04: Natty Narwhal In The Shop

Machine A: oldest machine I am using, running Ubuntu 10.10 fine, Final 11.04 won’t run Unity (can’t do OpenGL) and when it goes back to classic mode the menus first don’t display quite correctly and then they disappear completely and flash on and off. Unusable. Installed Fedora Beta, Gnome 3 runs, machine stable, looks pretty, is a Beta but off Ubuntu on this one. Update chime for Fedora is very pretty, I like it.

Machine B: Had same problems on Ubuntu Final Beta as “A” (see above) with Menus and graphic displays. It was my first install of Fedora 15 Beta to play with Gnome 3 and everything is working great. Not going back to Ubuntu on this one as drivers simply don’t seem stable for graphics.

Machine C: newest machine (non-laptop) that I am running. Running Ubuntu 10.10 fine, 11.04 installs, Unity, etc… proprietary drivers pops up quickly and I install the NVidia “recommended” and now Unity won’t work, part of it displays but nothing clicks, works, it simply hangs (with white screen). Machine is dual screen, that configuration was completed on delivered driver and it went fine, but on updated driver I now have a non-operational machine. Assume that small fix by NVidia will make everything nice in a day or two, but it does mean a complete reinstall and one surmises it could have been done prior to this. I may reinstall this one in a few days, although I will check the Fedora release schedule as well.

Overall, I am not going to get into the Gnome 3, KDE 4, or Unity debate on whether upgrades are useful, I will learn, and I suspect enjoy them once I get my system monitor tray add-on working, or find screenlets, or whatever they will be now.

I will say that Ubuntu switching to its own interface and NOT Gnome 3 or KDE 4 is not successful for older machines where it heritage originates. If not on underpowered machines, then what? Mind you, I certainly don’t mind clicking on Classic mode, and it does detect it and switch automatically, but Classic mode simply doesn’t work anymore on these machines.

I will NOT be using Ubuntu on my production equipment, although I will reinstall in on high speed desktop after a few weeks (using Windows until then on this one).

Final Score: 11.04 is a non starter and I assume with complaints over Unity it will be awhile till operational details are filtered out of nonsense of “why doesn’t my computer work like 1968”.

Glasnost: Test if your ISP is shaping your traffic

Glasnost: Test if your ISP is shaping your traffic. I am running this to test if my ISP is shaping my traffic, it uses the Measurement Lab research platform and I found information on it recently that suggests it does what it says. I wonder what my ISP does?

The goal of the Glasnost project is to make ISPs’ traffic shaping policies transparent to their customers. To this end, we designed Glasnost tests that enable you to check whether traffic from your applications is being rate-limited (i.e., throttled) or blocked.

Glasnost tests work by measuring and comparing the performance of different application flows between your host and our measurement servers. The tests can detect traffic shaping in both upstream and downstream directions separately. The tests can also detect whether application flows are shaped based on their port numbers or their packets’ payload. For more details on how Glasnost tests work, please read our NSDI 2010 paper.

We configured our tests to be conservative when declaring the presence of shaping, i.e., passing our tests does not necessarily mean that there is no throttling occurring on your link.