Boot-Repair (other uses/ramblings)

Boot-Repair (other uses/ramblings)

I installed boot-repair on my new to my i5 ubuntu 16.04 LTS system so I could keep the generations of kernels installed limited (see my earlier but related post here: using boot-repair to keep installed kernels trimmed ). Tonight I had an epiphany (of sorts). I thought I should try this on my crouton chroot on my HP pavilion chromebook (butterfly) system and see what it produces in terms of system info that might prove useful. Besides this system has a fairly large but still limited amount of SSD storage after I expanded it to 128GB internal drive a while back. I've been running and upgrading the kernels on it for about three years so it definitely has built up a list of useless old kernel cruft that needs to be trimmed right?

Hmm, maybe not I found no grub entries for upgraded kernels on the crouton run boot-repair (Create Bootinfo Summary). Apparently and not surprisingly the chromeos does not use the grub bootloader to do it's magic. After browsing the crouton synaptic list of "kernel*" entries I was able to find and remove the accumulated cruft. Interestingly it does not include the actual kernels just the two header deb files are installed. I found and removed about ten of those guys in synaptic which seemed to work even though it barfed up what looked like a few errors in the console while it was removing the modules. Here is the launch dialog that was shown by synaptic:

I recovered about 340MB if the dialog above is to be believed. I did not do a before and after df so sadly I will never know the truth. Next time I upgrade the chroot I may do this exercise again and I will confirm savings via df during any such future exercise.  Even though I am a command line kind of guy and was disappointed not to be able to use the concise and easy way to remove the list of modules without dredging through miles of gui pages of kernel-* candidates in synaptic. I did not come up empty handed in this exercise...  I was pleasantly surprised with some other useful information that I was unaware of on my chromebook like how to change the chronos password for example. I am keeping copies of my Bootinfo Summary pages for both my machines on a thumb drive for future possible emergency use if my boot configurations melt down somehow.

In that earlier post I neglected to give a link to how to install the boot-repair facility. This link points to an official ubuntu how to page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

• Note that I do NOT advocate actually using the boot-repair software's first button to actually attempt boot repair on a chromebook with or without crouton installed. It is great for linux computers but not sure what it might do to a chromebook boot configuration.

Postscript:

Okay I updated my chroot and it installed another set of headers: 105. So I ran the synaptic driven removal of the lowest one left installed last time and here are the results:

Here is the result of the df before and after....

# df -hm /usr

Filesystem                                          1M-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on

/mnt/stateful_partition/crouton/chroots/precise.pws    113999 66083     42119  62% /

# df -hm /usr

Filesystem                                          1M-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on

/mnt/stateful_partition/crouton/chroots/precise.pws    113999 65849     42353  61% /

                                                                                  --------

                                                                                  234MB

I think any reasonable person will agree that you don't want to just ignore these as they continue to build up over time on a machine with limited storage. Also it is pretty obvious you can't trust the synaptic dialog to give you the actual picture can you? I look at all gui software with a pretty jaundiced eye because I have to work with such tools all the time while working on gui software systems and I find that the trustworthiness of gui software in general is, in a word, atrocious at best.

Post Postscript:

Just running the Boot-repair bootinfo summary page generation seems to have corrupted this file and I had to restore it from my other system to get the apt based stuff to work again: /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99synaptic

So I recommend not doing this on a chromebook. If anybody is interested I may post the content of the bootinfo summary I generated.

My nomination for worst rest area ever built....

Mile marker #162 I-10 Florida

Here is the google earth shot of this trap...

A word of warning, if you are returning to points west of Florida after a vacation in South Florida late at night, do yourself a favor... DO NOT EXIT AT THIS REST AREA!!!

At night it is very easy to miss the fact that you are crossing over the interstate you have just exited. The negative elevation of the interstate and the heavy forestation of the surrounding terrain very effectively conceals the reality of what is happening at that east bound exit. Therefore the odds are not in your favor of resuming your journey in the right direction.

The first of two easily missed signs from street view image shot in daylight of course...

Notice how far away from the pavement the idiots have place the sign!!!   Bear in mind that it is pitch black at night here!!! RIDICULOUS

It is so bad that even Google maps does not correctly track all the pavement...

Oddly, the street view overview DOES have all the pavement (and even some of the paved walks)....

Our Tom-tom (GPS) reported "unknown road" or something like that while we were in the parking area. I used dividers and the map scale and established it is approximately 1.5 miles from the point you exit WB I-10 to the parking area we stopped at, again, RIDICULOUS!!!! There are eight separate curves to negotiate before you can even see the facilities... very disorienting. It was sorta like an episode of the Twilight Zone after we realized we where going east again.

Most of it is not lighted at all and the parking is poorly designed... you have to walk great distances to get to the facilities. The signage is TERRIBLE. In our case we drove about 25 extra miles out of our way because the signs are INADEQUATE. There was a car off the pavement being attended to by emergency responders as we were trying to negotiate the resumption of travel which of course did not help. Hopefully the designer of this travesty is retired and no longer being paid to create more motorist traps like this mess. 

OR designer screen shot

New remote UI tweaks

I rearranged the buttons on the main panel to make it more usable. I removed a few old unused buttons to allow the music and ads buttons to be better described with some custom buttons I designed. Also add the roku >> (forward) button to be accessed in a convenient place on the main panel now for skipping undesired music tracks when using Roku fill music while watching the ever annoying commercial TV ads. This allowed more room at the screen bottom to come up with a more pleasing arrangement of the main AVR volume keys and the two keys for toggling to either the cinema or music profiles on the AVR.

Revised buttons are now labeled "TV Audio" and "Roku Audio" respectively so as not to be confused with existing "Music" button in the same screen panel section. "TV Audio" reverts to the regular cable TV audio. Only downside is we have to manually mute the actual TV Audio when listening to the Roku Audio channel since the TV will still only receive the cable tv audio input. I may change the semantics of the Roku Audio button to mute the TV audio channel and the "TV audio" button to unmute the same to resume normal TV listening. My AVR tends to overheat or overload and the circuit protection kicks in which disables the AVR outputs completely during loud sequences in audio content (gunfights and action movie explosions etc). We have resorted to using the built in TV speakers more since revamping the system with the new cabinet and Vizio TV (sigh). I may be installing dedicated cooling fan to address the overheating issues with the new cabinet.

More remote UI tweaks

Yesterday I made a few additional tweaks for ergonomics of my openremote webconsole panels. Primarily was moving stuff around to make accidental key presses of roku reboot key and the main return of the roku remote control less likely to ever happen. These keys now have more white space around them. Important especially on my 7" nexus tablet which serves as my primary remote panel. Here are the affected screen shots below....

The reboot key now powers off the AVR which now powers both a switched fan and the roku power supply. It pauses for five seconds and then powers the AVR back on which in turn powers up the fan and the roku via an extension cord on the switch outlet on the back of the Sony AVR. Works like a charm.  I gave up on the infra-red reboot sequence as it was completely unreliable.  See earlier entry: http://timbocephus.blogspot.com/2015/12/rebooting-roku-made-easy.html 

My only regret is the final panels design, the cute little roku remote tag is partially obscured by the panel indicator (the four white/grey dots at the bottom that indicates which panel of the current set you are displaying). I should have made the black segment shorter to pull the tag up above the panel indicator dots. Alas there is a bug in the graphic file indexing of the open remote designer which renders the 112 buttons on the three greyed out panels randomized. Not sure what triggers it but when it happens the only cure is delete the panels and start over from empty panel templates which means laboriously reassigned all 112 button commands and graphics on those three panels. I've already been through this fire drill a couple times (or ten) and I think this is good enough for now.

Revised remote control to have full DVD control access

I've added buttons to give access to a new DVD control panel to the main screen. I created space for these by moving the music/ads buttons to the bottom of the main panel. This allowed me to have all four input mode buttons tightly grouped at the top of the screen as you see below. Only down side was I was not able to have the DVD control panel transition button on the right gutter like the other three (Roku, Cable, TV). It is in the second column just to the left of the DVD input transition button (looks like a DVD icon on a black field). 

Here is the new DVD control panel. Acess via  large "DVD" button in the second column of buttons.

Note: As usual though I've stuck with the return button being at the exact same coordinates on the 2nd level panel and with the word "Main" on it.

wf2ir blaster device

Business end of wireless remote control system for my home entertainment system...