Linux suitable for every event

Today Kymberly and I had our engagement party. If you haven’t kept pace and I don’t blame you since I haven’t updated the blog. But yes, we are engaged. I asked Kym to marry me on the 16th of June, and she said yes. Romantic stories are for another blog far far away.

Anyway I really wanted to share our lovely Engagement Cake… If you know why you have an engagement cake be sure to tell me. But it kept the future mother in-law happy.

HyKim ready to March

Flight leaves tomorrow 6 AM

• I Checked my site visit statistics and noticed that I’m now on the Linux.conf.au planet, I don’t normally put my blog up for planets but it was part of the registration and was easy. so hello my extra blog readers from http://planet.linux.org.au/lca2009/
• Linux.conf.au, I have tickets to for the conf. Tiger airways are now on my list of banned airlines, In 1 year they’ve gone from alright to horrible. Basically they canceled our flights from Melbourne to Hobart. and put us on other ones but then we can’t get the Jetstar flights we have to connect us to the Newcastle to Melbourne Part. So more money had to be spent Tiger gave a less than expected refund.
  • Related on the 18th January we fly into Melbourne from Newcastle at 7:40 am our next flight to Hobart doesn’t leave until 17:55 so we have 8 hours in Melbourne to kill, please leave suggestions in comments if you have some ideas of what to do.
• Kym and Linux.conf.au. Not so good she is trialling her talk out at work the week before, but the robot isn’t ready yet… it was meant to be ready for her last year but the processor still isn’t inside the bear yet. As for the talk well the OO.o sliders aren’t finished yet either.
• Still looking for a new OS for my Acer Aspire looked at Kuki.me but it’s still not near production stage yet.

Anyway welcome to the new Planet readers

So last night I turned 3D acceleration back on then slowly went into System Settings -> appearance and turned each of the effect things I could find to none (colour-> effects, style->effects, icons->advanced), Then Gab suggested I backup and then delete .kde4 in my home folder due to the multiple kdebase updates that have been d’loaded since kubuntu beta release. I also edited my xorg.conf, adding to the bottom of it:

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection

After restarting my computer seems to work, even when I turn it on for a second time it still seems to work (Including 3D acceleration) however it has produced some more errors, such as firefox 3 has gone back to the gnome look, and I can’t get to webpages using the address bar something about “ASSERT: *** Search: _installLocation: engine has no file!”

Edit: firefox seems to have had an update, now the address bar works

I decided on Kubuntu 8.04 Beta 1 with KDE4, my first problem was because I have an nvidia graphics card (8600) splash screens usually fail to appear and so did the disk check and ‘press enter to reboot screen’ before and after I installed 8.04, but after installing and updating I found the “Hardware Drivers Manager” which had the latest version of nvidia drivers; they were just one click away. Sadly my Dvico TV tuner card doesn’t work out of the box, but when 8.04 becomes stable I’ll reinstall that.

After installing nvidia drivers and restarting my splash screen came back! Sadly only in 640×480 so I changed the splash screen res to 1440×900 by:
sudo vim /etc/usplash.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u
I also changed the splash so it showed details of loading by changing
sudo vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
delete ‘quiet’ from the kernel line of the kernel you are running right down the bottom of the file then you will get all the messages under the loading bar of “filesystem OK”, etc.

I also installed Firefox 3. It looks horrible out of the box, BUT there is a package called gtk-qt-engine-kde4 which will put KDE4 themes on GTK. After the package is installed you go into system settings-> appearance -> GTK Styles and Fonts. I still don’t like the look of it, so I ended up installing Firefox 2.0 to get back to something that looked decent.

And my last problem that I have found so far is they took IRC out of Kopete!!! (bug 201732) So annoying… I may have to start using pidgin.
Oh and Adobe Reader doesn’t seem to appear for 64bit Linux, kpdf it will have to be.

Another random note Openoffice.org 2.4 opens nearly instantaneously

following the “How to install DVB devices”

then at step 2 switching to Chris Pascoe’s notes after “At step 2″

or if reinstalling:

sudo rm -r xc-test
to remove old source files if you have them

hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/~pascoe/xc-test/
cd xc-test
make
sudo make install
sudo init 6

NOTE: do not do ‘sudo make’, or ‘sudo make && make install’ it doesn’t work.

for some reason (either updating envy, 2.6.22-14-generic kernel, or chris has updated something) my nvidia drivers worked this time (169.09)

Fixing it:

sudo -s


cd v4l-dvb-6591-dd4-withremote
make && make install

this should reinstall the fusionhdtv dual digital 4, if for some reason the folder isn’t there download a new copy form chris http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/Linux-DVB/DVICO/6591/v4l-dvb-6591-dd4-withremote.tar.gz

type exit to leave super user mode (root)
now to reinstall your nvidia drivers. we cheated and just used envy to do this to launch envy in text mode use
envy -t


your computers is now reset and everything works again

After googling we found and install guide for Gentoo most of the credit for this guide must go to this guy: Dual digital 4 under linux

For starters we want to do everything in terminal and everything as root

sudo -s -H

Install the software from the ubuntu repos
apt-get install mercurial build-essential linux-headers-‘uname -r’

Follow the downloading and patching as described in Dual digital 4 under linux. (I’ll copy and past it over if I have time.)

When you get to the “Now make and install the modules”
We need to divert for a second to do this part. We need to do some hacks as Ubuntu isn’t really up for kernel changes

First find out what kernel version you are up to
uname -r
For me at the time it was 2.6.22-14 if yours is different you need to change where I have “2.6.22-14″ to whatever yours is.

The kernel source wasn’t in the the right place so we have to create a symbolic link

ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.22-14 /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/source

Now for some reason I needed to tell make to compile for the 2.6.22-14 kernel not the older 2.6.22-12 kernel which was installed.

make release VER=2.6.22-14-generic

Now we can return to Dual digital 4 under linux and do

make && make install

Once we have done that follow the firmware upgrade as in Dual digital 4 under linux.

Now we can modprobe it into the kernel

modprobe dvb-core
modprobe dvb-usb
modprobe dvb-pll
modprobe xc3028-fe
modprobe zl10353
modprobe dvb-usb-cxusb


Open up kaffeine and success we have a working turner card.

Note: We have an Nvidia card installed, we are using the latest driver from Nvidia which we have manually installed . This broke when we complied the kernel so it had to be reinstalled.