camerongray.net - Tech

Ubuntu 9.04 Compaq Mini 700 Sound Issues (update)

nospam@example.com (Cameron Gray) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:27:39 -0700

I found this out this week that if you update your kernel via the usual Synaptic method - your sound will stop working.

You will need to follow the steps described in my previous post again. Found here

I guess that given the alsa-base modules are compiled against the kernel if you update it then they need to be recompiled.

I just did the recompile and the make install etc and sound is now working.

Ubuntu 9.04 Compaq Mini 700 Sound Issues

nospam@example.com (Cameron Gray) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 11:25:05 -0700

I upgraded my system to the latest version of Ubuntu 9.04. It seems the alsa drivers which ships with this are somehow broken as you will have no sound. There is a bug report on the myhpmini forums which detail a few people having the same issue. If you upgrade the also drivers to 1.0.19 it seems to work fine.

MyHPMini Forums

There is a fix here:
Work Around

I followed these steps and after a reboot, all done.

Compaq Mini 700 and Ubuntu 8.10

nospam@example.com (Cameron Gray) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:33:54 -0700

I bought a Compaq Mini 700 netbook yesterday from PC World. I am currently using it now to write this blog using Ubuntu 8.10.

The install was painless. I chose to install via the flash usb method - I dont have a usb cd drive. One tip is you need to have the usb key plugged in before you enter the BIOS to change to boot order. Once I did that the live usb was already finding my wireless network!

The install took about 20min plus another 40mins to update all the packages.

I am pretty happy with the performance of the whole setup so far. Firefox is crisp and on first use getting about 3 hours battery life. Webcam works too.

I would definitely recommend this if you are looking for a quality linux netbook with minimum fuss.

MSI Motherboard K9AGM3-FIH Fails to Boot?

nospam@example.com (Cameron Gray) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:13:43 -0700

I was trying to fix my mates sound issues and thought it might be worth upgrading the BIOS. He has a K9AGM3-FIH and the sound keeps skipping when playing a file off the hard disk. I had read around that upgrading the bios might fix the problem.

I downloaded the MSI update tool and began bios flashing. Then it all went wrong. The PC stalled and then on reboot it would not switch on. The screen was black and all that happened was the sounds of fans whirring. I think I will probably avoid using the BIOS upgrade tool in the future.

I have a USB drive caddy so I took out the hard disk and backed up all the important data just in case.

After doing much reading the solution was to switch a jumper located on the motherboard which resets the bios. It took a few attempts to do this but after finally taking out the battery and putting it back in and leaving the jumper in the reset position for five minutes. All you need is a pair of pliers and some patience.

Once I replace the jumper into its normal setting and booted up, the computer POST beeped and all was well.

This train is delayed until Windows reboots

nospam@example.com (Cameron Gray) — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 12:52:47 -0700

I was out and about in London last night and took a quick snap of Windows working its magic. It is a display sign above one of the platforms and is meant to show the next train, destinations, time etc. It won't be doing that tonight. I have seen this happening before on train displays - a few times on the CityRail network in Sydney, and elsewhere in the UK.

If you zoom in you can see that the message says "Your system is running low on virtual memory". I will give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, if you check out the version date 22/7/2002, it is clear this software has not been upgraded in a while - and probably is currently unsupported. Given the state of the railway companies in the UK it is more likely to be the case of dodgy software and a memory leak from the timetabling system.

Fortunately my train was on time.

Last.fm and Fedora 5

nospam@example.com (Cameron Gray) — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 21:00:36 -0700

I heard of Last.fm only recently through a friend. It is a personalised internet radio station. I was intrigued by the functionality which allows it to learn your music tastes and recommend other artists to you. This feature is perfect for me as I don't have the time or the ability to remember artist names and tracks.

Installing in Linux Fedora 5 was a breeze.

I went to their download page, and it presented with an option to download for Linux. At the moment it is a beta version but is working perfectly on my system.

[cgray@graytop Downloads]$ bunzip2 LastFM_Linux_1.0.0b.tar.bz2
[cgray@graytop Downloads]$ tar -xvf LastFM_Linux_1.0.0b.tar
[cgray@graytop Downloads]$ mv Last.fm_Client_1.0.0b/ LastFM
[cgray@graytop Downloads]$ mv LastFM/ ..
[cgray@graytop ~]$ cd LastFM/
[cgray@graytop LastFM]$ ./lastfm &

This will then launch lastfm, and if you don't have a login name - will load up firefox to send you to the registration page. I have mine set to use the Alsa sound-system.

An additional thing which is needed to be done is associate the lastfm:// tag in firefox.

open about:config

Right click and select new, string and enter the following as the preference name:

network.protocol-handler.app.lastfm

And the value:

/home/username/LastFM/lastfm

This will make sure when you are browsing the lastfm site you can click to play group radio stations etc.

So far it is working perfectly, even has a tiny system tray icon with a menu to skip tracks, ban tracks, love tracks.

Netgear WG511 v2 Marvel Chipset and Fedora 5

nospam@example.com (Cameron Gray) — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 09:01:28 -0700

I got rid of the Belkin F5D7011. The card was poorly manufactured, it never worked consistently under Windows or Linux. There would be frequent drops of connection, plus it would not find all the wireless networks in my area. An older card my girlfriend uses could find 2 or 3 more networks than the Belkin. I imagine it has a dodgy internal aerial.

Anyhow, I went out to PC World and bought a Netgear WG511 v2 wireless card. A bit of reading around suggests that model and version numbers on this card mean nothing. If you have a marvel chipset you will need to use ndiswrapper, other chipsets are supported by the kernel. To see which one you have, insert the card into your laptop and type

lspci

This lists all pci details. Look for something regarding networks. Mine was:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)

It is supported under linux using the ndiswrapper software. In my case I used the latest source which was 1.21. I installed it following the instructions, make, make install etc.

Now I needed to get the drivers off the CD which came with the wireless card. There is some disagreement as to whether you should use XP or Win2K drivers with the CD. I used the XP drivers as I recieved an error message when I tried the Win2K drivers. Copy these two files to a directory, WG511v2.INF WG511v2XP.sys. It is worth keeping them handy somewhere as you will to repeat the process for each kernel upgrade.

To use ndiswrapper:

/usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i WG511v2.INF

To test it has worked:

/usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -l

You will get something like:

Installed drivers:
wg511v2 driver installed, hardware present

Now to configure to connect to your network add these to your rc.local, that way it will bring it up on boot.

echo "Setting up Netgear WG511v2 Adaptor"
/sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper
echo "Applying wireless settings"
/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 essid "YourSSID" channel X mode Managed key xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xx
echo "Finding wireless IP"
/sbin/dhclient wlan0

This will set it up for connecting to a wireless router. Obviously you need to set the channel and the key. Additionally you can type man iwconfig and see what other options might be more applicable for the setup you have.

A good check to see things are all in order is the following:

iwlist wlan0 scanning

It will list all the wireless networks in your area.

So far the card has been working fine and seems a million times more stable than the belkin card.

Edit: If you are using ubuntu, which I recently switched to there is a conflict with the following kernel module:

mrv8k.ko

I just deleted it and added mrv8k to the blacklist.

Belkin F5D7011 wireless network card with Linux Fedora 5

nospam@example.com (Cameron Gray) — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 18:24:08 -0700

I have previously being using the ndiswrapper app to use the Belkin F5D7011 with linux Fedora 5. It worked pretty well, however it did not allow me to use wifi-radar or similar scanning apps.

Today I updated my kernel to 2.6.17-1.2145 and I got a message about a conflict with bcm43xx and ndiswrapper - my wifi no longer worked. This got me thinking that maybe there is another way to use the Belkin card with the kernel. You still need to use the bcmwl5.sys driver which is used for Windows XP etc.

I did some digging and what I found is based on the the following discussion.

I commented out all the scripts where I was using ndiswrapper in case I ever needed to use it again.

First thing I did was use the livna repo to get bcm43xx-fwcutter rpm. This installed with no problems using yum.

I then executed the program to create the necessary files the kernel needs and loaded the module by:

bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware bcmwl5.sys
(This is the sys file from the drivers that come with the card)

cp /usr/share/doc/bcm43xx-fwcutter-004/modprobe.bcm43xx /etc/modprobe.d/

modprobe bcm43xx

Then just using system-config-network under the System/Administraton/Network in Gnome. I added a new wireless device choosing a Broadcom BCM4306, entering all the rest of the details for my wireless network - eth1, activate on boot,dhcp, channel number, SSID, and hex key. After saving this I activated the device and was allocated an IP by the router. Quick test with Firefox and internet was working fine.

Something which I did need to do to ensure the wireless card came up on boot, besides the "activate on boot" tick in the above was to add a modprobe file to /etc/modprobe.d/. On my first reboot it could not find the device eth1. So I created a small text config called belkin and added the following line:

alias eth1 bcm43xx

Now on boot the startup script will activate your wireless card. After launching wifi-radar I finally had a list of other wireless networks in the area.

If you have no luck and can not get it to work, add the bcm43xx to the blacklist file in /etc/modprobe.d/. This will stop it loading and you can continue to use the ndiswrapper program. I saw a note on this blog which seems to suggest this could be a problem for a few other people.

Using Skype, Linux Fedora 5 and a USB Handset Phone.

nospam@example.com (Cameron Gray) — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 21:40:27 -0700

Finally got round to trying VOIP and decided to use Skype. The main decider was SkypeIn which allows me to have a Sydney number which my family can dial and all the calls are redirected to me in London. For only 10c Australian they can speak as long as they want.

I bought a simple USB handset - it is tiny which means I will be able to take it travelling, plus it was cheap. The one I settled on is pictured here:

Setting this up with Fedora 5 was pretty easy. I downloaded Skype version 1.3 beta rpm, installed using the usual rpm -ivh. I signed up for Skype purchasing a Sydney based number for €10 for 3 months as a trial.

I then inserted the USB handset into my PC and opened the options under Tools in Skype and changed the Sound Devices to ensure it was on ALSA and the Calls tab to "Generic USB Audio Device". I am not sure of the exact name of the handset - no real branding on the package. When I run /sbin/lsusb it is identified as "0d8c:000e C-Media Electronics, Inc" which is the internal audio card.

Using the echo123 feature on Skype I got pretty decent call clarity for incoming and outgoing sound. If you find you have problems with the sound level use either alsamixer or the gnome volume control - selecting the correct soundcard.

The only caveat is the handset buttons do not work, you still need to use the Skype software to pickup or dial. I hope someone might write a wrapper to get this to work in the future.

All in all it's not too bad. Ill see how it goes over the next three months.

How did I install Serendipity and Coppermine with GoDaddy hosting?

nospam@example.com (Cameron Gray) — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 17:23:17 -0700

Using the value applications that come with GoDaddy whilst appearing initally the easy option I think actually make things more complicated. Instead I chose to install my own separate copies of Serendipity and Coppermine. The main advantage of this being I have total control of the mySQL databases if I ever need to back them up or migrate to a different host, plus it makes it easier for upgrades.

Step 1: Create two databases using the GoDaddy control panel, one for each PHP application you are installing. Give them a name which gives a description for the application it will serve. Once the GoDaddy system has set them up, you can use one of the icons to the right of the database name to give basic connection information. You will need this later.

Step 2: Download the application zip files and unpack them on your local system.

Step 3: Now I wanted Serendipity to load on my root address eg www.camerongray.net, so upload the contents of the Serendipity folder to the root of your remote disk. If you choose to upload the base folder you will get something like www.camerongray.net/serendipity which is not always ideal.

Step 4: Follow the install instructions available from the Serendipity website, using the database connection information from the GoDaddy control panel it should be fairly straight forward. You should now have a simple blog ready to go.

Step 5: Do the same with coppermine - unpacking the zip locally and uploading to remote server by FTP, but use a folder to contain the application files. Using the GoDaddy control panel create a subdomain which points to this folder. In my case I have /coppemine pointed to be images.camerongray.net . Again you will need to use the connection information from the GoDaddy control panel.

I would recommend installing the Spartacus plugin for Serendipity, this allows you to install other plugins very easily. I used this to install the serendipity/coppermine thumbnail plugin - again using the database connection info from the GoDaddy control panel. This plugin - as far as I know does not work on GoDaddy unless you install as above.

Step 6: The coppermine gallery is fairly intuitive however the batch adding of photos is not necessarily. Create an album name in coppermine eg "My first album". Create a folder in coppermine/albums eg myphotos. Upload all your digital images via FTP to coppermine/albums/myphotos. I would recommend keeping any albums as sub-directories otherwise it will become too confusing. Once your upload is done, click on batch-add then navigate to the folder which corresponds to "My first album", click insert into album (it's down the bottom) - coppermine will add them in and your done.

I am using the Linux hosting with PHP, mySQL on GoDaddy.