The Communication Cube


"I should probably inform you guys, due to a personal emergency, I went ahead and requested a refund of my Pyra preorder. I plan to leave the forums as soon as it's processed, since I can't really justify being here without a Pyra or Pandora, or at least a GPH device."

@JDTAY

Omg, please take care, ok. And please, at least stay/come back to post in the Nintendo Switch thread/topic.
If not, we'll all miss you :(
 
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Tropical Storm Grace has formed, meaning we have Fred and Grace at the same time now. Still kinda yawning here, considering that we had five named storms on the seas at the same time at one point last season.
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I should probably inform you guys, due to a personal emergency, I went ahead and requested a refund of my Pyra preorder. I plan to leave the forums as soon as it's processed, since I can't really justify being here without a Pyra or Pandora, or at least a GPH device.
It would be sad to see you go; we may make the odd joke but you’re definitely an integral part of the boards! Also, as @Nintendo says, you don’t need to have either a Pandora or a Pyra to be a relevant member of the boards - they are about all sorts of gaming devices after all. Hope you stay safe
 
No need to own any of the homebrew devices to stay here indeed,
I mean if you don’t own a plane and you are in a „plane tour club „ it would make sense to leave as it’s a bit difficult when you have to work when other members fly whit there planes, but there is no Board Law that says you have to own a Pyra to be a member ..
so stay, enjoy the show, or watch my videos and be amused about my bad English
 
Will it be possible to use BedrockLinux on the Pyra? https://distrowatch.com/weekly-mobile.php?issue=20210705#bedrock

The news item beneath the distrowatch review of BL, about Ubuntu working on RISC-V support, is pretty awesome too.
I'd expect AUR to be basically usable in any linux, with some customisation. Download the pacman package, decrypt it using zstd (I haven't checked how easy that it to install in debian, might need to build it from github), unpack it using bsdtar (or just normal GNU tar works if you're okay with ignoring errors), and that should give you makepkg. To use makepkg, find the project at AUR and git clone the PKGBUILD, inspect the PKGBUILD for sanity, install any dependencies (makepkg -i won't be able to help here because a lot of the package names will be different), run makepkg without any options to build the project. Under arch the next thing to do it to install the package it spits out, but under debian or other that package won't be installable, but the build artefacts should still be there as far as I know. You can either package these up as a .dbp and go through all of those hoops or just manually mangle the build artefacts into your /usr and /etc directory in the form they appear in. In practice these AUR packages tend to live on their own anyway, suggesting minimal dependencies, and there's no way to automatically update them even on archlinux without further helper scripts, which I personally don't have installed anyway.
 
I have a question relating to checksum verification, which I was wondering whether anyone here might be able to answer:
Does anyone here know anything about labtestproject.com ?

Context:
Windows has its own checksum hash generator - CertUtil - but if, say, you’re downloading GParted for use on Windows and you follow the gpg verify page from GParted, you can get to the start of step 4 only to find that cmd.exe throws back at you:
“‘sha256sum’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.”
That led me to DDG search the issue and then to search for “sha256sum.exe”. The only seemingly reputable places I could find links to it were in Fedora and CentOS documentation:
(One DDG search result indicated that SourceForge might be an option but if you go to sourceforge.net separately and search for “sha256sum.exe” the result you get is “0 programs”.)

Both the Fedora and CentOS documentation indicate that the “sha256sum.exe” program can be downloaded from labtestproject.com but it appears to be an HTTP only site and when you search for “labtestproject” in DDG, it doesn’t seem to bring up any Wikipedia article or any 3rd party commentary about “labtestproject”. So I’m a bit loathe to follow the Fedora/CentOS advice and download from them. At least there’s a Wikipedia page on etree.org (the website from which Fedora/CentOS recommend downloading the “md5sum.exe” program)...

EDIT: Yes, I know - Windows = o_O+o(! - but it’s not mine :p
 
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I think I've used certutil on windows before now to do a hash calculation to verify a package I downloaded from t'internet. IIRC the arguments/incantations you need to use on certutil are fairly esoteric, but it should be workoutable by doing a 'certutil /?'
 
I think I've used certutil on windows before now to do a hash calculation to verify a package I downloaded from t'internet. IIRC the arguments/incantations you need to use on certutil are fairly esoteric, but it should be workoutable by doing a 'certutil /?'
Yeah I was able to figure out how to use CertUtil (EDIT: by following https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...ndows-10/dbc3c569-4b5a-4967-8810-c25255cdc1fd ) but that wasn’t my issue; I was trying to follow GParted’s gpg verification guide and could successfully get through the first three steps but when attempting the final fourth step it would fail because whilst Windows has CU built-in, it doesn’t appear to have sha256sum.exe or md5sum.exe programs installed (I have searched C:\ ) so I can’t create/adjust any environment variables for those two programs in order to complete the fourth verification step.

Looking for somewhere from which to download those two programs gave me labtestproject.com and etree.org but, on the face of it, the former doesn’t seem terribly trustworthy :(
 
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I've not come across the file formatted like checksums.txt before, but I'd assume you read it manually and just run certutil against each file in term and check the code it prints out visually.
 
I've not come across the file formatted like checksums.txt before, but I'd assume you read it manually and just run certutil against each file in term and check the code it prints out visually.
Yup! Those file names are what you’ll find on GParted’s website. But it seems like that’s only half the step?

So, have you heard anything about labtestproject.com before?
 
Looking for somewhere from which to download those two programs gave me labtestproject.com and etree.org but, on the face of it, the former doesn’t seem terribly trustworthy
So the Windows machine is not yours. And you can't install a quick VM with a minimal linux with a share that can run your checksum? And you cant' install WSL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about
which would morph your windows into a hybrid thing. Do you have Python or Perl installed? These are slow, but they have libs to checksum.
There is the ancient CygWin that has it: /C/cygwin/bin/sha256sum.exe (but the executable requires so many cyg*.dll that I lost interest to check which ones it actually needs)
There is a way using html with embedded JS

Why not this ready-to-use exe? https://sourceforge.net/projects/checksum-util/

Or:

With: https://bellard.org/tcc/ (I tested it on Linux to "tcc sha256_test.c sha256.c" (you also need the sha256.h in the same directory) and "./a.out" to successfully run the selftest)
But you will need to write your own read-file-and-check-the-md5sum
 
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So the Windows machine is not yours. And you can't install a quick VM with a minimal linux with a share that can run your checksum? And you cant' install WSL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about
which would morph your windows into a hybrid thing. Do you have Python or Perl installed? These are slow, but they have libs to checksum.
There is the ancient CygWin that has it: /C/cygwin/bin/sha256sum.exe (but the executable requires so many cyg*.dll that I lost interest to check which ones it actually needs)
There is a way using html with embedded JS

Why not this ready-to-use exe? https://sourceforge.net/projects/checksum-util/

Or:

With: https://bellard.org/tcc/ (I tested it on Linux to "tcc sha256_test.c sha256.c" (you also need the sha256.h in the same directory) and "./a.out" to successfully run the selftest)
But you will need to write your own read-file-and-check-the-md5sum
Wow thank you so much, I had no idea there were so many other options available - my DDG searching is clearly not up to scratch! I’ll check these out at the weekend :) It may be possible to run a VM with Linux since the person whose laptop it is, is interested in getting started with those, though I’m not sure I understand where I’d go from there unless Linux distros come with sha256sum.exe pre-installed, or it’s easy enough to do “apt-get install sha256sum.exe”?
 
or it’s easy enough to do “apt-get install sha256sum”?
$ dpkg -S sha256sum
coreutils: /usr/bin/sha256sum
coreutils: /usr/share/man/man1/sha256sum.1.gz

Debian packs sha256sum in coreutils, and I'm pretty sure you get that by default.

If you are going to VM route, then pre-download this on your usb: https://www.virtualbox.org/
And a small usable image, I suggest choosing one from: https://www.linuxlookup.com/linux_iso *(the ISO's link to the official sites and mirrors, a.f.a.i. checked)
 
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So, my Pyra refund was processed, but when I heard about vaccine news this morning, this was the only place I could think of to talk about it.

I still don’t think I’ll hang around here too much.
 
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