June 15, 2004

October, 2006

I'm now among the xorg modular masses though. That update went smoothly. I'm now sorting out all sorts of other package blocking issues in emerge. Complete pain in the kiester.

In other news I recently tried the BackTrack live CD that combines Whax and Auditor live CD's for vulnerability assessment. Boy it loads slow, and I can't believe a CD touted for its wireless auditing capabilities doesn't include madwifi drivers. I wasn't terribly impressed.

I also recently got my first USB memory key. I never had much of a use for one until I started working with multiple machines and didn't want to network them to share files. $20 for 1Gb and Fry's. Woof. Sales are kewl.

July 2007

One tech challenge that was driving me nuts here for a couple weeks was my foray into building a MythTV box--freeware TiVo stuff. I was concerned that my ridiculously cheap Norwood Micro S800 TV tuner (circa 2005ish, CompUSA for about $30) might not be supported, but lo and behold, I was able to get it to work. I chose an Ubuntu based system, though KnoppMyth also got consideration. I used these nice instructions on installing MythTV on the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn release and did a Combined Backend, Frontend, & Regular Desktop thang. I picked up an Asus M2N-E motherboard and the cheapest AMD processor I could buy, and a gig of Crucial RAM for a whopping $20, mixed it with a case, hard drive, dvd-r drive my brother in law had laying around the went to work. Total cost of the system was about $220.

My first challenge with this box was to get the video card recognized. Evidently in a cost cutting measure, the hardware on the card that tells the computer the make/model number just ain't there. I was tipped off by reading some log messages that were pretty funny--they basically chided the card manufacturer for being lame. I did find a great workaround though, that involved creating and or adding to a file /etc/modprobe.d/isapnp the following aliases:

alias char-major-81 videdev
alias char-major-81-0 cx88xx
alias char-major-81-64 cx88xx
options cx88xx card=54 tuner=69

So the first step in my audio debugging was actually reading the instructions that came with the card. Even though there's no discrete audio output jack like my prior experience with an ATI TV Wonder VE, the crazy DIN looking jack on the back of the Norwood Micro card has a pigtail included with it that provides the audio output. This needs to be jumpered back to the audio line in jack on the back panel of the motherboard.

No sound mythTV

• set the first "Capture" switch to "Mix." "Line In" wouldn't do it, "CD" wouldn't do it, "Mic" wouldn't do it. And...
• I needed unmute ...oh, I think it was the Capture slider setting and unmuting for recording. Then finally, I had sound. The combination of the Capture source and undoing record mute on that Capture slider did it.

Hope that helps someone!

Moved to new case, laster reinstalled Myth / Ubuntu

I also today purchased a second capture card at Fry's as I'm finding more and more conflicts in prime time, particularly now that my wife has jumped on the mythTV bandwagon and given me her requested shows. I got the WinTV-HVR 1600 which contains a standard definition tuner as well as an HDTV tuner in it. I grabbed a $40 antenna as well and I'm very curious if I"ll be able to get an HD signal here, particularly in the basement. I'll report back. Ugh.... it doesn't look good right now: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_HVR-1600 says currently "Note: There are no Linux drivers available for the WinTV-HVR-1600 as of yet." Grr.

Converting .3gp files to .mpg .mpeg for Smugmug

Now, there is a Windows freeware program or 15 to do this out there, but god knows if they are spyware addled, and for conversions like this, some part of me just wants to do it on the command line. We don't need no steekin' GUI. So I'm trying to figure out how to do it with ffmpeg under linux. I thought I was on the right track but turns out my machine lacked the codec necessary for the audio portion of these .3gp files coming off the krazr. Apparently, they use amrnb codecs which stands for "adaptive multi rate narrow band" and this sort of audio codec is apparently common in mobile phones (if Wikipedia is to be believed). So now I'm recompiling mplayer in gentoo with the amrnb USE flag and hoping for the best. Once mplayer can play the file, I'll give it a go with conversion with ffmpeg again. Oh, and recompiling ffmpeg with the amr USE flag (--enable-amr_nb --enable-amr_wb if configuring manually) seems to be required too. Boy this is fun! "Unsupported codec (id=73728) for input stream #0.1" was my error that tipped me off to the missing audio codec.

After recompiling ffmpeg with the amr USE flag, this finally worked:

ffmpeg -i test.3gp -f mpegvideo -ar 44100 -ac 1 -acodec mp3 test.mpg But... the files were kinda big, and sorta crashed players and behaved strangely. Smugmug support clued me in to mp3 not really being a part of well behaved mpeg-1 files which should be using mp2 for audio coding. Also the default resolution of my files was not part of the preferred MPEG-1 onstrained parameter set. Who knew? This turned out with much better results:

for i in `ls -1 *.3gp | cut -d. -f1`; do ffmpeg -y -i $i.3gp -sameq -f mpegvideo -s cif -r 25 -ar 32000 -ac 1 mpegs/$i.mpg; done

That's "ffmpeg, overwriting output, taking the 3gp file in, using same quality, forcing mpegvideo as the video format, changing to CIF resolution, 25 frame/sec framerate, audio sampling frequency of 32kHz (mp3 min), audio channels 1 (mono), and stuff it in a subdirectory I created. The files were still kinda big, but then I had to remember that mpeg-1 just isn't as good a compression as h.263.

Some helpful references were:
http://www.niemueller.de/wiki/index.php?ConvertVideoTo3GP http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Emerge_MPlayer#Codecs http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC7 http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2007-August/068635.html http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-user/2005-July/000682.html

Hauppauge PVR-150 + MythTV = Bliss

CD drives perform a disappearing act in Windows

I booted into the handy System Rescue CD and test both drives for readability. They worked fine and I could read discs in both drives. I also updated the clam antivirus scanner with the "freshclam" command, mounted the hard disk with Windows on it and ran a rather painfully slow clamscan on the root of the drive, WINDOWS directory as well as the Documents and Settings directory. It found a couple things in some Outlook Express mailbox files, but nothing in any of the system areas... so the search continued.

So I finally boot into Windows and guess one of their passwords (which hadn't been left with me, lest I'd tried to get into Windows earlier). I confirmed what the owner had said about the drives just not being there in Windows. Hunting under My Computer>Manage>Device Manager showed the smoking gun that these drives had had the "Doh!" yellow caution exclamation points and an error suggesting registry corruption ("Your registry might be corrupted. (Code 19)").

A google search on missing CD drives led me to a forum where Microsoft's knowledge base article Cannot Access CD-ROM was referenced. I'm not sure if Adaptec EZ CD Creator was involved at all, but the exceedingly simple fix of "Remove the Upperfilters and Lowerfilters values completely from the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}" was tendered. I found only a Lowerfilters key at that registry path, but I'll be damned if deleting it and rebooting fixed it. Made me look like a freakin genius. I have no idea why it worked, but it did. So I post is here for more google food and hoping it helps someone else!

Lenovo T60 locking up while plugged in but with low battery

So I plugged it in at the desk, disabled wireless, shut it down, and let it charge all night. In the morning, the battery LED was solid green indicating all was well. The battery monitor in Windows also now indicated a 100% charge.

And nary a reboot or glitch all day. So, it was either the battery voltage causing the problems (despite being plugged in), or something in the wireless driver or something more interesting. Email me if you have a data point similar to this situation.

Tomato, Wireless bridging, MythTV and Samba

I managed to upgrade an old WRT54G Linksys I had that was still running the White Russian release of OpenWRT to Tomato, a third party open source firmware based off Linksys's official firmware. I'm very impressed with it. I was hesitant about the upgrade, unsure if the bin file from tomato would load okay from the openwrt admin interface. It did, and I opted not to erase the jffs partition. It worked fine. What I was after was a little box that would implement wireless bridging. dd-wrt didn't do it so well, but Tomato has delivered! I now have my MythTV server in the basement on the network now, and no longer behind the NAT'd wireless client setup of the dd-wrt box that was previously sitting down in the basement. I never could figure out the port forwarding incantations to get through that thing to talk to the myth box. With wireless bridging though, everything just works. Werd to Tomato!

With a clear network path to the Myth box now, I could apt-get install samba on the Ubuntu-based myth box, dialed in some settings in /etc/samba/smb.conf to share out my Myth recordings directory, add a couple smbusers, and voila. Once I got that working, I slapped the VLC media player on the wife's computer, pointed her to the share, unzipped and ran /usr/share/doc/mythtv-backend/contrib/mythrename.pl on the myth server to make the filenames have Show titles instead of random id numbers, and voila--any computer in the house can play things out of the Myth recordings database. It's not fancy but it works. To become more elegant, I may give MythFrontend a look on Windows, but for now, this samba share was easy to implement.

New Monitor - Samsung 245BW

I tested this 1920x1200 monster on 2 different laptops and a DVI-D equipped desktop (the Myth box actually GeForce 5200) and noticed differences on all of them. Sadly my Thinkpad T60 was the worst of them, t60p better, DVI-D best, and I got panicked and upset about the lousy graphics card on my T60 model 1951 for a while because it looked so bad in analog, and had no affordable DVI-D upgrade path (unless $300 on a Thinkpad Advanced Dock and $60 on a low profile PCI express DVI-D video card is affordable to you). So, I went back to the store, prepared to throw in the towel and try something smaller (the Brother in Law's 22" Samsung looked great with my T60) and lower resolution but they encouraged me to talk to the tech (since they werent' going to give me any money back). I manged to get him to see the issue I was dealing with and he encouraged me to take home another unit to try it. Sure enough, the new unit was much better and the T60 when directly connected via dsub does 1920x1200 WUXGA resolution acceptably via analog. Woot.

Now the bummer though is my Belkin OmniView SE 4-port KVM switch (F1D104) and its complement of pricey high-resolution co-axially shielded VGA video cables that have been nice accessories for about 8 years now is due for replacement. Its max bandwidth is 1600x1200 and things just look like poo through it at this monitor's native resolution. The wife's Belkin OmniView SOHO F1DS102T specifications claim that it handles it, but even with the pricey co-axially shieled high res cables, the degradation is enough to annoy me on text. I may just get a small cheap panel to run off the KVM as I get enough wounded duck machines brought by friends to troubleshoot that I still need a kvm or an extra monitor in my life.

Boot to CD on IBM Netvista model 2257

On a related note, I installed Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) for the first time today. It simply amazes me how simple installing Linux is these days. Kudos to the Ubuntu folks. I made the target machine (this old Celeron based NetVista with 372MB RAM) dual-boot, and I'm absolutely dreading chasing down all the freakin drivers for the XP partition. But Ubuntu Gutsy... installed with about 8 mouse clicks and no thinking. Amazing. This computer is an upgrade for my son. Who is 18 months old. His Pentium-II-based Win98 box, despite fresh reinstallation wasn't even stable enough for Snood and Giggle Baby Shapes without having to reboot daily. He's young, he's precious, he needn't be so rudely exposed to lousy 16-bit operating systems at this tender age. And so we are upgrading...with a box lying around the house.

Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 replaces Gentoo on the home box

Installation with Ubuntu was a breeze. I just specified manual disk partitioning, and repartitioned my existing Gentoo disk. I'd previously tar'd up home and etc directories to an external drive so I could repartition and give /boot more breathing room (512MB) than it needed under Gentoo at the time. I gave this memory-heavy box just 512MB of swap, and for / I big MurderFS, errr, reiserfs goodbye (sorry Hans, you seem to have your hands full with some more pressing matters than your filesystem) and opted for ext3 for my Ubutnu /. For shits and giggles I also gave 9GB of space to a fat32 partition just in case I need to exchange some info with my Windows partition at some point (in a way that doesn't require VMWare).

Now on this aging box, I had a dual boot setup with Gentoo and Windows 2000, and even had VMWare Workstation for Linux configured so that it could boot the windows partition (separate hard drive actually) and run it in physical disk mode, leveraging Windows MUP hardware profiles so Windows wouldn't get too uptight switching between bare iron and vmware's virtual motherboard. Since it's been a few years since I got that working, I needed to relearn all the incantations I needed to do to make it work. This time I figured I'd write em down here.

The first problem I overcame with Ubuntu was that apparently Workstation 5.5.6 (I haven't paid to upgrade to 6.x) doesn't support Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 directly. I was encountering an error during vmware-config.pl that included a compliation error "Unable to build the vmmon module." with some specific gripes about "expected declaration specifiers" errors when compiling some header files.

To get vmware-config.pl to run and be happy, I did a few things (perhaps not all necessary):

1. sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential gcc-3.4 ; export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4
2. applied the "any-any patch" conveniently mentioned in the VMWare knowledgebase article. Vmware to their credit links to this article right in the compilation error I was receiving. Then once that patch was applied, I tried this again, with success:
3. cd whatever/vmware-distrib; sudo ./bin/vmware-uninstall.pl; sudo ./vmware-install.pl; sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl (if you said no to it in install)

With this any-any patch installed and run after installing vmware workstation, but before running vmware-config.pl, all was well. By virtue of the prior export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4 gcc 3.4 was used, but I'm not sure if the defautl Gutsy version of gcc would've worked fine after I'd installed the any-any patch.

Second tip for other would-be VMWare workstation physical disk Windows booters from an Ubuntu host system:

The third struggle was to get the permissions right for my physical-disk-mode Windows virtual machine. I was attempting to create the new virtual machine, Custom, New Workstation 5, Microsoft Windows, Windows 2000 Professional, file location is in my regular user account home directory, one processor, 512mb ram, bridged networking, BusLogic scsi, Use a physical disk (for advanced users), /dev/sdb (the physical disk my windows installation is on), use entire disk, and chose the default name for the vmdk file. When I clicked Finish, the errors VMWare Workstation 5.5.6 was throwing at me as I try to add my Windows virtual machine is: "Error Unable to complete wizard: Insufficient permission to access file." Of course that error lacked any definition of what file it was talking about. A little experimenting (use partition instead of whole disk) indicated that it's the physical disk device itself that it's griping about. /dev/sdb (my ide disk that I have Windows on) is what it couldn't access.

To address this, I edited /etc/groups and created a new group called "windisk" and added my unpriv'd normal ubuntu username is a member, then did "sudo chgrp windisk /dev/sdb /dev/sdb1" so that my regular unix user would have read/write access to this physical disk with Windows on it. Test it out with "fdisk -l /dev/sdb" as your regular userid (i.e. no sudo). To get vmware to recognize this change, I had to back out of the vmware virtual machine wizard recreate the new vm. This "windisk" group approach is my own invented variant of the advice of vmware kb article Configuring Dual- or Multiple-Boot Systems to Run with VMware Workstation which suggested just adding the user to the "disk" group. I wasn't comfortable just adding my user to the disk group as that might allow Windows malware to possibly get its hands on my host operating system's raw disk too. NOTE though...this chgrp on the raw windows disk will not survive a reboot. Getting the windisk group to be assigned to your windows disk only at boot time will require some udev configuration tweaking. /etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules is one file that's involved. I haven't gotten that sorted just yet. For now I can deal with a sudo chgrp command done manually on reboot.

And with that, I declare success on replacing my Gentoo partition with Ubuntu! This may embolden me to revisit Gentoo on my 2nd work laptop, as I don't want more than 1 Gentoo system in my life!

.NRG vs .ISO

Widescreen monitors

Jumping to the Mac: Outlook under Windows to Entourage for Mac conversion and import

To transfer his workflow, I had to figure out how to get Outlook 2003 mail contacts and calendar entries over to Microsoft Entourage, which is the component of Office for Mac that is most like Outlook. I'm pleased to say that it eventually worked.

I used O2M from littlemachines.com for $10 and holy crap, covnerting 2GB worth of email took FOREVER but it ultimately worked. O2M connects to Outlook, and created .outbox format files for mail, .ics files for calendar entries, and .vcfs for contacts.

Importing these into Entourage wasn't a File>Import operation though. To be honest it was kinda a pain in the ass. You might think Microsoft really wants people to stay on Windows or something. Instead of using File>Import in Entourage for these files, you need to a) make sure the Mac association for each file type involved is to open it with Entourage (rather than mail or iCal or AddressBook), then drag the .mbox files from finder into the mail folder where you want it, then the .vcf's into the addressbook pane, and then the penultimate pain in the ass, you need to open every .ics with Entourage to get it to stick (and close every appointment window that pops up for hundreds of appointments).

It's possible that the calendar thing would be easier if all appointments were done in one .ics file, but the individual files eventually worked. I'm not sure whether a single .ics file would've made that much easier, or would've worked, but with 400 or so entries I wasn't in the mood to take chances. Finally, to get him Yahoo Instant messenger, I opted to install Adium X, a multiprotocol instant messenger.

He's up and running, and time will tell if the transition is as smooth as I think it will be for him. I can't believe they didn't include a friggin ethernet adapter with that machine though. That's pretty irritating, but the machine is so damned thin they barely managed to fit a single USB port on its razor slim profile. He'll need a USB hub too if he needs to be on the office network and hook to a local printer at the same time. No wonder, someone came up with this spoof of the airbook video.