bkil vs. programming

Installing a Huawei E352 HSPA+ dongle took ages under Windows. I had to abort it halfway through because I was running out of time. In retrospective, it was probably caused by a conflict with the previous modem's connection dashboard. I was shocked when I wanted to resume next time. Some time after inserting the device, the system asked for a .sys file from a driver disk. Neither modem worked anymore. As usual for this kind of dongle, no vendor download is available as the device itself contains all drivers on a virtual CD-ROM. However, that is only accessible before it's  switched to modem mode  by the parts already installed. Chicken and egg problem. Puppy Linux to the rescue! Thankfully, I had it on my USB flash along with DSL and SliTaz . The system loaded to RAM rapidly. I copied over the drivers from the modem to another USB flash. As a plaything, I enjoyed the command line and the responsivity, also browsing the web a bit over 3G. After rebooting to Windows, re...

I've started experimenting with my TV & radio tuners. One of them gets perfect reception on 15 of the 17 nearby FM radio stations in the area. It gives acceptable quality on the remaining two talk radios. It's an Asus 3in1, supporting hybrid PAL/DVB-T/DVB-S/FM. My UHF TV aerial is just a bare wire of proper length at the end of an extension cable. FM reception gets a bit weaker on some channels after disconnecting it. I've tried to disconnect every cable except the display, power and keyboard to no effect. A proposed explanation is coupling through the power lines and/or improper grounding. Three of the broadcasts are high power regional transmitters with nearby origin. The rest are local ones with reduced power that also transmit from the surrounding hills. I made a script that uses fmtools to scan and tune in channels. It also coordinates digital audio capture and playback from the card's ADC. I've also experimented with gnomeradio. Unfortunately, I ha...

It runs on over the air broadcast, so you won't see any more grabber failures because of a website that decided to change their design (deliberately). bkil-open: tv/grab-dvb-epg.sh

While it may sound like utter nonsense at first, on second thought maybe it really is: cron.standard: please provide configuration facility to avoid given filesystems Someone should really be thinking more about a serious reminder system. I've put together an iotop oneliner that logs disk actions with timestamps which pointed me to anacron. Daily mlocate updating was easy to reproduce and fine tune: simply add your HDD mount points to tho PRUNEPATHS variable of /etc/updatedb.conf . On the other hand, it took a few more attempts and many days in total to track down what causes the HDDs to still start up. When trying to further examine the issue by hand, /etc/cron.daily/standard didn't start them up on first look, perhaps because of caching. However, today after randomly testing things again, it finally did, which took me to adding CHECK_LOSTFOUND=no to /etc/default/cron . It's a pity though, that I'll have to use an alarm clock from now on.

I had to revert from compressed BTRFS to Ext4 on my tiny netbook partition, as it wasn't playing nice. That's a pity, as Ubuntu is highly compressible and compression didn't slow it down. The system occupied less than half of the space and reported such, however when I was starting to fill up the space, it complained of insufficient space. Probably because of metadata allocation. As I didn't want to reinstall the system, I went the more costly route: * I've rebuilt the partition in an image on ext4, * copied over the data * copied the initrd image from another computer of mine with the exact same system, both were updated at the same time - otherwise it couldn't read the new kind of partition * adjusted grub settings * reinstalled grub (was extra painful when I attempted to do that inside an image..).

I had a similar problem as described below on Ubuntu 12.04 and found that inserting saa7134-dvb into /etc/modules.conf did the trick for me too. It's interesting though that it has been working fine before. I did recall seeing this issue once or twice, but this time it did not seem to have been resolved by multiple cold booting by itself. http://linuxtv.org/pipermail/linux-dvb/2008-June/026775.html [ 43.162971] tda1004x: timeout waiting for DSP ready [ 43.202914] tda1004x: found firmware revision 0 -- invalid [ 43.202918] tda1004x: waiting for firmware upload... [ 48.675012] tda1004x: Error during firmware upload

I found a nice hack to undelete an open file: Undeleting an open file by inode Though, I generally use cat , as that's much easier. It's also useful to view cached content of plugins which delete their files upon download.

The problem is triggered by me rapidly changing capitalization via shift while typing. I use the two shift keys symmetrically, but it always seems to involve the left shift. It lasts from about 10 to 30 seconds on average, but today it ceased to resolve by itself. So I started to research the issue (IN CAPS), and thankfully found something that seemed to work: CTRL+FN-F1 to switch to a console, then back to Xorg with CTRL+FN-F7, and pressing the left shift right away. Maybe it is indeed related to TVTime usage, I need to concentrate more on the issue. It is said to be caused by automatic periodical screen saver inhibition via stuffing control and shift keypresses using XTest. Ubuntu Bug #588473: shift key get stuck randomly

Hugs is a nice little interpreter if you'd like to try out the language Haskell. It has few dependencies and it requires moderate resources to run. The download for a minimal install is less than 1.5MiB in size. If you have an operating system with package management, you can simply install the package 'hugs', or 'hugs98'. For example, on Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu) this amount to simply running: aptitude install hugs On distributions without a decent package manager (like Puppy Linux), you can install the Debian packages manually (refer to your distribution for details, but it usually involves clicking on each downloaded package or typing dpkg -i name.deb ). You first need to select a Debian major distribution version which matches with the versions of libraries on your system. On the Pupeee (Puppy 4.3) I had been using till now, choosing Lenny seems to work fine. So I've downloaded each i386 version from a mirror close-by of the following packages:...

I only gave a quick shot at the beast, but it did work out pretty well. It didn't work out of the box, however. kernel: 2.6.31.5 (Puppy) hardware: IBM ThinkPad T42 error message: initrd boot error "pup-431.sfs not found" solution: remove 'pmedia=usbflash' from syslinux.cfg other remedies to try: kernel command line: add 'acpi=force' and 'pci=noacpi' BIOS: turn off Fast Boot

Please don't be intimidated by the fact that I always tag my articles with "linux". This is not snob ignorance and I don't mean to ignore or belittle any other operating system. I can't come up with a tag that is both fair *and* remotely understandable by humans! :) As of 2008, I think "the Linux operating system" (yeah, I'm on your side in the argument for distributions and the */GNU marking! :-D) does ring a bell in some heads. After Minix$N has gained world domination, I will adjust my tags accordingly. I have considered trying some other tags, like: oss-os, libre-os, gnu-os, posix-os, unix, unix-like, bsd-os, darwin, plan9, inferno, opensolaris, minix3, haiku, ... In short, if I write something related to the Linux kernel, I will use the tag "linux kernel". Otherwise when I use the tag "linux", I refer to any free open source software operating system.

This has been asked by a friend of mine some time ago. In short, you have the needed links over here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netfilter As it was a phone call, I started the conversation by telling him that you don't necessarily need a firewall, or at least it's not a problem if you will only have time to configure the system in a week or so. "Really?" - he gasped. In short, I told him, you can trust an Ubuntu system (okay, not the best example of this but that's what he had at hand :->) much more than what you had before. You see he was accustomed to seeing malware taking over his w. system in a matter of minutes and having a need for re-installation many times despite taking precaution (firewall, virus scanners, etc.) _and_ having an I.T. background. He asked me how this could be true. I said it's simple. There exist many layers of protection that improve your security. You can install software packages that are signed by a trusted third party (the d...

The first OS I have installed was probably some DOS for a friend or classmate in primary school, I can't remember which. You understand if normal people can't install and configure that properly, as it is considered pretty difficult. I then did winblows a few times, though that's a harder treat. How do you expect a normal user to feel at home with his computer if he can't even install it for himself? It's supposed to be user friendly or so. Also note, that after removing the installer disk and placing it on the shelf does not end your responsibilities. If you install new hardware, software, or just simply switch some setting that change a major part of the system, you will need to get used to handling setup dialogs and wizards. And by the way, if the installation process is usually done by a semi-professional anyway - either in the shop before you buy, or if you ask help from a friend - then that voids the major part of the very common argument against using any unu...

I'm not specialized in doing that, but I had to commence many operating system installs to this day. I plan to write a bit on that next time. Here's how I've installed Debian 5.0 Lenny (qualified as testing as of September of 2008). I did it two times in a row to be exact, because of an unfortunately hardware fault after two days of usage (okay, maybe it was partially mine). The second one should have taken much less time, but I goofed with the settings of apt-move. You see I got it right with Etch before, but I forgot to write it down (I found it in the file anyway). I have been writing down what I customize from the start just because of that. Thankfully, that's a good habit of mine. Some words about the instructions in the file ("almost" a shell script). I tried to be self-explanatory, and have written a little preface to help place things in context. NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND: I am not held liable for anything you do wrong with the text given below, not even...

It would be interesting if environmental friendly, low power and mostly budget solutions like the following were more wide spread in office and computer lab environments. Computer display sharing would also be possible among friends! They say compositing with Wine and/or a virtual machine is also possible. http://www.linuxtoys.org/multiseat/multiseat.html