Building Yocto/Poky on openSUSE Factory

Since a few weeks, openSUSE Factory no longer is labeled as "openSUSE Project 13.2", but as:

seife@susi:~> lsb_release -ir
Distributor ID: openSUSE project
Release: 20140918

When trying to build the current Yocto poky release, you get the following Warning:

WARNING: Host distribution "openSUSE-project-20140918" has not been validated with this version of the build system; you may possibly experience unexpected failures. It is recommended that you use a tested distribution.

Now I know these warnings and have ignored those before. The list of tested distributions is hard coded in the build system configuration and in general it would be a bad idea to add not yet released versions (as 13.2) or rolling releases. And since the Factory release number changes every few days, it is clearly impossible to keep this up to date: once you have tested everything, the version has increased already. But apart from this, purely cosmetic warning, there is a really annoying consequence of the version change: the configuration cache of bitbake (the build tool used by Yocto poky/OpenEmbedded) is rebuilt on every change of the host distribution release. Updating the cache takes about 2 minutes on my machine, so doing a simple configuration check on your already built Yocto distribution once a week can get quite annoying. I looked for a solution and went for the "quick hack" route:

• bitbake parses "lsb_release -ir"
• I  replace "lsb_release" with a script that emits filtered output and is before the original lsb_release in $PATH

This is what I have put into ~/bin/lsb_release (the variable check is a bit of paranoia to let this only have an effect in a bitbake environment):

#!/bin/bash

if [ -z "$BB_ENV_EXTRAWHITE" -o "x$1" != "x-ir" ]; then

        exec lsb-release $@

fi

printf "Distributor ID:\topenSUSE project\nRelease:\t2014\n"

Then "chmod 755 ~/bin/lsb_release" and now the warning is

WARNING: Host distribution "openSUSE-project-2014" has not been validated...

And more important: it stays the same after updating Factory to the next release. Mission accomplished.

UPDATE: Koen Kooi noted that "Yocto" is only the umbrella project and what I'm fixing here is actually the "poky" build system that's part of the project, so I edited this post for clarity. Thanks for the hint!

Fix coolstream neo tuner voltage problem

After trying to use the EN50494 feature of neutrino-mp, I found that as soon as I attached the coolstream neo to my coax-"bus", all other receivers on the same bus could no longer tune any frequency. After quite some investigation, I found out, that the tuner does not lower the voltage to 13V if there is less than about 10mA of current load on the "LNB in" coax output.
I tried to work around the problem in software. However, that did not work too well, because if the neo was the only active receiver on the bus, then the SCR matrix would shut down if there was no voltage applied. So I checked if there is a way to simply fix the broken hardware.
There is. Next to the tuner "tin box" there is a transistor that has the 14/19V at one of its terminals. Just adding a 1.1kOhm resistor from there to ground made the voltage switch correctly even without any coax cable attached.

1.1kOhm resistor fixes tuner voltage problem

 The picture is not very good but it shows where the LNB power can be tapped.Note: use this at your own risk, soldering the resistor to the wrong terminal or shortening the wrong solder points might very well kill your box. You have been warned.
It is also very well possible that better soldering points exist, however this solution can be implemented without disassembling the box completely by just soldering on the top side of the PCB.

It would be interesting if this modification also solves the huge amount of DiSEqC switching problems that were reported last spring after some software update, it surely solved my EN50494 (aka unicable) bus blocking problem. After all the vendor has issued no statement until today, even though this clearly looks like broken (by design) hardware...

Coolstream neo broken power supply

Now who would have guessed the guys that are good at trademark trolling (they withdrew their trademark application after other users of the name "Neutrino" complained, too, now they are trying to get new variations of the neutrino brand) are apparently not very good when it comes to hardware engineering?
The power supply of my coolstream neo box died of blown out capacitors after only 18 months -- which tells you about the hardware quality IMHO. I own a lot of electronics but have never seen this happening after such a short time.

My advice to the coolstream guys: spend a little less effort on trademark trolling and violating the GPL, instead spend a little more effort on quality assurance. I cannot say that I'd recommend this hardware to anyone.

I could probably just replace the capacitors, but that box has been just annoying lately and I have enough other well-working boxes so I'll probably just leave it dead so I don't need to get upset whenever I try to use it for something serious.

What to do about a trademark trolls?

Imagine there is a GPL'd open source project, going strong for more than 10 years, with more than 50 contributors. Now a company comes along and registers the name of the project as a trademark with the clear intention of suing people using this name to sell equipment with the software preloaded.

They are not contributing to the project.

Is there anything the project can do about that?
The opposition deadline (german: "Widerspruchsfrist") is not over yet.

Oh - and of course they are blatant GPL violators, linking the project's GPL'd software against closed source libraries which in turn use closed source kernel drivers, ship a U-Boot version of which nobody has ever seen the sources and so on, but that's a different story.