coding in RT-AC88U

[Manny]

How are you coding in the router? with putty.

Thank You,

 

[sfx2000]

putty is one client - it's pretty popular on Windows (because it's free and works well)

On Windows - I really do like MobaXterm - for personal use it's free, and it does SSH, VNC, and a lot of other handy stuff...

http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net

Outside of windows - Mac and Linux have native SSH clients built in, and there are packages for additional functionality perhaps...

On the router, most scripting is done there - real code is done offline, and with AsusWRT-RMerlin, the preferred environment is 32-bit Ubuntu - which is best run inside a VM.

VirtualBox is a good choice there.

 

[Manny]

Thank You...

 

[RMerlin]

On the router, most scripting is done there - real code is done offline, and with AsusWRT-RMerlin, the preferred environment is 32-bit Ubuntu - which is best run inside a VM.

All my development is done with a 64-bit VM. No reason to use an obsolete 32-bit environment.

 

[Manny]

All my development is done with a 64-bit VM. No reason to use an obsolete 32-bit environment.

Hi RMerlin,

that's what I thought 64-bit all the way, I haven't run VM on windows 10 pro. I will have to set this up.

Thank You for what you do...

 

[Xentrk]

Hi RMerlin,

that's what I thought 64-bit all the way, I haven't run VM on windows 10 pro. I will have to set this up.

Thank You for what you do...

I set up Ubuntu 16.04.2 Desktop on VMWare Workstation 12 Pro the other day on my Windows 10 laptop. It worked great and was easy.. Trouble is, VMWare Workstation 12 Pro cost $$. I qualify for the education price though. Running on the trial version right now.

I first tried it with the built in Hyper-V feature of Windows 10. But I experienced screen flickering issues. A search showed me it was an issue with the Lenovo/Intel Graphics Card Driver. The fix was to remove the device and delete the driver. Then reboot. The MS driver is then installed automatically. I was then able to replace it with the Intel driver. This worked temporarily. But something in Lenovo or Windows 10 detects I am not using the Lenovo/Intel driver and automatically replaces it with the driver I had removed/deleted. I even turned off the feature in Windows to automatically replace hardware drivers.

But based on the limited experience I had with Hyper V, VMWare is much better. With Hyper V, I had to go thru extra steps to get it to work with my WiFi. VMWare was seamless in this regard.

 

[RMerlin]

Trouble is, VMWare Workstation 12 Pro cost $$. I qualify for the education price though. Running on the trial version right now.

You can use the free VMWare Player tho. Same performance, you just lose the manageability that Workstation Pro adds.

I use VMWare Player here. I ditched VirtualBox because:

1) I don't trust that kernel hardening crap that means your VMs can stop working at any time just because your antivirus software got updated to a version their whitelist doesn't recognize (and the devs refuse to back down on this controversial feature)
2) Better I/O performance with VMWare Player (lesser video performance, but I develop over SSH so I don't care about it).

 

[sfx2000]

You can use the free VMWare Player tho. Same performance, you just lose the manageability that Workstation Pro adds.

I use VMWare Player here. I ditched VirtualBox because:

1) I don't trust that kernel hardening crap that means your VMs can stop working at any time just because your antivirus software got updated to a version their whitelist doesn't recognize (and the devs refuse to back down on this controversial feature)
2) Better I/O performance with VMWare Player (lesser video performance, but I develop over SSH so I don't care about it).

The kernel hardening can be a pain - and it doesn't just affect VBox running on Windows, it can also be seen on Linux with some of more paranoid (e.g. security focused) distro's. I haven't seen many issues with the Mac versio of VBox, except that on a major OS update (let's say from 10.11 to 10.12), but that's expected - and normally it's a reinstall - the virtual disk images are fine, and just update the extras...

VMWare is a great choice - Workstation or Player (or spin up an image in ESXi for those so inclined).

I used to be a big user of VMWare on all platforms, but have been moving away from them in the last year or so - for me, it does come down to money, as on Mac, all upgrades are a cost, and there is no 'free' option like VMWare Player for Windows. That, along with the news that EMC basically laid off all of the US based developers for the client solution - that was all moved to China about a year ago, just made it even easier to move away from VMWare on any desktop platform, at least in my opinion...

My main point about running the build environment in a VM is that once one has a working environment, the idea is to keep it stable and reproducible - which ensures consistency and if things break, it's less effort to debug.

So VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox, KVM, Hyper-V, Xen - whatever works best for your platform is good enough...

As for 32/64 bit - AsusWRT builds under both - in the Wiki, last time I looked, there was info for both - basically if one is 64 bit, one has to add a couple of more packages (maybe just one?) - but the gist was that 32-bit was more than sufficient...

The Wiki could use some updating and cleanup...

 

[Manny]

Thank You for the fast responses, VMWare Player looks like the best way to go, I have to read more on this.

if you have more info on this I would appreciate it and links

Thank You,

 

[Xentrk]

Yes, thank you from me too. I did not notice the VMWare Player option when I looked into it. Their site appears to emphasize the Pro version in an attempt to get the revenue.

 

[sfx2000]

Yes, thank you from me too. I did not notice the VMWare Player option when I looked into it. Their site appears to emphasize the Pro version in an attempt to get the revenue.

Player is enough for many that just need a local VM. Just note with Player, that only one VM can run at a time, and can't connect to a VMWare ESX server, which, outside of creating snapshots, is probably the best benefit of going with Pro over Player.

Workstation Pro does have features that are fairly handy if working deep inside the VMWare ecosystem, which these days I'm not.

 

[RMerlin]

Just note with Player, that only one VM can run at a time

I regularly run two VMs at the same time in Player (a Windows and a Linux VM).