I creating my Meshtastic network and was having trouble setting a node with the right settings and wanted to plug in the unit into my Lenovo laptop running Fedora installed from the factory.
I click serial connection. The web app recognized the connection. Click connect. Failed. Tried different plugs and ports. Failed. Searched online and I need to do a bunch of things in terminal to get it to work properly.
Normally I would spend a few hours figuring it out. Instead…
Pulled out my 15 year old PC running win10. Plugged in, instantly worked.
I reeeeally want this to be my primary laptop, but man. I am just struggling on some basic things.
Ah, permissions chicanery. Had to deal with that with connecting a Switch 2 controller with a WebUSB enabler. To be fair, once you add the right udev rules (it is a bit of a pain, yes), it should work for any other devices of the same type (I think it’s any with the same USB ID so like same manufacturer and model? Don’t quote me on that though). Still, I wish Chromium (since Firefox as far as I know still doesn’t support WebUSB) could sort it out by itself (like just have an “allow” button rather than writing udev config files yourself) or at least be a bit more helpful in pointing you the right way with a helpful error message.
You do have to get used to weird edge cases like these throwing a spanner in the works, just like you have weird stuff on Windows (trying to get some older Android devices to communicate in fastboot mode in Windows makes me feel like Odysseus).
Asking around and screwing around usually gets you places though. Eventually you find something.
My PC just programmed all the units in my mesh in around 5 minutes. It would have likely taken longer trying to fix the USB connector. I should figure out how to fix this edge case so I don’t have to take my old PC out again.
What they are talking about is an open source piece of software (Meshtastic) that’s using a well-known (if specific to Chromium) standard, WebUSB. It’s a genuine pain point, and stuff like this needs to work out of the box, no manually written udev rules required.
I creating my Meshtastic network and was having trouble setting a node with the right settings and wanted to plug in the unit into my Lenovo laptop running Fedora installed from the factory.
I click serial connection. The web app recognized the connection. Click connect. Failed. Tried different plugs and ports. Failed. Searched online and I need to do a bunch of things in terminal to get it to work properly.
Normally I would spend a few hours figuring it out. Instead…
Pulled out my 15 year old PC running win10. Plugged in, instantly worked.
I reeeeally want this to be my primary laptop, but man. I am just struggling on some basic things.
Ah, permissions chicanery. Had to deal with that with connecting a Switch 2 controller with a WebUSB enabler. To be fair, once you add the right udev rules (it is a bit of a pain, yes), it should work for any other devices of the same type (I think it’s any with the same USB ID so like same manufacturer and model? Don’t quote me on that though). Still, I wish Chromium (since Firefox as far as I know still doesn’t support WebUSB) could sort it out by itself (like just have an “allow” button rather than writing udev config files yourself) or at least be a bit more helpful in pointing you the right way with a helpful error message.
You do have to get used to weird edge cases like these throwing a spanner in the works, just like you have weird stuff on Windows (trying to get some older Android devices to communicate in fastboot mode in Windows makes me feel like Odysseus).
Asking around and screwing around usually gets you places though. Eventually you find something.
My PC just programmed all the units in my mesh in around 5 minutes. It would have likely taken longer trying to fix the USB connector. I should figure out how to fix this edge case so I don’t have to take my old PC out again.
udev? WATCH -N 1 CHMOD A+RWX /DEV
it will never be your main mschine of you don’t use it as your main machine.
If it can’t do everything your main machine needs to do, it can’t possibly become your main machine.
But it CAN do it, it just needs a bit of work, be it by yourself oor by someone on the devs’ side
Counter argument. What is the goal of owning a computer in the first place? Needing to do “a bit of work” with the OS or actual work.
I don’t want to be a Linux developer. I want to do work. Sometimes I feel like I’m too much developer.
If you get Microsoft office to install and function, let me know how you did
deleted by creator
Whoa man. You ok?
What they are talking about is an open source piece of software (Meshtastic) that’s using a well-known (if specific to Chromium) standard, WebUSB. It’s a genuine pain point, and stuff like this needs to work out of the box, no manually written udev rules required.