Linux, BSD, Servers and Computer Hardware Articles
First time this has happened to me, but running the FireFox Nightly (which came on NetBSD 11 BETA) I noticed my TrackPoint \ middle mouse scrolling was reversed. I think they might call this “natural scrolling”… anyway, to fix it simply go to about:config in the title bar and search for mousewheel.
I for one am definitely looking forward to FreeBSD 15 RELEASE! 14.3 brought strong improvements, and things can only get better. Going to be putting it on my X1 Carbon Gen 3 soon, but for now I figured I’d try it on a spare machine. Nice to see it got going with hardly any effort on this 15+ year old machine! Just had to do a bit of manual X.Org config tweaking…
For a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM in 2025, it runs surprisingly well. I’m posting from this machine right now 🙂
I recently picked up a used Thinkpad T420. While I could boot it up, use it, install another OS and all that there were some settings locked out.
There is apparently an option for a regular CMOS password, and a “supervisor” password. Hitting enter got me in with limited access, but I couldn’t do things like turning hardware virtualization on or off… among other things.
If you’re like me, maybe you’re thinking: Hey, just unplug the coincell for a few minutes!
Well that doesn’t work. Fortunately though, there is an easy enough hack. Remove the screw for the RAM door on the bottom of the machine, then use a credit card or blade to nudge the keyboard up from the palm rest. Carefully keep the keyboard connected, but place it sideways out of the way. We need to short a couple pins below where the CMOS coin cell battery connection is on the main board.
Now, lets zoom-in on the actual area where we need to short two points… Tweezers will work well for this purpose.
Now, inside that area where we have the orange box… We need to short the upper left corner to the middle right (center row) pad. This should make things totally clear:
So, this is what to do… Keep either the AC supply, or battery attached to the machine and boot it up.
When you boot it up, hit the blue ThinkVantage button and QUICKLY use your tweezers to short those two points together for a second. If successful, you’ll see the following message.
“Data access error” sounds bad, right? Well in this case, such an error indicates success. Yeah, and you don’t stop ‘Cause it’s 1-8-7 on a undercover tsop! Well, SPI, but that wouldn’t rhyme…
Once you get into the BIOS (press F1), be sure to disable all passwords or set them to blank and then save.
That’s it! Worked perfectly on my Thinkpad T420. I found this method via a YouTube video, his pictures were not so clear though. Hopefully this will help my fellow Thinkpad enthusiasts!
Earlier today I stopped by a local Goodwill to see what they had in the way of electronics. Among the digital photo frames and old keyboards, I spotted two routers. I’m always on the lookout for hardware that can run Linux. One of the routers was a Netgear WNDR3700 v4. It was in its original box with the power adapter and a couple of patch cords.
Normally I’d pull out my phone and check OpenWrt support before buying, but this one looked old enough that I figured there was at least a 50/50 chance it would be an easy convert. I’m glad I grabbed it; Not only is this model supported, but flashing OpenWrt is about as painless as it gets.
Flashing with OpenWrt — No UART, no TFTP, no drama.
http://192.168.1.1/ in your web browser. Log in with:192.168.1.1 again.This 2012-era router is now running a fully up-to-date Linux distribution.
In My Case…
I reconfigured mine to serve as a simple gigabit switch:
br-lan) to DHCP client so it picks up an IP from my main network.WNDR3700 v4 Hardware
CPU / SoC: Atheros AR9344 @ 560 MHz
RAM / Flash: 128 MB RAM / ~128 MB flash
Wireless: Dual-band 2.4 GHz + 5 GHz, 802.11n (N600)
Ethernet: 1× Gigabit WAN, 4× Gigabit LAN
USB: 1× USB 2.0 “ReadySHARE” port
What Can You Do With It?
Plenty. This hardware can easily run the latest OpenWrt without feeling sluggish. The USB port opens up even more possibilities:
With OpenWrt, you’re only limited by your time and imagination.
Why Bother?
Netgear’s last firmware for this model came out in 2018. That’s seven years without security updates. OpenWrt gives you:
All on hardware that cost me four bucks at a thrift store.
OpenWrt Support History for the WNDR3700
This combination of long-term support, open-friendly hardware, and GUI-based flashing makes the WNDR3700 v4 one of the easiest budget OpenWrt targets you can find.
NETGEAR WNDR3700 on OpenWRT Wiki / TOH
OpenWRT Version 24.10 Factory Image for WNDR3700 V4 – Direct Link
Preparation: You’ll need to install some tools and dependencies required by the build process. On Fedora you’ll want to run the following:
sudo dnf install gcc make ncurses-devel bc openssl-devel elfutils-libelf-devel rpmdevtools fedpkg rpm-build
sudo dnf builddep kernel
Getting the Kernel source tarball
Head over to https://kernel.org and download your branch of choice. I’d recommend the latest Stable tarball.
wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.15.9.tar.xz
tar -xf linux-6.15.9.tar.xz
cd linux-6.15.9
Copy your current defconfig
We’ll copy the running kernel’s configuration into our source tree…
cp /boot/config-$(uname -r) .config
make oldconfig
You should see some output, ending with “configuration written to .config”.
The easiest way to set our flags is to simply export them in our current shell before proceeding to run make. I did the following for my AMD Ryzen 5800XT:
export KCFLAGS=’-march=znver3 -O3′
export KCPPFLAGS=’-march=znver3 -O3′
You can do march=native if you’re not sure exactly what to use for your specific CPU. Only do znver3 if you’ve got a Zen 3 chip!
Then build.*
make -j$(nproc)
* If you’d like, make additional makefile edits before running make. Or, make menuconfig if you’d like to browse through available options. But, be careful… It gets pretty technical! Simply by following the instructions above you’ll end up with a Kernel which is newer than what you’ve got, better optimized, and smaller. Basically, better in all ways. All without having to make any questionable changes on your own… But of course, feel free to explore the available options! Keep in mind, always keep a known-good stable kernel in your grub configuration in case you make a mistake!
Your kernel will take some time to compile. Anywhere from several minutes to a couple of hours, depending on how powerful your processor is and how many modules must be built. Higher optimization levels typically will take more time as well; the standard level is O2, we’re doing O3. Performance is generally better but the initial build will take a bit longer.
When the compilation is finished:
sudo make modules_install
sudo make install
This will install the kernel modules to /lib/modules/6.15.9/ (in this case). These are drivers and kernel features compiled as =m; they’re loadable instead of built directly into the kernel. Make install will install the compiled image to /boot. In this case /boot/vmlinuz-6.15.9.
We can verify our new image is Grub’s default by running:
sudo grubby –default-kernel
We should see “/boot/vmlinuz-6.15.9”.
Reboot into your new optimized kernel!
Finally decided to retire the Haswell system I’ve been using, and ordered up some AM4 goodies during the recent Prime Day sale. I grabbed an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (8-core, 16-thread), 32 GB of DDR4-3600, and the Gigabyte AORUS Elite AX (Rev 1.3) motherboard. The CPU was the main draw — it was only $130! The board was on sale for $90 (currently $149.99 on Amazon).
Thus far I am happy with this motherboard. It doesn’t give me the same vibe of Gigabyte superior value which I got back in the day from the likes of the classics — GA-EP45-UD3P comes to mind! — but, for under $100 it seems quite adequate.
The included WiFi leaves much to be desired though… Maybe it works fine on Windows?? On Linux, I was only seeing 2 bars and maybe 300 – 400 Mbps.
The solution? Grab yourself an AX210.
Intel wireless cards have excellent support on Linux and BSD alike. For just $20–$30 online, you can replace the built-in Realtek card. It takes about half a dozen screws to open the board and swap the M.2 module. I highly recommend tweezers for disconnecting and reattaching the tiny U.FL antenna connectors.
Where’s the Wi-Fi module located?
My pings are now way, better. Night and day. And the speed is a solid 100 Mbps better, or more. See for yourself!
I’ve been using apt-cacher-ng for a few months now. For those who don’t know, this is a service you can run locally which will proxy apt requests from your network clients. This way, each time a package or update is requested there will be a copy retained in the cache. Upon each subsequent request for the same file(s), the local copy can be served instead. This saves bandwidth, and offers a speed advantage since you’ll likely be getting full GB ethernet line speed on your LAN. Read more about ACNG here.
While several local machines and VMs have no issues using my local ACNG proxy, the server actually hosting ACNG itself seemed to be giving errors when doing an apt update.
You’ll likely see the warnings “503 Server reports unexpected range” as well as “Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.”
Basically, because the machine is trying to proxy through itself, some kind of problem occurs. Now, the simple solution is to just point to the normal Debian mirrors directly. That however wouldn’t offer the benefit of our local cache! The more boxes / VMs pulling for it, the more value you’re getting out of the whole setup… So here’s how we resolve this issue.
Write a text file to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00acng and place the following lines inside:
Acquire::http::Proxy::localhost “DIRECT”;
Acquire::http::Proxy::127.0.0.1 “DIRECT”;
Acquire::http::Proxy::novo.lan “DIRECT”;
Of course, change “novo.lan” to the hostname of your ACNG host. My sources.list looks like this, hence the hostname used in my example.
deb http://novo.lan:3142/deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://novo.lan:3142/deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb http://novo.lan:3142/security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://novo.lan:3142/security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb http://novo.lan:3142/deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://novo.lan:3142/deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
You may want to add a 4th line, with your actual LAN IP if you’re naming the apt mirror by IP instead.
Here is a bit of KDE software which I was not aware of. It was not included in Debian 11 (Bullseye) — you had to build it from source or use third-party packages… However it was officially packaged starting with Debian 12 (Bookworm) and newer.
Here it is, running it on Kubuntu 25.04:
Excellent little tool for those who don’t want to benchmark disks in the terminal via dd / fio. Nothing wrong with healthy feature parity & easy of use!
I’d like to take a moment to explain a handy feature of htop, a system monitoring and process management tool — basically a text-based “Task Manager,” but far more powerful and flexible. I run it on my desktops, laptops, servers, and occasionally on virtual machines, whether in a graphical session or a terminal-only environment. Below, you’ll see it running on my server, where I’ve configured it to display the frequency of each CPU core, temperatures, total disk I/O, and total network I/O. As you can tell, activity is minimal — not much happening at this early hour, around 7 AM, when both local and internet traffic tend to be quiet.
htop is a brilliant little utility that punches way above its weight. It’s lightweight, packed with functionality, and refreshingly easy to use. Better yet, there are hardly any dependencies required, and it’s so cleanly written that even a novice should have little trouble building it from source, should they desire to do so. Remarkably portable, htop will compile on just about any Linux system, any of the BSD variants, macOS, Solaris and illumos derivatives, Haiku, and Cygwin (Windows). I think you get the point.
One handy but often overlooked feature is that htop can remember your custom display settings. Whether you prefer to see CPU frequencies, temperatures, disk I/O, or network traffic meters — you can tailor your view exactly how you like it.
Once you’ve customized your layout (press F2 in htop to access the Setup menu), simply press capital S (Shift + s) to save your settings. The next time you launch htop, it’ll load up your preferred view automatically.