Rammblings and Madness

Just purchased a B&W Brother HL-2142 Laser,

Ubuntu compatibility is plug in wait and print work out the box. (10.04)

$99 from office works.

Only fault does not come with a USB cable !

Actually got around to looking a CUDA on Nvidia cards at work yesterday.

Got the SDK and sample code up and running on the mac pro, next thing to do is find some maths problem to do on it which will be faster than on a CPU / Grid. well at least that it will be faster given a better GPU the NVIDIA GT 120 isn’t that fast considering there is 2 Xenon quad core chips 2.4ghz. on the mac then there at 6 macs connected to the Xgrid. so it will be a bit hard to do a direct comparison.

Also had a informal meeting with the lab manager from physics we discussed how that for ever increasing amount of remote courses at the university how he plans to do physics labs for the astronomy course next year.

Ended up sending him to have a look at the UTS remote labs http://remotelabs.eng.uts.edu.au/ and told him to keep us posted since it’s all of interest.

So any ideas how to show that CUDA and GPU computing is useful ? or how to conduct an astronomy lab when your students are in Queensland ?

If your a commonwealth bank customer and you use ubuntu or other linux OS you may find that the Netbank website is extremely slow to login to.

Solution install nscd name server cache daemon

sudo apt-get install nscd

apt://ncsd

by the way this was found out by putting a complaint into the commonwealth bank which the complaint was swiftly replied to with generic flush your DNS for windows instructions and further instructions saying that AVG link scanner also is known to slow down Netbank. but once I dismissed these solutions as not solving the problem they then actually asked real questions got me to try and different dns server.  I also got plenty of phone calls check that my problem has been resolved or that at least someone is attempting to fix it so there ads must be right..

In the long run Commonwealth bank need to fix there DNS so that there sub-domain address is faster to look up.

In the short term my problem is fixed if it’s only a speed increase when I log into Netbank for the 2nd time, since the cache seems to clear on each restart.

AGVCRtoMPEG2 – is an old and outdated program that can convert your AGVCR recordings to avi or mp3.

README can be found at https://svn.ci.uchicago.edu/svn/if-media/AGVCRToMPEG2/README

Dependencies from apt repos:

• Scons
• Subversion
• Build-essentials
• libgsm
• libsamplerate
• libz

sudo apt-get install scons subversion build-essential libgsm1-dev libsamplerate-dev libz-dev

Download the code form the svn repository

svn co https://svn.ci.uchicago.edu/svn/if-media/AGVCRToMPEG2

We have to use the exact version of ffmpeg that he used in development since he has used superseeded functions from the ffmpeg libiary

svn co svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg -r 5652

Configure and Make ffmpeg (don’t install unless you want to)

cd ffmpeg

./configure

make

Next we have to edit the scons file in cd ~/AGVCRToMPEG2 , it is meant to take the command argument of where you complied the version of ffmpeg but it seems to use old and outdated scons code so we hard code the location in.

Using your favourite editor e.g vim SConstruct

On line 23:

ffmpeg_path = env['ffmpeg_path']
#ffmpeg_path= /home/jack/D/project/ffmpeg

change to

#ffmpeg_path = env['ffmpeg_path']
ffmpeg_path= ‘/home/carma/ffmpeg’

replace carma with your username

We can now attempt to compile the code with the the command scons. but your most likely to get errors due to poor C++ coding most are just related to messing #includes

The following files will need to be edited:

AGVCRToMPEG2.cpp
VPMedia/video/h261/VPMH261ASEncoder.cpp
VPMedia/video/h261/VPMH261Encoder-mash.cpp
VPMedia/video/VPMVideoBufferSink.cpp
VPMedia/video/VPMVideoAssembler.cpp
AudioMixer.cpp
VPMSSRCManager.cpp

To make things easier attached is the output of svn diff AGVCRTOMPEG2_904update.patch Note gunzip because of wordpress security doesn’t allow patch files.

gunzip AGVCRTOMPEG2_904update.patch.gz

now patch

patch -p0 < AGVCRTOMPEG2_904update.patch

Compile attempt 2

scons

Readme contains many examples and hopefully you now have a working system.

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.

Firstly I’ve had a hard time getting to the rhythm of uni life again. For those who care I’ve changed degrees. I decided to after spending a lot of time last year in the engineering building, it holds my interest more than maths I changed degrees this year from my B. Mathematics degree to a B. Engineering (computer) / B. Mathematics Combined. Of course this makes everything feel weird as I go from ELEC1700 first year subject to a 3rd year subject in programmable logic then number theory.

A lot of people had a good laugh at my last blog post actually it has been my most popular to date. I didn’t really mind people laughing since if I did I wouldn’t of blogged. I did get a couple strange comments though, a lot of if its a server config use a server.. someone said to use a Mac ?! and this guy from windows watch, miss labeled Mandriva as a live cd which it isn’t (sorta technically you can argue) and then segwayed into why having no screen or keyboard is good.

I don’t really see my computer as a serious server, yes it’s on 24/7, it is my personal SVN server but why spend a tonne of money I don’t have just so I can easier sync my uni work between my laptops and desktop, and have some revision control on the programs and latex files I write.

Just a note for me while I slowly re-build my computer. Some documentation that comes in handy.

• Subversion installation
• Nut UPS software

I’ve also applied for a Job with 17000 to be the techincal help with the access grid room. It would be a nice job since it looks to require you to sit in the room during the access grid lectures, and work the equipment and according to my mates in the maths deparment the lectures can be pretty interesting. Haven’t heard back yet, and I’m not sure I will get it since I did direct them to this blog as a refrence and the last couple of posts don’t make me look smart…

Ok I have a computer it generally stays on 24/7. it does important work like download files during off-peak download periods. It also is my svn server. samba etc…

It is also used by my family to surf the web since it’s always on and they don’t need to wait for computers to boot.

Ok so the short of the story is my computer got reformatted.

Distributing the blame

• Me – should of know better than to leave a mandriva install disk in the drive, (virtualbox install is why it was there) and when I finished my linux install I SHOULD of changed the BIOS setting to disable boot from CD.
• Dad – shouldn’t of turned off the computer he knows is always on.
• Mum – shouldn’t of continued to click yes through the mandrivia install, by the time i found the computer it was asking for a username and password for the new mandriva install. so it already had FORMATED and INSTALLED mandriva.

Coming soon !! more blog entries on the success or failure of data recovery tools in linux. If you have any pointers please tell me.

Aside welcome planet.linux.org.au readers !

By default you can not browse samba shares in Linpus being based of XFCE there is no XFCE file browser that support samba, you can still doing it using a hack and fuse smb. ok so everything is done in command line so start with Alt+ F2 then type in xterm to get our command line.
sudo yum install fuse-smb
We then need to add our linpus user “user” to the fuse group
sudo usermod -a -G fuse user
We can check that this command worked with “id user”
Create a new folder in our home directory
mkdir samba
Mount fuse to our new directory you will also need to run this code every time you reboot.
fuse /home/user/samba

cd into the samba folder or open up thunar and navigate to the /home/user/samba folder and there should be your samba network.

Last night we had a another successful Linux Owners Group In Newcastle meeting

I gave a talk on the OLPC XO and sugar. Main point is that sugar is now available on Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora after my talk William talked to the group about bidding for the open source developers conference (OSDC) to take place in Newcastle.

Sugar on Toshiba and XO

Useful links:

• Talk Slides
• OLPC Website
• OLPC Australia
• Getting Access to a XO in Australia
• Australian Deployment of the XO
• Sugar Labs

Stuff on OSDC

• OSDC website
• Newcastle Lug wiki

I did struggle at the end of the meeting to explain to a linux newbie that he doesn’t really want to install a program from source… as he told me linux isn’t as easy as they say it is… I also no nothing about Mandrivia. We also discussed the Linux.conf.au inner circle and that too many of the LCA talks are repeats!

The guys at Kuki Linux, have released a deb package of a slightly more custom kernel (latest wireless added etc..) than the vanilla ubuntu and debian kernel.

You can view the Tutorial on Kuki website:

http://www.kuki.me/tutorial/installing-kuki-linux-kernel-on-ubuntu-810

Hopefully it means that it will be easier to install ubuntu and debian on to a Acer Aspire One.