Monthly Archives: December 2006

Bluetooth GPS on Gentoo

Configuring a Bluetooth GPS receiver on Gentoo was pretty straight forward for me.
This assumes that you already have the bluetooth stack up and running on your Gentoo box.

# emerge -p gpsd

# hcitool scan
Scanning …
00:0B:0D:6E:65:8A iBT-GPS
# sdptool browse 00:0B:0D:6E:65:8A
Browsing 00:0B:0D:6E:65:8A …
Service Name: SPP slave
Service Description: Bluetooth SPP V1.23
Service RecHandle: 0×10000
Service Class ID List:
“Serial Port” (0×1101)
Protocol Descriptor List:
“L2CAP” (0×0100)
“RFCOMM” (0×0003)
Channel: 1
Language Base Attr List:
code_ISO639: 0x656e
encoding: 0x6a
base_offset: 0×100

# rfcomm connect 0 00:0B:0D:6E:65:8A
Connected /dev/rfcomm0 to 00:0B:0D:6E:65:8A on channel 1
Press CTRL-C for hangup

On another terminal, start the gps daemon.

# gpsd /dev/rfcomm0

The fun begins:

# xgps

How to upgrade udev to 103 on Gentoo

I run into some problems when I upgraded udev to version 103 on Gentoo.

In order to have it working I needed to:

emerge -C coldplug
emerge -C hotplug
emerge -C hotplug-base
emerge -C udev

rm -rf /etc/hotplug
rm -rf /etc/hotplug.d
rm -rf /etc/udev
emerge udev
emerge baselayout

etc-update

rc-update del coldplug
rm -f /etc/init.d/coldplug

reboot

See http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml and http://webpages.charter.net/decibelshelp/LinuxHelp_UDEVPrimer.html
for more information about udev.

Linux Kernel 2.6.19 released

For the first time ever, the Linux Kernel includes a stackable file system. The new file system name is eCryptfs and it is based on FiST.

“eCryptfs stores cryptographic metadata in the header of each file written, so that encrypted files can be copied between hosts; the file will be decryptable with the proper key, and there is no need to keep track of any additional information aside from what is already in the encrypted file itself. ”

eCryptfs can make use of the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) using TPM Keyring.