i am huge in japan

New HTPC

2010-03-14T09:02:00.003+13:00

I have installed a new HTPC, a faster, quieter, smaller one. The details I needed to know before buying the parts and to configure were somewhat lacking on the Internet so I am posting them here for anyone else with the idea or problem.

Computer: Dell Studio Slim
Software: MediaPortal 1.1
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
TV tuner: Avermedia AverTV Satellite Trinity

The Studio Slim is the base configuration and handles 1080p HD fine. It can be a little slow in seeking through the video but playback itself is smooth. SD content seeks quickly. It's fast, quiet and good looking.

To get the Freeview New Zealand DVB-S scanned in I had to use different settings to my Hauppauge Nova S Plus card. MediaPortal settings needed are:

DiESQ: none,
Band: KU Universal
Satellite frequencies: 12456000 and 12483000 with sample rate 22500

Override LNB settings to use: LOW: 11300, HIGH 11300, Switch: 20000

That worked for me. TV playback is smooth and channel changing is quick.

Hope that helps someone.

Logitech Pure-Fi Anytime review and bad experience

2009-07-28T16:01:00.006+12:00

I recently bought a Logitech Pure-Fi Anytime to use as a new alarm clock with iPod/iPhone support. It was great until after a couple of weeks when I started to notice sound distortion coming out of the speakers. This happens on all audio inputs so it was not a badly tuned radio station.

I initially thought it might be due to condensation from the winter air because the sound did eventually come right. Upon further investigation I found it is a known fault with 2008 models of the Pure-Fi Anytime. 2009 models had this problem fixed, unfortunately many 2008 models have been sold, they all develop faults. Some people are on their 5th model because they can not source a 2009 model reliably. You can read more about this in a thread on the official Logitech forums here. If your Product ID starts with EA8xxx you are affected, EA9xxx are fine.

I logged a support call with Logitech to attempt to get a new 2009 model sent to me to replace the faulty 2008. I did not want to deal with the online store I received it from initially because it would mean I pay courier costs for a Logitech problem and I could not reliably get the right replacement. The distributor would have to open the box of each Pure-Fi Anytime to check the sticker on the bottom. I explained this to Logitech and they predictably replied saying that I should contact the retailer. He also said that even if they wanted to help me, they couldn't because they have no access to stock. But then Logitech also say that if I have no luck with the retailer to please contact them for help.

When I explained again my reasons why and that I wanted to claim a replacement directly from them under the New Zealand Consumer Guarantees Act, things started to get weird. The customer service agent, started to lie to me about fictional aspects of the CGA, claiming they only had to help me if the retailer was now closed or if the retailer was more than 100KM away. When I pointed out they were lying to me and demanded an apology, I stopped hearing back. Requests to escalate the ticket to a more senior colleague were denied.

I logged a second job to complain about the bad customer service and things pretty much followed the same tune. The mocking claims that they can't help me but can help me if I try the retailer and don't get a result. It was pointed out that the 2009 models can be identified by their Product ID, a fact they knew I was aware of. 2008 models are still readily available in stores, well into 2009.

I have been put off ever buying Logitech products again. If you are thinking about buying a Pure-Fi Anytime, I especially do not recommend it. You have a high chance of being stuck with a product that is not of reasonable quality and speakers which give bad sound for the first 10 to 30 minutes of use. Not very good for an alarm clock is it?

It is disgraceful that Logitech continued to sell a knowingly faulty product and that they do not stand by their products when a customer complains. Their anti-customer attitude is not acceptable. There should have been no problem with immediately sending out a replacement model. I find it very hard to believe that a company like Logitech does not have access to its own products.

Mac Mini

2009-03-08T13:20:00.003+13:00

In September 2007 I blogged that I had my eye on a new Mac Mini but could not quite justify it. I finally justified it to myself and with the release of the revamped models, I bought one. I went for the low end model and installed upgrade parts myself. I bought 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB 7200 rpm hard drive. Doing the RAM was easy but the hard drive was a bit more tricky. The guide I was following left out a couple of key steps.

But once up and running it was great. I've been very happy with it so far and have been busy importing my stuff in. I've liked playing with the face recognition in iPhoto. It's fun teaching it what people look like.

It's also nice being able to plug in my iPod Touch and manage it without having to open an XP virtual machine first.

After using the Mac Mini at work for so long it's a little strange having a totally different set of apps on my dock.

A rare update

2009-01-09T22:52:00.002+13:00

Wow, what a difference a year makes to my setup.

1) The Eee PC while awesome was not quite meeting all my needs so I sold my Acer Laptop and Eee and bought a Dell Mini 9 instead. It's running Ubuntu 8.10 really nicely and I love the bigger screen and key size.

2) PVR is now running Media Portal 1.0 featuring working fine (finally!) TV Server 3 and using the Monochrome skin. I have the Moving Pictures and My TV Series plugins going for a much more informative and graphical viewing choosing experience.

It also got a big hard ware overhaul to match my new 32" 1080p LCD TV. I bought a new HDMI motherboard and cpu and ram upgrades. Storage also got a 500 GB boost. It is a much better PVR now and I'm really happy with it.

3) Ubuntu 8.10 is my distro of choice on my main desktop. I have just recently switched to a slightly modified Darklooks theme from the GNOME extra themes in the repos.

4) I have a 2nd gen iPod Touch that I have tricked into being linux PC compatible by installing iTunes in XP under VirtualBox. The iTunes uses a unc path back to the Linux PC host for the Library location and I have it managing the filenames for me. This means my Linux media players can also take advantage of the proper tagging. I've started synching podcasts with it too.

5)My quest for proper tagging is also related to an addiction to last.fm :)

PVR

2008-02-12T22:43:00.000+13:00

I've been doing some more trials with (the ever increasingly inaccurately named) pvr.

I attempted an install of Media Portal TV Server 3. I last tried it around 10 months ago. I was hoping it would be improved but I couldn't even get the database to create. So I tried the latest Media Portal SVN instead, but that would not detect my satellite card! Not wanting to troubleshoot at that time, I reverted back to the stable.

Next on the cards was making a partition to install Mythbuntu. Happily, getting TV out working was a breeze. A bit tricker configuring to be readable and flicker free, but I got there. Mythbuntu control panel is not designed for low resolution.

I could not get my satellite card to work in MythTV either, even though the Myth wiki says it is supported. I was not able to do much troubleshooting because whenever I rebooted or reset the X Server, I had to wait 10 minutes to power on. Due to a weird power on issue. On the plus side, the remote kind of worked out of the box. I think I chose the wrong kind of MCE remote in the setup. Overall I prefered the Media Portal method of navigating within videos.

I think I have tracked the power on problems down to a fan cable on the PSU being detached. So hopefully things are more stable. In the process I took the time to image my Media Portal partition on to a bigger hard drive so I am currently without a Mythbuntu install. When I have some time soon I will make another attempt.

squeee!

2008-01-15T19:56:00.000+13:00

1) I got an Asus Eee PC laptop for Christmas. It's so small and handy. I didn't think I would be keeping the default 'easy' interface but I've grown to find it refreshing. It's nice to get away from a standard interface for a while. I'm also impressed by the 20 second boot time! Websites display on the screen better than I hoped. I only come across a few that require side scrolling. I installed Skype 2.0 beta to get video chat working and a little system tray app to turn the camera on for it. Nifty.

2) I started using Leopard on my new Mac Mini at work pretty much from day one. I really like the experience. I didn't realise just how handy Quick Look and Stacks would be! The upped specs really make my VMware work much more pleasant.

3) As part of a general domain project at work I built a Samba file server. Using winbind it authenticates Active Directory users and auto creates them a shared home folder. No username and password prompt necessary. It took me a bit of fiddling around but I got a config that works. I think most of the trouble was on the Windows side requiring digitally signed transmissions.

4) KDE 4.0 came out but I have not tried it yet. I hear it is still a bit buggy so I am holding off for now. The intrigue is starting to grow though.

Another overview update

2007-11-06T19:07:00.000+13:00

1) I made the jump to 64 bit linux with Ubuntu 7.10. It's a really solid release and everything I thought I would have trouble with was not an issue. I installed it as a trial but I think I'll keep it around

2) I had to switch the type of Internet connection I had when I moved recently. It has turned out okay and speeds are acceptable. I was scared it would be close to dialup at times but speed tests put my download speed at just above my last one. Yay.

3)PowerFrank is going well. A couple of times I have used him as a general desktop and the speed while a bit sluggish is not so bad. Better than the G3 Powerbook at least!

4)I am awaiting delivery of a new Mac Mini at work, specced as high as it would go. It will also mean playing with Leopard a bit, but not as my main OS yet.

Goings on

2007-09-04T16:05:00.000+12:00

Key points of what I've been up to:

1) The G3 Powerbook is now running OS X for the first time in its life. I have it using 256 MB of RAM. It's not enough but I'm suffering not having any low density memory of any useful size. I also need to replace the motherboard battery because it loses the date and time on power off.

2)Frank the PC who became an iTunes server, died a sudden horrible death. I was able to replace it with a G4 PowerMac and it's much nicer. I was able to recover most of the music and import it back into the new iTunes. It's now called PowerFrank.

3)I am still using a Mac Mini at work. I've had my eye on getting a new iMac or Mini for home use but I can't quite justify it yet. Perhaps at the bare minimum I'll get myself a bluetooth dongle because I really enjoy not having to use the overly sensitive data cable my cellphone has.

4)Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn is still my linux distro of choice. I have testing out 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon in a virtual machine at work since update traffic is free. It's shaping up to be a very nice release and I'm looking forward to October.

The rise of the Mac.

2007-06-30T21:49:00.000+12:00

Bit of a shuffle has happened with my work setup. I gained a Core Solo 1.5 GHz Mac Mini with 512 RAM to use for iCal and general better Mac familiarity. This made 3 computers on my desk, a bit crowded. I decided to try using the Mac as my primary computer for a week. On day 4 I decided to stick with it. I wiped my Windows computer which was faster than my current Linux one, and installed Ubuntu Feisty + VMWare Server to run XP in. I hooked up the 17" LCD which came with the Mini.

My Mini needed more RAM though so I had the adventure of popping open the case with wallpaper scrapers and tackling the tiny screws to access the RAM chassis. It was a success and I was happier. The RAM was bumped up to 1 GB. I configured Synergy to share a single keyboard + mouse across both screens. I edited startup scripts so that the Synergy server and client would start at the login screen. The only issue I have is that I can't send the Shift or Caps Lock key to the VMware XP for some reason.

When sorting out the backlog of Mac Mini inventory, I found we actually had some Core Duo 1.66 GHz models.I had just grabbed mine at random so I had no idea. I got the OK to swap mine out with a faster one. I also gained a bigger hard drive and a super drive. So the wallpaper scrapers came out again and I shuffled some RAM around.

Since I now had a bluetooth enabled computer, I tried out syncing my cellphone, the Motorola E398. I was pleased to find it an easy process and I soon had my various iCal calendars on my phone.

I may get fed up with OS X eventually, as I am prone to do with desktop environments, but perhaps not being able to change much will stifle that need to tinker. I am looking forward to trying out the new Finder in 10.5 Leopard because the current Finder leaves something to be desired...

Crystal clear PVR

2007-05-13T15:49:00.000+12:00

I am now taking advantage of the FreeviewNZ service.

The quality of the picture is amazing. So much better than the analogue signal I was using. I had to "upgrade" to MediaPortal-SVN and install TVServer3 in order to have easy setup. Stable MediaPortal doesn't have the best interface for setting up satellite TV.

There are a couple of bugs to work out but it's improving all the time. I am now getting the Electronic Program Guide from the satellite feed rather than downloading from the Internet. This is cool because I don't have to keep up with website breakages and timezone offsets.

So far I have been unsuccessful in getting TV streaming to work. I'm either doing something wrong or it's broken in the code. Did a trial of the aerial splitter today. Got signal to the digital tuner but the analogue TV could not see anything. I wasn't sure what to expect, I guess that is it.

My next task is finding a good way of getting a dedicated network connection for the PVR instead of an ad-hoc one. I may end up using a PCI wireless card, or doing some tidy cabling.

A much requested update

2007-05-04T21:01:00.000+12:00

So let's review the current situation shall we?

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn came out and is installed on my home and work computers. This time I opted to do in place upgrades which went smoothly except for another command needing to be added to my xorg.conf to get Beryl working again. Overall I am enjoying the new version and am pleased to find noticeable improvements in performance. My hard drive speed when copying lots of files to my data partition is now significantly better - think 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes.

On the desktop for a new sprinkle of bling I have starting using the Murrine GTK engine and Screenlets. I always thought people were silly to keep an analogue clock on their desktop but now I can see the attraction. We have been oppressed by the digital taskbar clock for too long!. I also keep a snazzy weather screenlet going.

On the laptop front there has been much change. In the wait for Feisty Fawn I decided to try out SimplyMEPIS. I'd heard it was a good KDE implementation so I was hopeful. As luck would have it, the official release of 6.5 had just happened the day before. After waiting for suitable mirrors to pick it up, I downloaded and installed. MEPIS gives you the option of using a Beryl KDE session out of the box. I gave this a try and was pleasantly surprised to see my laptops onboard video can handle it quite well. There was a window management problem with knetworkmanager which ultimately kept me in standard KDE. Wireless worked fine and I even got some Amarok going along with some SuperKaramba widgets. I enjoy the non standard look and feel of MEPIS after being bored by Kubuntu. The other nice touch was having nearly all multimedia codecs installed out of the box. No more Automatix for me!

On the PVR front, I have just installed a new power supply which has improved performance. It is noticeably quieter and doesn't overheat anymore thanks to a big 120mm fan. It's also sexy black, not that you can really see that when it's in the case. In about a week, a new digital tv tuner card from Hauppauge should arrive. This coupled with the relatively unused satellite dish on my house will let me receive the new Freeview service. At last, crystal clear tv and I'll get to use my splitter!

A red 4 GB iPod Nano is slowly making its way to me. I decided to replace my failing 20 GB 4th Gen model with a much newer and smaller one. I flirted with the idea of getting a Shuffle but decided I would miss having a screen. I'm going for the 'just the songs I want to hear at the moment' regime instead of the 'all the music i have with me all the time' overbearing one.

Is that all? I hope so.

bits and pieces.

2007-03-23T20:36:00.000+12:00

1) I have successfully switched my wife to using Gmail instead of Hotmail. I transferred years of messages over to the new account using a combination of Thunderbird's webmail extension and Google Mail Loader. A bit of waiting and some filter and label creation's later I was all done. The finishing touch was installing the Google Notifier for Mac.

2) I have been experimenting with TV aerials because I wanted to install a splitter to feed another channel to the PVR. After choosing the right parts and screwing it all together I was ultimately defeated by the fact the original signal just isn't good enough to split well. Came out looking terrible. I tried some other aerial + booster options but none gave everything I wanted. Back to square one!

3) My work has been joined up to an advanced education network connection. This gives unmetered free traffic to other educational sites around the world, instead of paying 3 cents per MB. The benefit for me is I now have a free fast way of downloading linux ISOs and also a place to get Ubuntu updates. At work they have previously built up because I don't want to spend the traffic on them too much.

4) I am using the Avant Window Navigator as my dock both at home and at work. It is quite similar to the OS X dock but better for me. It solves some of the window management issues I have with OS X. For instance if Firefox opens two separate windows, I can easily pick which one I want. The dock is being developed by Neil J Patel and his blog is a good read to catch up on AWN development and his other ideas. I strongly recommend trying the SVN build if possible.

5) The countdown is beginning in my head to the release of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. I believe I will download it and keep it fully patched with the connection mentioned above ;)

one of those projects

2007-03-03T08:18:00.000+13:00

It was a simple idea. Gather together some spare computer parts and frankenstei/build a sandbox to try out Windows programs on without putting the PVR at risk. What it turned out to be was a two day headache as an amazing array of failure was presented. Nearly every bit of hardware was replaced at some point:

3 Motherboards
3 Processors
10 RAM sticks
4 Video cards
2 Sound cards
2 Power supplies
2 Cases
2 Keyboards
2 IDE cable sets
3 Heat sinks + fans
3 XP discs

After finally getting a configuration that would POST every time, XP would freeze during the install. Trying of different discs and keyboards eventually lead to the discovery that it was just too hot in the case. This lead to the heat sink swapping the next day. Much hardware and support time provided by the one and only Ze "no blog" Jackal, second case and some hardware provided by Peter and some help with boot disc software and moral support given by Trog

Many Thanks to you all.

If it hadn't been for the chinese food smorgasboard dinner, I think we would have carked it.

More phone modding.

2007-02-12T21:34:00.000+13:00

Yesterday I eventually installed this monster pack for my phone.

I really like it a lot. I wasn't expecting the video recording to be available so it was a nice surprise.

The iTunes is a bit hit or miss though but it does work. I haven't found the right version of iTunes software to talk to my phone so the onboard DB re-creator is what I'm using to import songs. Doesn't always play or sort songs how I'd want them though. It might take some getting used to so that I know what quirks to avoid invoking.

Previously I had tried some fancier ones that had all the latest bells and whistles but they didn't flash properly and crashed a bit.

This Enlightenment theme is cool because it has the same good features, a slick interface and no overly grandiouse startup and shutdown sounds/animations.

Qemu

2007-02-10T19:03:00.000+13:00

I decided to follow some instructions on Qemu virtualisation with Ubuntu.

I had to read part of it carefully but for the most part it was straight forward and a bit of apt-getting later I had Windows XP booting. It is a little slower than VMWare but less mucking around to get going. I am especially curious about trying the seamless virtualisation options. This is technology that Parallels has been hyping for the Mac lately so I'm pleased to see it available in free open source software.

PVR tinkering

2007-01-29T07:46:00.000+13:00

I decided to give the GB-PVR software a try. The installation was fairly straight forward but overly complex. Once the program was up and running I found most of the buttons on the remote control didn't work or they were doing the wrong things. I wont blame the program for that though, it was probably me not selecting a remote control to use in the configurator. Remote control issues aside, the real kicker was nearly everything I tried to do resulted in a memory exception error so I gave up and uninstalled.

I tried out some AutoGK for video compression too. I tried it out on an existing xvid that was bigger than I wanted. AutoGK has preset file sizes you can aim for. I chose 350 MB (original was 995 MB), but it just spent the day going in loops because it couldn't get the file small enough, so it kept lowering the resolution until it was finally unviewable. Recompressing an already compressed file might not be a fair test so I will give it another go on a raw mpeg2 file soon. On the plus side it does give good feedback about what it is doing and how long it expects things to take.

I also finally got around to installing UltraVNC on the pvr so I can check on video compression progress from the other room. Don't know why I didn't do it earlier, just lazy I guess.

I've been using Media Portal's Video Editor plugin to remove ads from recordings. Somtimes it can be a bit buggy starting or it just drops out while you're marking the cut points and you have to start again. For the most part it works well though.

Cellphone modding

2007-01-23T08:11:00.000+13:00

My Motorola E398 (MTV Hijacked version) has been a bit buggy lately. Sometimes the picture database seems to become corrupted and new pictures taken will not show up in it, only on the storage device.

As my phone is highly moddable, I decided to try flashing on a community built firmware package. After downloading the prerequisites I was ready to go.

I didn't have much to lose, but the only worry was the battery running out during the flashing process and leaving me with a brick I couldn't charge. For once, everything went right and I was soon enjoying the new interface. I haven't had a chance to explore extensively but it looks like things have changed for the better. I'm happy with the new skins too.

Time will tell if the bug has been resolved though.

New year update

2007-01-07T09:02:00.000+13:00

Sorry it has been so long since my last post. The new improved Blogger was refusing to let me log in!

I now have my new monitor and it is glorious. Above is a visual representation of my improved desktop area. It's really great having a proper brightness on images. Pictures that were previously big dark squares to me are now full of activity.

I had a bit of a problem getting the right screen resolution to stick at first but after moaning to the Mrs about the problem, she came to look at the error ridden screen and it suddenly worked. Now I know how people I support feel when their problem goes away as soon as I arrive.

I reinstalled Ubuntu Edgy a little while ago because things got a bit bogged down with my constant meddling. It's much better now and I am running Beryl with AiGLX instead of XGL. Visually it is no different but it does meant I get a smoother log on and a shutdown button when I go to log off!

On the PVR front, I have it hibernating from the remote control now. Previouly it put it in standby mode. Which made a bright blue light flash and kept the fans on. I'm still having some intermittant troubles with the hardware. When I first tested the hibernate, it started doing the power on power off loop. I left it for a while and tried again and it hasn't repeated. Then a couple of days ago I was 5 minutes into a show when I got a BSOD and a boot disk failure. The BIOS could no longer detect my IDE hard drive. Replugging it all solved that. Still a mystery why that happened though.

New year changes

2006-12-28T15:02:00.000+13:00

Downloaded an unexpected new version of Media Portal yesterday (v0.2.2.0). Something for people to play with over the Christmas break. It was a pain free upgrade and the subtley slicker interface is nice. There are some good back end features I have started to tinker with but am yet to perfect.

My main gift this year from the Mrs is a new LCD monitor. I get to choose it though. I'll be ordering it in the next couple of days as I see what sale prices unfold.

KDE was tempting me all week after a play with the Kubuntu live cd. Gave in to temptation yesterday and did some customising. Doesn't quite feel right though so came back to GNOME. Speaking of GNOME, I gave the Slab menu from SUSE a try again. I didn't like it as much as last time. Too cumbersome for my new way of working.

I think it's time to look for a new desktop wallpaper too.

Tribute to my MD

2006-12-19T19:37:00.000+13:00

I found out last night that my beloved Mini Disc player no longer works. It tries, it really tries, but it can't manage to read anything. I guess I have neglected it over the past few years. I went down the mp3-cd player route instead of upgrading it to net-MD, using it only for occasional listens. I think I made the right decision but sometimes you just want to record audio digitally in real time.

I have a collection of mini discs that will perhaps never be heard again. All that time spent manually tapping in song titles and track marks is now spent forever. I guess I could buy a cheap player second hand but maybe it's time to let it go. I have some audio and VHS cassette tapes I have no player for.

So good bye my mini friend, you were a companion on many a driving session.

Housekeeping

2006-12-09T10:56:00.000+13:00

Today I did some long over due housekeeping on the increasingly inaccurately named PVR. These days it is more of a....media portal.

I did some maintenance on iTunes. Updated to 7.02, reindexed the library after all the files had changed to a different drive letter. Enabled network library sharing. The sharing worked great between PVR and Macbook. However Apple changed the protocol with version 7 and now third party programs can't read the shares until they reverse engineer it again. Bad news for the linux pc!

There was also a problem when inserting a DVD. Media Portal offered to play it but then Media Center popped up and took over. This is bad because these days whenever Media Center opens, it corrupts the display and I have to reboot. I told Windows to do nothing when a DVD movie is inserted and told Media Portal it could offer to play DVDs. Now that works great.

I also found a website with NZ TV exact frequencies. I entered into Media Portal the two that don't display properly for me. Alas there was little change. More of an aerial issue I suspect.

I'm still resisting another try of MythTV. There was an attempt made on the XP day after all but it went so wrong I don't want to talk about it :P, ok just a few bits. Wasted big download, kernel panic, power on issues, video out issues, monitor carrying and grub errors - I was beat before it all began.

Giving XP a kick in the bum

2006-12-02T09:08:00.000+13:00

I have noticed the PVR booting slower and slower, taking a frustratingly long time to finish loading Media Portal. Today I decided to do something about it.

As sometimes getting the PVR on is an urgency, I will use a slightly expanded boot time frame. From power button to Media Portal menu being available it was 1 minute and 25 seconds. Miserable. It used to be around 40 seconds.

I knew some things I could change but I googled around for others and found advice about emptying the prefetch folder. C:\Windows\Prefetch. This basically caches programs you've opened before in hopes you might need them again. I had 104 files in there. Some multiple versions of programs. Clearly this was a major bottleneck to deal with at boot time. I deleted these files, gave the pvr a static ip (been meaning to for ages), deleted temp files, then rebooted. Instantly I had 30 seconds chopped off with a boot time of 55 seconds. Note that it took two reboots to see this change because the prefetch folder needed to be repopulated with stuff I actually use (a whole 5 files now). 55 seconds is good but I can do better.

Next up, disabling some services. Wireless and printer services are something I wont use on it so they can go. A few other odds and ends got disabled and it was time for another reboot.

(note, something just clunked over at the now off PVR, I hope everything is okay!)

Before completing this reboot, I dropped into the bios to clean up the boot order, just the main hard drive only. Getting back into Windows I had approximately 42 seconds. Much better and probably about the best I can do for now. I may do some more indepth research to better it but the main bugbear is off my back.

On another note, I am being encouraged to give MythTV another go - some preliminary research is still making me unsure. I can distract myself with optimising XP for now!

One of those projects

2006-11-26T08:32:00.000+13:00

After work on Thursday I prepared the table to accomodate two computer cases. The old pvr and the new. I took photos of the current motherboard layout for reference later if I was confused, then mentally planned out the order to install the parts.

The first sign of trouble was when I accidentally used the wrong screws to fasten the motherboard down. They looked like the right ones but turned out to be ones for use in the hard drive rack. In my defence the bag with the motherboard poles only had two screws in it and I didn't notice them until later. So they got stuck but otherwise it was ok. Not critical.

Everything was then going smoothly, I had the video and pci cards connected, the front usb and power switch etc were connected. I took a break for dinner and then started up again.

I decided it was time to mount the power supply. This is done unusually. You screw a face plate to it and attach it in the front of the case. A power extension cable runs from a plug at the back of the case to the front. I soon found my standard ATX power supply to be half an inch too wide. Damn. No matter how I twisted and turned it wasn't going in. I swore a few times and rechecked the instruction sheet, I was definitely doing it right. The optical drive bay rack was in the way.

I went to check my the PSU in my other computer and measured it. Looked like it was the length I wanted so I decided to use that one instead. So I pull it all out, having to cut really tight cable ties only to find it's too big too. Damn. That PSU goes back in the case and I decide a new smaller PSU must be bought.

But then I decide that until then, I can do without the optical drives and just have the big power supply mounted ungracefully in the case for a couple of days. I unscrew the rack and put it to one side. I then screw the power supply into place. Suddenly able to slide it underneath the side rim of the case, leaving enough room for the optical drive rack to return! Praise Be. This is a tip that really really should have been in the instruction sheet!.

I then set about mounting my SATA hard drive in the middle of said rack. The case came with mounting...mounts to make it fit. The two IDE drives were put in the racks on the right side of the case.(one in each corner). I installed the dvd rom and cdwriter and began to connect the cables. Throughout all of this I am getting very sick of the screwdriver and screws falling away etc. The IDE cables don't reach to the hard drives very well so one of them has to come out of the rack a bit. This is when not having all the proper screws available wasn't so bad. Finally everything looked good and I took it down to the TV to have a test boot up. Push the power button....power button gets stuck...no go. More swearing. Turns out the PSU extension cable is blocking the spring. It was then about 4 hours since first starting and I was in no mood for failure. The wife calls to say she's on her way home. Earlier in the evening I had claimed I would be finished hours before she got home.

I decided that since I had to take things out of the case anyway I would take the time to put one of IDE drives where the SATA is because the SATA cable is longer and can reach the back corner better. So I fiddle with unscrewing and remounting. Also moving the extension cable to the other side of the PSU so it doesn't block anything. I still fiddle with making the IDE cabels reach and SATA power plugs coming out easily. Once again everything looks good and it's time for another test. Can't see the boot hard drive, can't see the dvd rom. Gah. Check cables and realise the DVD rom is not powered. Easily fixed, push the boot drive cables in to make sure and try again. Just the bood hard drive missing. I wonder if I have the master and slave mixed up or something and disconnect the slave and plug the master into the other part of the IDE. Still wont boot. I then notice the plug is not sitting completely. I was unsuccessful in making it get snug so I removed the hard drive to inspect. There were 8 pins either laying flat or pushed in. Oh shit.

I then painstakingly used long nosed pliers to try to adjust them to acceptable lengths and straightenness. Every time it looked good, an IDE cable test would bend some of them again. So frustrating. In the end I got a working combination and was relieved to see Media Portal appear on the TV screen. I turned it off and went to bed. 5.5 hours after I started.

The PVR performed fine on Friday, but was laying on the carpet all day. Friday night after recording a show for the wife, I decided to move it to the TV cabinet. Removed a shelf that was in the way and took out the DVD player and PS2. Threaded the cables through the back and got everything back in place. Powered on. After a few seconds of boot with no display, it would loop and start again. WTF. I pull everything out and jiggle and replug cable. It starts up.I turn it off and connect the extra case fan, put the lid back on then push it back into the cabinet. Power on again - the loop returns!. I'm looking around for the hidden candid cameras at this point. The wife comes home again and I leave it to go moan to her. I go back and try again, it boots! Just in time to record another show I forgot was on.

It's been fine since. Unbelievable that I had to fight it every step of the way.

Silvery goodness

2006-11-20T20:54:00.000+13:00

Today I ordered this home theatre case for my PVR. Now that the concept has been proved and I wouldn't be without it, it's time to lose the beige tower. I should get it in a couple of days then it's the tedious task of transferring all the hardware over.

It took me a while to settline on what case to get because I had particular drive bay and case dimension requirements. It's the same brand as my new desktop tower case so I am confident it will be worth it.

Things have been reasonably quiet in linux land. Flirted a bit with different desktop wallpapers but otherwise surprisingly minimal appearance customising.

Ooh fancy

2006-10-31T12:48:00.000+13:00

No surprise to anyone, I now have XGL/Beryl running on my work and home computers. Work went flawless but at home I tried to be fancy with AIGLX and beta Nvidia drivers and it all went very badly. So tried again the normal way and it worked.

Beryl is a good improvement over Compiz. I like the improved settings manager and the default settings aren't too crazy. Being able to change the window decorations in high detail with the Emerald Theme Manager is also a welcome addition.

At work I have am still running the default Edgy Eft theme but at home I changed to a modified Adonis_Mod theme.

Edgy on desktop

2006-10-28T13:49:00.000+13:00

So Edgy Eft has gone on my work pc and my home pc. Both installs have been without complications. Work needed the 1920x1200 resolution manually put in to xorg.conf but I was expecting that.

By default my home pc booted to login in 29 seconds. I got stuck in and busted that down to 20 seconds. I'm sure it will rise again when I install VMWare but it's a nice achievement all the same. I'll use what I've learnt to try and cut down the laptop boot time but there's not a lot I can do as part of speeding up the desktop was removing features the laptop uses.

I've had a look over guides for installing Beryl (a fork of Compiz) but I am not ready to take that jump yet. Soon my desktop ADD will kick in and I'll change things.

Now the 6 month wait for Feisty Fawn begins! ;)

Trackpad blues

2006-10-23T16:51:00.000+13:00

So the one thing that bothered me about my new laptop was the trackpad. I was constantly making mistakes on things because my hand would hit the trackpad. Tap to click was enabled. On my laptop it was quite easy to disable. Just had to add to the trackpad section of my xorg.conf:

Option "MaxTapTime" "0"

This fix is detailed at Ubuntu:Chronicles

So edgy

2006-10-21T20:01:00.000+13:00

Unable to wait another week, I got the Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft Release Candidate ISO from a friend and installed it on my laptop. It went smoothly and after a couple of updates installs I had the new artwork and bootsplash. The change is quite refreshing.

Boot time so far is 30 seconds. I'm sure I can drop it down a notch with a bit of tweaking. I am very curious to see how fast the dual core desktop boots but I shall wait for the final release for that.

This time I tried using Automatix2 instead of EasyUbuntu for my multimedia codec needs. Quite a good interface but much the same result :)

Thankfully the wireless still works out of the box!

portable!

2006-10-14T20:44:00.000+13:00

So I broke down and a laptop finally. After almost getting a cheap new Dell I opted for a nearly new Acer Aspire 3624. It has better compatibility with Ubuntu out of the box. I am writing this with it now via wireless of course. In a couple of weeks I will throw Edgy Eft on it.

Specs:
Celeron M 1.6 GHz
1.3 GB of RAM
40 GB HDD
14.1" widescreen
Cd writer.
Integrated ethernet
Atheros wireless.
2.3 Kg

I was hesitant of getting a Celeron but the huge amount of RAM in it makes it really snappy and perfect for what I want to use it for. I'm glad it's a true 14" widescreen too and not a 14" in a 15" casing. It was more than I wanted to pay for a second hand but less than for a new one. So a good compromise.

Checking in

2006-09-19T12:39:00.000+12:00

So a few things have been going on, here's a rundown:

1) PVR had a video driver hiccup and would no longer fit the tv screen, driver update sorted that though.

2) XGL/Compiz is ticking over nicely. A couple of cosmetic updates have happened which has made it nicer

3) Thin Client project is progressing well. Now using KDE Kiosk Admin and after a break this week I should get it sorted. Editing Firefox code is next!

Success!

2006-09-10T14:07:00.000+12:00

After much trial and error I finally got the LTSP Thin Clients booting. The last two major stumbling blocks were discrepencies between one line in the two dhcp config files and a folder called 'oldroot' needing to be created. There were still booting errors that were solved by copying the LTSP provided filesystem over the Ubuntu provided LTSP filesystem. No idea what it fixed but all I care is that it worked.

Now I am looking at locking down the desktop/firefox into a kiosk mode. I am going to try the KDE Kiosk Admin tool because it appears to be more powerful than the GNOME 'Pessulus' tool.

At the moment I have Firefox auto closing and deleting private data after a period of inactivity.

New project

2006-09-06T19:52:00.000+12:00

I have begun a new project at work. Building linux thin client internet kiosks.

So far it is not going all that great.I am using the LTSP packages. The server DHCP has been telling the clients it doesn't have any ip addresses to give them despite being told about the clients explicitly. I think the trouble is I am trying to work within the greater network conditions. Being a full DHCP server would be heavily frowned upon so I'm trying hard to not upset anything.

Tomorrow I will try it in an isolated network environment with just a 5 port switch. That way I can have whatever settings I want to at least prove the concept - then port it back to the main network.

In home linux news, I am back in GNOME Compizing it up. Just to be different for once I am using the new gnome-main-menu that appears in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. I have found it to be a little inconsistant though - only sometimes showing all my 'favourites'.

Compiz in KDE

2006-08-31T18:44:00.000+12:00

So I got bored and installed XGL/Compiz under KDE. It works mostly well but since some versioning issues forced me to use compiz-gnome instead of compiz-kde it's a little bit iffy. I've had to manually change font size settings to stop things being wither very small or very big.

I'm glad to see Compiz configuration has gotten easier under Ubuntu but I still had to disable most of the features in the wobbly plugin because no settings I chose made it less wobbly.

Having some urgent notify issues in Gaim to work through but otherwise it's ok. I guess if I really wanted to I could move back to GNOME but we'll see.

Only a couple of months until the new Ubuntu comes out, Edgy Eft. I read that will come with AIGLX turned on by default (instead of XGL) which you can then run Compiz on top of. I'm curious to see how that works out.

Tecra M5

2006-08-27T17:12:00.000+12:00

I have been building a Tecra M5 at work. We use Windows 2000 there which hasn't worked too well with flashy features on new laptops, until now. The finger print reader worked! I spent a day logging on to Windows by swiping my print across the reader - easy. Until it started to shock me most of the time - ouchy.

After investigating the implications of this technology it was decided to disable it anyway. It's a great feature for a personal laptop but for a business one where the user is not the admin it's troublesome. Fears of locked out data abound.

The sound driver supplied by Toshiba would not install under 2000. I managed to find a copy of the file that would install though - with a little file grabbing out of the modem install archive. I then received a cd with 'Windows 2000' drivers for it - a later version number that did install fine. Oddly the hacky version I got was the same version number as the XP one. Nice work there Toshiba.

Googling for the sound driver I found that the sound card is very hard/impossible to get going under Linux currently. Boo-urns.

Nice laptop though, shiny and light.

My work desktop

2006-08-17T11:45:00.000+12:00

Kubuntu with Ksmoothdock and a small transparent kicker in the top right to house the system tray. Imagine the image being a glorious 24 inches diagonal.

I switched to Kubuntu at work in a clever way. I didn't want to download all the packages because of charges so I copied my home /var/cache/apt/archives/ folder to a usb drive and took it to work. I could then pasted the contents into my work folder and did an aptitude install kubuntu-desktop. It had to download very little which was great. A few packages had trouble and had to be redownloaded but for the most part a success.

Kubuntu

2006-08-05T10:01:00.000+12:00

So once again getting aggravated at the still broken SUSE 10.1 package/update management I decided to blow it away and put Kubuntu on instead. I started with Ubuntu and aptituded kubuntu-desktop on over top. I pre-changed my repositories to include KDE 3.5.3 to save downloading it separately. After applying some updates and whatnot, all the KDE settings disappeared. I had to manually reconfigure everything.

Two days later (after upgrading to KDE 3.5.3 and GNOME 2.14.2) I see the announcement that KDE 3.5.4 and GNOME 2.14.3 are out. Sigh. I haven't applied the updates yet but will shortly. I delayed the KDE because Kubuntu.org posted a warning saying the current build would keep kubuntu default settings from applying - the same error I had with 3.5.3 which makes me wonder if they are related.

GRUB to Login is currently 35 seconds.

Vista n Benchmarks

2006-07-29T11:21:00.000+12:00

Yesterday I was able to install Windows Vista beta2.

It's a mix of nicer things and horrid redesign. They really seem to have changed things for the sake of changing things. It takes 5 or 6 clicks to do start-run!

I really hope they improve it dramatically for final release because right now I'd rather be using XP.

Speaking of XP, I was doing some benchmarking with it and Windows 2000 on a double dual-core 3.2GHz Dell with 4 GbBof RAM. 2000 and XP, Ubuntu and Knoppix can only see 3 GB of the memory. Vista could see all 4. The upshot is the pc is almost twice as fast under XP because 2K is not seeing all of the CPU. Silly old OS!

I was also at an expo and got a broken compass/stop watch from HP. Nice quality control guys. A prize draw I missed out on but the announcer kept saying there was 'three boobie' prizes. Haha

new adventures in buntu

2006-07-19T21:32:00.000+12:00

Getting bored with my current single panel Gnome lay out at work, I designed a lower left corner double panel set up. One vertical with the apps, launchers and system tray and one short horizontal with the menu and clock. At first it was a bit weird but I'm getting used to it. I also ousted the OS X theme and replaced it with a slick grey ensemble.

But the true action has been taking place on the Powerbook. Kubuntu was too slow really so I gave Xfce a try. It loaded a plain desktop but no panels and no configuration dialogs would open. So I dumped it. For a lark I installed JWM, but that was a similar story. Fast though.

Accepting I may have to give up QT for GTK again, I attempted a Xubuntu-desktop install. It went kind of ok but the laptop was clearly getting confused. I had a Kubuntu boot splash and would get dumped to the console instead of GDM or KDM loading. A Startx would kick in Xubuntu but I still couldn't do that much. With all the instability I decided to try to start again with a fresh install of Ubuntu. But the live cd was doing the same crap about not having network - so bizarre.

In the end I set a download of the alternate (text install) iso of Xubuntu. After work I installed it flawlessly and I'm posting from it now. I've done my usual clean up activities and it's definitely a faster experience. Memory usage is also significantly lower. Gaim and Opera + a few tabs open and I am using 110 ot 256 MB, I used to only have a few MB free!
(also it boots about 20 seconds faster!)

Lighter GTK window manager plus more RAM = P-P-P-Powerbook!

P-P-P-Powerbook!

2006-07-15T08:34:00.000+12:00

Yesterday I got stuck in to making the Kubuntu Powerbook go faster. I did the usual thing of removing unneeded startup processes and I uninstalled a whole bunch of software I wouldn't ever need on it. Gnome has been almost completely gutted as well.

But then I got hold of some 128 MB RAM for it and decided to attempt an upgrade. It had more than I remembered, 192 instead of the 128 I thought. This could potentially have been a problem because the stock standard model came with 64 MB. Only the top RAM slot is (easily) user servicable so I was thinking the 192 was made up of 128 at the top and 64 at the bottom. But I gave it a go anyway and was pleasantly surprised to see the RAM level bump up to 256 MB! woo. There is a noticeable difference but I still max out on RAM usage. Though I can often sit at about 1 or 2 MB of RAM free ;)

There has been suggestion I give Xubuntu a try on it. I may do some day but I am just getting sick of the GNOME/GTK look at the moment and need a bit of KDE/QT in my life.

Macbook and Kubuntu

2006-07-14T12:48:00.000+12:00

So the Macbook came and it is truly stunning. I want one for myself but I suspect that will just be a pipe dream. It boots in 20 seconds and had such a nice screen. Wireless is up and running. Bought a new white router to go with it

At the moment the dual booting has been delayed because I'm not sure it will be needed. OS X is being liked more than an anticipated. :)

The Ubuntu Powerbook has been reborn as a Kubuntu Powerbook. Ubuntu doesn't like to boot when there is no network connection. Frustrated I downloaded a Kubuntu iso to start fresh because I've been missing KDE a bit lately. It failed to boot the livecd successfully. I could force the desktop to load but the installer would crash.

Later in the night Ubuntu did decide to boot up ok. Provided with the new network details it was away with a sudu apt-get install kubuntu-desktop. An hour later and another half hour later for KDE 3.5.3 it's up and running. I am currently gutting out all the gnome stuff which will probably make it fall down dead. Hah ha..

Virtual XP does the job

2006-07-09T21:34:00.000+12:00

I am pleased to report my VMWare install of XP achieved the goal I set for it. Today I had the opportunity to load Yahoo Messenger and view my wifes isight. Of course it was in her last few hours before her flight home, but the fact remains it was done!

I could not get Windows to see my usb webcam though. USB devices were allowed to be mounted but it wasn't happening.

Soon the project to dual boot Ubuntu and OS X will start!

Faster!

2006-07-06T07:52:00.000+12:00

So I got stuck in and streamlined my Ubuntu boot process yesterday. Disabling unneeded services and some obscure ones. I found some good instructions on the Ubuntu forums. The net result was that I now boot about to the login prompt about 15 seconds faster than before. 40 seconds!

I didn't realise how many laptop specific services I was starting each time. I also uninstalled my previous 386 kernel so I'd stop getting nagged about security updates for it.

Oddly enough, the GNOME system monitor reports that I have two CPU's in my work machine. Which surprises me because it's just a P4 2.6 GHz.

I must look into trimming my SUSE boot some more. I have disabled some things I can see are unnecessary but there must be more I can do. The boot seems to have slowed down some what.

Speed

2006-07-02T10:40:00.000+12:00

As you can see from this picture, I am very happy with my cable internet. I find I peak around 250k/s which is just glorious. Tends to slow down just at the end of a download though so the numbers are slightly misleading.

Nothing too much to report on the geek side of things. I have been starting to look at the best way to dual boot Ubuntu and OS X on the Macbook. But that will have to wait until I have it in my hands.

VMware and OS X tease

2006-06-25T12:19:00.000+12:00

The Macbook has been purchased, with a heavily rebated 30 GB iPod to go with it. I can't wait to have a play with them. I still have to wait two weeks sadly.

In preparation for using OS X a bit, I have skinned my linuxes to use OS X window borders and button positions. I am getting quite used to minimising with the middle button.

Last night I wanted to do a virtual install of Windows XP for Macbook iSight testing with Yahoo Messenger. I downloaded Parallels (13 MB) and tried to install but of course it failed. Looking at their forums it seems it doesn't work with SUSE 10.1 yet. So I look at VMWare Workstation. After some humming and ahhing I gave in and downloaded the 95 MB install. Followed some online instructions and I was soon installing XP.

I couldn't believe how long it took! About an hour to copy in a base OS. It also asked me for network configuration settings on two occasions. Silly install. When it was half way through the graphical file copying process and it said '37 minutes remaining' I thought it was joking!
At least it boots fast.

I've noticed my SUSE boot has slowed a little bit. Somewhat annoying but not too bad.

Xfce

2006-06-20T08:02:00.000+12:00

Yesterday I installed the Xfce desktop environment in Ubuntu. It's looked alright in screenshots but I didn't vibe off of it. Since it wasn't preconfigured like with Xubuntu I had to do it all from scratch. I found it a bit cumbersome and soon when back to GNOME. It is supposed to be lightweight and faster but I guess my computer is powerful enough to make it no faster than other environments.

Ubuntu was really getting on my nerves with a shift+backspace=restart x server issue. Looking at the forums it is quite common. Something to do with XGL config I think. I applied a fix which worked for a day then came back. Finally got it stable. So aggravating being logged out just as you get to the end of an email.

SUSE is still going okay. Except for a bug where the updates list doesn't clear after installing. I was reading in a recent status meeting that SUSE 10.2 will 'definitely' feature GNOME 2.16. That's good news because I figured they would get stuck with 2.14.

Gmail and Earth

2006-06-14T07:25:00.000+12:00

Yesterday I got inspired to shift all my work email to Gmail. I found a nice program to do it.

It was a good excuse to cull my mail archives before uploading. In the end I only took up 4mb of my 2.7 GB of space.

I have my work mail forwarding to the gmail account which is authorised to reply to mails using my work address. Unless people really read headers no one should know any different.

Google also released Google Earth for Linux beta yesterday. I downloaded it and ran it on SUSE 10.1. It was extremely buggy and not showing the right parts of the world which was disappointing. Then I decided to turn XGL on (it was off) and sudddenly it all worked mostly fine. Don't understand that one. Good to see my city finally has good enough imagery to make out my house!

Speed glorious speed

2006-06-12T19:36:00.000+12:00

Cable internet was installed today. Technically it went fine but it took me a bit of head scratching to get our home network connected up to it. I eventually found the problem, a rookie mistake. Over the course of a few distro installs the last few days, our network domains were all different. Made those all the same and presto! fast net all around.

So far my downloads have peaked at 190k/s which is quite good. That was some downloads I started last night but cancelled when they were going a mere 5k/s on my old ISP.

In gaming news, I have a PS2 that I haven't played much lately. Yesterday I bought Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for it. It was half the price it usually is. Now I have something to keep my occupied over the coming weeks.

Brickbat to Ubuntu for freaking out on the Powerbook when booting up without network connectivity. Took a few reboots to get it barely usable to change the network config!

XGL under Ubuntu is still not going very well. It starts ok but then does weird behaviour like not accepting mouse clicks. I also can't change the settings for the life of me. Maximising and resizing windows is extremely wobbly.

The return of SUSE

2006-06-10T17:22:00.000+12:00

It was a brief falling out but I have reinstalled SUSE 10.1 at home. The updating and packaging has now been fixed and it's nice to be back in XGL goodness.

The balance tipped last night when I tried to order pizza via a flash based website. Opera wouldn't display it, Firefox kept crashing half way through. I had to use the pvr to order it! bah.

Good thing about SUSE is that all the flash stuff is set up properly straight out.

Now that things aren't so broken it's much ncier to use.

I think I'll still keep Ubuntu at work because some of the features are more valuable there than at home.

The question you're all asking is, did I make two GNOME panels or just the one that SUSE 10.1 provides? I made two!

Starts with U ends in u.

2006-06-08T21:50:00.000+12:00

Ubuntu went on the work pc today. Much the sameness except Opera icon worked fine and dependencies (though I installed a nightly Opera 9 build). I had to edit xorg.conf to make it use 1920x1200 on my monitor. I got XGL going somewhat. It's not as slick and featured as under SUSE but it's a start. I need to learn how to manually configure it.

I am pleased to report that Ubuntu supports hibernating with network support on my home pc. This is a good thing!

I also changed my home kernel today from 386 to k7 because I noticed it was only using one cpu and not two. (I have a dual core Athlon). But a simple 'sudo apt-get install kernel-k7' was all that was needed. Nice to have something not be a headache.

A very dapper PC

2006-06-07T07:17:00.000+12:00

Surprise surprise, yesterday I installed Ubuntu on my home PC. After an enlightening dummy run on a work PC I discovered it's best to use the Gnome Partioner first before running the live installer. Turns out the partitioning program in that is a little simplistic and buggy. Once that was avoided it was all plain sailing, 15 minutes later I was on the desktop.

I went back to work while EasyUbuntu did it's thing and then came home to do more configuring. I knew the first user created would have the root password so I wanted to make my own user the second created. I soon found this to be troublesome because I then lost access to menu items that required the root password. (Quite against the spirit of Linux I think) so I gave myself admin rights, possibly temporarily.

My next task was mounting my data partition, post install it auto mounted temporarily but later boots made it read only. A fstab here and a change permission there, I was up and running.

I downloaded Opera 8.54 and installed it to find the same issues as on the Powerbook, missing libraries. So I visited the Ubuntu Wiki and downloaded those. Still can't use the Opera icon for the shortcut so it is once again a Goat.

I really like that no matter what platform I am using, I can get Opera up just the way I like it with all my data stil there.

I haven't had a good play with Ubuntu yet but I am keen to explore more. Until then...(pray for working XGL)

EasyUbuntu

2006-06-04T13:16:00.000+12:00

Yesterday I got on the task of making Ubuntu play non-free file formats. It's quite easy with a program called EasyUbuntu which luckily supports the PowerPC architecture too.

It's a simple program that with a few tick box selections will install the things you need to play mp3, wmv, mov, dvds, 3d graphic drivers, java etc. It went quite smoothly though I haven't had a chance to try out the java. When I tried to do it manually on Hoary it didn't work out so well. But it was a really easy process so I was glad.

I will definitely use it when/if I choose to install it on an x86 pc.

I have noticed that Dapper boots on the powerbook in 1 minute 40 seconds. Programs like Opera and Firefox open faster than under Hoary but OpenOffice is still slow as a dog. That really needs a fast processor behind it. I ended up making the Opera icon a goat since it refused to use Opera.png. The Mrs really likes the choice and wants one on her Mac!

A very Dapper Powerbook

2006-06-03T10:05:00.000+12:00

Updating the G3 Powerbook Lombard model from Ubuntu Linux Hoary Hedgehog to Ubuntu Linux Dapper Drake went quite smoothly. There was only 3 problems.

1) During the install process via the live cd, out of interest I chose to manually edit the partition table instead of erase the entire disk, just to see how it looks for when I want to do it. But it hanged. So I rebooted and chose to erase the disk and it went smooothly

2)Opera Browser wouldn't install because it was missing a dependency that wasn't in the repositories. (I had already added multiverse and universe). I was a bit stumped and googled to find other people with the same problem. But it was eventually solved by the Ubuntu Wiki which had a page about Opera with a link to the elusive file. Phew.

3)I had backed up the data before installing Dapper so I copied it all back. When I went to tell Opera where the bookmarks file was, it couldn't be found. It seems not all the files were backed up. Oh no! But I discovered them all safely on my main computer. The pendrive for some reason didn't get them all copied on. Damn Nautilus. That has been giving me grief at work a bit too.

Anyway, I am quite liking Dapper. It feels and looks newer. But how much longer it will be used I don't know as in a couple of weeks a Macbook will be purchased!

Still undecided about replacing SUSE with it.

Final hours

2006-06-01T11:47:00.000+12:00

My new keyboard came yesterday.
http://www.benq.com.au/HomeShowProduct.asp?ProdID=309
It's really nice to use but not as silent as the promo material makes out.

Waiting on Ubuntu to release sometime in the next day. I am getting keen to give it a try. SUSE has started to talk more openly about the severe bugs they released with and they say an update patch is very close to coming out. It could be a case of too little too late though?

I found the long standing 10.0 bug about copying to USB devices going really slow (like dialup speeds) is still there in 10.1 They knew about this bug before 10.0 came out and decided to just fix it in 10.1, but they didn't. Makes me really mad. This on top of the horrendous package management bug is why I am seriously looking at Ubuntu.

It will be more work to get set up though, but maybe it's about time I got my hands dirty again.

newness

2006-05-30T20:49:00.000+12:00

Yesterday I ordered my new keyboard for home. It's a BenQ slim silver and black number which will match my case and mouse. It will be nice to escape my boring generic beige keyboard!

Ubuntu Linux releases 'Dapper Drake' on June 1st. I will definitely be updating the version on this laptop (Hoary Hedgehog). I unexpectedly have the urge to install it on a desktop too. Maybe at work or home. I love SUSE a lot but right now it's just not up to scratch so maybe it's about time I got my feet more dirty in a debian based system (I've never even used apt-get!). Setting up XGL and non-OSS stuff in SUSE is really easy but it's a bit more work in Ubuntu. I guess I will try the livecd to get a feel for how it will work out. It's a big step but that's what Linux is all about - choice and not being locked to one option!

Package woes

2006-05-25T17:17:00.000+12:00

So I've seen mention on the SUSE website and various news articles around the Internets that there is definitely something seriously broken with the 10.1 package management. YaST and Zen-Updater don't get along it seems. I'm glad it's not just me, but I am appalled that it shipped with such a horrific bug not resolved. Looking at the comments of the bugreport it looks like someone declared it fixed when it actually wasn't. That might explain it. A fix for this issue should be out in a few days or a week or something. Just how people will be able to update to get the fix is another issue ;)

Been battling access to FTP repositories and I now finally have the new amaroK installed. I couldn't even install it via an rpm because of the above bug.

Took a peek at KDE under 10.1 yesterday, very briefly. Enough to see that it had a nice package manager program but otherwise looked rather KDEish. Since there was no easy XGL option I fled back to GNOME.

In other woe news, my G4 iPod has decided it doesn't feel like charging at the moment.

Boot times

2006-05-24T17:43:00.000+12:00

This afternoon I started to look at the time it took to boot SUSE 10.1

I looked into what services were starting on bootup and disabled some unnecessary ones. I then timed it before and after. I wanted to compare my work and home computer. So to make it fair I only timed between pushing enter on the grub bootloader screen and being presented with a login prompt.

Work PC: 60 seconds and I got it down to 55 seconds.

Home PC: 45 seconds and I got it down to 35 seconds.

Returning from suspending to disk I get a prompt after 25 seconds however I lose the connection to my router so that's useless.

On the software updating front, I see other people are encountering the same issues that I am. Looks like a fix is in the works, hope they push it out to people and don't just leave it to 10.2 to give it. *cough*faultyusbdrivesin10.0*cough*

Fresh install

2006-05-21T20:15:00.000+12:00

A fresh install of SUSE 10.1 at home went well. I had a bit of trouble yesterday and this morning because for some reason I couldn't access the repositories. Finally started working this afternoon though. I had to download some codecs so I could watch the video of Lordi at Eurovision.

I hope the guru and packman repo's that I use get 'digitally signed' soon because it sucks having to dismiss a warning message every time I open Software Management or Installation Sources.

I must say I am not impressed with the new way of installing standalone rpm files and the 'Software Updater'. It takes ages to load when installing software and sometimes doesn't work. The updater tells me I have updates but when I try to install them it says I need root privileges. It doesn't *ask* for the password however.

I hope these issues get fixed with a bug fix patch but I doubt they will somehow. I will try updating my GNOME packages which could fix it. (If I can get that repository to load). I think I've found a 2.14 source.

A fresh install means that GNOME now has only one panel instead of two. I didn't think I could make it work after getting used to two, but I've found it not too bad. I considered adding the top panel again but I feel it makes my screen seem too small.

At least XGL is still being awesome. Stumbled across a couple more tricks too.

Oh and the Macbook

2006-05-17T20:45:00.000+12:00

Great news today about the Apple Macbooks now being available. One will most likely be purchased by the Mrs on her holiday because it works out to be $400 cheaper that way.

(this post posted by the blog posting applet)

The switch is in motion

2006-05-17T20:43:00.000+12:00

Today I got so fed up with the slowness of my wireless 'broadband' that I made the call to switch to cable internet. I'm getting the 2mbit/2mbit 10 GB plan for the same price I am paying for a "1mbit/128k" 5 GB plan. 1mbit really now meaning "about twice to three times as fast as dialup" not '20 times faster" as advertised.

Anyway the install is scheduled for the morning of June 12. Hopefully all goes to plan, stay tuned for my June 13th post of rage if it doesn't. Still tossing up whether to cancel my current service this month or not. The Mrs says no. It ends on June 14 so there is a chance I will be paying another month for no good reason or it will be a lifesaver if the cable install is delayed...

The Mrs is going away for some weeks on June 17th so she doesn't want to risk having no net on the days leading up to it. Fair enough really. I guess I can leave my spare "broadband" downloading big stuff to the pvr.

SUSE 10.1/XGL goodness

2006-05-16T20:02:00.000+12:00

As expected, my SUSE 10.1 dvd arrived today. I promptly installed it on my home and work computers.

Visually it has some subtle differences and the most noticeable change being the revised way ot installing software.

But I then got eager to set up XGL. I reinstalled the NVIDIA graphics drivers and then went into the Gnome settings to enable XGL. I was really blown away at how much it improved my experience. Window management is much smoother and crisper, and the eye candy effects are really cool. Justin the Mac user across from me was jealous ;)

When I got home I configured XGl as well and discovered even more effects I didn't know about, like peeking behind a window by bending the top of the window down.

I thought a reinstall would be needed at home because it was very slow logging in and CPU usage was maxing out. But it seems to be a problem I read about in a review with the Beagle search enging racing away indexing everything by default. I disabled that and things have sped up.

I haven't used it yet because I'm posting from an Ubuntu laptop but Gnome now features a blog updating program that supports Blogspot and Livejournal so I doubt I'll be updating from the web much anymore.

I'm yet to fully explore the 10.1 set up so I wont comment too much yet.

Better SUSE news

2006-05-14T12:30:00.000+12:00

Last night I was reading the SUSE website and they were talking about how you can make a DVD iso by using a special program to merge the 6 CD isos. About the same time I recieved an email from the Linux shop saying they had decided to do just that so I can get my order on Tuesday instead of Saturday. A really nice coincidence. I agreed to this plan and they will still send me the real DVD iso if this doesn't work for me.

Now I have to choose which I will upgrade first, work or home...

SUSE 10.1 delay and Opera

2006-05-13T13:28:00.000+12:00

When SUSE 10.1 was released yesterday I got up early to start the torrent download but found the DVD iso would not be released until May 18th. This was sucky because I was hoping to use up the rest of my internet traffic allowance on SUSE before today. Instead I have pre-ordered the DVD from a local merchant that I got 10.0 from previously. It was only $22.

I've tackled using some of the traffic by catching up podcasts instead.

I tried a newer nightly build of Opera 9 to see what the revised widget ui was about. Ugh I didn't like it at all and reverted to the older nightly. I need my dim screen with widgets appearing with a keystroke. Choosing them individually from a menu sucks.

goodness

2006-05-10T07:46:00.000+12:00

So on Monday I got the minotaur working at 1920x1200. It's soo nice to have a big desktop. After that I went to help someone with a 17" CRT and it just felt so tiny.

I started to have a bit of problem with the VGA connection but I corrected that by using the DVI cable. I would have used DVI the whole time except it bizarrely didn't work at first.

SUSE Linux 10.1 is out either tomorrow or on Friday, depending on where the "11th of May" announcer is. This time I think I am going to download the DVD ISO myself instead of buying it online. I have a few gigabytes of monthly traffic to use before Sunday and I have a DVD writer now. I just need to get a blank DVD.....

MINOTAUR

2006-05-06T12:48:00.000+12:00

At 12pm yesterday Justin informed me that our 24" monitors and video cards had all arrived. I was hungry so we set his up and it looks nice. Then we went to my place to try some PVR stuff. It's going quite well now - timeshifting rocks. I even got a missing channel sorta tuned in.

At 1pm we arrived back at work and I started to install my monitor. This began 4.5 hours of hair tearing out boot failures, video card failures and multiple linux reinstalls due to a mangled file system (caused by said failures). Anyway after a bit of googling an alternative search string I got the solution and am now running it at a useable resolution and visually useable. Previously it was ultra zoomed and psychedelic.

It's not running at the optimum res of 1920x1200 at the moment because I haven't had the time to tweak but it's sitting at 1450xsomething. I'm just glad to have it running - it was looking quite bleak for a while

and the post title? Back in a previous job I was labelling about 50 boxes as 'MONITOR' and on one of them I accidently wrote MINOTAUR. It made me laugh and I hope the receiver noticed and laughed.

PVR

2006-05-04T07:11:00.000+12:00

Media Center totally went wrong. I installed a certified MCE codec and then suddenly I couldn't playback recordings OR watch tv. I reapplied some patches/reinstalled the tv card to no avail. So I decided to give Media Portal a try. Justin uses it so I knew it worked with my TV card.

He kindly brought me in all the downloads I'd need to get it going and in our lunchbreak we set to installing it. It all went quite well and we left the electronic program guide downloading information since it would take a while. Unfortunately I couldn't tune in one of the channels I want but it did give me some I didn't want.

After work the EPG data was ready and I set to ordering the channels and aligning them with the EPG. Somewhere a long the line I lost TV3. The channel frequency it was showing up on was no longer working. Eventually after a long new scan it picked up at 91 instead of 11. I redid the channels again and now have it all working nice. The good/bad thing is the reception picture is better on the pvr than the native TV which means more power consumption.

Media Portal has been reasonably stable for a 0.2 RC4 release except for it choking a bit when it had to handle 200 channels and a skin change causing a forced reboot and having it accidently change to a skin I didn't want but have found to be good.

I even did some timeshifting for reals lastnight when I missed the start of a show. But not enough to be able to fast forward all the ads.

All in all, it looks like I'll be staying with Media Portal since it actually does what it's meant to.

ps, still now video cards or 24" monitors at work. Sigh.

surprises and expected things

2006-05-01T21:45:00.000+12:00

I arrived at work this morning to find my TV tuner and mouse package waiting on my desk. Yay.

Then I checked my email and got told my ISP plan was auto upgraded overnight and I now had a 1mbit connection (up from 512k) and a 5 GB data cap (up from 3 GB). This is good news so I went home at lunchtime to try it and all day since I have only been getting 4 to 15 kb/s downloads. 128k connection at best! boo.

Anyway the install of the tuner went well and I was soon using the remote to watch tv. It did crash out to the desktop ungracefully a few times when mucking around and even told me once that the tuner was already in use so I couldn't watch tv. Sigh. I upgraded the drivers though which I think helped. I seem to need a decoder codec to be installed. I thought it came with one though. Will have to look into that. Maybe reapply Rollup2 now that I am using MyTV.

The red mouse is cooler than I suspected. It lights up all red around the sides!

waiting or not waiting

2006-04-28T12:15:00.000+12:00

I'm waiting for my pvr parts to arrive soon. I hope they do come today, I expected them this morning but looking more like afternoon (especially since it's lunchtime now)

I'm not waiting for my pvr to boot though. I initially thought it to boot in about a minute, but recent tests have shown it to be closer to 30 seconds to the desktop and 40 seconds into Media Center. I did patch it to Rollup2 so maybe that made a difference?

purchases and parallels revisited

2006-04-26T07:47:00.000+12:00

On Monday I decided to try Parallels again because I remembered doing a kernel patch last week. Joyfully it compiled perfectly this time and I was able to install Windows 2000 virtually. It's working ok but so far no network capability. Though since certain patches aren't on yet I haven't been aggressively trying that.

Yesterday having been paid a day early I ordered my computer bits. Keyboard was out of stock so I postponed that. I did get the Hauppauge PVR-150MCE (with remote) and a red Gigabyte optical mouse to go with it. Red to match the furniture. Hopefully they come before the weekend but you never know.

Still no video cards or 24" monitors at work. Woe is us.

bang bang you're dead

2006-04-22T13:34:00.000+12:00

Forgot to mention that yesterday Justin supplied me with the linux version of Quake 4 Demo. Tried it on my home machine and it installed ok. However running it wasn't so good because the sound was all messed up for an unknown reason. Couldn't make out what people were saying and the guns sounded like electric sparks. Couldn't test the graphics that much because the demo is limited to lower quality. Ran smoothly though.

General happenings

2006-04-21T17:22:00.000+12:00

1) Next week, I am going to order a new keyboard for my main home computer and a new optical mouse for the pvr

2) Next week, I am going to order a new Hauppauge tv tuner for the pvr.

3)I am also thinking of buying an RJ45 Ethernet joiner for the pvr so I can easily plug in a network cable and also have the back of the case in an awkward to reach location

4) I switched to using Gnome 2.12 at work. A couple of teething problems after being quite set up with KDE but I have resolved all isues.

5) Wine 0.9.12 was released which I gleefully installed at work. It said it had improved font support so I was hopefull. Unfortunately it seemed to be a regression for me so I reverted back to 0.9.11 and I'll try .13 when it's out.

6) I installed Opera 9 Beta RC1 at work because I had a hankering for widgets. Weather and Wikipedia widgets soon sprung up on my desktop. The next day the real Beta was released and turns out to be a build before RC1. But next week the weekly build will be patched to fix a regression they detected. Not long now hopefully until Opera 9 Final!

Media Center Edition

2006-04-16T08:37:00.000+12:00

I got Windows XP Media Center Edition installed on my pvr machine yesterday. It all went smoothly except I have somehow misplaced my motherboard cd and we had to hunt the net for my audio drivers. A couple of codecs installed later I was watching my stuff.

MCE is quite a simple interface but not too bad. I haven't tried the TV part yet because I can't get my TV Tuner to install. I had trouble in Windows 2000 last time because of a change to DirectX. It causes Windows to BSOD on installation of an important driver. So I have disabled it and will look at getting a proper MCE tuner.

I did install a weather program for it so I can check the forecast and satellite images. Unfortunately due to the screen resolution on the tv, the MCE title bar blocks the buttons to change cities so I can't enter more than one. Sigh.

xgl and how it affected me

2006-04-14T08:18:00.000+12:00

I tried Kororaa and found XGL to be really cool to use. Still a bit buggy but I can't wait to use it properly. I may install it at work. The cube effect is fun and on the fly translucent windows is a handy feature.

It was using a new version of Gnome that I hadn't used before. Certainly a lot nicer than the version that comes with Mandrake 10.1 or Ubuntu 5.04. This made me want to try it under Suse. I installed the Gnome packages and logged back in. Suddenly my pc is even faster! I quite like the set up and have been customising it a bit. Now it feels more like having a new computer. Looking at different things helps.

I wonder what will look best with my 24" lcd, KDE or Gnome...

xgl

2006-04-13T07:11:00.000+12:00

In an effort to use as much of my monthly data cap as possible, I am downloading Kororaa. Kororaa is a linux livecd that showcases the new XGL desktop environment. Cubed desktop and other distortions.
Only 120mb to go as of press time, hopefully I can play with it by lunchtime as I have to go to work soon.

approved!

2006-04-12T17:51:00.000+12:00

It's official that I'm getting the 24" monitor. They've been ordered but there might be a couple of weeks delay for stock.

We were playing with a 23" Apple Cinema Display today and I thought it was a great size for what I want. Suddenly the 20" was tiny in my head and I wanted the 24" for sure. Luckily the man with the wallet agreed.

Goings on

2006-04-12T07:27:00.000+12:00

Justin got Parallels installed on Windows. The weird thing was, it failed to install Suse 10.0 despite having the option to do so. Installing Ubuntu Hoary worked despite not having the option to do so. Damn computers.

I was talking to my Mother last night about getting a 20" or 24" widescreen LCD for my work. She hit back by showing off that she has dual 19" LCD's for her work computer. I think I'd still prefer a single monitor though. It makes a cleaner look and I don't like having a vertical stripe in the middle.

virtualisation woe

2006-04-10T20:07:00.000+12:00

Based on a tip by Justin, I spent the afternoon trying to get Parallels 2.1 to work under Suse Linux. It is OS virtualisation software that runs off of Linux, Windows or Intel OS X.

It installed okay via rpm and tgz but when it came to configuring it, the driver compile section would always fail and an error log file created. I studied the output and was able to change it by fixing minor issues but it looks like there are more complicated things going on. No help in Google of course. Seems to be something to do with a patched kernel.

Tomorrow Justin will have a go on his Windows box to see if he can virtualise linux. Hope he has more luck. In the meantime I will ponder Super Gamer 1 (thanks Andrew)

Geek project

2006-04-09T15:32:00.000+12:00

Now that I have a spare computer I am turning it into a PVR. My first instinct is to use linux and MythTV but it is overly complicated. KnoppMyth is not as straight forward as I'd like with my current TV tuner (it wouldnt let me scan for channels). I am going to get a newer tuner anyway I think. Probably a Hauppage card because they have good Linux support. Hardware encoding is very worthwhile.

At the moment the pc is running Windows 2000 for a media playback via the TV. I do need a Windows install around for firmware upgrades of my Wireless modem and iPod so I am thinking of using XP or XP Media Center Edition. Two birds with one stone? If it's just mostly playback of media Windows is fine for the job. Certainly helps with codecs. I am reluctant to change my Linux/OS X only household policy but you should use the right OS for the job, right? Besides, with full screen video it doesn't matter what the desktop looks like.

I get to hang out in my Suse 10.0 desktop the rest of the time.