Il blog di Gas

Nowadays it seems that superkaramba works well, in the past it was heavy and buggy and I used to have conky. There are no particular reasons that made me switch to superkaramba , other than moving from Gnome to Kde.

My superkaramba monitor is based on the dual cpu monitor by Loacoon, I changed it a little to show some useful stuff , some of them gentoo specific ( last sync, last emerges, currently emerging….. genlop is a dependency).

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I decided to keep ubuntu even if I don’t like this new release ( hardy ) at all. When it came out it used to hang for no reason , the new kernels seem to have solved the issue.

I had two big problems, I couldn’t hibernate/suspend and I couldn’t switch to the ttys with Alt+F1 for example.

Starting from the latter I realized that the nvidia-glx package instead of the nvidia-glx-new does the job. Since I don’t know the difference between the two packages and I really don’t care to have the newest nvidia driver I consider this problem fixed.

Now suspend works and not sometimes or just one time like it used in the past, I had to change some config options in /etc/default/acpi-support

SAVE_VBE_STATE=false
POST_VIDEO=false
SAVE_VIDEO_PCI_STATE=true

Hiberating is still a problem or better waking up from hibernation is a huge deal on my laptop. It does hibernate and it tries to wake up during next boot but when X starts everything freeze. It seems a kernel or xorg problem because I can’t turn on/off the capslock led. Here’s the bug I’ve filled, hopefully someoene will look at it.

Ho comperato un nuovo harddisk e ho deciso, dopo averne fatto a meno per un anno, di installare windows xp….magari una mezz’oretta con Cod4 ci sta.

Inizio col dire che è stata più lunga del previsto.

Ho una vecchia copia di windows xp sp1 che non ha al suo interno i driver per il controller sata della mia scheda madre (ICH9) e allora ho dovuto scaricarmeli dal sito della Asus. Dopo averlo fatto mi sono ricordato di quel famoso pulsante F6 da premere in fase di installazione di windows per poter caricare driver di terze parti, subito dopo un flash: “Ma serve il floppy??????”. Già…..

E dove lo prendo un dischetto? Ho varie chiavette, da 128 MB a 8GB, ma di dischetti pochi o nulla…ma uno si,che non va. “Ravana ravana” ho trovato in un angolo di una libreria una vecchia confezione di Verbatim con scritto “Gia Formattati!!” Wow

Copiati i driver sul dischetto e riavviato facendo il boot da cd di windows mi trovo schermata nera, solo una piccola scritta “Rilevazione Hardware” in corso e poi nero completo e cd fermo che non legge.Sia il cd? Cambiati 3 cd e stesso problema.

Ho poi scoperto che se l’installer di Microsoft trova sugli harddisk più di una partizione con la flag “bootable” esce senza avvisare lasciandoti li come un pirla con la schermata nera. Ho risolto scollegando gli altri due harddisk in raid (quando ho fatto il raid forse ho creato anche il danno), un altra soluzione con “parted” era di togliere le flag bootable o lasciarne al massimo una.

In compenso però ora mi ha avvisato che cambierà la risoluzione dello schermo….ma vedi di andare a ….

Finally i got it….at first it was a mess, some explanations on what does what:

• Media Server: it serves the content on the network
• Media Renderer: it renders the content served by a media server

So I actually needed both on my gentoo linux.

Probably the easiest way to browse content served by upnp servers is djmount , it works as a FUSE file system ( that can be mounted by a normal user) and it looks for all the upnp devices in a network. It works very well even with content provided by Windows Vista (or better from the Media Player that comes with windows vista). You create a directory and simply “djmount it”, in that directory there will be other subdirectories , one for each media server you have in your network.

Easy and working but not that cool, I mean…all this new stuff and , in the end, I still have to browse directories. I’m not using these new things just because I don’t want to plug in an usb cable, I’m not that lazy. So I went searching in various forums another solution.

My first choice as media server was ushare, somehow connected to the geexbox project but it had its limitation, one above all that it doesn’t read tags, so when you copy a music file to another device you must retag it manually. Another problem was the init script that didn’t work that well and I didn’t have time/will to fix it. Mediatomb seems the definitive choice to me, it seems a nice project, it reads metadata and has a built in sqlite backend. (you can use mysql too but i don’t have the server on my box). Mediatomb has a webserver you can connect to and you can add/delete content to your share and chose how to rescan your library , you can chose inotify on that ( if you are using beagle you should already have inotify in your kernel).

When it goes to the Media Renderer it seems that there is not much choice yet, but there is some and in particular there is gmediarenderer from the GNU guys. GmediaRender , as the names says, it’s able to render content served from a MediaServer, it needs gstreamer as a backend for all the codecs (it actually uses gstreamer to render the stream ). If you have gmediarender running you can simply go to your nokia N95 media player , chose a song and in options chose “execute on personal network” ( or something like that) and your computer (not the phone) will sound. You can do the same for videos or pictures.

What about coherence? I have it installed and the rhythmbox plugins actually works , I can see my N95 and browse its contents but you can’t (yet) make rhythmbox work as a MediaRenderer. Coherence is supposed to be a full UPNP solution with its server, renderer and controller but the people who develop it are very good in making Youtube videos but not that good to explain the world “how the hell that damn thing works”.

What is missing? On my nokia I can chose to copy or move stuff to my personal network, I can’t do it and don’t know what part of this upnp mess should provide this feature.

In the past conky had some built in features regarding mldonkey that have been dropped later. I launch a script that uses netcat to do the same thing ( at least what I need).


#! /bin/sh
USER=user ## mldonkey user
PASS=pass ## mldonkey password for user
HOST=192.168.1.2 ## host where mldonkey is running
PORT=4000 ##port
(echo "auth $USER $PASS";echo $1;echo q) | nc $HOST $PORT

and then for conkyrc

${execi 50 ml_command bw_stats|grep Down|awk -F " " '{print $1,$2,$3,$10,$11,$12}'}


New emerald theme for my desktop, I’ve modified a little Scaled Black Mod by DBO

Emerald Theme
MurrinaDBO

I need to sync many applications on different devices so the best idea for me was using a central server where I can sync too. ScheduleWolrd is a funambol based service that regardless of its ugly interface does what I want .This small howto covers my Nokia N95 , thunderbird + lightning and Google Calendar but it should work with many other devices or applications. Syncing between ScheduleWorld and Google Calendar works mostly out of the box.
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Assieme al cellulare mi sono arrivate un paio di cuffie bluetooth della motorola, il supporto in linux c’è anche se le cose sono in continuo cambiamento.

Requisiti:
poter compilare , alsa e bluetooth gia testati e funzionanti , detto questo per gentoo dovrebbe solo servire il cvs , per ubuntu invece

• build-essential
• libbluetooth2-dev (3.5 or newer)
• automake
• autoconf
• cvs
• libtool
• libasound2-dev
• libdbus-1-dev
• libdbus-glib-1-dev

Io sono su gentoo e sono riuscito a far andare il tutto con bluez-utils>=3.16, la guida originale è per ubuntu

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I finally have sound , nice to hear

My laptop is a Packard Bell Easynote MX51-B-058 and is shipped with with Realtek ALC660 HD Audio sound chip, lspci gives the following:

gas@gas-laptop:~$ sudo lspci
00:00.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2)
00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 0 (rev a2)
00:00.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 1 (rev a2)
00:00.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 5 (rev a2)
00:00.4 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 4 (rev a2)
00:00.5 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2)
00:00.6 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 3 (rev a2)
00:00.7 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 2 (rev a2)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:03.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:04.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
00:05.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a2)
00:09.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Host Bridge (rev a2)
00:0a.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 LPC Bridge (rev a3)
00:0a.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP51 SMBus (rev a3)
00:0b.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP51 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:0b.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP51 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:0d.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 IDE (rev a1)
00:0e.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Serial ATA Controller (rev a1)
00:10.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 PCI Bridge (rev a2)
00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
00:14.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Ethernet Controller (rev a3)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/fOpteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. Unknown device 001c (rev 01)


even if it says “Audio device:nVidia” you must use the snd-hda-intel module to make it work and actually ubuntu loads it during startup but sound still doens’t come out from speakers or headphones That module supports lots of chipset and sometimes they are not recognized properly and you must tell him what kind of chip you are using.
My “real” sound chip is the ALC660 from realtek and the solution for me was having a look at:

gas@gas-laptop:~$ zless /usr/share/doc/alsa-base/driver/ALSA-Configuration.txt.gz


scroll down until you find
Module snd-hda-intel
--------------------

Module for Intel HD Audio (ICH6, ICH6M, ESB2, ICH7, ICH8),
ATI SB450, SB600, RS600,
VIA VT8251/VT8237A,
SIS966, ULI M5461


and down again until you find
ALC861/660
3stack 3-jack
3stack-dig 3-jack with SPDIF I/O
6stack-dig 6-jack with SPDIF I/O
3stack-660 3-jack (for ALC660)
uniwill-m31 Uniwill M31 laptop
auto auto-config reading BIOS (default)

as you can see the default config for those chips is “auto” and thats bad….for me the right one was 3stack-660.

Last step and we are done:
gas@gas-laptop:~$ sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base


and add as the last line the following:
options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-660

now, just because we mostly all come from windows,reboot.

Have fun hearing

E’ da un paio di settimane che sto su gnome 2.18 2.18.1 e anche se masked sul mio sistema è stabile quanto il 16 se non di più.
In gnome 2.16 nautilus dava un po di problemi , dal famoso “incrozzarsi e riavvio” al ” io decido da solo che non hai i diritti per cancellare il file anche se non è vero” ; nel 2.18 non sembrano esserci più.

Per il resto ho individuato ( come sempre ) un po di pro e un po di contro.
Fra i pro metterei il guadagno in velocità e la maggior reattività, fra i contro spicca la furba scelta di togliere il backend per xine e di usare solo gstreamer 0.10 con una serie di menate tipo tirare avanti con la rotella o trovarsi il play che diventa “vai avanti a rallentatore”, togliere xine e usare quel cesso di gstreamer per i video è stato un bell’errore.

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