All posts by Gabz

linux.conf.au

Embedded Mini-conf

First day at linux.conf.au and i’m at the Embedded miniconf not really because  i’m overly interested  or knowledgeable. But kym manly comes for the conference for the embedded miniconf so i join her.

So far the first talk was from a artist compared to an engineer, so it wasn’t techincal but there where plenty of “cool” things to show aswell as how to obtain huge amounts of money for research apparently selling a robot as “art” works wonderfully

the other talks have been interesting, one was way too technical for me. I was about making mirco-kernels i had no idea what was going on.

Kyms still got show and tell to go and it looks like it would be a good session. And day all round.

Linux, linux.conf.au

Tiger airways

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 .

/dev/random, Kymoie, Linux

Fixing kyms kernel

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

Linux

LOGIN update

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

/usr, Linux

KPMP

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

Linux

USB-to-Serial in *buntu

4 Comments

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

Linux

Linux.conf.au 2008

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 😀

Linux

Apt mirrors in australia

Westnet sponsored mirror guys 3FL seem to be restructuring there mirrors in australia, so i decided to look if they fixed the apt-proxy problem with ubuntu but it seems they have solved this by implementing a full mirror. Very impressed. i’ll have to update the list of australian apt mirrors soon to reflect this https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AustralianTeam/LocalAptMirrors

While mucking around i also notice now with gusty we have alot more australian mirrors in the offical listing if you go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources from the drop down list “Download From” select “Other” then you get a list of all mirrors . You can see alot more isp mirrors are listed than the normal 3 last time i checked.

Software Sources

Kymoie, Linux

FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Digital 4 (Kubuntu 7.10)

Kymberly brought herself a Divco FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Digital 4

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.