Linux

Because Intel on-board video isn't quite good enough at 3D and my somewhat old laptop with built-in NVIDIA chip wasn't doing all that well at X-Plane either, I bought an NVIDIA GT240 card. Mostly because it seemed to be a good performer without doubling the power consumption of my PC. Stuff wasn't working all that well though and I got pretty frustrated:



was all X-Plane could tell me. Google Earth also didn't work and seemed more like Google Black hole to me. Both are 32-bit apps. A 64-bit binary of Flightgear did work. Sigh.

After some poking I noticed the nvidia-glx package replaces /usr/lib{64,}/libGL* with its own versions, but didn't touch /usr/lib32. A-ha!

The fix: Get a 32-bit version of nvidia-glx, extract it somewhere (dpkg -X) and copy all the files in its usr/lib to /usr/lib32, overwriting the libGL symlink that is currently there.

Or, hmm, as I just found out: apt-get install nvidia-glx-ia32. I'm glad someone thought of it already.

Now X-Plane works perfectly (with maybe even ten times the frame rate I had with Intel on-board) and Google Earth can show me my house again.

Just blogging this since so far a Google search for any part of the error above didn't give useful results.

Now, I just have to find out if I can get a TV signal out of this thing somehow, since my TV was made long before HDMI was invented. :-/

So for about a year I have a DSL modem and a separate router (running OpenWRT) here. Simply because the average DSL router has crappy software (no decent CLI, connection tracking for nothing more complicated than TCP and for only a few hundred of them, crappy wireless ... well, you get the point). So I decided to buy a Linux-powered DSL router, the Netgear DG834G. I hoped for one with an AR7 board, because that one seems very well supported, but I received a v4 which has a Broadcom board instead. :-(

Anyway, Netgear is still pretty decent. The stock firmware comes with a telnetd (must be activated via the webserver though), and (well, forced by the GPL) they put tools on-line which I can use to rebuild firmware images, which I already abused to remove the multi-lingual web interface and use those precious kilobytes for a tcpdump binary instead. :-) Adding a kernel with IPv6 support is going to be more complicated though.

Anyway, I should first focus on making the thing actually wortk with my IPoA ADSL2+ connection.... sigh

But after bricking the thing once I did manage to write up a tool (based on a half-finished tool written by someone on the OpenWRT forum) to fix that very problem. These routers can be reflashed without any serial cable or whatever these days, using the power of raw Ethernet frames (R). It's a gross hack, but it works and is reasonably convenient. It's up for download for anyone who needs it. Be careful, only use it when things can't get any worse anyway!

Now that my (and pretty much every other) machine uses UTF-8 by default, I was pretty much forced to ditch rxvt in favour of rxvt-unicode. Unfortunately the rxvt-unicode authors think attaching some keycap picture insert mode to the Ctrl-Shift key combination (which is easy to hit by accident) would be HANDY. Even handier, it can only be disabled at compile time.

Thanks for nothing guys, I really hope there's at least one person on this planet who agrees that this is handy ... I'm afraid most people who accidentally hit Ctrl-Shift every few minutes don't agree.

So, behold:


For all you Debian+rxvt-unicode users out there waiting for this bug to be fixed... :-)

[edit]Added dch command to make sure apt-get doesn't reinstall the original package every time.[/edit]

Got a little bit confused by this bug report while trying to get the TV-out on my mainboard working properly. As any European TV, mine wants PAL signals, not NTSC. The bug report gave me the impression that there should be separate PAL/NTSC mode definitions. But in the current driver, this isn't the case anymore.

Instead, they now use RandR properties to maintain this setting. And RandR, at least for properties, seems to be read-only .... soooo, how does it work then???

Well, try something like this:


Took me a whole weekend to find this, but at least it works now, in full colour! This didn't seem to be very well-documented to me, so I hope this post will help. If it doesn't work for you, maybe your TV doesn't understand S-Video. There's a very simple hack to solve that issue too. All you need is two wires, no need to solder anything. :-)

Thanks for making Linux drivers for the on-board graphics stuff on my mainboard. Next year, could you please not publish them as a .... .EXE file???

There are two things in nature here that I don't like. The ever-strong wind that slows me down when I cycle to work ... and trees! I bought this radio-controlled airplane yesterday and went to the park to try it out. The flight went very well thanks to some help from ... well, the wind. The result?



(Try to find it on the big picture, it's not too easy. :-))

Something I really do like here is World Market, though. They actually sell this candy we call "drop" in .nl, and it tastes pretty good:



I just wonder why the German pack says "katjes" instead of "kätzes" or something like that. And there are fishes inside, not cats. They're pretty tasty though, so I don't care.

Work is still going well, my main mission for during my stay here is done. I got two more weeks here before I have to go back to Dublin, so that's well in time. It'll be nice to be back in Europe, at last...

In other news, worked on BitlBee a bit more again in the last few weeks. Worked on the API a bit, so the next time someone says porting Gaim modules to BitlBee is easy, please don't listen. It's a lie. ;-) And there's basic support for Jabber chatrooms now! Just for the non-anonymous ones, unfortunately. (And the majority of Jabber rooms I know of are anonymous.) Will work on that support later, unfortunately it'll be very complicated and hackish.

And this weekend, besides "dropjes", I'm enjoying eye candy from Beryl on Ubunty Feisty. Wobbly windows and all the other stuff. Hey, I wanted some of my OS X eye candy back, okay? ;-)

Just back from a short trip to Belgrade, and now I'm in the last days of my current job. As I could expect, time is running out, and there's always more to do than I thought, also thanks to having some "bad luck" with the only server with only one hard drive (yes, I know RAID != backup) and broken backup software. Suddenly it turns out that debugfs is not quite the best data recovery tool after all. ;-)

Meanwhile preparations for Dublin started. Looks like I'll go there on the 17th of January already to spend the rest of that week on an introduction tour through the city and another day for looking at some houses that might be good for me.

Meanwhile I didn't have too much time for hacking. The new BitlBee Jabber module isn't completely finished yet, I'm afraid. Would be nice to find some time for it soon...

Oh yes, and the following quote is making me a bit nervous: "All systems administrators have their horror stories. For me, it was setting up a HP Color Bubblejet under Linux using ghostscript before linuxprinting.org was alive. Well that was a piece of cake compared to what I am about to describe in this document."

I know how terrible the Linux printing hell is, so maybe I should go for Maildir after all... ;-)

Just to express my frustration of the day a bit. I want the left column to be higher than the right one here. ;-)

From time to time you hear people boasting that they can use standard tools to handle .deb archives. "ar x blablah_0.123-4_z80.deb" and you get two standard tar.gz files to play with. That's indeed convenient, more convenient than rpm2cpio.

However, just try, on a Linux system, to convert those two tarballs (and the debian-binary file, of course) back to a .deb. "ar cr blablah_0.123-4.1_z80.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz" will do, right? Try to install it using dpkg... Yes, it works! But then, try to put it in your apt repository!



Turns out that there are multiple ar formats and that Debian uses a very simple format and doesn't (fully) support the ar files produced by GNU ar. It's quite confusing that dpkg does support these files while apt does not. Some consistency (or at least packaging a version of ar that is compatible with apt) would be nice, guys.

Anyway, to not be too negative in this post: debian-installer is pretty cool, once you understand the internals a little bit. I just spent a couple of days now on customizing an USB stick installation image, and I think I understand the system at least for a few percents by now. ;-) Have to find the limits of what can be done with preseeding files now. Having fun!

... What ... if anyone reads this? Dunno. :-P

(See also: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=161593)