Monday, 15 September 2008, 16:20:22 EDT
Speaking of problems with my MythTV machine, I recently lost sound on the machine. I built my HTPC (Home Theatre Personal Computer) to be a High-Definition machine. As such, I intended to have one cable connecting the HTPC to my television — an HDMI cable. I specifically bought a nVidia GeForce 8500GT because it uses passive cooling (no fan noise) and has an SPDIF audio input so that it can pass audio out over an HDMI cable. After putting the machine together, and getting it all setup, I discovered that the nVidia drivers for Linux did not support passing audio over the HDMI cable. So I sighed, maybe said a few choice words in nVidia's direction, and connected an eighth inch DIN to RCA cable between the HTPC and my television. All was dandy!
Fast forward to last Thursday, when I decided to work on my HTPC. The first thing I did was update the operating system and software. That meant I got new video card drivers; version 173 instead of the old version 169. Suddenly I had no sound! Actually, I had much weirder problem. I could play sound at the console, before starting the X session, but got only silence after X had started. It took me a while to discover this, but once I did, it was clear that the video card driver was doing something very strange. After a bit of searching, I came across a single forum post that gave me the answer. In the 173 version of the driver, nVidia had silently enabled audio over HDMI (oh the irony!).
I spent hours trying to get sound to play via the HDMI cable. But for some reason my machine just will not do it (I'm beginning to think the patch cable from the sound card to the video card is bad). So I switched over to a regular VGA connection. I quickly got tired of that. The picture was blurry and I had to restart X multiple times whenever I turned on the television, because the display wasn't syncing properly.
In an effort to get this resolved, I wrote a lengthy post ... (view rest)
Sunday, 14 September 2008, 17:23:47 EDT
Several months ago I built a MythTV computer. Since I built it during spring semester I didn't really have the time to fully configure the machine. So it's been in a usable but needs work state ever since. One of the biggest problems was getting the machine to boot into the MythTV frontend application without requiring a login every time. The GNOME Display Manager would allow me to specify an automatic login, but that only works for the first login. So if I had to quit the MythTV frontend for some reason, GDM would automatically come back up, but then ask for a username and password. SLiM recently (as in 9/7/2008) added support for an automatic login, but it also only works for the first login. This seems to be the way of things for this type of application. They will automatically login a user the first time, but not subsequent times, and there is no way to make the programs quit after one execution.
This situation was unacceptable to me. I needed a login manager that would do three simple things:
Automatically login a chosen user.
Grant the user privileges as defined by PAM.
Quit execution when the X session was quit.
Since I could not find such a simple program, I wrote my own. In my code section you can find the source code to a program "mythlogin".
Why not just execute xinit directly from inittab? As of Linux kernel 2.6.24 it is necessary to establish privileges through PAM in ord ... (view rest)
Friday, 20 August 2004, 23:31:22 EDT
I got a new hard drive in for the laptop I use at work because the one that I was using was just plain horrible. So far this one is working excellently. Since I got a new drive I decided I would load it with SuSE 9.1. I had tried out a demo version of SuSE back when it was version five or so but shortly loaded Debian Slink over it because it was a time limited demo. I liked SuSE at that time and I must say that I still do. They now provide a personal edition so that you can install it and use it free of charge. Basically, they let you install from either FTP or a single downloadable CD that does not contain all of the numerous packages available in the distribution. That is easily rectified after you get the system installed by adding an FTP install source as the FTP mirrors contain all the packages.
The SuSE, I keep wanting to write 'SuSe' as that is the way it used to be, install is very straight forward and will take about thirty to forty minutes, depending on your machine, if you go with the default package selection. The installer is quite smart and can pick up Windows partitions to add to the boot menu. The only thing I have found that I don't like so much about the installer is that it uses the "twice the ram for swap" rule when anything over 128MB is overkill; unless, that is, you are using suspend to disk. That seems to be the only hitch to the installer as it picks up hardware very accurately and supplies enough information to at least guide newbies through the process without much confusion. Once the installer is completed and the system boots you are presented with this desktop. As you might be able to see, this brings me full circle to KDE; strangely enough, almost one year to date.
Probably the nicest thing about SuSE 9.1 is YAST2. One can think of it as the control panel in Windows except that it only deals with the actual system configuration; KDE provides its own "Control Center" for user configuration of the desktop. YAST2 makes browsing and installing packages a snap. For the most part it will automatically resolve dependencies and install them for you. There are some dependencies that it feels are too strong to install without asking you though and I believe that is probably a good thing. It lets the user decide what large or troublesome packages get installed. In complement to the software installation portion of YAST2, SuSE 9.1 comes with an application that runs in the background to notify you of available critical updates. In the screenshot it is the little 'i' icon in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. The icon will change to a red exclamation point if there are critical updates available. YAST2 also allows you to easily configure and manage the hardware in your machine. It didn't do such a good job selecting the proper driver for the Dell TrueMobile 1150 wireless card built in to my laptop but I can live with that. Wireless cards use various chipsets within the same model so it can be quite difficult to figure out which chipset your particular card has. Once I realized it was selecting the wrong driver for the card all I had to do is fill in the correct one an ... (view rest)
Thursday, 01 July 2004, 23:11:40 EDT
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I will start of this month with an über-geek post. If you have no interest in shell scripts or mail servers you should just quit reading now :)
Earlier today, my friend Jason sent me a message saying he needed an email account. Well, I just happen to run my own mail server so I decided to reconfigure it so that people other than me can use it. But, I don't want just anyone using it to spam the world so I needed to secure it as best I could. I settled on replacing my current installation of Exim with Exim-tls. This allowed me to set up an encrypted SMTP AUTH system; since I am not an Exim guru I found a couple web pages to help me out. The first was excellent for setting up the TLS portion and the second clearly explained how to get Exim to authenticate through PAM. So, if someone wants to send email remotely through my machine they have to have a local account and their client must send STARTTLS after sending HELO.
Email wouldn't complete without being able to retrieve it from the remote server though now would it? I did a quick apt-search and came up with ipopd-ssl to serve as a POP3 server. It was a really straight forward setup and allowed me to choose the ports I wanted it to listen to. Since I was trying to make the email system as secure as possible I opted to only listen on port 995 via SSL.
After setting everything up I sent an email through the system and monitored it with Ethereal. Everything checked out well. After the STARTTLS command was sent nothing was sent across the line in plain text as a normal email would have been. So, mission successful.
... (view rest)
Tuesday, 25 May 2004, 22:12:21 EDT
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A few weeks ago my mother gave me a paper shredder that she did not want any longer. Last night I cleaned it up and tried to use it. The basket is cracked on the side and the prongs that hold the shredder in place are bent and won't support the shredder any longer. I was going to live with it and try to use it because the shredder stayed in place decently enough to do the job. There was only two problems: 1) the shredder is only a straight-cut shredder and 2) the shredder choked on some of the papers that I really want to be able to shred on a regular basis. So, I went over to Staples after work today and picked out one that suits my needs. I bought Executive Machines' EPS-711X shredder. This thing is awesome. It will shred seven sheets of paper at once and is a cross-cutting shredder. Not only will it shred paper but it will shred credit cards. When I got the device home I immediately set to work shredding papers I had been saving since early 2001. I was shredding paper for about an hour and a half straight and filled the basket four times.
Gnome 2.6 was released a couple of months ago and I have been eagerly anticipating it moving in to the Debian unstable branch so that I can start using it. It has been caught up in Debian's slow approval process, one of the things I like about Debian, but in today's Debian Weekly News it was mentioned that the process of populating unstable with the Gnome tree from experimental is finally taking place. So far only GTK+ 2.4 has been committed but it shouldn't be lon ... (view rest)
Monday, 10 May 2004, 19:54:37 EDT
My Aunt Leslie and I were talking yesterday at my Mother's house about Linux, basically a continuation of our conversation last Christmas, and she expressed interest in trying it out but does not wish to erase the hard drive in her machine just yet. She wants to get rid of Microsoft software on her computer but she does not want to do so until she is comfortable with something else. I mentioned that Knoppix would be a good way to try it without having to commit to anything. Last night I tried to download the ISO from the Knoppix web site but when I awoke this morning I still had about twenty-four hours left on the download. So, this afternoon I hit up a BitTorrent tracker and got a copy much quicker. I just burned it to a disc using a method I had hitherto not used before. I right clicked the ISO on my desktop and clicked "Write to CD..." That is just too damn easy. I knew that Nautilus, the file manager that I use, had the capability to do so ... (view rest)
Saturday, 14 February 2004, 23:07:44 EDT
The one thing, in my opinion, that Windows has over Linux is software installation. On Windows you have two or three standard installers that you basically just click "Next" several times and your new software is installed. While this can be a bad thing, a standard user should not be able to modify system files, it is also the key thing that makes Windows easier for 99% of the computer users out there. Well, the tide is starting to shift. A day or two ago I read a statement that said something to the effect of "Linux will get a standard installer with-in the year." I was a bit leary of that statement but I also know how possible it is.
Lo and behold Bitrock. Bitrock is a GTK2 based installer that aims to create a standard, eas ... (view rest)
Thursday, 05 February 2004, 18:55:13 EDT
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Seriously, someone buy me this book. Not more than an hour ago I was hoping for an Art of Assembly targeted towards Linux based assembly. It is insane that such a book was posted to the ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 31 December 2003, 16:35:32 EDT
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Here is a good link detailing a method for gaining, and keeping, root access via hacked up binaries on Linux. If you administer a Linux box I recommend you check it ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 17 December 2003, 23:43:38 EDT
Linux Kernel 2.6.0 was released about forty minutes ago. The last major stable release was in 2001. I will be upgrading in a couple days just to make sure there are no quirks to be wary of. If you plan on upgrading, and you use Debian, be sure to install the `module-init-tools` package; the old kernel management tools do not work with newer kernels and visa versa. The package is a part of the unstable branch. So, if you are usin ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 10 December 2003, 00:53:13 EDT
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I am really digging Gnome 2.4. It is very easy to use and allows a great deal of customization. I am particularly fond of the sticky notes applet.
I finally decided to organize my home directory tonight. I spent an hour on it and am not even halfway done. I have a 92GB /home partition and when I started cleaning up and organzing my directory I had ~8GB of that free. I know have 20.4GB free but ... (view rest)
Friday, 05 December 2003, 17:51:41 EDT
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I changed up my desktop scheme yet again. E16 was getting very very laggy for some reason. E just does not like my machine and I wish I knew why. As it is now I am using Gnome 2.4 with ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 29 October 2003, 18:14:03 EDT
Here is a good link for those of you that may want to try out Gentoo ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 14 October 2003, 12:19:07 EDT
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Here is a link that explains how to build ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 23 September 2003, 12:41:44 EDT
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I was looking at the load averages on one of the servers I run today and all three [see here for more information] were at '1.0'. This was the first time I had ever seen a load average that high so I decided do a little research to find out if an average that high is bad or not. I came up with this ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 20 August 2003, 11:15:28 EDT
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This is really just a note for my benefit but some of you others might like to check it out: LUFS.
This will definitely make edi ... (view rest)
Monday, 18 August 2003, 18:30:13 EDT
Damn Windows machines. Every machine brought on to campus today must have had the fucking MSBlast virus. It brought the campus' network to its knees right about lunch time, a.k.a. when everyone was on campus.
I am actually stunned that I am able to write this post right now. I am shocked that my bootleg server even has a connection.
If you, the person reading this page, are a Windows user and have not already done so then apply the patch found here. You would do the rest of the world a huge fucking favor by not sucking up all the damn bandwidth.
That or ins ... (view rest)
Saturday, 16 August 2003, 19:36:34 EDT
Well, it seems that I am joining some sort of new fangled wave in that I am now turning this page into some kind of "blog". I really hate that damn word - who the fuck came up with such a shitty word for a web based journal. Anyway, I wrote this system myself and I think I will like it. I have it set up to show only five postings on a single page (like the jokes section) and show the newest post first. When it comes time to have an archive section I will implement that.
So, on with the first post...
I decided to give KDE a shot. So far I am still undecided about it; it is definitely better than GNOME in many respects but I do have some issues with it. For one, I can not seem to bind random hotkeys. I absolutely love being able to press "alt + t" for a new xterm or "alt + F1" to play/pause ... (view rest)