Entries Tagged 'Linux' ↓

Xbox Media Center is no longer for just the XBox. It’s UI is slicker than MythTV’s Frontend for playing music, videos, and showing slideshows of pictures. (It’s weather applet is also much nicer…) If you have an existing Ubuntu 9.10 based system, the PPA:team-xbmc repository makes it dead easy to install xbmc on a ubuntu computer with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc
sudo apt-get update


MythBuntu (and Ubuntu I assume) don’t support the AutoIP standard.
(Auto IP is basically a way for devices to form ad-hoc networks…if you don’t have a static IP, and are not assigned a dynamic IP via a dhcp server, you try out a random address in the 169.254.x.x network (255.255.0.0 netmask) and as long as ARP doesn’t report a conflict, you now have your IP!)

Windows, and the HDHomeRun devices support this, but MythBuntu 9.10 does not. So, I’m back to using firestarter to easily configure my MythBuntu box to assign the HDHomeRun an IP address via DHCP.

I was in the process of changing out my MythTV backend machine, and when configuring the new machine, I took a look on SiliconDust’s website for a firmware update for my HDHomeRun (HDTV Network tuner box). I hadn’t updated it since late 2008, and sure enough, they were five or six firmware versions farther along. (Up to 20091024 to be specific.) So I upgraded the box using the newest version of the hdhomerun command line utility under linux. Everything went fine until the HDHomeRun rebooted. After that point, the utility said that an error occurred discovering the HDHomeRun! I tried booting into windows to try out the windows software, but it also could not discover the device, and gave me this ominous message:

Discovery Error 4001: Please email support@silicondust.com
Continue reading →

Wine will install and run the ventrilo VOIP client very well. To get this working, follow these steps:

apt-get install wine wine-dev msttcorefonts

download ventrilo-3.0.5-Windows-i386.exe

run “wincfg” to prepare things

run “wine ventrilo-3.0.5-Windows-i386.exe”
(go through the install, using all the defaults)

Now, everything works with one quirk.
Push to talk works only when the ventrilo window “has focus”
This is somewhat understandable, but annoying, in that you have
to focus the ventrilo window before you can talk.
The other option is to use voice-detection, but that takes up a bit more cpu-time, and you may accidentally broadcast something you don’t want to.

A program that listens for keypreses and directs them to the ventrilo window fixes this problem:

http://np1.pp.fi/ventriloctrl/

http://np1.pp.fi/ventriloctrl/ventriloctrl-0.3.tar.gz

To compile it, you’ll need xorg headers:
sudo apt-get install xorg-dev

Getting the Aiptek T-6000U tablet working with Ubuntu 9.04 was relatively easy, following the directions here.

Summary:
Install the xserver-xorg-input-aiptek package.
Add a file called 10-aiptek.fdi to the /etc/hal/fdi/policy directory containing:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.product" contains="Aiptek">

      <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">aiptek</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true </merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.USB" type="string">On</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.Type" type="string">stylus</merge>

      <merge key="input.x11_options.Mode" type="string">absolute</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

In order to get a Acan CCD Barcode Reader (Type: FG-8100) to work with Ubuntu linux (8.10), I had to blacklist the usbhid module (in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf) and instead use usbkbd.

The Ubuntu Barcode Readers page offers helpful advice.

SSH Login to my Ubuntu 8.04 machine was slow. (It would delay about 5 seconds after I issued the ssh command for the remote machine to request a password.) I believe this is because the remote machine is on my home network, and I have set up it’s hostname using host entries instead of having a true DNS name.
I edited the /etc/init.d/sshd_config file and added the single line:
UseDNS no
which fixed this problem as soon as I restarted the SSH server, with
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Ubuntu 9.04 comes with some visual effects from Compiz turned on by default. This post contains a list of the key combo’s used to active some of them. Compiz also offers many other “cool” effects. If you install the compizconfig settings manager you can enable/disable all of the neat effects (most of which are eye-candy, and not really useful).
Continue reading →

Following the directions on Lars’ blog, I set up an encrypted home directory on Ubuntu 9.04 using LUKS.

The following commands were all executed with root permissions. Add “sudo” to the front of the commands if you are not running with root permissions. Continue reading →

Installing Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) on an Acer Aspire One (Model D150) worked quite well. I had to use an external USB CD-Rom Drive as the Aspire One does not have a built in drive, but after enabling the “Press F12 to choose boot device” menu in the system BIOS I was able to boot off of the external USB CD-Rom drive.
Ubuntu worked well with all the major hardware (video, wifi,wired-ethernet, soundcard, and webcam) and the only hiccup was with the built in microphone, which did not work out of the box (the microphone jack would work, just not the built in microphone.)

To get the built in microphone working, I had to install the latest version of the ALSA driver following the instructions I found in post 28 on this thread, as copied below:

So I downloaded alsa-driver-1.0.20.tar.bz2 from

http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page

I unzipped the package, I entered into the main directory of the package and then I typed:

sudo apt-get install build-essential ncurses-dev
./configure –with-cards=hda-intel
make
sudo make install

Then I edited /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and I added at the end of file the line:
options snd-hda-intel model=acer-aspire

After the reboot I adjusted the audio preferences in this way:

Device: HDA Intel (Alsa mixer)
Preferences: The first 3 items and last 2 items (Front Mic is disabled!!!)
Input Sources is set as default at Mic (not Front Mic!!!).

Finally check that System->Preferences->Sound->Sound Capture is set to “HDA Intel ALC272 Analog(ALSA)” not “ALSA”