Rammblings and Madness

Trial x+1 on getting my TV tuner card to work after kernel updates.

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)

Ok today I went to Newcastle local computerbank despite the name this group is unrelated to most computer banks around. it’s mainly a windows shop but that has more to do with the volunteers knowledge is limited more than any theological differences of why windows is better than linux.

I went there to pick up some cheap computers to act as workstation for work.

What I got.

Hardware:
Dell case
40gb hdd
2.4 Ghz P4
256 MB RAM
ATI graphics (glxgears 650 fps off live cd)
Intel Motherboard
1 Gbps on-board NIC
lntel audio

Software:

because there was a windows XP OEM sticker on the box they had windows XP installed. along with every anti-virus anti-spywear program… AVG ad-ware… so much crap i decided it needed a wipe.. i did get warned as i took them out if it’s going in a “secure” area i should reloaded as he couldn’t tell me what they have preloaded. As they didn’t have any QA or standard installs.

What i gave:
Since Computer bank is a subsection of Community Helping Hands Association and that charity pays for there power and adsl, also the CHHA does their paper work for them. I handed over a donation to CHHA for more than what the computers where worth on behalf of Sneddon & Partners Solicitors. Also because the guys there are nice they let me pick through the shelf until i found something good and they are slowly letting us educate them about linux.

For contact information see http://www.chha.org.au/

Back at uni again to my horror the IT guys changed the wireless. all the time spent on writing a really nice documentation on how to connect all wasted since they now used a completely different connection method ,  this time i decided to rewrite the doc but use a wiki so it can be edited by others.

So if you’ve come to this site going how do i do the dam thing see wiki.newcastlelug.org

Currently it still in development but it’s moving on quickly since it’s now Wednesday, the changes happened Monday and last time it took me 3 months to work it out this time 2-3 hours.

Biggest change to the uni wireless seems to be the access control program i can’t get my POP3 emails or my IMAP emails while at uni which is a big pain. that and the access control program requires java which isn’t always installed on our linux laptops is it !

Anyway i should be concentrating back on classes but you know how it is.

Gabriel

Setting up a new computer for Sneddon & Partners , We decided we wanted a RAID system since data these days is now always more expensive than the computers and we’ve just had a string of failures on our older systems.

The Motherboard is a giga-byte GA-P35-DS3P which contains a Intel
ICH9R RAID controller, i didn’t really know about software RAID when i
brought it and thought intel good they support linux and Phoronix
gave it 9/10 in a review it all must work

Ok i’ve discovered it’s a software raid… and what that means.

So now i had 2 choices:
1. I could try and use the Software RAID Intel chip, this would involve using dmraid which hard really hard install instructions https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto , through after reading the instructions and some advice from IRC i came to the conclusion i only needed to this this if i was dual booting with windows.

2. I could use Linux software RAID mdadm to create a software raid just turn my hard drives into 2 standard sata drives and go on my merry way.

obviously I choose 2, and since the Ubuntu Community Wiki didn’t have instructions so set about writing them https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SoftwareRAID
Waiting for some people to find the site for a bit of feedback but we’ll see how it goes.

We flew into Melbourne taking the new Tiger air ways.

Frankly for $25 dollars a ticket we expected a lot worse. The flight was on time  it wasn’t crowded.

The only disappointment was when  we got into Melbourne airport it has a cow shed for a terminal, basically they converted  part of the car park, put a tin roof on it, fenced it off and put a  baggage carousel around it.

All in all likely to flight with  tiger again .

Because we haven’t gotten around to reinstalling kubuntu on kyms machine every time it does a kernel upgrade it breaks the nvidia drivers and the FusionHDTV drivers

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

We ended the year with a lot of no shows. But that’s ok as it was so close to the 26th of December, we sorta expected everyone to be busy anyway.

So with the roughly 10 of us there we all had some chips and lollies, while chris showed off his new ASUS eeepc. Tony showed of his cast (broken foot)  and kde 4, and one of the other guys did a new install of linux onto his brand new laptop.

Good meeting.

To all our Linux Owners Group In Newcastle members have a great chirstmas and New year, and I’ll see you all again in February the 18th. As we skip our meeting in January for Linux.conf.au

Gab

Kate Project Manager Plugin

installing KPMP on a pretty stock standard kubuntu system

kate should already be installed but unlikely that kate-plugins isn’t installed if you use kate of programing it’s worth it..

so start with

sudo apt-get install kate-plugins


you’ll now find some cool plugins for kate in settings -> configure kate then explain application and select plugins personal favourite so far is the kate make plugin.

now lets look at our kate project managemet plugin
download the source from sourceforge
sourceforge

now we need to grab some devel files and some compile tools
apt-get install kde-devel automake1.9 build-essential

now we can compile the project manager
as root use sudo -s or su or whatever you like to get root rights

tar jxvf projectmanager-0.1.2-24.tar.bz2
cd projectmanager
./configure
make
make install


open up kate again and hey presto it works

ok i purchased a cheap usb-to-serial converter off ebay.. very generic HK thing. of course it only came with windows drivers and no indication that it would work in linux so i’ll go through the process of trying to get one of these things to work.

start off with a terminal and run lsusb this list all your usb devices

kubuntu2:~# lsusb
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 4348:5523
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000


From this output we can see that my usb-to-serial connector is plugged into bus 004

So we’ll try and get it running using the generic kernel module. as root or sudo on both this lines go.

modprobe usbserial vendor=0x4348 product=0x5523
modprobe pl2303

as you can see we’ve taken the 4348 and 5523 numbers from our lsusb output and used them as our vendor and product identifiers

we can how check dmesg

[ 285.140496] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for generic
[ 285.231366] usbserial_generic 4-2:1.0: generic converter detected
[ 285.232808] usb 4-2: generic converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 285.232989] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
[ 285.232993] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core
[ 304.352347] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for pl2303
[ 304.353133] usbcore: registered new interface driver pl2303
[ 304.353142] drivers/usb/serial/pl2303.c: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver


well it looks like it did something. i know how a usb device in my dev folder now to test it.

At the moment I’m trying to test it with my ups so far it’s no good… i changed the port=/dev/ttyS0 to port=/dev/ttyUSB0
and i get error messages back saying that it can’t find the ups… bummer

Most of you know read my blog, you know who you are (kym…) know i’m off to linux.conf.au is in Melbourne this year

Registrations are open and I’ve booked my ticket with linux.conf.au and 7 night accommodation in Trinity so that totalled to about $609 .

And Tiger airways have decided to set up shop in Newcastle so we decided to book tickets with them and take advantage of there 50% off sale so flights to Melbourne was $25 per person and $50 to come home again.

With in all this booking and credit card purchases i had to ring netbank (commonwealth bank) to get them to reset a password as i forgot mine. seems every time i ring tech support they try to sell me something this time it was a $500 increase on my Credit card.

So now i can spend even more money in Melbourne