prism p54 wireless usb

each time i tried to use this, i have had to trawl through and research quite a bit. i have just had to do so again. so i am documenting this here.

download the latest version of your softmac firmware from
http://daemonizer.de/prism54/prism54-fw/

identify what it should be called, and where the firmware needs to go.

openwrt backfire asked for /lib/firmware/isl3886usb.

alternatively, on a debian derivative, get the firmware-linux-nonfree. i don't like this, as it contains a lot of garbage, none of which i use except one single item.

openwrt internet radio

Since my openwrt is on a thinclient with embedded soundcard, I don't need any extra hardware. A set of unpowered speakers are enough. Now I have a router playing internet radio stations!

It can be controlled remotely for changing stations, etc. from
- client installed on PC or Android
- web browser on any device

The how-to link below is a good start. I might add detailed instructions, if needed.
http://tomatousb.org/doc:play-audio-with-usb-audio-adapter

openwrt backfire x86 install

vision: portable internet router, to carry on my travels, or use at home.
openwrt on a portable (thin-client/netbook) device. internet sourced from ethernet-port or 3g-dongle or wifi. internet served via ethernet-port or wifi.

linux roadmap

just read a comment by Tomáš Pospíšek in a blog. I have been thinking about this recently and couldn't have put it much better. So I quote verbatim:

I can see that additional daemons running idle in the background (“background”, for “the casual” user and D-Bus seem lately to be indicative of “without any no documentation at all”) are even further cluttering up the system. I can also see, that it will add a few layers of communications, and hard to see protocols. Unfortunately I fail to see, what good such a daemon is good for at all.

$ ps auxw|wc
186 2242 18356


Very far from KISS. And since KISS is also a aesthetic system quality, having 186 processes running on a plain desktop system with only 11 user visible applications is quite ugly.

I’d argue that one of the main dangers of Linux is that it is acquiring all the bad properties that Windows had in the past: nothing is documented, nothing is transparent, everything is binary or in some undocumented protocol that can’t be dumped into a text editor, nothing is meant to be touched by the user directly, but only through some GUI thing( which connects to a message bus, which connects to a daemon, which changes some registry, which triggers some helper, that … etc.)

local.prop

i used to change my /system/build.prop, each time i found a hack. frequent changes were cumbersome, as /system partition is read-only. also, any rom updates would wipe that clean.

now i put these changes in /data/local.prop, a more efficient way of keeping all these hacks together, and maintaining them across rom updates. also, /data partition is mounted read-write. so i can push the changes anytime.

most viewed