Older blog entries for keverets (starting at number 4)

New geeky stuff: got started with the Home Theater setup. Now have a Technics SA-DA10 (no longer able to navigate to it from their page; strange), Toshiba 34HF81C (widescreen is hard to come by in North America), and a set of Totem Mite-T's with a Mite-TC (centre channel) and Mite's (rear). Well, the speakers should be in this week. Now I'm looking for a good DVD player.

Basic:

• Component Video out
• TOSLink Optical out (and able to output DTS over this WITHOUT decoding... who would think that pretty much outputting straight from the disc would be a feature?)

Good:

• quick-start (straight to the movie or at least be able to bypass FBI warnings and other "mandatory" trailers... I HATE commercials that are forced on some discs)
• progressive scan
• multi-region (almost impossible to find in NA)
• HDCD

Great:

• Able to override Macrovision so I can use the thing with older TVs through a VCR
• Able to play VCDs and Oggs on both CD-R and CD-RW
• DVD-Audio

If anyone has suggestions for players in North America, I'm very open to them!

Got the OpenBSD firewall happy, finally. Still need to find another nic in order to get 2 internal nets. Initial difficulty seemed to be in getting the Intel cards to work with OpenBSD. I couldn't force it to recognise the Intel EtherExpress 16 at all (the 'ie' device, I believe), and the Intel EtherExpress Pro/10 would always force a kernel crash. Nasty. The SMC card and Magitronic ne2k compatible both seem happy enough for now. IP NAT was uber easy to setup, too. Other issues: OpenBSD doesn't seem to recognize all 32M of RAM that's in the box, though Linux does. What I would like is a bootable OpenBSD firwall CD which could read its configuration from a floppy. Get rid of the noise-generating Hard Drive again (similar to the Coyote setup I had before). Logs could still be emailed/remote logged. Mildly surprised that no one's tried that with OpenBSD before.

Been playing with some new toys. Got the Yamaha CRW2100E. Previously used the old 16x4 (16x read, 4x write) SCSI. Was dubious at first about the EIDE, but report from lintec was that EIDEs were working pretty well these days (and I didn't feel like dropping an extra $200 CDN needlessly).

Also got the STB PCI TV used, and finally got it working under GNU/Linux. Couldn't get sound with the old 2.2 series kernels (no driver for the TDA9850, or at least the BTTV driver couldn't find it), but I can with the 2.4's ... the only problem being is that I can't turn sound off! (It just keeps coming through the CD in on the sound card.)

Hurd progress seems to be moving along well. It seems a lot more stable now, and apt is functioning again so keeping it recent is much easier.

Still have to send patches for XHippo to azz, especially since he mentioned my Advogato entry in the ChangeLog. Problem is, the patches are a bit messy and need some serious cleaning. I was toying with making XHippo similar to aumix-gtk... that is, able to function both on the console as well as in X. I'll probably just send the button/shortcut patch and do the curses stuff later.

Also, I'm now using the Ion window manager pretty much exclusively these days. Keyboard friendly and stays out of the way. Good stuff.

Life's been fun lately. Just got the DXR2 playing DVDs on the weekend. No more DVD under Windows! Woohoo! Having trouble getting the overlay stuff to work properly, though. It actually works better in console mode (where I can just see a little thumbnail of the picture) than in X. In X I get a constant anp82_waiting_vsync error (rather annoying). Seems that it's not syncing properly. Wanted to try out OMS, but the server's been down for the past few days and the version that I did manage to checkout was broken pretty hard. Why don't people check in only tested code (and ensure that they check-in new files that the old ones depend on)? Seems that there's a severe lack of good information on how to properly use CVS. Perhaps a "CVS for the impatient" would be in order.

Otherwise, I finally got around to installing Hurd. It was a bit of a challenge, and it ain't over yet. I still can't properly access the network from within the Hurd. I can ping the box from another on the network, but 'ping' from the Hurd gives an immediate "Bus error" and telnet and ftp both tell of problems with libnss_db having an undefined db_open method. The thing also fell over repeatedly (and hard) while I tried to install it. Learned to love the 'sync' command. Once I got the base stuff installed and defined some swap space it seems happier. If only I could get net access, I'd consider it a success. Oh, as part of the process I've found that Grub is damned cool.

Still have to get around to putting together my changes to XHippo and giving them to azz. And figure out how I can get listed as at least a contributor for the project on Advogato. Perhaps once certified to a minimum level I'll be able to request it. Will have to see.

Also just figured out that Advogato uses case-sensitive URLs for its project names (and probably user names). That's mildly annoying.

Spent the morning setting up the router (using an LRP knockoff distribution of Linux called Coyote Linux) to have a secondary internal LAN connection. Used an old Intel EtherExpress 16 (not the PRO or PRO/100 ... this one's "Vintage" by Intel's standards). Also changed Jody's mods (which allow incoming connections on various ports) to use the IP address from the configuration file instead of his scheme of using the result of an "ifconfig eth0". This may not be correct if we go to DHCP, but allows the interface number to change and not break (a more likely prospect in the short term). Had to purchase a cross-over cable to connect the computer to the router. We now have a cable to allow visitors to use our cable-modem connection if they only have 10Base-T available (as the rest of the apartment is 10Base-2).