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April 8, 2015September 20, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

How to Easily Install Popular Add-ons in Kodi

You can use Kodi to watch videos locally, but various add-ons can be installed to also access videos online, but finding and installing add-ons might be a pain if you don’t know where to start. TVaddons.co, previously known as XBMCHUB, is providing add-ons allowing to do just that, more or less legally [Update: You may want to read comments for details about the legality of these add-ons], as well as a method to install a bunch of popular add-ons in a few clicks. These add-ons are completely unrelated to Kodi project, and have been developed and maintained by third parties. The installation requires Fusion Installer and Config Wizard with detailed instructions available there with every screenshot, which makes it more complicated than it really is, but it can be summarized as follows: Go to System->File Manager, and click Add source You’ll get the following pop-up window, where you need to […]

April 4, 2015September 5, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 48 Comments

Xiaomi Mi Box Mini Review

After showing pictures of Xiami Mi Box Mini, it’s now time for a “review”, but a bit different from my other reviews, as Xiaomi tiny media player is much different. First the firmware is in Chinese only, and there’s only one external port HDMI output. So first I’ll show the user interface is Chinese, then explain how you can install your own Android apps, and finally run some benchmark to evaluates Mediatek MT8568, Wi-Fi and storage performance. Xiaomi Mi Box Mini Setup and Chinese User Interface The device is super small, but in my case it was almost too big, as it takes enough space to potentially cause problems with the adjacent plug. This little issue will of course depend on your power extension. You then need to connect the 1.5 meter HDMI cable, which should be long enough for most setups, and you’ll see some guide asking you to […]

April 1, 2015May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Cubieboard 4 Ubuntu Review – Setup, Usability, and Performance

Cubieboard4 is a development board powered by Allwinner A80 octa-core processor with 2GB RAM and 16GB eMMC. I’ve already shown how to get started with the board using the pre-installed Android 4.4 image, and run some benchmarks in Android, so now it’s time to check out the Ubuntu Linaro 14.04 image provided by CubieTech. I’ll show how to install and setup Ubuntu 14.04 on the board using a micro SD card, run desktop applications like Chromium, Libre Office, and son on on the board, and complete the review with some Linux benchmarks. Setting up Ubuntu on Cubieboard4 Firmware images for Cubiebord4 can be downloaded @ http://dl.cubieboard.org/model/cc-a80/Image/. Currently Android 4.4, Debian server, Ubuntu Linaro server, and Ubuntu Linaro desktop with LXDE desktop environment. That’s the latter I’ll use for the experiment, and two images are available: linaro-desktop-cb4-card-hdmi-v0.4.img.7z – Bootable image from micro SD card linaro-desktop-cb4-emmc-hdmi-v0.4.img.7z – Installation image to eMMC to […]

April 1, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

How to Read OpenOffice / LibreOffice Files from the Command Line

Let’s say you have edited a file in LibreOffice Writer, but later you access your computer remotely via SSH for example. You don’t really want to bother copying the file to your current machine, and rather just quickly check its content in the terminal. Is there a way? Since odt files are just some zip files containing XML files, you could manually decompress the file, and open XML files, but there is a more convenient the program is called odt2txt. On an Ubuntu / Debian machine it can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install odt2txt

1	sudo apt-get install odt2txt

For basic usage, you just need to pass the filename as parameter:

odt2txt test.odt 

This is a test

odt2txt test.odt

This is a test

But there are also a few more options:

odt2txt 
odt2txt 0.4
Converts an OpenDocument or OpenOffice.org XML File to raw text.

Syntax:   odt2txt [options] filename

Options:  --raw         Print raw XML
          --encoding=X  Do not try to autodetect the terminal encoding, but
                        convert the document to encoding X unconditionally
                        To find out, which terminal encoding will be used in
                        auto mode, use --encoding=show
          --width=X     Wrap text lines after X characters. Default: 65.
                        If set to -1 then no lines will be broken
          --output=file Write output to file, instead of STDOUT
          --subst=X     Select which non-ascii characters shall be replaced
                        by ascii look-a-likes:
                           --subst=all   Substitute all characters for which
                                         substitutions are known
                           --subst=some  Substitute all characters which the
                                         output charset does not contain
                                         This is the default
                           --subst=none  Substitute no characters
          --version     Show version and copyright information

odt2txt

odt2txt 0.4

Converts an OpenDocument or OpenOffice.org XML File to raw text.

Syntax: odt2txt [options] filename

Options: --raw Print raw XML

--encoding=X Do not try to autodetect the terminal encoding, but

convert the document to encoding X unconditionally

To find out, which terminal encoding will be used in

auto mode, use --encoding=show

--width=X Wrap text lines after X characters. Default: 65.

If set to -1 then no lines will be broken

--output=file Write output to file, instead of STDOUT

--subst=X Select which non-ascii characters shall be replaced

by ascii look-a-likes:

--subst=all Substitute all characters for which

substitutions are known

--subst=some Substitute all characters which the

output charset does not contain

This is the default

--subst=none Substitute no characters

--version Show version and copyright information

This also wrote with ods (spreadsheets) and odp (presentations) files with ods2txt and odp2txt which are just symlinks pointing to the same program as odt2txt, namely odt2txt.odt2txt. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as […]

March 23, 2015March 23, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

How to Install Ubuntu 14.04 on Acer Aspire E5 Laptop

I’ve been owning an Acer Aspire One D255E netbook with a 10″ display, an Intel Atom N455 processor and 1GB RAM that served me well during my travels, but as I’ve become older and less patient, I felt I needed to upgrade it. I planned to spend around 10,000 Baht (~$300), wanted a 14″ display, one of the low power CPU such as Intel Bay Trail-M or AMD Mullins / Beema processors, at least 500GB storage, 4GB RAM, and the ability to install Ubuntu. Finally, after going through several products at my local shop, I had to chose between Acer Aspire E5-411-P3CL with a 7.5W TDP Intel Atom N3540 and Acer Aspire E5-421G-45L0 with a 15W TDP AMD A4-6210 processor that both sell for 11,900 Baht ($365). Despite my preference for processor with lower TDP, I still went with the AMD system, since the performance is a little better, the […]

March 22, 2015March 23, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Acer Shamelessly Sells Aspire E5 Laptops with a Crippled UEFI Setup Utility

Yesterday, I bought an Acer Aspire E5-421G-45L0 laptop powered by AMD A4-6210 “Beema” processor and after some effort I managed to install Ubuntu 14.04 and make it mostly work, but more on that later. I also planned to copy a 64-bit OS VirtualBox virtual machine from another PC to this PC, but I quickly realized I could only select 32-bit operating systems, so my 64-bit image could not boot. Virtualization extension are required for 64-bit support in VirtualBox, and I had not checked whether AMD A4-6210 supported these before purchase. Amazingly, I could not find that information on AMD’s very own website, but CPU Boss reports A4-6210 does indeed support AMD-V virtualization. All good, so I must be just a question of enabling it in the “BIOS”. So I rebooted the laptop, and pressed F2 to enter InsydeH20 Setup Utility. There are few options with only Information, Main, Security, Boot, […]

March 20, 2015May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Cubieboard4 (CC-A80) Unboxing and Getting Started Guide

A few samples of Cubieboard4 board may have been available in China in October 2014, but Cubietech only officially launched their Allwinner A80 development board about ten days ago, and you can buy it for $125 + shipping on sites like R0ck.me, Eleduino, Seeed Studio, and many other distributors. The company decided to send a sample for evaluation, and today I’ll start with a post showing some pictures of the kit, and explaining how to get started with assembly and first boot. Cubieboard 4 Pictures I received the board within two days after the company told me they would send a sample, as they used DHL. I also had to pay a bit of import tax and DHL’s handling fee. There should be CC-A80 box with the board and accessories, a white box for the power supply, and a power cord. There’s quite a few items to play with… The […]

March 6, 2015June 18, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

How to Build a Single Kernel Module (Driver) in Ubuntu

When I bought UNI-T UT61E digital multimeter, I planned to to use the open source tool Sigrok to capture voltage, current or resistance data with my Ubuntu 14.04 machine. Unfortunately, it was just not working for me and I kept getting some “Invalid function byte” error messages, so I asked on Sigrok mailing list, and since it worked for others, I was in big troubles. It turned out the RS-232 to USB dongle I used:

idVendor           0x1a86 QinHeng Electronics
idProduct          0x7523 HL-340 USB-Serial adapter

1 2	idVendor 0x1a86 QinHeng Electronics idProduct 0x7523 HL-340 USB-Serial adapter

was most likely to culprit, so I decided to buy another random USB to serial dongle on eBay, and after a few weeks I received it only to find out it had the exact same VID:PID, so I was out of luck. Finally, I gave up on Sigrok on Linux, and tested the power consumption of some Rockchip RK3288 & Amlogic S802 devices in a Windows 7 virtual machine running in my Ubuntu 14.04 […]