Managing Eagle Projects with Git

Here are the commands I use to manage my Git repositories for my Eagle projects.

PROJECT_REPO is an environment variable designating my repository URL or path.  

Each project starts as a branch from a root project with a blank board or branches from another project.

Start a new Eagle project

Current directory is an empty project working directory.

git init
git remote add origin $PROJECT_REPO
git pull
git checkout origin/master
git checkout -b BRANCH-NAME

Pull an Eagle project
Current directory is an empty project working directory. 

git init
git remote add origin $PROJECT_REPO
git pull
git checkout BRANCH-NAME

Create and push a new branch
Current directory is the current project working directory.

git checkout -b NEW_BRANCH_NAME 

... make changes and commit ...

git push origin NEW-BRANCH-NAME

LibreOffice vs. the Liberty to Open the Application You Want

Occasionally LibreOffice seems determined to open PDF files with a web browser instead of the pertinent preferred application. Nosing around I learned that Libre/OpenOffice appears to be opening files thru /usr/bin/x-www-browser which links to /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser - a web browser startup script.

I instead linked /usr/bin/x-www-browser to /usr/bin/gnome-open which properly selects the gnome preferred application.

Win98 Guest in True Color High Resolution

I'm finding that the Win98 Vbox guest is running intolerably slow. I found this help.

... 3. Video driver integration.
By default Windows 98 will run only in 640x480 resolution, 16-colors.

Performance Note: VirtualBox is not optimized for 16-colors (4-bit) emulation. It works very slow this way.
Having 32-bit True Color driver makes Win98 VMs run on VirtualBox *much* faster.

If you want True color or high resolution, you need to download special drivers.
3.1. bearwindows driver (unstable)
http://bearwindows.boot-land.net/vbe9x.htm

NOTE: You must install "Universal version", as "VirtualBox" version is known to have problems.
WARNING: This driver is buggy, and many Windows fonts do not render correctly with it. Not recommended.

3.2. SciTech Display Doctor (recommended)
The second option is to get the SciTech Display Doctor version 7 beta driver (12 MB) -
(contributed by Richard_S)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/226caou8x0jf8 ... ctor-7.iso
-or-
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BycgkM ... UhnWGRycVE

The driver is a high quality commercial grade video driver (even includes some software emulated Open GL 3D support), and it does include an exe installer program.

Despite having an installer, the SciTech Display Doctor is a little tricky to get going. After the program launches, you have to find the little round radio button link to click to 'enable' the new driver (otherwise you still have VGA). Even then, you can't select any higher resolution modes until you ditch the 'default monitor' and select one of the 'Super VGA' types.

After fiddling around with the above changes and rebooting several times you should be able to select 800x600 or 1024x768 (or higher) resolutions with 32 bit color depth. (setting 32 bit color mode optimizes the interface with Virtualbox and really speeds things up)

Windows Boot Floppies

Trying to install an old win'98 CD to a Virtual Box machine I found that the CD is not bootable (though newer ones are). I have some old boot floppies but no physical drives set up and ready to run or copy from. Poking around I found boot floppy "images" of every kind but they're all self-extracting '.exe files. Peculiar thing  about windows folks is they seem to want to run every exe they can download to see if anything bad doesn't happen. I was willing to run one in a vbox but Wine won't allow it to write to a floppy, even a virtual one.

I found a helpful boot image  from Bob Cerelli's site, but it's an iso. I virtually booted it and copied all to a virtual floppy which was all I was looking for. Thanks Bob.

Configuring xdg-open

Open/Libre-office spreadsheet hyperlinks would not open PDF files with Acroread even though caja was properly set to do so by default.
 
Xdg-open is the freedesktop.org scheme for opening files and URLs with our preferred applications.

First I verified that PDF files were recognized as such:

> xdg-mime query filetype somepdffile.pdf 
application/pdf

Good, and then that Acroread was the default application:

> xdg-mime query default application/pdf
userapp-acroread-9UNI5W.desktop

Excellent, but does it work?

> xdg-open somepdffile.pdf
Error: no "view" mailcap rules found for type "application/pdf"
Opening "somepdffile.pdf" with Document Viewer  (application/pdf)

In this case "Document Viewer"is Atril, not Acroread.

Poking around the mailcap thing I edited the user section in /etc/mailcap as so:

#  User section follows:  Any entries included in this section will take
#  precedence over those created by "update-mime".  DO NOT CHANGE the
#  "User Section Begins" and "User Section Ends" lines, or anything outside
#  of this section!
#

# ----- User Section Begins ----- #
application/pdf;/usr/local/bin/acroread %s; test=test "$DISPLAY" != ""; description=Portable Document Format; nametemplate=%s.pdf; priority=1
# -----  User Section Ends  ----- #

That did the trick.

PICkit2 User Permissions

Problem: Tried pk2cmd on a new box and got:

No PICkit 2 found.

lsusb indicated that the OS recognises it:

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 1bcf:053e Sunplus Innovation Technology Inc.
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 04f2:b2dc Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 04ca:3006 Lite-On Technology Corp.
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 04d8:0033 Microchip Technology, Inc. PICkit2

It works fine if I sudo which indicates that it is a permission problem.

The solution is to set proper udev rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ but I 

wasn't successful working it out. I checked another box and it appears 

that MPLABX has installed this:

/etc/udev/rules.d/z010_mchp_tools.rules:

# 2012.01.23 Changed SYSFS reference(s) to ATTR.
# 2011.12.15 Note: Reboot works on all systems to have rules file recognized.
# 2010.01.26 Add reference to "usb" for Ubuntu.
# 2010.01.22 Attempt to further simplify rules files requirements.
# 2009.08.18 Rules file simplified.
# 2009.07.15 Rules file created.

ENV{hotplugscript}="/etc/.mplab_ide/mchplinusbdevice"

ACTION!="add", GOTO="check_remove"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", GOTO="check_add"
SUBSYSTEM!="usb", GOTO="rules_end"

LABEL="check_add"

ATTR{idVendor}=="04d8", MODE="666", RUN+="%E{hotplugscript} add"
GOTO="rules_end"

LABEL="check_remove"

ACTION=="remove", RUN+="%E{hotplugscript} remove %E{PRODUCT}"

LABEL="rules_end"

Note the executable /etc/.mplab_ide/mchplinusbdevice. Things appear 
to work fine without it but the simple solution is to just install
MPLABX.

Device not managed

Problem: NetworkManager indicates 'device not managed' for eth0.

Edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf:

[ifupdown]
managed=true

Restart:

# sudo service network-manager restart