Monday, March 27, 2017

Car trouble again

This morning, after I brought my son to school, I stopped to pick up a parcel at the local deposit. Got my parcel. But my car won't start.

It's a E-Mehari, an electric car derived from Bollore's Blue Summer. I chose that car because I assumed that BlueCar having provided the AutoLib cars in Paris had some experience with the technology. I was wrong. I had this car for less than 6 months, and it already spent a quarter of that time in the repair shop.

Part of the problem is a little "authentication" device, a kind of RFID locking mechanism that you have to unlock before you can start the car. It makes sense on a fleet of cars like AutoLib. For an individual, it's much less convenient than the regular radio-unlock most cars are equipped with. What's much more annoying is that it's alos much less reliable.

On a regular basis, the car will tell me that I'm not authorized to drive it. Sometimes, it won't let me unplug it (the charging plug being electrically locked inside the car), which is I guess a variant of the previous one, but I may be wrong. Usually, fixing these issues involves opening and closing the rear trunk, don't ask me why.

This time was different, though. The locking device has a small LED that lights green if unlocked, blue if locked. This time, the LED was just off. And the RFID key would have no effect whatsoever, obviously. I had to call "Citroen Assistance", who told me they would be there within 45 minutes, was finally there after 1h30. Bringing the car back to the repair shop in Nice (where it was until last Friday, after being kept for over one week for a routine operation that was supposed to last only the day).

Another 10 minutes to walk to the nearest bus station, another 20 minutes for the bus ride. A good deal of time wasted. I'm starting to dislike this car, despite the fact that when it starts, it's a real joy to drive.

Big's turn to cause trouble?

Now, it's with Big that I have some issues:

ddd@ptitpuce[master] xlr> ssh big
Last login: Sun Mar 26 17:24:16 2017 from 192.168.77.22
-bash: /yum: No such file or directory
-bash: warning: setlocale: LC_CTYPE: cannot change locale (UTF-8): No such file or directory
ddd@big ~> ps -ef | grep -i gnome
-bash: /usr/bin/ps: Input/output error
ddd@big ~> ps
-bash: /usr/bin/ps: Input/output error
ddd@big ~> dmesg
-bash: /usr/bin/dmesg: Input/output error

Screen is black.

OK. Time to hard-reboot.

Nano lost user

Nano has decided to lose user "ddd". Not sure exactly why. I can still ssh into the machine as "ddd", but the main login screen does not show it anymore.

Manually re-create user, keeping user directory as is seems to work.

Windows 10 setup

Still have not figured out how to boot with the network activated.

Jenkins setup

(Re-)installing Jenkins on Nano to be able to test simple projects on several machines at once. Testing setup with the build and ELFE projects.

virt-viewer for Mac

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/Cellar/gettext/0.19.8.1/bin
./autogen.sh

This gives me:

configure: error: At least one of spice or vnc must be used

I find it odd that the default autogen.sh would not pass correct configuraiton options to the configure script. Investigating. I think it's because while I built spice-gtk, I did not install it in a location that configure looks into.

Upgrading Raspberry Pi

I have a Raspberry Pi and a Pi2 which I was using for testing ELFE. They were a bit outdated. Also, I had the classical problem with the SD card on the first generation model. I had tried all sorts of glues, without success.

I finally found a remarkably elegantway to solve that problem and my Raspberry Pi now boots reliably: