Low cost Intel Bay Trail mini PCs such as Pipo X7, MeegoPad T01, MeLE PCG03, etc… almost all share one thing in common: they lack an IR receiver, and for people who’d like to use their box as a dedicated HTPC running Kodi for example, this could be a problem as connecting a keyboard might not the best of solutions. Since I’ve been asked about this recently, I’ve decided to dig into the issue to see what options could be available, and I also hope to trigger a discussion in comments to discover other interesting solutions. RF Air Mouse I’m using MeLE F10 Deluxe air mouse during my reviews, and such device can be used with HTPC. You just need to connect a tiny USB RF dongle to one of the USB ports of your mini PC, and you’d ready to go with having to configure anything. In Kodi, you […]
How to Program STMicro STM8S $1 Board in Linux
In January, I discovered there was such thing as a one dollar development board based on STMicro STM8S103F3P6 8-bit MCU with 1KB SRAM, 8KB flash, and 640 bytes EEPROM, some GPIOs as well as I2C, UART, SPI, ADC, and PWM signals. Links to documentation and source code were provided, but development tools were only Windows based. However, one of my reader informed me SDCC (Small Devices C Compiler) supported STM8, and development in Linux should be feasible. So I decided to buy the board on eBay for $1.62, as well as an ST_link V2 programmer for STM8 / STM32 for $4.52 in order to flash the firmware. The board came pretty quickly, i.e. within 2 to 3 weeks. But due to a lost package, the programmer took nearly 3 months to reach me, as the seller had to re-send after I failed to receive it within 2 months. It comes […]
How to Compare Systems Benchmarked with Phoronix Test Suite
Phoronix Test Suite is an open source benchmark for Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows & BSD operating systems, but in practice it’s mostly used for Linux OS since other benchmarks solutions are available in Windows, while choices are more limited in Linux. There are many benchmarks to choose from, and you can select the ones you want by running a “batch-benchmarks” from the command line. I’ve done so when testing performance of ODROID-XU3 Lite and Cubieboard4 boards in Ubuntu, and once the tests are completed, the results will be automatically uploaded to openbenchmarking.org. From there, it’s quite easy to compare recent results as you’ll get an “add to comparison” option on the site, and you can pick a few results. You can select a few systems, and then click on “Compare Results” to get a side-by-side comparison. If you want to compare your system to an existing system, you […]
How to Easily Install Popular Add-ons in Kodi
You can use Kodi to watch videos locally, but various add-ons can be installed to also access videos online, but finding and installing add-ons might be a pain if you don’t know where to start. TVaddons.co, previously known as XBMCHUB, is providing add-ons allowing to do just that, more or less legally [Update: You may want to read comments for details about the legality of these add-ons], as well as a method to install a bunch of popular add-ons in a few clicks. These add-ons are completely unrelated to Kodi project, and have been developed and maintained by third parties. The installation requires Fusion Installer and Config Wizard with detailed instructions available there with every screenshot, which makes it more complicated than it really is, but it can be summarized as follows: Go to System->File Manager, and click Add source You’ll get the following pop-up window, where you need to […]
Xiaomi Mi Box Mini Review
After showing pictures of Xiami Mi Box Mini, it’s now time for a “review”, but a bit different from my other reviews, as Xiaomi tiny media player is much different. First the firmware is in Chinese only, and there’s only one external port HDMI output. So first I’ll show the user interface is Chinese, then explain how you can install your own Android apps, and finally run some benchmark to evaluates Mediatek MT8568, Wi-Fi and storage performance. Xiaomi Mi Box Mini Setup and Chinese User Interface The device is super small, but in my case it was almost too big, as it takes enough space to potentially cause problems with the adjacent plug. This little issue will of course depend on your power extension. You then need to connect the 1.5 meter HDMI cable, which should be long enough for most setups, and you’ll see some guide asking you to […]
Cubieboard 4 Ubuntu Review – Setup, Usability, and Performance
Cubieboard4 is a development board powered by Allwinner A80 octa-core processor with 2GB RAM and 16GB eMMC. I’ve already shown how to get started with the board using the pre-installed Android 4.4 image, and run some benchmarks in Android, so now it’s time to check out the Ubuntu Linaro 14.04 image provided by CubieTech. I’ll show how to install and setup Ubuntu 14.04 on the board using a micro SD card, run desktop applications like Chromium, Libre Office, and son on on the board, and complete the review with some Linux benchmarks. Setting up Ubuntu on Cubieboard4 Firmware images for Cubiebord4 can be downloaded @ http://dl.cubieboard.org/model/cc-a80/Image/. Currently Android 4.4, Debian server, Ubuntu Linaro server, and Ubuntu Linaro desktop with LXDE desktop environment. That’s the latter I’ll use for the experiment, and two images are available: linaro-desktop-cb4-card-hdmi-v0.4.img.7z – Bootable image from micro SD card linaro-desktop-cb4-emmc-hdmi-v0.4.img.7z – Installation image to eMMC to […]
How to Read OpenOffice / LibreOffice Files from the Command Line
Let’s say you have edited a file in LibreOffice Writer, but later you access your computer remotely via SSH for example. You don’t really want to bother copying the file to your current machine, and rather just quickly check its content in the terminal. Is there a way? Since odt files are just some zip files containing XML files, you could manually decompress the file, and open XML files, but there is a more convenient the program is called odt2txt. On an Ubuntu / Debian machine it can be installed with:
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sudo apt-get install odt2txt |
For basic usage, you just need to pass the filename as parameter:
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odt2txt test.odt This is a test |
But there are also a few more options:
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odt2txt odt2txt 0.4 Converts an OpenDocument or OpenOffice.org XML File to raw text. Syntax: odt2txt [options] filename Options: --raw Print raw XML --encoding=X Do not try to autodetect the terminal encoding, but convert the document to encoding X unconditionally To find out, which terminal encoding will be used in auto mode, use --encoding=show --width=X Wrap text lines after X characters. Default: 65. If set to -1 then no lines will be broken --output=file Write output to file, instead of STDOUT --subst=X Select which non-ascii characters shall be replaced by ascii look-a-likes: --subst=all Substitute all characters for which substitutions are known --subst=some Substitute all characters which the output charset does not contain This is the default --subst=none Substitute no characters --version Show version and copyright information |
This also wrote with ods (spreadsheets) and odp (presentations) files with ods2txt and odp2txt which are just symlinks pointing to the same program as odt2txt, namely odt2txt.odt2txt. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as […]
How to Install Ubuntu 14.04 on Acer Aspire E5 Laptop
I’ve been owning an Acer Aspire One D255E netbook with a 10″ display, an Intel Atom N455 processor and 1GB RAM that served me well during my travels, but as I’ve become older and less patient, I felt I needed to upgrade it. I planned to spend around 10,000 Baht (~$300), wanted a 14″ display, one of the low power CPU such as Intel Bay Trail-M or AMD Mullins / Beema processors, at least 500GB storage, 4GB RAM, and the ability to install Ubuntu. Finally, after going through several products at my local shop, I had to chose between Acer Aspire E5-411-P3CL with a 7.5W TDP Intel Atom N3540 and Acer Aspire E5-421G-45L0 with a 15W TDP AMD A4-6210 processor that both sell for 11,900 Baht ($365). Despite my preference for processor with lower TDP, I still went with the AMD system, since the performance is a little better, the […]