Older blog entries for spicyjack (starting at number 13)

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Forgot a file.  Here's my /etc/modules file.  This file is what Debian uses to load the modules for the system when you boot it.  Compare it to the output of lsmod, and you'll notice that there's more modules loaded than what I ask for in /etc/modules.  Reason being, is that I only ask for the final module of a set of modules, and the kernel automagically figures out what modules the requested module depends on, then loads the dependent modules prior to the one I request.  Works great, and if I'm testing out things like ALSA, all I have to do is modprobe the snd-card-intel8x0 module, and the rest of the modules it needs gets loaded automatically.  After you build a new kernel, or build ALSA, you'll need to reboot for this to work, because the kernel builds a list of dependencies at boot time.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

We have Wood!  Woody is running very nicely on my 30G drive.  Cool thing about Woody is that most every package is only like one or two minor versions down, for example, libsdl is 1.2.0 in Woody, and the most current release is 1.2.2.  Migration was pretty easy from the old drive, however, I could not mount the Reiserfs partitions from the old drive.  I had to put the old drive back in, and then move the files to the ext2 partitions on the new drive with an external PCMCIA IDE adapter.  Here's my fstab and lsmod.  My drive is partitioned with a single 8G partition for Windows 2000, and 8G total for Debian Woody.  The rest (for right now) is unpartitioned.  Fujitsu has released a full set of Windows 2000 drivers, even the scroll button works in Windows 2000 now.  You'll have to come up with your own copy of WinDVD however :(.  I'm running the default kernel version that came with Woody (2.2.19), because I want to use VMware for another project I'm working on.  Here's my 2.2.19 kernel .config file.  Woody comes with recent ALSA (v0.9.0) drivers, but I could not get those to work using the Debian source package, so I went back to the 0.5.10 drivers, and they're working fine.  I've also got tarballs with WindowMaker and xmms themes on my server at home, which really helped me move over:

• Window Maker theme tarball (7.9M)

• xmms skins tarball (999k)

Note that there is a bug with theWoody X 4.1 package, X won't start correctly if run with [g|x]dm, there's a new Debian X package out that fixes it, do an apt-get update;apt-get upgrade to download it.  You can read more about the package bug on this Debian Weekly News page.

Fujistu Lifebook S-4546

Just bought a 30G drive, it's an IBM IC25N030ATDA04-0, or a Travelstar 30GN 4200RPM Ultra-ATA hard drive, in english terms.  The drive replaces the Fujitsu drive that came with the laptop with no problems.  The machine booted right up with the new drive.  You could use a 12.5mm drive, by taking out the rubber pieces at the bottom of the drive bay, that way you could use the Fujitsu 30G drive, but I chose to go with a 9mm drive just like what came with the laptop.  I've already got Windows installed in it's own 8G partition, and now I'm giving Linux it's own 8G's of space to play with.  It's Debian Woody time.  I mean, how many other distributions say that they've got wood?  I'll post specifics of the setup at a later date.

tkboom

My new project, it's a Perl/Perl::Tk launcher for Doom ports. It just got posted to Sourceforge today. I'm using prboom for testing it, but eventually I'd like to make it compatable with as many Doom ports as possible. Making a GUI Doom launcher sounds kind of stupid at first ("I just run it from the command line"), but trust me, there's a master plan at work :). Perl::Tk is a lot of fun, I've been wanting to do something like this for a long time. And prboom is a blast as well, I've got the sound and MIDI music working for it nicely, it all plays at the same time as I'm listening to MP3's with xmms. People walk by my desk at work, and always see me playing prboom now instead of working...

misc

Yes, September 11th was a big day, and not in a good way.

I'm waiting on the DSL installer from Covad to install my SDSL line from Speakeasy

I've also gotten into some of the Doom (the game) ports running around the web. The one I'm using is called prBoom, it's a fork/merge of a bunch of different ports of Doom that are out there, but it's actively maintained, and of course it runs in Linux, with full sound effects and MIDI music, and a TCP/IP client/server network playing system that replaces the old IPX networking that Doom used to use. It's godly.

I'm thinking of starting up 2 projects that would be related to prBoom, one would be a version of LoopLinux that would let you pop a CD into a computer and already have things set up so you could use it as a dedicated Doom machine with a minimum of fuss. Another thing I'd like to do is write a front end to prBoom which would be like the old 'Doom Control Center' that I used to run when I played Doom on DOS. DCC basically ran the command line Doom engine, and it allowed you to load extra Doom PWAD's, specify extra command line options, and start networked games very easily, and it looked great too :)

I saw System of a Down about 2 weeks ago, it was a good show, but I'd like to see them in a longer set than the 45 or so minutes they had.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Kernel 2.4.12: here's the kernel config file, and the lsmod without the cpqpjb.o module, I've not gotten around to recompiling it for 2.4.12 yet.  Remember, if you are using ALSA, you'll need to re-install the alsa-driver package again so that all the libs get put into the new modules directory for the new kernel. Use modprobe snd-card-intel8x0; modprobe snd-pcm-oss to install the freshly compiled modules into the system, no reboot required :)

I've just figured out in the last few days that the ATI Rage 3D Mobility video chipset is basically the same thing as a Rage 128, so there's a lot of extra things in my kernel now.  If you want to get a good look at the differences between 2 kernel config files, you can use this:

diff -u original_file new_file | vim -

This will open the output of diff in vim, if you have vim set up correctly, it will do syntax highlighting, and you'll easily be able to tell what's changed.

The framebuffer is for the Rage 128, and I also turned on DRI for X 4.x for the Rage 128 video card as well.  The end goal of all this video stuff is to be able to run the MesaGL version of prBoom, a version of the original Doom game engine that was GPL'ed by id Software.

php-stream

I was working on moving over the login/authentication code from the old codebase to the new one this week. It authenticates, but it does not set any PHP session variables yet.

stream-db

I got a copy of Ivan Woehr's stream.pl, he's got it doing a lot of neat things that I would like to put into stream-db.pl. Some day... :)

I'm fighting with my ISP, Cox@Home, over internet access. They've blocked incoming ports 25 and 80, so people can't run servers. Well, I run quite a few 'servers', so this effectively screws me hard. Here's what I'm doing to get things working again:

• Running an SSH tunnel from a server not on Cox@Home's network for port 25. So all of my mail is going to the remote server, the coming down the SSH tunnel to get to my server. This screws with a lot of stuff having to do with spam filtering, but at least it's still up.
• Using Apache's mod_rewrite to redirect web requests. This is really fun. Basically, whenever someone goes to http://www.sunset-cliffs.org (aka naranja.sunset-cliffs.org), they automatically get redirected to http://observer.sunset-cliffs.org:88 using the following rewrite rules:
  • RewriteEngine On
  • RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://observer.sunset-cliffs.org:88/$1 [R]
  Basically what the rule does is to
  1. match any text after the server name,
  2. and save the text you match (^/(.*)).
  The second half of the rule is to send it to the remote server, with the $1 at the end meaning "retrieve the text you saved previously from #1, and put it here". The [R] tells mod_rewrite to serve up the HTTP code 302, meaning "moved temporarily". Ralf Engelschall, the guy who wrote mod_rewrite, has an entire page dedicated to mod_rewrite here: http://www.engelschall.com/pw/apache/rewriteguide/#ToC23

Yes, I'm looking for a new ISP, but it's a pain in the ass to find cheap good bandwidth.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Flashed my SMC Wireless Barricade last night with the 1.93e flash image, and now the Lucent Orinoco Gold card works in Linux!!  Very cool.  Now the only excuse I have to be in Windows is to watch DVD's ;) This imwheel stuff is great, I'm still tweaking things, but it's a huge improvement in usability in the system as a whole to be able to scroll up and down inside of applications when I want to using the mouse wheel. Highly recommended to set this up. Oooo!  I also compiled kernel 2.4.8 last night, here's my config.  Remember when you compile you'll need to add the ALSA sound modules, plus for me I had to recompile the cpqpjb.o module.

misc

In order to fit 33 Gigabytes of MP3's onto the Personal Jukebox PJB-100 MP3 player I mentioned on the 10th, I'm reencoding most of my MP3 collection to 128kb/sec, as 99% of them are encoded @ 256kb/sec bitrate.  I'll be able to fit them all onto the PJB-100 that way.  That's going to be fun as hell, carry my entire CD collection with me.  Here's the script that I'm using with LAME to reencode.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Playing with imwheel 0.99.   So far, I've gotten Mozilla to scroll up and down, xmms and wmix to go up/down in volume, and BitchX to page up/down all with the mousewheel on my Logitech Optical Mouse.  Here's my imwheelrc and imwheel startup.conf (it should be called startup.conf).  I put both files into /etc/X11/imwheel/, and symlinked /etc/imwheelrc to imwheelrc in the former directory; you might create a ~/.imwheelrc symlink and point it back to the system imwheelrc file to keep imwheel from bitching.  I also had to monkey with my XF86Config-4 file, so pick up another copy if you are using mine.  I'm overriding Mozilla's mouse wheel support with that provided by imwheel, it scrolls a little smoother IMO; the imwheelrc has the dirty details.  imwheelrc is subject to change, so check back often.  I've also installed the aumix package, and I've got a startup script that uses it to set the voulme at boot time to 80% for the Master, PCM and CD volume levels.  Aumix works on ALSA because I have the ALSA OSS modules loaded.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

lsmod from 2.4.7 kernel with the Lucent Wavelan, and my new toy - a Personal Jukebox PJB-100 MP3 player. The PJB-100 has it's own module to let you use it with USB, called cpqpjb.o.  Here's a screenshot of me viewing the files on my PJB-100 while running Linux :).  Just like I did with my USB scanner, I've not even installed the Windows drivers for the PJB yet!  At this very moment, I'm at work, copying MP3's using NFS over the wireless network from a box in a lab to my PJB over a USB connection to my Fujitsu.  Buzzword bingo, I love it! Only problem is, at 802.11b speed, it's going to take forever to transfer 20G of MP3's.

Good Links (Also on the Links page):

• Here's the page with details on how to connect your PJB-100 in Linux; this guy, Max Berger, also has the hacked up cpqpjb.o that I mention above, aparently Compaq's cpqpjb.o module won't run on a 2.4 kernel. His module compiles and runs fine. It's about mid-way down that page, "Kernel Module for 2.4.0-test6" is where you'll find it

• Compaq's PJB  project website, and here's Linux PJB downloadables

• The application I'm using to upload MP3's is called pjbmanager by Alexander Mosley, get it here or here

• I just found an Sourceforge project called OpenPJB

The first link above has instructions on how to set things up.  I changed things a bit as far as the name of the cpqpjb device name, I have /dev/usb/cpqpjb instead of /dev/cpqpjb, which breaks the Compaq API, they have the path hardcoded as /dev/cpqpjb.  I did this because my Kodak DC280 device ( /dev/usb/camera ) also lives in that directory.  pjbmanager has a copy of the Compaq API (it's GPL'ed), so if you want to change either the Compaq API or the pjbmanager copy of the API to point the cpqpjb device to something other than /dev/cpqpjb, the file you want is pjbapi/pjbdev_linux.c.  Do a text search for the string 'cpqpjb', then change the device it uses; there's two references in that file, change them both, then compile/recompile.   I moved the module by hand from the source tree to /lib/modules/2.4.7/misc, and copied the pjbmanager binary to /usr/local/bin, I did'nt run 'make install'.  I'm still working on getting my Lucent to talk to my SMC Barricade wireless gateway, with no luck.  I think I'm going to get Lucent's source (wavelan2 driver) and toy around with that, see if it works.  I think I'm running the latest and greatest Mozilla as well, if I'm not, I'm sure I will be soon :)

Extra files added to my CVS tree:

• /etc/init.d/networking - This is what brings your network up at boot time.  If I have $PCMCIA=no in my boot environment (it's set in lilo.conf with an append="PCMCIA=no"), then the internal network card is used, otherwise ($PCMCIA=yes)only the loopback adapter is brought up at boot time

• /etc/manpath.config - I'm adding a lot of apps (PostgreSQL for one) that have their own sets of manpages, and this is my current manpath.config with all of my extra manpages from all over the filesystem.

• /etc/lilo.conf - Give you a good example of what you can do with schemes and setup and whatnot.  Hardest part for me is remembering what config does what, that's what the boot message is for (the 'message=' line in lilo.conf)

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

July 31st, 2001 - Kernel 2.4.7.  w00t!  I just thought about this a few days ago talking to Tom Greene, another S-4546 owner, that I should be posting my kernel .config files, so that people can use them as a base when they are compiling new kernels for this model laptop.  So here's my .config file for kernel 2.4.7, enjoy.  I had to recompile the alsa-driver tarball to work with the new kernel, make sure you delete config.cache before running the ./configure line listed on July 20th.  I also got the ornioco_cs driver to work, the trick for that was to change the /etc/pcmcia/config file so that orinoco_cs is loaded instead of wvlan_cs for any card that PCMCIA identifies as "Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE Adapter".  The way /etc/pcmcia/config is set up, each card is identified by the ident string, then a device is bound to that ident string.  That device will have the actual drivers needed to run that card.  Like so:

card "Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE Adapter"
  version "Lucent Technologies", "WaveLAN/IEEE"
  #bind "wvlan_cs"
  bind "orinoco_cs"

device "orinoco_cs"
  class "network" module "kernel/drivers/net/wireless/orinoco_cs"

Devices are listed in the 1st half of /etc/pcmcia/config, and cards are in the 2nd half.  So the "Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE Adapter" card will have "orinoco_cs" bound to it, and "orinoco_cs" in turn will load the file /lib/modules/$KERNEL_VERSION/)"kernel/drivers/net/wireless/orinoco_cs" when the card is inserted; now orinoco_cs.o is dependent on  hermes.o and orinoco.o, but that's what modprobe is for, it figures all of this stuff out for us and loads the dependent modules automatically.  Nice.  So here is my /etc/pcmcia/config file as well, you can either use it as it is, or diff it against your existing one if you've modified it already.  I'll post a 2.4.7 lsmod file when I have the Lucent card in, so you can see what modules are loaded where and in what order.

July 21st, 2001 - I forgot to mention, xosl (bootloader) munges LILO in some way so that when I try to type in a config that I want to boot when LILO comes up, the keyboard is dead, and LILO boots the default. Obviously I went back to LILO as my bootloader for now, that kinda bums me out though.

July 20th, 2001 - Kingston cross-shipped a 256M chip, so I'm back up to 256M of RAM again. I still can't connect with my Lucent Orinoco Gold card to my SMC wireless Barricade using the 2.4.x kernel driver orinoco_cs.o. My OpenBSD laptop works fine with the SMC, so I have to wag my finger at the linux drivers as being the problem. The card in this computer works in Windows, and works in Linux with a Lucent access point router at work. I'm also tried to compile the latest ALSA 0.9.0-beta6 drivers, but no dice. The problem was with getting alsa-libs to compile, so I went back to alsa-0.5.10. Here's my ./configure line:

./configure --with-isapnp=no --with-sequencer=yes --with-oss=yes --with-cards=intel8x0

Here's my 2.4.6 lsmod in Debian, and my /etc/modules file. When you install ALSA, you will need to add the users that you want to use the mixer and CD-ROM to your /etc/group file; I had to add myself to both the audio and disk groups, then log out and back in to make wmix and gcd work correctly. XMMS works again too, but I only have CD's with me right now. I also see xosd working again, but I don't remember compiling it. Jeez, big brain fart.

July 10th, 2001 - The next day after I got my laptop back, it won't boot. Now Fujitsu replaced a whole bunch of parts, so I start to thinking, what else could be wrong. Hmm, did they use my Kingston 256M DIMM, or did they put a factory 128M DIMM back in the laptop when they tested it? Sure enough, I replaced the 256M DIMM with the factory 128M DIMM, and life is good again. I've finally got kernel 2.4.6 up and running, and my Orinoco Gold card is working with the 2.4.x module orinoco_cs. Good news. I'm in the process of rebuilding the laptop still, but I tar'red up most of the config info on the old install, so it should not take that long. I used to use a RedHat package called 'xsri' to set the Debian logo as the root window image for logging in via GDM, but I can't get it to work anymore. Oh well, I'll use XV instead.

php-stream

I'm setting things up so that my CVS tree on my personal server is synced (via rsync) to what's on Sourceforge, so that people can get ahold of decently current code from Sourceforge without too much hassle for either myself or the person browsing the CVS archive on Sourceforge. I'm also re-writing most of my PHP code to be more modular, for example, there will be only 1 function for getting stuff out of the database, and it will return an array of rows, the rows themselves will be another array (so it will return a matrix basically, if there's more than 1 row returned for a query).

stream-db

I've created a new utility called filecheck.pl, this will build a list of MP3's on the filesystem, then check that list against what's in the database. Goal is to find missing/duplicate files/records in the database and on the filesystem. I added 2 new fields to the mp3main table, filesize and verify_date, filesize will be used for queries where you want to build a list of files for downloading, but you want to make sure you have enough room beforehand, and verify_date is used by the filecheck.pl utility, it's changed every time filecheck.pl runs and touches that database row.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

I got up this morning, went to turn the laptop on, and *NOTHING HAPPENED*. I was really starting to get mad. But after I thought about it for a bit, I decided to put the old 128M RAM chip back into the laptop. Sure enough, it's working now. I'll put the 256M module back in to double check that it really was the problem, but after I get the laptop up and running again software-wise. I've added my current fdisk -l /dev/hda and /etc/fstab to my CVS tree. Notice that the root filesystem is ext2, not reiserfs as it was previously. Before I killed my laptop, I was having problems with a root reiserfs partition. Also, now /boot is on the same partition as the rest of the / filesystem, and it's too much work to make it reiser and have everything be happy (see the mkreiserfs -notail option for more info on why you can't put a kernel onto a normal reiser partition). I'm now using xosl now as my primary bootloader, and it's way cool. I'll still be using lilo in Linux for implementing PCMCIA schemes, but the xosl GUI is really cool. BTW, when you look at the output of fdisk -l /dev/hda above, you'll see xosl's partition type is 0x78. I think it's just a DOS partition, but you could always go read the source and see for yourself.