Linuxlore

Wireless Ubuntu

Author: Paul Tansom

I’m in the process of trying to get wireless working on one (or both) of my aging laptops with Ubuntu 7.04. Having looked at the documentation it seems to be sadly lacking in anything useful in terms of WPA, although this may well be partly due to the sad lack of proper support in Linux for WPA in general (as in you are very restricted in the cards you can use). That said, I’m not having any more luck with WEP either. Not that a working WEP would help much as I really can’t reconfigure the networks I connect to using WEP just to allow Linux access sadly. I suspect the WEP issue may partly be due to the fact that I’m probably only half heartedly working on it as WPA is the real target.

So, where am I with my selection of cards? Somewhere about here:

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Tags: Linux, Ubuntu, WEP, wireless, WPA
July 5th, 2007  |  Posted in Linux  |  No Comments »

Extra Codecs for Xine on Debian

Author: Paul Tansom

More of a note to self, but I thought I’d blog it since I haven’t for a very long while! Anyway, I finally got around to patching in a few extra codecs into my Debian install the other day and it was surprisingly easy.

• first off I downloaded the file: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20050412.tar.bz2 from the MPlayer site
• next I extracted it and renamed the directory it created to codec
• this new directory was then moved to /usr/lib/
• finally a symlink was created so it also showed as /usr/lib/win32/

Not entirely sure whether working with it symlinked is necessary, or whether simply creating it as win32 would have done. It works OK though, so I’m not really complaining!

So why haven’t I linked the download? Well I’ve just checked it and there’s been an update, so this looks to be the latest version:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20060501.tar.bz2

So I’m downloading that for an update!

Tags: codec, Debian, mplayer, win32, xine
May 17th, 2006  |  Posted in Linux  |  No Comments »

Point and Click ‘experts’

Author: Paul Tansom

I’ve been resisting blogging this piece for about two months, but it bugs me so I’ve given in.

I’ve been working with somebody who hasn’t upgraded their mail server for a while now and they have been using a well known local company (which I will not be naming or identifying in any way). Sadly I am only involved on the domain side of things and not the implementation. Thankfully for the end users I know enough about their setup to save them from the ‘experts’ doing the work.

The first thing to do was install a new ADSL line ready for the shiny new Exchange server. The first I was aware of this was a request to point the MX record at the IP of the new ADSL connection. I almost did this on the assumption of some degree of technical competence, and more significantly the assumption that they had installed the new server they were talking about. I wasn’t completely convinced though, so double checked. The new server was not installed, and they knew little if anything about the existing setup. They were unaware of the following information:

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Tags: ADSL, IMAP, mail, MX, POP
November 8th, 2005  |  Posted in Computers  |  No Comments »

Whoops we’re aground!

Author: Paul Tansom

Well yesterday was intended to be a trip to the boat for a check of the engine and a quick run down harbour and back to check everything was ready fot coming ashore next weekend. Things didn’t go according to plan though!

The club has just purchased its own lifting gear and tractor to manage launch and lift out each year, and this year is going to be the first time it has been used. When we got down to the club we found that the tractor drivers were having a bit of practice with the new equipment and bringing a couple of boats ashore early (since the weather was reasonably good). On the way down the slip we were asked whether we would like to come ashore too. Well why not be a guinea pig?!

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Tags: Kingfisher, sail, Tudor
November 6th, 2005  |  Posted in Sailing  |  No Comments »

Which dot dot dot… again!

Author: Paul Tansom

Well I haven’t really given much thought to updating by blog for a while now (nearly a month in fact), which starts me wondering whether my initial thoughts that, at least for me, blogging wasn’t really worthwhile may have been accurate. Still, I checked through the Hantslug Planet today (again for the first time in about a month) and spotted another one of these questionnaires. I’m still not entirely sure why I did another one, but anyway, I came out as:

Well that didn’t come out too bad did it? It could certainly have been a lot worse, after all some people come out as Wesley! Since the text appears to be missing from the link and image (unlike the others) I’ll add it – it could be critically important after all

Jean-Luc Picard An accomplished diplomat who can virtually do no wrong, you sometimes know it is best to rely on the council of others while holding the reins. There are some words which I have known since I was a schoolboy. “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” These words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie — as a wisdom, and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged.

Tags: sci-fi, Star Trek
November 6th, 2005  |  Posted in General  |  No Comments »

Dual screen configuration – first pass

Author: Paul Tansom

OK, as a first pass at getting my two graphics cards working in a dual head mode I’ve made the following key changes to my XF86Config-4 file. This is by no means exhaustive, but should give a few reference notes to refer to. A HantsLUG wiki entry is planned

First off the Device sections. I had an original one for my NVidia card along these lines:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "NVidia GeForce MX 440"
        Driver          "vesa"
#       Driver          "nv"
#       Driver          "nvidia"
        Option          "UseFBDev"              "true"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Note that the two commented out lines are due to switches back and forth with the NVidia drivers. So far the vesa one is the only on that has consistently worked and for my usage is doing me fine for now!

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Tags: dual head, dual screen, Linux, Matrox, monitor, nVidia, XFree86, XOrg
October 11th, 2005  |  Posted in Linux  |  No Comments »

Old Monitors

Author: Paul Tansom

I finally hooked up a pair of old monitors onto my computer system last night which resulted in a small ‘yay’. It may seem a bit odd putting old monitors on, but the ones they replaced (an old Dell 17″ Trinitron and an ADI Microscan GT56 – again 17″ Trinitron) weren’t really that much newer, if at all. Sadly these two screens don’t appear to have built in anti-glare, but they are still nice Trinitron tubes. The screens are a matching pair of Iiyama Vision Master Pro 400 17″ monitors that I picked up from Jamies, so that must beg the question, “what was the point of switching?”.

Well these screens have dual inputs instead of the usual captive lead or single D-Sub. They still have the D-Sub, but in addition they have a set of 5 BNC connectors. This allows me to use a different lead that I’ve had kicking around for some time unused to connect to the computer, but more importantly it allows me to connect two computers at the same time and switch between them and therefore saves me a £200 outlay on a KVM (the cost of a Belkin twin screen USB keyboard and mouse unit with necessary cables). Although it doesn’t give me keyboard and mouse switching it does have one advantage over the KVM – it allows me to switch the screens individually.

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Tags: BNC, dual screen, Linux, monitor, Playstation
October 10th, 2005  |  Posted in Computers  |  No Comments »

System building

Author: Paul Tansom

I was planning to head to the LUG meeting today, but a combination of over tiredness, things that needed doing and apathy set in and it didn’t happen. What did happen was supposed to be reasonably productive – once I’d got myself going that is!

The first achievement was a good positive one. I tried the scanner I picked up from Jamies a while ago for the second time and found it actually worked. My first test was simply a power on test and when the scanning light didn’t come on and it made no noise or other indication of life I feared the worst. Well it seems that the modern USB scanners do the sensible thing and stay dormant until required – and this includes keeping the light off. My ancient SCSI one has the bulb lit permanently and makes a solid clunking sound as the mechanism checks that it is settled in the parked position as soon as power is applied.

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Tags: ITE8212, Linux, scanner, SCSI, USB, Windows, XP
October 2nd, 2005  |  Posted in Windows  |  No Comments »

Planet bug

Author: Paul Tansom

By the looks of things there is a bug in the Planet software that HantsLUG is using. I’ve just been tidying up my posts to ensure that my HTML is correct. The fact that each individual entry is then stitched together left me with a few teething problems unfortunately.

Anyway, all is now working fine, but in the process I had to escape some sections of quoted HTML. This left me with a whole load of < and > characters converted to &#60; and &#62; entries in there. This is fine except when it occurs in the title line of the RSS feed that Planet works with. In this case the first & of the escape secuence is escaped itself, so you end up with &#60; and &#62; actually showing up in the text because the first & has been replaced by &amp; (and you should see how this entry looks in raw HTML!).

Tags: HTML, Planet
September 30th, 2005  |  Posted in Web  |  No Comments »