I picked up a new toy this week to replace my aging and rarely-used Raspberry Pi 3 (original). It came with Windows 10 already on it and I immediate went to the forums for a howto on installing Linux. There is a guide on how to install Ubuntu 16.04 but it seems to require a lot of extra steps (special kernel, etc).  I figured it couldn’t hurt to try it with OpenSUSE. At worst it would fail and I would be left with Ubuntu.

To my surprise, it worked and it was easier than the steps that were provided. The thing with the LattePanda is that it is UEFI-only.  There is no legacy boot mode so if your distro doesn’t have a UEFI-enabled installer, then you are out of luck.

Edit: It’s not just UEFI only, it’s Trusted UEFI only.  That means that if your distro doesn’t have a trusted EFI key, then the bios won’t even recognize it. Canonical/Ubuntu, Redhat/CentOS/Fedora, and SUSE/OpenSUSE have trusted EFI keys and work. Mostly, I think because they have corporate sponsorship and they have a vested interest in working with hardware vendors.

Here’s the basic steps:

1. Flash the “Ubuntu” bios (this will allow you to boot the Linux USB key)
2. Burn the OpenSUSE iso to a USB 3.0 Key
3. When trying to boot with the key, it froze when the installer brought up the GUI.
   Workaround: Reboot and add “textmode=1” to the boot loader for the installer.

1. Install using ncurses installer. It’s a little clunky but all of the options are there.

5. Reboot after the installer finishes. Everything is as it should be. No more freezes, no special kernel, everything works great.

One last thing. The LattePanda has both HDMI and composite. Linux assumes composite out is Display 1 and HDMI is Display 2.  If you are running headless, then this is fine. If not, you will need to with your desktop environment to disable Display 1. I tend to use the i3 desktop for work and this was easy for me to workaround. It can be a hassle for others. I think this will be the case no matter which distro you use.

Here’s the webpage for a very early edition of Huckleberry Finn. If you open the PDF using a modern PC or tablet, it will look fine though a little slow to load. If you open it on your Kindle, Nook Color, or some other older Ebook reader that displays PDFs, you’re in for a shock.

Each page in these PDFs are actually 3 images. When put together by a modern PDF reader, they make one nice scanned PDF page. If you’re not suing a modern reader, you see all 3 layers separately. This makes the book unreadable. Even if you are using a modern reader, these PDFs have a noticeable lag time compared to other documents because it is loading 3 images per page.

This guide which show you how to eliminate the first two images and reverse the third image to be white on black. Will this 100% fix the book?  No. However if you value text over presentation, it does make the book readable on any device including the good old E-ink Kindle.

Step 1. Install the applications (OpenSUSE)

sudo zypper in pdfmod imagemagick pandoc grename

Step 2. Convert the PDF to images. Create a directory for the files to go to first:

mkdir huck
pdfimages huckleberry.pdf huck/

Step 3. The files that are created are all -xxx.ppm and .pbm: Bash doesn’t like this. I use grename to rename every file so that they don’t begin with a hyphen

Step 4. cd to the directory and delete the extra image files:

cd huck
rm *.ppm

Step 5. Reverse the images of the .pbm files. This will create a new copy of the files with inverted colors.

for i in *; do convert -monochrome -colors 2 -depth 1 -negate $i in-$i; done

Step 6. Move the completed files to a next directory and delete the originals

mkdir finished
mv in* finished/
rm *.pbm

Step 7. cd to the finished directory and create a new pdf. This will take time and may freeze your computer. Be patient.

cd finished
convert `ls -v` huck_bw.pdf

Step 8. Shrink your newly created PDF because it is far too large right now.

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen \
-dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=huck_bw_final.pdf huck_bw.pdf

Your new PDF is complete. It is not a pretty as the original but it is more handy.

I then use pdfmod to edit the metadata so the ebook is easier to work with in calibre.

I’m very interested if anyone has found a better way to do this with open source software that retains the color of the original but without the multiple layers.

I wrote this presentation on the weekends in April and May and it’s didn’t have quite the details that I wanted to put into it. Mostly I wanted it to be short and engaging. Putting in every detail that I wanted would have (I thought) been long and boring. I would like to take the time here to expand what went into the presentation and to make it a little more interesting.

I don’t really like these diagrams. They already existed on tor-project.org and were made by the EFF but it’s too high level and they don’t really tell the story that I wanted to tell. The actual description on how onion services with is here: https://www.torproject.org/docs/onion-services.html.en

I could have done a better job than what I did. The way that I prefer to describe it is like this:

After configuring your /etc/tor/torrc file, you run systemctl tor start and the local Tor daemon reaches out to the Tor networks and lets it know that you are running a local onion service. This creates a two-way link between your machine and the Tor network which is UDP traffic rather than TCP/IP as the Tor network never sees your actual local IP.

If I’m honest with myself, this is still pretty weak but it’s better than what I had. The best thing would be to take the information from Tor website almost verbatim and made slides but I didn’t do that.

I glossed over this when I should have made more slides to help fill out the presentation. The brief anecdotes and really touch on a lot of reason why I think people should be using onion services such as:

Being in the spotlight might just mean having a job where people know who you are. No matter who you are, there is a good chance that your political ideas will offend someone. Personally, I keep a strict no religion/no politics policy for myself at work. I just nod my head to everyone like I agree and/or understand. At home, it’s a different story. I am a political person and I care deeply about politics but I don’t want that interfering with my role at my company and I’m not alone. This is the point that would have had more punch than what I made and would have been a better case study on why onion sites are useful and needed.

The first two should have been one topic and the last should have been a call back to a better description of how the onion routing and encryption works.

Nefarious websites such as Silk Road and the Playpen were better case studies on how onion services are misused.

Finally, I think more details on how the docker-compose files are built would have been more useful as well as some hands-on interaction. Those file are all at my Github but I ran through them so quickly I didn’t really give the audience time to see them during the presentation.

I was incredibly excited to get this message earlier this week and now to finish my presentation.