The netool is a network diagnostics device sold by Netool LLC . The hardware itself is a chinese openwrt router + power bank. If you dig through the FCC documents for it you can find references to a 'CLOUD WIFI' / 'TOBY' company that is selling these with OpenWRT on them. The netool company took this hardware and did a lot of software work on it in order to create the Phone Apps and API server that runs on the device itself. The hardware is a Ralink RT5350 SoC with 32M of DRAM and a 128M SPI flash for storage. More info can be found on the DevWiki page. As for getting into the netool its fairly simple. I started out trying to probe the 4 pins on the side of the device hoping they were attached to the serial interface of the SoC. Turns out the 4 pins actually go to the Battery Management Controller. I don't see any other test / probe pads so I went ahead and just dumped the SPI Flash with a buspirate. Digging through the flash dump with binwalk shows a uBo...

Alright, this should be a much more user-friendly method of getting an Arch Linux chroot going on your steam link. But by doing it this way you're going to have to have some trust in me as we're going to be downloading and running a shell script that could potentially screw up your Steam Link. Its very un-likely though, more likely is losing important data on any storage devices you may have plugged into the Link. So first things first you're going to need a USB HDD or pendrive that you don't care about as all of the data on it needs to be wiped. After you're certain that this storage device has nothing important on it plug it into the steam link. Then you're going to need SSH access to your steam link, after you've SSH'd into your steam link do `busybox sh` to switch to a better shell with tab auto-completion. Now do `cd` to enter /home/steam/ then do `wget http://fgthou.se/steamlink/create-chroot-device.sh` to download my script that will automate t...

Note: If you don't have access to a Linux desktop you can use this method instead. I'm going to try and help you guys setup an Arch Linux chroot environment on your steam link. If you don't know what SSH or Linux is then this post isn't for you. First things first you'll need to have ssh access to your steam link. Below I'm going to detail setting this up with my pre-created tar file on a Linux desktop, if you don't want to use my premade one I'll detail how I made it at the end. If you're on Windows just wait it out, I'll do a post for it later. Download steamlink-chroot.tar.gz First you'll need a separate pendrive or usb hdd to run the chroot environment on. You need to format this harddrive/pendrive to have an ext4 partition on it that the chroot will be on. You'll need to make this partition at least 1GB, the extracted tar file is roughly 700Mb but you'll want some spare room for pacman updates ect. After you've cr...

Alright this was a lot easier than I expected. Thanks Valve! After digging through the full 332 update zip I found that Valve left their developer init scripts in /etc/init.d/startup. Not sure if they did this intentionally or not but I like it. So first and foremost I was wrong about the Android AOSP thing, it looks like its just a custom linux and the android stuff I was seeing earlier was just from them using the android signing utility for their updates. Basically they use signapk on their zip files which leaves some android stuff in META-INF. So sorry about the false alarm there. As for enabling ssh on your Steam Link its very easy. All you need to do is get a pendrive and make this file in these folders: /steamlink/config/system/enable_ssh.txt (Note: the file must have some data in it, if enable_ssh.txt is empty it will not work) Then reboot the Steam Link with the pendrive inserted, after its done connecting to the network you can ssh into the Steam Link as root with the p...

I've recently moved my Linode VPS from Ubuntu to Arch to try and save some disk space (which it actually does). The VPS is just a simple one to conserve my bandwidth at home to host some garrysmod or various source servers. Problem tho, the latest glibc that installs with pacman on arch fucks up with the hldsupdate tool. Well this is problematic, simple solution tho. Two options what I did was reinstall arch on the VPS and didn't run a -Syu, luckly enough the older version of glibc that comes with the base install is compatible with hldsupdatetool. But if you're reading this you probably don't want to reinstall arch just for srcds, so here is the steam i686 binary that comes out of the hldsupdatetool (see bottom). Just run ./steam (might have to chmod +x it) and it should create your clientregistry.blob in ~/Steam then run it a second time and you should get the help menu. Have fun installing dedicated server stuff :D By downloading this you accept to the valve/steam...

I need to post on this blog more. I recently moved off of ubuntu linux and switched to arch (great os by the way) and still kept my gnome desktop like ubuntu, issue is i was on a older version of ubuntu that was still using gnome 2 so when i switched to arch it put me on gnome 3 which looks unfortunatly WAY different. That is unless you use  fallback mode like I am, then it looks alot more like gnome 2. Altho this isn't the solution you are looking for, you're here because your wallpapoz/drapes/generic wallpaper changer no longer works for gnome 3. Sadly they moved away from gconf and the likes and now they use some xml kinda thing with gsettings and that is why most other desktop changers don't work with it yet (that i know of) so I got pissed and made a very simple and short python script to shuffle my wallpapers from a directory where all my wallpapers are stored. I'll shut up now and just give you the script. I told you it was really short http://pastie.org/212...