Older blog entries for lkcl (starting at number 341)

23 Jan 2007 (updated 23 Jan 2007 at 02:12 UTC) »

well, i finally got round to setting up one of the most exciting free software projects i've been involved in. exciting for its simplicity and usefulness - rather than from a technical perspective of 'oh ain't that greaaat cooode'

basically what i am doing is combining pptpd, backuppc, rsync daemon, debian-installer, apache2 with ssl, to provide a means to automatically install - and back up - debian multimedia / home / office desktop systems.

oh - and i took the oem-config .deb from ubuntu and hacked it into submission as well.

the evil plan is to sell preinstalled linux systems on ebay (Penguin PCs Online for not much money and then to make some money per month on offering an automatic backup service.

i think that's very cool, i dunno about you :)

p.s. .avi, .mp4 and .mpeg files are automatically excluded :)

fucking microsoft shit.

i bought some machines to sell on ebay, with linux pre-loaded. it turns out that, if you do that, that windows cannot be installed on the machine.

apparently, according to this, HP have had a practice of 'tattooing' machines.

The symptom is that any OS _other_ than windows on the machine causes the XP install to go 'blank' and shut down the machine after it checks the hard drive.

fucking great.

20 Jan 2007 (updated 20 Jan 2007 at 16:48 UTC) »

another laptop report, this time for an hp omnibook 500 - great little machine!

i'm selling it on ebay :)

zaitcev:

if you're now heavily into gpg, do consider taking a look at richard lightman's linux-from-scratch modifications.

he made /sbin/login use gpg as the authentication mechanism.

so you type your gpg passphrase, to log in.

steven: hi,

i installed the fglrx driver on a shared-memory system, with a 64-bit processor. xine was so unusable it was unreal: the framerate was measured in seconds per frame.

it looked absolutely great, though, with the anti-aliased fonts.

when i switched to the xorg ati driver, performance immediately went through the roof: xine was down to 17% cpu.

fglrx uses far too much memory, and uses it very badly.

it would be fine on a system with dedicated ram for the graphics.

6 Jan 2007 (updated 6 Jan 2007 at 05:27 UTC) »

I'm doing a debian-installer local cd which is customised to boot, without questions, even at the linux boot prompt, and to read the configuration information specifically off of my server.

the reason for wanting to do this is because i have a legacy-free pc with no ps/2 ports and i don't have a usb keyboard.

to be honest it would have been a lot easier to take the hard drive out and use debootstrap...

... but i want other people to be able to download the CD image i've created, and to be able to give them dreadfully simple instructions...

hw6915 suspend/resume - might be fixed...

arg arg arg a post by paul psokolovsky on kernel-discuss@handhelds.org describes a horror-story debugging session in suspend/resume, where, it turned out, he hadn't converted _one_ device driver for the h4000 from a legacy struct device to the more up-to-date struct platform_device.

apparently you can't mix-and-match both in your hardware: you have to all struct device or all platform_device.

read more

Syndicated 2006-12-22 02:10:37 from lkcl's blog

quick, quick, slow...

argh.

things were going _so_ well on the htc sable (ipaq hw6915) and then i ran into suspend/resume hell for over a week, went to holland for another week, and i think i left the charger there, so i can't carry on until i find it.

in the mean-time, i've been playing with other devices: sound on the blueangel, which is hell, and the s3c2442-based htc hermes, which is hell. all in all, i don't feel like i've actually achieved anything, for over two weeks. and it's pissing me off.

read more

Syndicated 2006-12-19 03:39:43 from lkcl's blog

old kernels, reverse-engineering, new kernels...

the key rule to reverse-engineering is to only have one thing to change at any one time in order to find out its effect. or to have the minimum number of things.

at the moment, i have a particularly difficult task with the blueangel: the sound infrastructure for soc devices is undergoing a rewrite, and unfortunately it was never entirely completed for the blueangel back for 2.6.12.

however, if sound was played from wince at the time that haret booted into linux, sound _did_ at least work. so there was a 'known' state to test things.

read more

Syndicated 2006-12-12 02:28:58 from lkcl's blog

first post!

hooray! i discovered today that at some point over three years ago i must
have registered on kerneltrap. so i've decided to create a diary here for
os-related stuff, and syndicate it over on advogato.org. note to self: must ask steven if he can put more than _one_ syndication site link into advogato profile pages.

Syndicated 2006-12-10 13:52:47 from lkcl's blog

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