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.

Linux

Ubuntu 7.10

Unlikely Ubuntu 7.04 from 6.10 there aren’t too many features in the way of new programs, but 7.10 is filled with driver updates.

Some of these important driver updates is a kernel upgrade 2.6.22-14

New printer driver support

the new xorg which everyone has been waiting for.

and to my surprise win modems support.
Restricted Drivers
When i did my upgrade on my Intel based laptops which intel graphics, wireless and sound. I was very shocked when i booted up 7.10 beta to find the Restricted Drivers manager launching. To ask me if I want to install the modem driver. i’ve never used the 56k modem on this laptop ever.

So far there has been a huge amount updates between BETA and RC so if you plan on upgrading to BETA wait until you get your RC version.

Gusty appears to be a strong update with nothing really new and flash but plenty of driver and other little software updates


Linux

Planet for Newcastle lug.org

ok so I got a bit bored. Yesterday i decided to install a planet for the lug members are there are a couple interesting blogs. why? because i was reading planet.linux.org.au and released that i read most of my favourite blogs on this site.. put not all so i wanted to cut down the number of websites i have to visit.

Installation process

Installing wasn’t that hard grab the python code zipped up from http://www.planetplanet.org/

extract the data, and well start reading the INSTALL doc.

Basics are easy enough

  • upload to your web server (i uploaded everything expect the .bzr folder as it has too many small files in it)
  • edit the config files
  • Setup Cron Job

ok the parts which took some time and googling

file permissions – all the .py files didn’t have a execute file permission so my cron jobs came back with permission denied, it seems that the file permissions change when you upload to the ftp server.

playing with making it pretty … well this hasn’t really happened yet.. i might see if someone else wants to edit the css file…

anyway here it is my first planet http://planet.newcastlelug.org/

/usr/games

Call Of Duty

I went to the local PC games shop looking for Quake 4 … it seems that noone has it.. i picked up Call of Duty because it was cheap.

Checked the Wine Application DB
and it all seems to work well

stuck and cd in the drive open up a konqueror window right clicked on setup.exe selected run using wine and the install pop up hassle free,

ok COD is a 2 disc installer and you just can’t press the eject button on your cd-rom drive.

wine eject d:
seemed to fix my problem through you may need to change d: to whatever your drive is called in wine.

ok there seems to be a problem with COD (game of the year edition) that means when you put CD 1 back in after CD 2 It says some blah about I/O errors more info about error

I Fixed the problem by using a 3rd party installer Loki 3rd party installer

the symbolic links don’t work the bash script needs some editing

but you can easily enough cd into your cod directory and go
wine CoDSP.exe and your off

Game plays smooth and well on my old hardware.

/usr

Clarkconnect Subversion

For some reason Clark connect comes with subversion 1.1.2 and this older version of subversion doesn’t allow 2gb commits so we need to upgrade ..not as easy as it seems

installing subversion 1.4.4

grab the rpm files for RHEL 4 from this mirror

apt-get install neon

we then need to update apr (this probably has caused something else to break)

rpm -U apr-0.9.12-2.i386.rpm
rpm -U apr-util-0.9.12-1.i386.rpm

finally we install subversion

rpm -i subversion-1.4.4-1.i386.rpm

and any extra tools we need

rpm -i subversion-python-1.4.4-1.i386.rpm
rpm -i subversion-perl-1.4.4-1.i386.rpm
rpm -i subversion-tools-1.4.4-1.i386.rpm

now it’s time to test.

seems that apr 0.9.x doesn’t support 2gb or larger repos so we download apr from here
OK this hit a wall Clark connect doesn’t allow me to update apr

/usr

Wine 0.9.46 Released

What’s new in this release:
– A variety of fixes to improve Photoshop CS2 support.
– More complete support for device installation in setupapi.
– New Bidi text implementation that doesn’t depend on libicu.
– The usual assortment of Direct3D improvements.
– Beginning of I/O completion ports support.
– Lots of bug fixes.

I actually decided to upgrade to this version and Steam works better on this one compared to 9.45.

That and i wanted to test the Digg Blog it function

read more | digg story

Life is boring if things "Just Work" !