Wezzul.com - It's the Dinglez

Ok, so I'm only posting this because I had problems with booting Linux from a flash drive on some of the Dells around here (most notable a GX270 and a Precision 650). I could boot Slax and DSL just fine on most machines, but on the Dells, I got the error "Unable to load operating system". The fix for this was found on the DSL Wiki, and it dictates that you have to overwrite the MBR of the flash drive with something called ms-sys . I did this, and booting on those problem Dells became easy.

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On the sidebar now, there is a link to Music. I wrote a plugin for the best music player ever to write all the songs I listen to to a mysql db. It only writes it when I've listened to the song for longer than thirty seconds, and it writes the time I started the song, the time I ended it, the artist, title, album, and length of the song.

You can view what I have so far up here . This is inspired by some shit that Mike Neir did on his site.

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Her is a link to some directions on how to install the nvidia kernel modules if you are using a vanilla kernel from kernel.org. This is mostly just for my own reference in the future.

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If you are trying to mount something with sshfs and you get the following error:



execute the following command to resolve it:

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Ok, I found out about a little bug in Ubuntu LTS 6.06 (Dapper Drake) yesterday. It concerns many of the D-Link wireless PCMCIA cards, those using the acx100 chipset. After every successive kernel upgrade, the problem returns, so you will want to make sure to fix this every time you upgrade to a new kernel.

In /lib/firmware//acx/default lies a file, tiacx111c16, which is the file used by the DWL-G630. This file is a symlink to /lib/firmware//acx/2.3.1.31/tiacx111c16. With this file being the one symlinked, you will never be able to connect to a wireless network. To get it to work, you need to remove that symlink, and create a symlink of the same name, in the same place, to /lib/firmware//1.2.1.34/tiacx111c16. Reboot, and things should be good to go.

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I got a laptop. Gateway Solo 1450. Thanks to Shelby, it was reasonably priced. However, upon booting into X, I realized that I could only get 1024x768 at 8bit color depth. This is not going to work. After finding this site, I found out it's because of a supposed BIOS "upgrade" Gateway pushed out. At that link, you will find a BIOS downgrade which will allow you to run at 1024x768@24bit. This is obviously much more desirable.

What I want to know is, how do you push out an upgrade that makes the video card use 1MB of it's 8MB of memory?

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Here is what has been happening for some time. If I open firefox while I have something like XMMS open, then at no point during the current firefox session can I do anything and have it play sound. It's like XMMS locks the soundcard, and nothing else can take it back. Turns out it's an issue with firefox. I changed two things, and it seems to be fixed now.

First thing, I added the following:

exec aoss /usr/libexec/mozilla-launcher "$@"

to the bottom of /usr/bin/firefox. The second thing, I added the following:

FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"

to /etc/firefox/firefoxrc. After this, the issue is resolved. Just putting it up here in case anyone else has the issue.

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My parents wanted to buy me something for graduation. I told them I didn't want anything, but they insisted. I saw this as a great opportunity to get a mythtv box up and going. Since I had about $700 to spend, I figured I could get some decent stuff together to have a really nice myth box that I could use to do general media center tasks, including tivo-type applications. I gave my dad a wishlist, and he pretty much came through on all of it. The box is as follows:

Cooler Master C541 Centurion Micro ATX Case
Intel Pentium 4 2.4A Prescott 533MHz FSB
MSI 661FM3-V Micro ATX Motherboard
Corsair ValueSelect 2x512mb PC3200 Ram
Western Digital Caviar SE WD3000JB 300GB 7200 RPM IDE
Hauppage Win-TV PVR-350

Pretty nice, right? I got the box on Christmas, put it together, all except the PVR which I was ordering from Insight.com due to my work getting decent pricing from them. I ordered that PVR a week later, and to my dismay, Insight was out of stock. However, yesterday, due to my boss being cool, he loaned me one of the two PVR-350's he picked up a week before I called. So I was all set.

Popped the PVR in last night, and installed KnoppMyth because of it's ease of use as well as the relatively painless install it does for MythTV and all it's plugins. It may not be the fastest (and I say may as I am 99% sure it's as fast as anything else doing these same tasks), but it surely works to the fullest of my expectations. However, things weren't as easy as I would have liked, and some extra configuration was required. First, since I wanted to use the PVR-350, which has S-video output, to do both the recording as well as the displaying to the TV, I had to run a script which reconfigures the XF86Config-4 file as well as recompiling the ivtv driver to support the PVR-350 for video out. That script can be found here . It is extremely well run, and does all the work for you. It may require some configuration, but nothing that is too terribly difficult. However, what this script does do is configure myth (and X) to run at 720x480. This is great if you are running a 16:9 viewing ratio, but for those of us running 4:3, it's a bit off. Since you really don't want to mess with the XF86Config-4 here (believe me, no good results come of it), you can set the width/height of myth and the offsets to produce a fullscreen looking front end. I am using the following:



Tv output is not effected by this, and plays fullscreen in mplayer. A second configuration that was needed was to the /etc/lircd.conf file so that my remote, which is not natively supported, would work. Another file, /home/mythtv/.lircrc also had to be modified, and mine is linked here .



Simple enough, right? So now the remote works, but it's not booting without me hitting CTRl-D and CTRl-C alot. A big issue is not being able to see all the boot output when you boot up after the video switches to the PVR's S-video out. This stinks, and was particularly a problem for me until I booted using a monitor to find that my boot was halting as a disk needed to be checked. So fixed that, re-modified the XF86Config-4 file, and was good to go. Everything is working now, and I'm pretty happy with it. I plan on looking into what I can do to customize the UI for both MythTV itself as well as making MythWeb more useful to me and my wife. More to come...

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So the other day, I figured I'd get dual display working in Linux. I had a spare video card and monitor laying around, so there was no reason not to add more real estate to any given desktop.

Though I don't run Gentoo, this site was extremely useful in getting things going.

First, I had to find out the PCI Bus ID's for both video cards. This can be easily found out executing the command lspci. I found the BusID's to be 2:0:0 and 1:6:0 for the Nvidia onboard card and the ATI All-in-Wonder, respectively. These values go in the Device sections. These values are not required for a one card setup, but if you are to use two video cards, it is absolutely necessary to have these Bus ID's in your XF86Config-4 file. Another major difference is adding the amount of video ram (in kilobytes) to that same Device section. I'm not totally sure if this is necessary, but I figure it definitely can't hurt. Next is to define both monitors, which is about the same as you would with one monitor. Defining the HorizSync and VertRefresh values is key for getting the most out of your monitors. Generally, you can find these specs for any given monitor with a simple google search. As usual, you need to define two Screen sections, one for each monitor, listing the device and monitor to be used, as well as setting the depth (in bits) and resolution.

The big differences in the config file lie in the ServerLayout section. Mine as is follows:



Note the RightOf command. This is pretty cool. You can use plain-text requests such as this to define where the second screen is in relation to the first. Also, for Screen0, the 0 0 after the name is the position that the screen lies at. I am fairly sure that, by default, this is where it lies anyways, but there is no need for ambiguity.

A last section that was not in my config by default is the ServerFlags section. I added the following:



Xinerama is a set of extensions for Xfree86 that allow you to use multiple displays as one big virtual desktop, therefore allowing you to move windows between them (much the same way Windows works). If you do not include this, from what I've read, programs need to have coded in them the ability to move from one display to another, and the performance is a bit flaky at best.

In any case, it seems to be working now, I'm not really having any issues with it. There is some tweeking to be done to increase speed, and I will post about that if I get any results. My full config is here .

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Me and Potterj were working on modifying Torrentflux today, and got one nice little thing done on it. However, I have a bunch more ideas for it, which may incorporate RSS'ing a site by parsing out the data on that page. Should be interesting to see if I can actually get anything done on it tonight. I almost wish I wasn't leaving work, as I'm sure I'll lose my motivation.

However, I'm getting out early due to coming in early. I'me excited. Tigers game and beer tonight, Cokedick Motorcycle Awesome tomorrow, and then, YES, Wedding Classes!!! YAY!!!!

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I found some information about getting iTunes to work with Linux, and I followed the steps listed here , but was unable to get iTunes to detect the iPod. I can actually get ephPod to run in Crossover Office , and have it read the iPod. iTunes also plays music fine, and can read and upate ID3 tags. But it won't read the iPod. I posted on the Crossover Office forums, but I don't know that I'll get anywhere with that.

I'll keep at it though, as I really dig iTunes and WISH Apple would port it to Linux.

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