Plug Tips and Tricks

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Introduction

This page contains some tips, tricks and howto's for the plug distro. Feel free to add your own.

Setting the timezone

The timezone is not set on a new plug install (See #757. To set it manually follow the steps below:

• Login as root or su to root.
• choose from /usr/share/zoneinfo which timezone you want to set your plug to.
• Issue the command rm /etc/localtime; ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam /etc/localtime
• Issue the command hda-php-zone-change "Europe/Amsterdam" to set the timezone for PHP.

Obviously replace Europe/Amsterdam with whatever timezone you want to set the timezone to.

Useful commands

The following useful commands are not installed by default:

• which
• man
• scp
• ssh
• make

To install issue the command:

yum -y install which man openssh-clients make

Advanced

Using the onboard NAND flash as a swap drive

Note that many devices are configured to fallback to booting from NAND flash if no USB/SD card is found. This makes it almost impossible to brick your device.

If you use the NAND flash as swap you will lose this ability.

cfdisk /dev/mtdblock2

• Create a "Linux swap / Solaris" partition that takes all the space:

1. remove any existing partitions, if any
2. create a new primary partition
3. select Type option, enter "82"
4. select Write option
5. select Quit option

mkswap /dev/mtdblock2
echo "/dev/mtdblock2          swap                    swap    defaults        0 0" >> /etc/fstab
swapon -a

Copy a root filesystem from one disk to another

This may be useful if you have set up things on a USB device and want to copy to an internal harddisk:

The code below assumes the old (usb) disk is at /dev/sdb1 and the new (internal) disk is at /dev/sda1. Substitute accordingly

# /dev/sda1 is the target filesystem; must have an empty filesystem on it
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
mkdir /mnt2
# /dev/sdb2 is the source filesystem
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt2
cd  /mnt2
cp -ar * /mnt