Upstart and Digi Etherlite 32

Here's how to get your Etherlite working with upstart. But really, this technique would apply to any serial connection.

First we need /etc/init/dgrp.conf.

# Digi EtherLite
# Starts a agetty for each serial port
# Normally run from the start-dgrp.conf task

stop on runlevel [S016]

env TERM=vt100
env BAUD=19200
respawn
instance $ID
exec /sbin/agetty -L tty$ID ${BAUD:-19200} ${TERM:-vt100}

usage 'dgrp ID=XX [BAUD=YYYYY] [TERM=ZZZZ]  - where XX is terminal id (A10) and YYYYY is baud (12900) and ZZZZ is the termcap entry (vt100)'

You can test this by starting an agetty on ttyA01 with:

initctl start dgrp ID=A01

Stop it with:

initctl stop dgrp ID=A01

Now create /etc/sysconfig/dgrp. Each line is the ID with an optional baud rate (default 19200) and TERM (default vt100) setting:

A01
A02 9600 vt100
A10 19200 wy60

Now we create the controlling task. This gets run after rc?.d is finished. It reads /etc/sysconfig/dgrp and runs dgrp.conf where needed.

# Digi Etherlite
# This task will read /etc/sysconfig/dgrp and will run dgrp.conf for each line in it
# It is run after all rc?.d the scripts are run

start on stopped rc RUNLEVEL=[2345]

env CONFIG=/etc/sysconfig/dgrp
task
script
    test -f $CONFIG || ( logger -t start-dgrp.conf "$CONFIG doesn't exist"; exit 0 )
    test -d /proc && test -d /proc/dgrp || ( logger -t start-dgrp.conf "drpd daemon is not running" ; exit 3 )

    temp=$(mktemp --tmpdir)
    grep -v '#' $CONFIG >$temp

    while read ID BAUD TERM ; do
        ID=$(basename $ID)
        initctl start dgrp ID=${ID/tty} BAUD=$BAUD TERM=$TERM
    done < $temp
end script

We use a temporary file so that we can ignore comments in the dgrp config file.

Far to many spelling options in Thunderbird and Firefox

Mozilla projects offer to check the spelling in every language installed on your computer. Which is great, except I don't need South African English, nor will I ever use Swiss French. And wading through the 20 items in the menu to switch from Canadian English to Québecois French is annoying.

And there is no easy way to fix this.

The hard way is to go into /usr/share/myspell and remove all the .dic and .aff files you don't want.

$ sudo su -
Password for fil@scott: 
# cd /usr/share/myspell/
# mkdir NOT
# mv *.dic *.aff NOT
# ln -s NOT/fr_CA.aff
# ln -s NOT/fr_CA.dic
# ln -s NOT/en_CA.aff
# ln -s NOT/en_CA.dic

Restart Thunderbird and you will now have 2 spelling options.

Yes, these changes are system-wide. There is currently no other way to do it, apparently.