Friday, December 22, 2006

The Christmas Present Trap

The missus and I were discussing the purchase of various items as presents for relatives and friends for Christmas, this all took place the last week of November and the first week of December. As the time went on, it was clear that the shopping would be completed before mid-December. Nice, if it were left to me it would have been done over the fornight before the event. So now I get earache for 'not helping with the Christmas shopping'. Having a bleat about that isn't the purposeof this blog entry, though. The purpose is to provide a warning.

You see, during those discussions, we came to the conclusion that not only did we not know what to get each other, we couldn't decide what we each wanted. So we decided not to get each other anything just yet - we'd wait until the January sales are in full swing (my missus is a black-belt at shopping; if it aint got 75% off, it aint gettin' bought). So here's the danger; PAY ATTENTION BLOKES! If the missus says she's not getting you anything for Christmas, and says you're not to get her anything completely ignore this. The last thing you want to be doing is be sat around the Christmas tree on Chrismas morning, the kids are quietly (yeah, right!) opening their presents, there's stuff for your mum, for her mum, presents for and from both your families and she turns round to you and says 'this is for you' and hands you a present. Then you look a right plum. And you'll be in the dog house until it's her birthday.

It's a very simple rule: if she says you're dont need to buy her a present at Christmas, she's lying, buy her one anyway and make her look a chump in the unlikely event that she's telling the truth! The good news is that if she's said this, she's not exactly expecting the earth, so you can safely get her something cheap that you like - just make sure it's wholly for her, not to share, not for the house, and isn't soap-on-a-rope. Buying her kinky underwear is out too - remember that's a gift for your enjoyment. Even if she was telling the truth, instead of making her feel bad when you give her the gift, tell her that you weren't going to get her anything, but you saw it and thought it would be just right for her, and you'll get her proper present later.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Media Centre?

So this guy just gives me a pc. Just gave it to me...

Yeah, OK, they were dumping them out at work and they were no longer needed, and these weren't even powerful enough to give to the local school. It was (I say was because it's kinda changed somewhat now) a PIII 500 with 250 MB memory, a 40Gig HDD and a rather cheesy ATI 128Mb 2D video card. I didn't have any specific plans for this machine, but I thought it might be fun to have a play with stuff I dont usually get to tinker with. So my choice was 'Linux Media Centre'.

My initial thoughts were 500Mhz? Not fast enough; I was right, but more on that later. The first thing to go was the video card. Now, kicking around somewhere I have some Geforce 5200FX cards - at least two that just aren't being used. But I cant find them; I did find my Geforce 3 250MB Ti-summat-or-other, so I stuffed that in the AGP slot. I downloaded the MythTV package, and pinched the DVB card from my PC in the cellar (dont worry, the card couldn't be used as there was no aerial point. All I had to find now was a sound card. I've got some of these too, somewhere. Buggered if I know where tho'.

OK, more robbery - take the server apart, remove the sound card (a sound blaster OEM summat-or-other, again not being used, it didn't even have any speakers plugged into it), re-assemble server and turn it back on before anyone else tries to log in and finds either the Domain (windows) or the LDAP server (Linux) missing. Put all these bits in the new computer, remove the scsi card and tape drive and we're off.

There is already one problem with this computer as a media centre - the lack of a DVD drive of any kind. Well if this project works I might blow twenty quid on a new DVD cooker for it, and have myself a better media centre as a result. In the mean time, we'll just have to make do with either cross mounted DVD's from one of the other linux boxes, or computer-based .avi's off the server. Either is no big deal.

So I install KnoppMyth, bring the computer up to the front room, plug it into the telly using a s-video cable and off she goes. Now I have problems though - the writing is very small and difficult to make out on a TV screen. Coupled with that, it's complaining because I've not got an analogue tv card in the machine. The DVB one is in there; it just takes a bit of menu-jumping to get the system to use it instead of an analogue card. I set it off doing a channel scan.

Maybe an hour later it's done nothing. Something is wrong; MythTV (as it clearly stated on the website) is still considered alpha quality. Oh well, I tried and failed; what more could I do? Back down the cellar to the workbench with the media centre, and out comes the Fedora disks. I should say now that I had just two simple reasons for choosing Fedora (well, 3 if you include the fact that I've actually quite enjoyed using it for the past few weeks) firstly I know the innards very well, so if things go wrong I can fix it and secondly (and probably most importantly) I'd got the disks hanging around. I install Fedora Core 6 and overwrite the previous install. I'm now using LVM for the disks, that should make life slightly easier if I want to add a hard disk or two for recording space in the future. This computer case can easily take two or three more hard disks, even if the 200W PSU isn't really up to the job).

So fiddling around with Fedora is now needed; unlike KnoppMyth it doesn't turn on the s-video system by itself. That took me about forty minutes to solve, I had to plug the media centre into the flatscreen telly (which fortunately has both computer RGB input and svideo, so I could flip between the two to ensure all is working). Once that's done I run the updates, install the livna repository, get xine, mplayer and kaffeine installed (the three packages that will make this work, well maybe I could do without mplayer. Kaffeine needs xine, and will be the primary video and audio package eventually), and I install all the codec packages I can find. I turn on auto-logon for the media user (I'm not using the regular accounts for this machine, and I want this up and running in a stand-alone, no-login fashion).

Next the PC sits down by the telly, plugs in through s-video, and seperately in through audio - we've got a scart-splitter box that allows us to combine these inputs into a single source, so that's now being used. The connection to the LAN is a bit of a test - I ran a cable down the side of the radiator pipe into the cellar and plugged it into one of the switches, this was a PITA to complete, there was barely enough room for the cable. Testing shows that things are not quite perfect, full screen video is flagging. OK, disconnect everything, back to the work bench and see what kit we have lying around.

To my surprise I found another mainboard with a 1Gig PIII on it, but no memory. I swapped them over, but the case connector didn't fit this mainboard right - so I did the best I could and put the connectors for the power on/off button on and nothing else. OK, so we've got no case lights. That's probably for the best while we're watching films on the telly with the lights down low, and nobody can accidentally kick the reset switch while they're reaching over to shut the curtains.

The swapover is clean and smooth, FC6 boots with no problems; it doesn't miss a heartbeat (boy am I glad I'm not using Windows for this). Back up to the front room with the box and start testing. This time its wonderful. Full-screen video is working perfectly from xine and mplayer. Now on to the TV; this is the real reason for installing Kaffeine. I load it up and scan for channels (having adjusted the font size in FC6 so that I can actually see the region name it's scanning). It finds all the channels - finds them a little too well, there are two entries for each one. Insert the stronger-signal half of the list and off we go, we can now watch freeview telly too (and record it, pause-in-play, and all those other goodies that kaffeine does that a forty quid freeview box cant do).

Now the box is useable. The aspect ratio is looking a bit off from xine (mplayer can be fixed by local config options, but xine cant). I take a look through the xorg config notes to fix it - just a display size declaration in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf telling the x server the exact physical size of the display, which I measured pretty accurately with a tape measure. Now, of course, xine will always have exactly the right aspect ratio, even at the res of 1024x768 on this widescreen CRT telly.

Now it's just down to tinkering. Eventually I'll get it set so that there is no login phase, no desktop, no nothing, it'll just launch kaffeine fullscreen and that'll be that. I'd like some kind of in-between UI that lets the user choose what they want to watch (telly, avi, dvd, etc.) but at least it's usable in the meantime. I also tried to get this working with my USB ir dongle, but it doesn't seem to be supported in Linux. This is a shame, but not impossible to work around.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Fedora Core 6 - How it's shaping up

Well, I've been using FC6 for a week or so now, and I've been able to settle on my opinions of it. Overall I'm really impressed. The desktop effects are awesome, the range of applications I have available is immense, and we've been watching TV and films on DVD (and in mpg, mp4 and avi format) and it's held up really well.
One thing is certain; whenever I've had one of the previous versions of Fedora Core on the system, as much as I've tried, I've eventually had to flip back to Windows to use one tool or another. Not any more. Wine or Cedega run all the things that I need, and I'm slowly moving my documents across to Open Office (I should have done this a long while ago, really, but I've not got no Windows on my laptop, so I've got no real choice - and the file sizes have come down by over 80% - I wont need a new hard disk at this rate...)
Bad points for FC6? Well if I'm honest, there aren't any serious issues. There no Wine menu on the main menu from Gnome, and the mouse pad was a bit dodgy (it was unresponsive, the pointer was slow or wandered on its own) in KDE last time I used it. Oh, and you have to be careful where you click in the text fields in VNC viewer logon and pasword boxes, because it doesn't always recognise that you've clicked in the edit field.
On to the good points. Mplayer is an awesome tool; it will play just about anything. And if it cant handle it, VLC player certainly can (OK, so these apps are both available for Windows too - but they're native to Linux and are cool). I use Cedega to play windows games, Wine to use anything else that I really cant live without (but that's nothing, yet). The email tools are better than Outlook Express by a very long way; they're still better when compared to Outlook - my mail server is IMAP4 using Dovecot, and Evolution wins on this hands down. I used Thunderbird from Windows on the laptop before I re-installed, but I've never needed to install that on Linus. I've tried using Outlook with this mail server too, and not only is performance crap, but it doesn't handle the protocol as cleanly as other applications. Both the text editors (gedit from Gnome and kate from KDE) piss all over notepad, which looks very lame and unuseable in comparison. I actually get a word processor that I dont have to pay an arm and a leg for, I have the Gimp installed so my webpage graphics all look nice, and I listen to my music collection (FLAC and OGG, of course) with xine. I've got the full suite of developer tools installed too, but I've not had chance to use any of those yet. There's plenty of time yet, though, I'm still getting comfortable with it.
A quick note about Cedega; I've been so impressed with it that I've installed it on my tower PC. It lets me play Windows games. I dont have all that many games, but I've been selective down the years. It handles all the DirectX acceleration cleanly, and uses OpenGL to provide the performance required by computer games. Of all the games I've tried on it, very little has failed to install.

Monday, November 13, 2006

Fedora Core 6 - Configuration a Breeze

So I finally found out what was causing all the headaches with my Fedora Core 6 install; it had installed the wrong kernel. Not a big mistake, like installing the wrong architecture or whatever, but a small error. Small enough to make it almost work. It put the xen kernel on the system - this is designed for virtual machine environments. It had also put the real kernel on too, except that it had instructed Grub (the boot loader) to install this as the default. Easy fix, rpm quickly removed the xen kernel and now the system is fine.

All the changes I'd made to the wireless config were backed out. I'd used the firmware cutter to get the firmware out of the windows drivers, and dropped that in the right place. wpa_supplicant was a particularly straightforward config, and I took a look through the newest xorg.config - it doesn't even define my monitor, let alone set flags for it; it just doesn't need them.

I checked the nvidia driver version installed from Livna, and it was new enough, so I turned on the desktop effects. Wow. I have fluid menus and tool tips, and everything takes on a more natural feel.

Applications went on by the dozen, I popped up kyum and pulled in dvd support (mplayer/kplayer), dvb-tv support (kaffeine & xine), mp3 support (a wide range of apps - really) and it all just works. I must admit that I've not even missed Windows on this laptop for one moment. There is nothing I use that doesn't work. Kaffeine is better at playing dvb-television than its windows counterpart that came with the card, I didn't have to type in an extraordinarily long license key for a windows dvd player, and I've got Cedega installed so I can play windows games. Or, at least I could if my video hardware was detected correctly. It seems to think I've got half the video memory I should have (I've got Geforce Go 64MB chipset - but it tells me it's only a 32MB version, and its interfering with the ability of openGL to function).

So everything isn't quite smooth yet, but it's a very long way along the line. This is the first release of Linux I've ever used where the interface seems better than Windows rather than just keeping up with it. There seems to be quite a bit of new stuff gone into this Fedora release, and I'm pretty impressed. I hope the coming RedHat EL5 which is supposed to be based on FC6 is this good.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Fedora Core 6 - The Installation Experience

The installation guide for Fedora Core 6 has a section on downloading and burning the right version of the installer software. It wasn't much help with this, and it was no fault of FC6.

So we'll put aside the gripes I had in actually getting a disk burned in both Windows and Linux. Windows was the first to screw up - it nearly burned my disk properly. I didn't find out until I sat down at the computer to do the install, and then hurriedly tried to download the CD version and burn that from KB3 on my CentOS server (which only has a CD chugger, it cant cook DVDs). This second problem wasn't even down to the OS - the site I'd been downloading from decided it was going to terminate the 650Mb download of each disk when they're 9% complete (about 55Mb of the way in). I have a DVD burner in my laptop (the target computer) but I'd changed the hard disk over ready for the install... So, I change it back, boot up FC5, kick off the download of the DVD, go to bed, get up in the morning, kick off a DVD disk burn, go to work, get home and finally, finally, get to run the installer.

So, at long last, we're now able to look at the operating system.

For anyone who's already familiar with Fedora Core and RedHat installations, the installer for this distribution will come with no surprises. Personally, I was pleased that they'd tarted it up a bit, the whole thing is becoming much more polished these days - and it was good before. The installer is a bit of a breeze; the operating system goes on with little fuss, if anyone has ever had to re-install Windows XP, they'll know what a pain in the ass it can be - and then you've got to download drivers from all over the place because you cant find your original install disks that came with the computer (well I do - so I'm assuming that others suffer the same fate). There is a glitch in the FC6 install for me though. This new version offers the chance to enhance one's install by referring to extra software repositories on the internet at install time. Wow. Except that when I clicked on the 'fedora-extras' tickbox, it crashed the installer. So I didn't even bother adding anyone else, such as Livna or Dag.

The install went particularly quickly; I was impressed. Last time I installed Windows it took me about 3 hours, this took less than half an hour (although I did just pick the option for office productivity, and a few extra apps from the list - but I'm an advanced user, I'll add Kaffeine later...)

Now on to system startup. Changes from FC5? Well during boot up it still cant allocate memory resource for the card reader on my HP laptop! No big loss, it doesn't have a slot for SD cards anyway, and my USB reader works a treat (note, that the card reader does work from Windows, but I never ever use it...). The bootup mechanism is quite a bit quicker. In default install mode there are way too many services started in the background, and it still manages to boot up quicker than FC5. That was quite impressive. Oh, and theres a nice new font on the loadup screen, which is a welcome improvement.

The login screen is a spiffy new layout, this is one I've not seen before. I'll get bored with it before the week is out - but this is Linux so it's easy to change. Logging in is easy - first time logins are a bit slow, but it's creating the home directory contents to drive (in this case) Gnome; I've not yet tried KDE. Personally, I prefer KDE, because it's always been nicer, but I find myself using Gnome more - it just seems easier to find stuff, perhaps the more boring and less obtrusive the desktop, the better it is for such stuff.

Next I'm on to configuring the system. First up, getting all the available updates. I know how to do this, open a terminal, su to root, run 'yum -y update' and go make coffee... Only on this occasion it says 'yum is already running' or something along those lines. My first assumption is that it's running updates in the background. Nope, wrong. It is running in the background but it's not actually doing anything useful (or quickly). It's checking for updates, after five minutes or so, it pops up a box saying there are 79 updates available. I open the tool from this pop-up box and it lists them for me. Now the fun starts, and I dont even have my coffee yet.

First time through the update tool, I just try to run them all. Then I get a message saying that it cant download headers for one of the packages. OK, deselect the package and try again. Another one, different package this time. OK, I've been here before. I remember FC2, where my /var was too small to download all the updates available after a new install, so I did them bit by bit by hand. Only now this new update tools doesn't let you select or deselect all, or select by dragging or select bunches of them, it lets you hightlight one and tick or untick its box. So I untick my way to the bottom and select the top few packages and get them installed, then the box closes. Despite there being more updates available, the box is bloody gone. That's not very helpful. I cant even re-open it, 'cos it's off in the background checking for more updates... It's not often I'm critical of a Linux system, but here I really cant see why it operates this way. It builds in frustration to an extent that I'd think this software came out of Redmond. The update tool ('pup' I think it's called) is clearly a new bit of kit, and needs work. So I turn it off, stop the backround yum process, add the Livna repository from the command line (it's a one-liner) and go get kyum... Life is now more manageable, but it still cant satisfy some dependencies for a couple of the packages (kde-base is one), so those updates will have to wait. At least I got a coffee this time.

Now on to setting my stuff up the way I want it. While waiting for the updates to appear (and I'll be honest - the updates were significantly faster than they ever were with FC5) I managed to turn the font size down. The laptop has a 1280x800 display - I dont see why that means we have to suffer a font that only lets me have three characters across the screen at any one time...

I set up my wireless connection. I had all sorts of problems with NetworkManager on FC5 - it would involuntarily decide to jump networks, close the wireless connection altogether and attempt to spanner my wired connection. It wouldn't just do this all the time... It would wait until the most comically appropriate moment, such as when I'm about to send an email to my boss explaining why I would be late into work, or when I was 95% of the way through downloading the latest OpenOffice updates. Oh, and it only worked while I was logged in through the X terminal, too, so it was completely useless. I hand cranked wpa_supplicant, and that worked a treat. The same cannot be said for FC6, however. I got the broadcom BCWL5 driver, used the bc54xx-fwcutter tool to strip the firmware out of it, bunged the firmware into /lib/firmware, and fired up the driver. With wpa_supplicant running in the background it kicked up, the wireless connected and it was all peachy. For about ten minutes. Then it stopped working. It's not worked since, and I spent most of the rest of the evening trying to make it work. Bugger.

Time for bed rolled round, so I switched once more to wired network, downloaded kaffeine, and shut it all down. I took it up to bed, plugged in my DVB-T usb box and started the laptop up. Unlike FC5, however, and despite having a 2.6.18-summat kernel, there is no support for my TV device. I bet I need some kind of module to enable it - but I cant check 'cos the wireless lan doesn't work, and I've no network cable up here. So no telly tonight then. I turned the computer off; this seemed to cheer the missus up.

What's left to do then? Well the wireless isn't working properly, so that needs doing - it's probably highest priority. Nothing else will be tricky - the word processor is installed, the tv dongle will work after getting the right module 'yummed' onto the system, all the peripherals work (except the card reader... which I care not at all about). Oh, and the Livna nvidia drivers dont work yet - some sort of GLX problem. Without that I cant play games; and that, my friends, is what computers are really all about.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Hallowe'en? Is it really just a bit of fun?

It's just a bit of fun, isn't it? Surely dressing up in a silly costume with the sole intention of getting free sweets isn't really bad is it?

No, on the face of it, it isn't. But surely there are deeper issues here that the modern celebration of Hallowe'en is papering over. The longest pagan traditions of hallowe'en are that it is the barrier of the summer time and the winter time; a time when the worlds of the living and the worlds of the dead are said to overlap. In terms of that description, then the Pagan festival is well placed - the beginning of a new chapter in the calendar, and the preparation for the real winter to come. Very practical and very ordinary.

From a Christian point of view, there can surely be nothing to be concerned about with such a festival. If this is the way that another belief system needs to behave then we dont have any problems. Until you look at the way that Christians have both usurped the festival and bent the meaning to be something else. You see, walking around the streets begging for money or 'soul cakes' is pretty benign. Getting your children to dress up as demons or devils is another matter altogether. Such matters should not be mucked about with.

As Christians, surely we should be encouraging at best for our children to participate in the way that was originally intended; even going part the way and allowing them to dress as skeletons, ghouls and (in some cases) the witches out of the 'Wizard of Oz' are pretty mundane - this keeps the whole event on a level that is both spiritually and practically sound. But when the Christian symbols of all that is evil are brought to the fore, then we have a new image we're allowing our children to represent. We're telling them that it's absolutely fine to be at one with the Devil. I know it's stretching things a little far, but the Devil does have his worshippers.

And the pagans cant be particularly happy about all this. Firstly, the Christians have nicked their festival. Then they've bent the image of their priestesses into something of a joke. How can this be good for anyone, Christian or Pagan? We live in a multi-pluraist society, one in which many religions are represented. How can we take images of two of those religions and bend them in the name of 'fun' - particularly when some of those images represent utter evil?

Maybe this is all a little extreme. But there are more practical matters involved too. We spend all year telling our children not to accept gifts from strangers - if they offer you something to run as far and as fast as you can. Then Hallowe'en turns up, and we have them walking down the streets, knocking on doors begging for sweets from people they've never met (incidentally, we do this at Christmas too - we invite a complete stranger with a long white beard and red jacket into our homes to leave us gifts, all this from a bloke we've never met before!).

Yes, society has its problems. I often wonder why.

New Blog...?

Cool - so now I'm visible! This is a bit of an unusual adventure.

I suppose I'd better get a little down about me, if this thing takes off at all, it'd be nice for anyone reading this to understand a little of my background.

I'm a software engineer by profession, I've been in and around the Windows and embedded software development world professionally since 1993, and my specialities include C, C++ and a smattering of assembly language. I've worked in Windows application development, device driver development, and embedded software for a range of applications from telephony tools for Windows to full-on SIP-based VoIP software. Before that, despite being an insurance salesman, I used to tinker with computers in my spare time. Most recently, I've been working for a company that specialises in fluid dynamics and heat transfer modelling with software that runs on Windows, Solaris, and Linux.

I cut my teeth, software-wise, with an old Sinclair ZX Spectrum back in the mid-80's, which I was proficient at programming from both the built-in BASIC and from assembly language - and even from machine code when I needed to. From there I moved to an Atari ST, giving me a leap into 16 bit computers and moving me to a development environments of multiple layers. From there I went into the PC arena, working with Windows for games and (since about '95) with Linux for anything semi-serious.

Most recently I've set up my own consultancy service for Linux. I've been doing this unofficially for a good few years anyway, so there's nothing wrong with trying to earn a little extra income from this while educating the world to the phenomenon that is the GNU/Linux OS.