Tidbits from my daily-life

This post is about the construction of the SIG calculators.
Prices in $HK. All parts gathered from Sham Shui Po golden centre

1. Pre-selection of components from Tank and I
2. Shopping with Tank of the following components:
   Cheap Keyboard, Mouse ($68)
   SATA to MINI-SATA adapter ($35)
   Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @2.93 gHz with 3MB L2 cache ($1090)
   ZOTAC Geforce 9300-ITX WIFI motherboard ($1190)
   SILVERSTONE NT07-775 cpu heatsink ($200)
   2THEMAX 8KR1 ITX case with 120W PSU ($455)
   TEAC DV-W28S 8x DVD+-RW – slim ($360)
   2x OCZ 2GB DDR2 @ 800 mHz (w heatsink) ($260)
   HITACHI 640GB SATA2 7200RPM 16MB HDD ($450)
   TOTAL: $4108 (leaves $892 to purchase 19″ LCD)
3. Assembly of the computer with Tank(very easy)
4. Installing Windows 7 beta and Linux Mint on the drive
5. Finish installing drivers and compiling wifi drivers for Linux.
6. Bring it back home, use the “stress” command under linux. Stressed RAM + CPU + HDD at maximum for 24hrs. No problems. Consider system stable
7. Test of HD video playback with videos from Apple.com/trailers. No dropped frames under linux and windows. Settings: Max resolution on 22″ + 15″ dual-screen. Windows with Aero turned on and using the task switching to stress system. Linux with Desktop compositing enabled (Compiz), rotating cube effect applied without any problem.
8. installing XBMC – Xbox Media Centre (www.xbmc.org) on linux in order to test more video playback.
9. Installing the “ubuntu-studio” suite of programs under linux
10. TODO:
    Installing, Processing.org and Arduino suite of programs.
    Buying 4more copies of the config
    Buying 5 LCDs (ended up with 5 19″ ACER LCDs. they are quite decent and have a vesa mount on the back. The plan is to hang the computers at the back of the screen.
    Testing on HDTV using HDMI port
    Backup and restore system for ease of use by all
    Restricted account for casual internet browsing by other users

Below, a shot of the small ITX case that will eventually be hung behind the LCD screens.

In order, from left to right: cheap Linksys router, SIG-CALCULATOR1, Mac Mini G4 (1st generation), 1TB backup E-SATA drive, (under all of this) my home computer

Backing up is important. People tell us that all the time and there must be some kind of truth in this. Else why would people keep on stressing how important it is?

Well… I always believed in backup, but never put it into practice. Since my first PC computer with a hard-drive inside (aged 10) I have been loosing data on a regular basis. The only reason why this happens less and less frequently is because I run Linux and do not have to re-install my system every other day and also because I have more than one drive, thus spreading the data over several mediums. Continue Reading »

After re-installing my system today I realise that all my ALSA apps were not making a tweet. I remembered that using Pulse on my previous system (Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon) was working properly, but i had to do some trickery for the ALSA apps to use Pulse. Looking back into my backup files here is what I would recommend:

edit /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

and then:

sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins

and you should be good to go.

You might also add some more GUI tools to configure PulseAudio:

sudo apt-get install padevchooser paman paprefs pavucontrol pavumeter

Backup/Restore your mac (only tested PPC) from a linux box using gparted, a firewire cable, a calculator, mount and dd.

/! PLEASE NOTE that I only write this so that people can try to make a full clone of their mac’s hard-drive including the partition table. If you have any mis-hap while playing with the following instructions I am in no way responsible for it. It worked for me, but may not work for you. At least you are warned.

Checking you have everything:

• a PPC Mac (using the HFS+ hard-drives that don’t have a MSDOS disk label)
• a firewire cable (and a firewire card in your linux box)
• following linux tools:

• gparted
• mount
• dd

Backup your mac:

• First, if you mac is on, please turn it off.
• Start your mac while pressing the ‘T’ key on your keyboard. This will boot your computer into ‘Target mode’. (for more info)
• After you see a firewire logo appear on the screen of your mac, you can insert the firewire cable into your mac and your linux box.
• [OPTIONAL] Open Gparted (only if you want to be able to mount the disk image on your linux box later on)

• find the correct device id and display it (in my case /dev/sde)
• right click on the biggest partition (the partition normally containing your system and data, the two other ones are only holding the partition table and boot firmware) and display properties.
• copy the “First Sector” in the calculator and multiply this number by 512bits (see why here) (/!keep this number safely)
• close Gparted

• in a root terminal type the following after replacing the /dev/sde by the device representing your mac and the filename you want your file to have:
  dd if=/dev/sde of=/PLACE_YOU_SAVE_YOUR_FILE/FILENAME.ddimage
• be patient…. it will take a while~

Restore your mac:

• First, if you mac is on, please turn it off.
• Start your mac while pressing the ‘T’ key on your keyboard. This will boot your computer into ‘Target mode’. (for more info)
• After you see a firewire logo appear on the screen of your mac, you can insert the firewire cable into your mac and your linux box.
• If your system auto-mounted or you mounted some of the partitions of your mac, please unmount them now (ie: umount /dev/sde1)
• Now let’s copy the image back to your mac

• in a root terminal, after replacing /dev/sde by the device representing your mac and the filename to the real filename of your image, type the following:
  dd if=/PLACE_YOU_SAVE_YOUR_FILE/FILENAME.ddimage of=/dev/sde
• once again, be patient

MORE TO COME:

Compression

mounting the image file

Maybe some of you out there are also using Sun’s JVM on your linux box but did not yet realise that the timezone settings in Java would not match the ones you use in you Gnome settings or system settings. The reason for that is that the JVM looks at a file /etc/localtime to find these timezone settings and apparently wants it to be a Symlink and not a file per se, so let’s fix it~

1. backup your /etc/localtime
   sudo cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.bak
2. now let’s link to the correct file after making a backup of it. In my case “Asia/Hong_Kong”, look for other regions in /usr/share/zoneinfo/
   sudo cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Hong_Kong /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Hong_Kong.bak
sudo ln -s -f /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Hong_Kong /etc/localtime

Just try the following ASCII version of StarWars

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

For windows:
Windows>Run>”cmd”
then type telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

For Linux/Macosx:
open a terminal window
then type telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

“Wubi is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application. If you heard about Linux and Ubuntu, if you wanted to try them but you were afraid, this is for you.”

please see more on http://wubi-installer.org/ 

I’ve had a little trouble reading a VCD on my computer tonight.

People using Mac OS X or Win XP might know that the simplest steps if your VCD is not recognised by your VCD playing tools is to simply copy the biggest of the *.DAT files on the VCD to your desktop and rename it to *.mpg to play it.

Well…apparently under ubuntu Fesity, it’s still not the case. But I found a nice way to do it though

Continue Reading »

follow the link

Please refer to the following link
you will find it useful
copy of this is when you click on “more” Continue Reading »