Older blog entries for spicyjack (starting at number 28)

misc

Props to Stellarium. It's a star/planet identification program, it's an excellent tool for figuring out what everything is up in the night sky. It's commercial grade open-source software, which is always nice too.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

I gave this computer to my mom about two years ago. I put Debian Woody with KDE on it for her, along with OpenOffice as the main "productivity tool". She hated it. She's so used to using Microsoft Office, and she doesn't have the time to learn something as different as Linux is to Windows, that I relented and put Windows 2000 on it. I'm sad I had to do that, but it was a lesson learned, I guess.

misc

I've been super busy with school, so much so that I don't have extra time to work on any of my side projects. I get about 10-15 hours of homework a week, on top of working full-time. I should be done with school by the end of 2005, being done with school can't come too soon, I keep coming up with crazy ideas for projects.

I've purchased two Apple laptops since my last diary post, one runs OS X full time while the other will dual boot OS X and Linux. OS X has a very seksi interface, I prefer it when I'm doing papers for school and whatnot. I miss all the GNU tools however, and how a lot of the applications/games I use are written on Linux, and can sometimes not compile on OS X. The Powerbook (manzana) runs OS X, and the iBook runs both OS X and Debian (Sarge) GNU/Linux, and will most likely run in Linux most of the time. There's an application for PPC Linux machines called Mac On Linux that will let you run OS X apps on Linux. Can't wait to try it out.

I've gone through a lot of hardware within the last year or so, I now have two small computers running at my house 24/7, one computer acts as the backup to the other one, so that if one dies, I should be able to plug the running one back in whereever it's needed with only minor configuration. I've sort of discovered that for me, hard drive backups are the cheapest and least painful method of backing things up. I had a nice tape drive for a while, but tapes are a PITA if you have lots of storage, and tape libraries are way outside of a hobbyist's budget.

12 Dec 2003 (updated 2 May 2004 at 21:50 UTC) »

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Compiled kernel 2.4.22.  I've added the following patches:

To patch the different drivers, use the following commands in /usr/src:


patch -p1 -d /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/wireless/ < orinoco-0.13d-patch.diff
patch -p1 < linux-2.4.22-ntfs-2.1.4c.patch
patch -p1 < squashfs1.3r2-patch
patch -p1 < usbdnet-2.4.20-patch

The usbdnet patch barfs, if you want to use it you'll have to hand-edit the kernel source to add the rejected patches in.  It's pretty straightforward, open the *.rej files, and copy and paste the text into the files that need to be patched.  Those files are:

  • drivers/usb/Config.in and
  • drivers/usb/serial/Makefile

I created new sets of files that describe how the laptop is configured and running for kernel 2.4.22:

One thing I did forget to do was build the base SCSI driver as a module, the system complains when it boots.  I'll redo it shortly.

I ditched lilo and installed GNU GRUB instead.  What's really cool is that GRUB supports splashimages, the splashimage will be set as the 'wallpaper' when GRUB starts.  I got the information about how to set up GRUB splashimages from the GNU GRUB splashimage HOWTO.  Here's the GRUB menu.lst file that I'm using to load the splashimage and also set up PCMCIA schemes, and here's a thumbnail of the image I'm using as the splashimage:

http://www.antlinux.com/lifebook/sunspot-bootlogo.png

It looks most excellent!  The already-formatted splashimage shown above can be had here:  http://www.antlinux.com/files/linux/graphics/sunspot-bootlogo.xpm.gz

I've also been toying with ALSA, I upgraded the laptop to ALSA 0.9.6 with no problems.  I tried to make some changes to my asound.conf and ALSA specific additions modules.conf file so that I can get rid of the errors that the ALSA modules throw when they load on bootup. The asound.conf

file has a reference to a few web pages that explain what the settings do. To use the ALSA additions to the modules.conf file, save the file linked above to /etc/modutils, and then run update-modules.  This will automatically add the options and aliases listed in the file to /etc/modules.conf.

streamcast/stream-db

Work on the DocBook documentation continues, I got some of my changes that I put down on my paper notes back into the XML sources. I figure I'm about half way done with the documentation. I also have a lot of ideas about re-writing the code so that it all runs from one single file, and calls functions from different modules depending on how you want to run the application (with database support or without database support). We'll see if I ever get to put my ideas into real code...

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

More e-mails about the Lifebook.  From Klaus Rudolph < lts-rudolph {at} gmx DOT de >, he was having problems with the FN key on the keyboard.

I found your website with your linux usage report for the lifebook. I have the same lifebook but can?t get the function keys to work.I can?t switch sound on/off or the screen brightness with the FN+Fx keys under linux. I installed a suse linux 8.2 with kernel 2.4.20. An older linux (suse 7.3, kernel 2.4.10) works well. Can you give me an idea where to search for. Is there any deamon to start? Any add on to install? I don?t touch my bios settings so I don?t have any idea :-(

I've never had a problem using the FN key to raise/lower the volume, and raise/lower the brightness of the LCD panel, it's always "Just Worked" ™ for me with no problems.  Subsequent e-mail said:

The problem comes up with using acpi by default in the actual kernel. With the parameter "acpi=off" at the grub prompt or in the /boot/grub/menu.lst the acpi switches off and the FN+Fx keys work again. 

So don't use current version of Linux ACPI drivers with theselaptops :). 

Werner Heuser < Werner.Heuser {at} web DOT de > has his own Lifebook S-4572 page, which links back to these pages.  Since I'm in the process of changing domains, I asked him to update his page to reflect my domain change.  He also has a website that deals with laptops and Unix at http://www.tuxmobil.org.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

I've received 2 different e-mails over the last two days for different things on the laptop. First one is from Andrew Wei <andrew.wai {at} wild dot com dot uk>, he writes:

Hi Brian,
Just some updates regarding the fujitsu laptop and linux.
I managed to get dri working on my laptop but with only
4MB it only runs at 640x480! I actually managed this prior
to the mach64 was in mainstream X with info from          
http://www.retinalburn.net/linux/index.html     
                                           
I have also managed to get the modem working. See
http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/resources.html.
Use the SmartLink chipset.  Some reports of version 2.7.14
having problem dialing out so I used version 2.7.10 and
managed to connect using wvdial on Redhat 9.                                                   

Second e-mail is from Jan J. Wiktorowicz <victor {at} horyzont dot com dot pl>, and he writes:

Hi Brian  after 3 sleepless nights I have got modem in
S4546 working. Just use smartlink modem drivers (version 
2.7.10 is actually working), to obtain from 
ftp://ftp.smlink.com. As your page is the only valuable page
about S4546 and linux I think you can put mentioned link 
there.

Also, a few more things; being the tech junkie that I am, I started another laptop page for my Toshiba Satellite Pro 490XCDT. If you've got one, I've got mine dialed in (finally, ALSA was kicking my ass), go over and sneak a peek. I'm also in the process of changing my domain, antlinux dot com will be the domain I use now for all of my projects.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546 - Had a problem with PCMCIA, cardmgr would not recognize PCMCIA cards when I inserted them.  This was happening for my CompactFlash adapter, and my Megahertz modem.  I don't really know when or how things got changed, I just knew that it sucked when it stopped working right :)  When the card was inserted, you'd hear the high beep, then the low beep, meaning something didn't work.  I read the PCMCIA HOWTO from the PCMCIA project @ sourceforge, and they recommended adding some more high memory ranges to the file config.opts, which is where cardmgr gets it's settings from on startup.  I added them and lo! it worked.  If you make changes to your config.opts file, make sure you restart cardmgr by using the 'pcmcia' script in /etc/init.d:

/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart

Here's my config.opts file in CVS.

10 May 2003 (updated 12 Feb 2004 at 07:26 UTC) »

Canon PowerShot S-50 - Oop, I forgot one thing. I just bought a Canon PowerShot S-50 camera, which is an incredible piece of hardware. The pictures from it are great. The sounds it makes as you use it are customizable as well, I have mine so that it makes various noises from Beavis and Butthead; for example, when you press the shutter, the camera burps. No shit! I've written a page on how you can customize the sounds that are played and images that are displayed in the LCD. These instructions should work with any of the newer Canon digital cameras, it should be interesting to see what people come up with :)

Aloha

I've recently created and registered a new domain, AntLinux, which I'm using as an umbrella project for all of the stuff that I'm working on that runs off of floppy/CD-ROM/ComapctFlash card.

Anywipe - one of the first sub-projects of AntLinux, Anywipe will let you scrub storage media using randomly generated cryptograpic data, in hopes that if someone were to come along and try and recover data, they would not be able to. The project is using the wipe developed by Tom Vier, located at http://wipe.sourceforge.net/. I have a floppy that holds a statically compiled version of wipe, and also uses BusyBox for just about everything else. I've got the floppy to a point where it will boot and drop you to a shell prompt, and you can run wipe from there. I would like to make it more menu-driven, which will have to be put together with shell scripts. I don't have a floppy image posted anywhere yet, if you are interested, e-mail me and I would be happy to give you what I have.

stream-db - in the middle of re-writing all of the documentation into DocBook XML. This way, I can maintain one set of documents, and output into multiple formats. Once I get docs that I'm happy with, I'll release a new version of stream-db that has some bugfixes, and suggestions from users.

PortaBoom - I've got a Perl script that will find all of the library dependencies of a dynamically linked file; I'm going to use this script to give PortaBoom the filesize diet it most desparately needs. I've also been working a lot lately with cramfs, and it's very handy for making 'packages' that can be used at runtime without de-compressing the 'package'.

Soekris - bought a Soekris Engineering Net 4501 a few months ago, someday I'll be building a mini-distro for it as well, hence the playing with boot floppies/initrd images/cramfs packages. I'm currently booting the Soekris using the built in PXE functionality and observer is serving the boot images via tftp. It's a super quick way to do development, instead of putting the boot image on the CF card every time you want to make a change somewhere. Gave this box a hostname of 'pulgas'.

misc - I'm pretty much moved into my new place, domains are all up and running fine on tfb.net, which makes me very happy. Bought a new couch so guests have someplace nice to sleep instead of the $15 garage sale futon.

Hulloa

Observer: Lost another hard drive a few days ago. I replaced a 9G SCSI and 60G IDE with a 120G IDE, so now this box has an 18G SCSI and the 120G IDE. Only problem was that LILO would not boot the 18G SCSI. Ooops. I fixed the problem by replacing LILO with GNU grub, which worked flawlessly. It took a little bit of time to get used to grub over using LILO, but it works great now.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546: Not much going on with the laptop, I'm still running kernel 2.4.18, and 0.5 ALSA. I've been playing with the movie players in Linux a lot lately, and here's what I've found:

  • xine (0.9.13): works good with DVD's, you can use the DVD navigation menus in Linux just like on a stand alone DVD player. Playing files works okay, it takes too many menus to load random files, playlists of files work nice however
  • mplayer (0.60.0): works good with individual movie files. I got it working with DVDs, but I can't move around in the disc at all.

stream-db: I tried coding in a file skip feature, so that when stream-db loads up the song_q table with random songs to play, it skips any song with the skip boolean field set in that song's record, but I don't think it's working. It's funny, when I have a piece of software that's working really well, it's hard to motivate myself to spend time on it to add little things.

PortaBoom: I'm currently working on a Perl script that will build a database of files, and from this database I hope to build a minimal running Linux distribution for PortaBoom. Having the database will hopefully also allow me to build packages of modules to add onto the base PortaBoom package. This is how I plan to add other software to PortaBoom, using specially created packages that include all of the binaries and control GUIs for the application that is contained in the package. I'm coming up with more and more ideas about how and where I can use PortaBoom, and I've got a long list of applications that I would love to see run inside of it. But first PortaBoom needs to go on a major diet, a 50M bzipped file is not acceptable to me, I don't think people will be as motivated to download it as they would for something that was say 10M in size. I think it can be done, hence the motivation for building the file database. If you would like to see the code for the file database building Perl script, I have it here: filedb.pl.

atari: I bought a pre-made SIO2PC cable from the guy in Poland who sells them (the SIO2PC link), and it works great. I sold the 130XE because it was not working correctly, and bought an 800 and an 800XL with 256K of RAM. The 800 is my game machine (M.U.L.E), and the 800XL is for hacking, I'd like to get back into coding 6502 machine language. The person I sold the 130XE to was the same person I bought the 800XL off of, he buys/sells old Ataris and recycles them.

misc: I just bought a condo in the north part of San Diego, California (Rancho Penasquitos), so I've been super busy moving from my old house in Ocean Beach to my new place. I don't even have a stove or refrigerator yet, so needless to say I've been eating out a lot. I should get ADSL hooked up in a few days, I got it from tfb.com in case anyone was looking for a decent DSL provider in Southern California.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Long time no update. Hopefully to clarify the ATI drivers situation, the ATI chipset in the laptop is a 128-bit PCI chipset; so theoretically the r128.o module would work, but it's only written to support AGP cards, which this laptop is not. a128.o loads fine, but agpgart.o does not. This means that currently you can't do hardware accelerated OpenGL with this laptop, and this won't change untl the ATI drivers are re-written to support PCI chipsets.

Got a few new things hooked up to the laptop. The SanDisk CompactFlash USB card reader uses the usb-storage.o driver and usually shows up as /dev/sda. If you do an 'fdisk -l /dev/sda', you should see the partitons of the CF card. Also got a Logitech Wingman Action gamepad working, it uses joydev.o along with all the USB stuff. I've been playing with MPlayer, a movie file player, it works good, but it's not 100% stable like movie players in those other operating systems. Almost makes me wish I had a TiBook with OS X.

Right now I'm doing a re-install (again) of Woody, because I upgraded to 2.4.18 many moons ago, but didn't like it and tried to take it back out. Backing out the 2.4.x kernel upgrade borked PCMCIA, which was working nicely, but at the time I was using an older version of VMware that didn't support 2.4.x kernels. The Fujitsu Extended warranty went through, so if I do something stupid again, I can pretty much get it fixed for free for the next 2 years, with the exception of the LCD panel.

PortaBoom

I've got SMB/Windows shares working from PortaBoom Control Center (PCC); I was able to mount a Samba share from my Samba server to a mount point in /mnt using the Perl::Tk tools I scripted. Very cool. I don't have a good idea of how long it will take me to finish the share code so I can mount NFS/SMB shares; local hard drive mounting will not be working for a bit, it's going to take a lot of work to do the right thing. The hardest thing is to get blocks of time big enough to tackle the problems that the share code has, which is why the next release is taking so long. I also broke the inittab in the boot floppy, so now only X starts and no shells on other consoles.

misc

Ice skating lessons are going well, I can tool around the ice rink now, I do still fall down. For those of you who randomly reading this, I live in San Diego, California, so ice rinks are not plentiful around here, if you grew up here as a kid chances are you didn't really see a lot of hockey. So you don't really learn about hockey and ice skating unless you watch a lot of TV, and I didn't. I've figured out why falling down bothers me more than when I was a kid, I'm about twice as tall as when I went ice skating last, so the falling down part is farther. I did manage to coax my mom to go ice skating last weekend, which was fun.

I bought an Atari 130XE 8-bit computer, and I've been playing with the atari800 emulator in Linux, and having a wonderful time. There's a cable and software called SIO2PC that you can use from a PC's serial port to your 8-bit Atari that makes the Atari think your PC is a floppy drive. The above SIO2PC link is a guy in Poland who makes cables and has links to all of the different versions (DOS/Windows/Linux) of SIO2PC software that you can use to get this up and running. I recommend him if you want to get a cable made, he makes excellent quality cables. I've not tested the whole setup yet, but it looks like this weekend will be a good chance to try it all out.

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