Resurrection

After ages and ages of dust gathering, I think I might start this blog back up.

I have been bitten by the dork bug again after a very long stretch of not really doing anything. Part of that has to do with a long stretch traveling for work and only being focused on whatever project I was on. I have some time at home, finally, and I have found myself obsessing over little side projects.

My current focus is lower power computing. I bought a RaspberryPi at the beginning of the year, and it hasn't been doing much until now. I currently use it as a music player in my home office. More will come, but I'm not sure what it will become. I also have an old netbook that wants an update, and that sent me to the net. I stumbled on a post about CrunchBang Linux. It. Is. Awesome. I tested it out by installing it on an old (~7 years) laptop that we had lying around. I have tried some other distros on it, but it was so slow that it kept getting shelved. I put CrunchBang on it a couple of days ago, and it runs like a champ. It is running so well, in fact, that I have decided to start using it instead of buying a newer compact notebook. I know, right?

I plan on writing up more about what I have done with that laptop's configuration in a future post. I will also be adding my experiences with CrunchBang on my netbook once I get it backed up so it can be rebuilt. Hopefully, I find something more for my RPi besides being an MP3 player. I will include anything that comes along there as well.

Until then...

Some upgrades really suck

So, what has been happening? My hard drives acted like they crashed. A couple of times. After migrating to openSuSE 11.0 and then on to openSuSE11.1, I have come to this conclusion. My computer just isn't up to it, my PCI-IDE adapter didn't consistently work, and X+nVidia=Unstable.

I installed 11.1. I really like it. But... It is unbelievably unstable. X crashes randomly. But frequently. I have completely given up on KDE for the moment. It runs really, really slow on my system. And it seemed the most unstable. So I switched to WindowMaker. I have used that for years as a backup. I got a little tired of it, and it wasn't any more stable. It is a little too simple. I only decided that after trying IceWM, though. Hell yes. I really like it. It is really easy to change the menu and the quick launch bar. I am still working on setting the icons and the backgrounds. I expect that to last about an hour or so once I set myself to it. Other than that, it is just as fast as WindowMaker, it works great over VNC, and it is great for tweaking. I expect much more from it in the very near future.

I obviously suck

Ok, so I have accomplished zero of what I planned. Well not zero, I did some of it, but... Even worse, I sold out and gave up on MythTV because getting the damned EPG in Germany is such a pain in the ass. It took me weeks to get it working, and I ended up just running it by hand every so often because it was so freaking unreliable. So I caved and bought into Deutsche Telekom's TV over IP solution (Windows CE 5.0 on a little media box). The quality was tolerable for a while, but it is in the crapper right now. I have a few days off next week, I plan on calling to see what can be done.

Sorry.

In better news, I just installed openSuSE 11.0 during a drive rescue. I tried Ubuntu 8.10 while I was at it. I had a drive fail, and I decided to buy two new ones (one for root and home - 160 GB, the other for storage - 500 GB) so I could recover whatever I found to new drives. I went with SATA. Ubuntu saw the one IDE drive connected to my motherboard. It didn't see either of my SATA's or my IDE on a PCI controller. That pretty much sums up my previous experience with Ubuntu. 25% useful, but overall: FAIL! To top that crappy experiment off, the old drives weren't apparently. I may have nice, new, fast S-ATA drives now, but I am out €120 that I needn't be. Grrrr!

So SuSE 11.0 works. I had issues with the newest NVIDIA driver. My 512MB card just short of locked up with 3D games (only used to test if the driver works). I rolled that back a version, and it is OK again (I think I am on 163). KDE4 is cool in concept. My 1.6 (overclocked to 1.9) GHz system can't handle it, though. I am running WindowMaker as my main desktop. It has been a while since I needed it, but it is good enough and crazy fast.

I will be installing openSuSE 11.1 when it comes out week after next. I hope it is more stable. I will work some more on not installing crap to make that happen. I was a little more lax with the 11.0 install because I knew it was only for a few weeks until the new version came out.

I will try to be less of a suck after this. I can't promise it, but we'll see.

Oh, one last thing. Check out TiddlyWiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com). This shit is amazing. It is a single file encapsulated wiki written in JavaScript. It is pretty cool for personal management. Notes, ideas, personal projects and the like. It looks like I might be learning a little bit of a new language in the near future.

Vonage Motorola VT-2442 with T-Online

I have a Vonage/Motorola VT-2442 VoIP adapter that I am using while I am here so that my tenants and family can call us easily. We use it to make some phone calls as well to lighten the financial load here. It was a real pain in the ass to set up. There is nothing clear online, and the hotline can't get it to work, either. The hotline said that I needed the T-Online adapter in bridge mode, but that isn't true. Putting it in bridge mode kills its wireless function, which makes the whole system useless. The only things actually plugged into it are my printer and my VoIP adapter. I have the Vonage adapter running through the Telekom DSL modem so that the DSL modem manages the DSL connection and my wireless network as well. I will try to clean this up more later, but here is the gist of what you need:

Set the Vonage device up to authenticate with PPPoE. My Telekom adapter allows PPPoE passthrough. I had to activate that. Here's the trick, though. Your Telekom user name is composed of three different numbers. When I configured my Telekom adapter, I entered everything in its own little box. You can't do that with normal interfaces. To make the Telekom info fit into the single username/password entry field setup do this:

username = Anschlusskennung+T-Online-Nummer+#+Mitbenutzernummer@t-online.de
password= your T-Online password

The Anschlusskennung and the T-Online-Nummer should both be about 12 characters. The Mitbenutzernummer is typically 0001.

The result should look something like this:
username: 123456765432123456765432#0001@t-online.de

I was able to make the connection to Vonage when I entered this info. After the first time I powered the VoIP adapter down, it quit being able to connect. I went in and switched the connection to DHCP again, and it worked. It has worked that way without issues since. It seems that it just needed that one connection to get it straight.

My Computer Configuration

My setup:

• ASUS P4S800D-X Motherboard with SiS chipset
  
• Creative Labs SBLive! 5.1 Digital Model SB0220
• ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AS [Radeon 9550] (AGP)
• MSI nVidia NX7600GT 512MB (AGP 8x) [WooHoo!]
  
• Promise Technology, Inc. Ultra133TX2 IDE Controller
  
• Linksys WLAN PCI Card (BCM4303 Chipset)
• Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 (MPEG-2 Decoder/Encoder)
  
• Now using a Deutsche Telekom MR-300 Media Receiver with TV over IP
  
• Floppy drive (it's an old case)
• Zip drive (came with the hand me down case) on Promise controller
  
• DVD RW
• DVD ROM
• 2x 1x Seagate 300 GB HD (root, home, backups being recovered) on MoBo IDE controller
• Firewire (IEEE-1394) PCI card
• 1x Samsung 160 GB S-ATA on onboard controller (root, home)
• 1x Samsung 500 GB S-ATA on onboard controller (storage)
• 1x Western Digital 160 GB HD (MythTV storage) cam-corder digital video capture on Promise controller
• 22" Westinghouse widescreen LCD that I currently use as Computer monitor, DVD monitor and TV.
• Logitech 2.1 speakers I am running my computer through my home stereo system
• Logitech Communicator STX USB Webcam
• 1 GB (2x512) Team DDR400 RAM
• 512 (1x512) Kensington DDR200 RAM (I lost a stick after the move)
  

I don't have onboard graphics. I hate the ATI card. ATI may have open source drivers, but they suck. I would much rather have a closed binary that worked. In my opinion, they are releasing their drivers as open source for marketing reasons. They do not support Linux.

My onboard SiS sound doesn't seem to cooperate with SuSE. I didn't bother with it since I have the SB card. It is nice, so why not use it?

Here we go!

I have been threatening to post my Linux struggles, errr... I mean experiences, for some time now. I haven't. I think that it is only fair, since I have gotten so much from other peoples' pages, blogs, and wikis.

Here are some caveats to what will show up here:

1. I am lazy. I want you to have done it for me so I can copy it. Sometimes that doesn't work.
   
2. I am currently a faithful SuSE/openSuSE user. I have used it for years in spite of Novell. I plan to keep using it for the time being. I have used Mandrake in the past. I quit using it when each release got buggier and less functional (ca. 2002) I hate RedHat/Fedora as an OS. I love what they have done for Linux in general. Debian is cool because it has spawned so many useful distros, but I am not that hardcore.
   
3. I am not a real programmer. I know some BASH scripting and Python. I have worked in industrial automation for years, so I know how to think like a programmer, and I know enough low-level, industrial languages (SFC, CFC, Ladder Logic, SCL (like PASCAL), etc.) that I can typically sort through scripts and C source to change/fix things. I am more likely to do this the more I work on a specific project. I try to avoid it when possible (see item 1).
4. I am competent with networking. I have written my own firewall rules in the past, but I am lazy. I see myself having to do this again in the near future due to some planned projects.
   
5. I am not a web developer. I can make simple little pages, but I gave up around the time CSS became a big thing. I want to learn XML to make some things at work easier, but I don't have a really good reason yet.
6. I speak German (as a second language), so I will be linking and/or including German help and references when I find it useful. I will be able to answer German questions or translate to English if requested. I am not planning on doing this as a rule. My advice to SuSE users is to learn German. There is a lot of German SuSE support.

I am currently in the middle of a handful of projects. I will be writing about these experiences. These projects involve:

1. MythTV with a Hauppauge PVR-350 in Germany. I have it functioning, and I will write up a summary soon. This is very pressing because my kids finally have "Channels" again. It has been 6 months with no TV.
   
2. mediaWiki. I want to get a series of HOWTO's written for my wife along with some calendar capabilities. I will focus on security with this because I want it accessible from outside, and I don't want any Tom, Dick or Harry futzing with it.
3. Running and securing my own Apache2 server.
4. Learning a little more MySQL (for my wiki and MythTV).
5. I am keen on the whole LAMP idea, so I might follow up with that.
6. I want to get Bugzilla working. I manage a software test team for the R&D division of my company. I use bug tracking software at work, and it is useful to keep track of what isn't working. I would like to carry that concept over to day to day crap at home (i.e. my laptop is crashing all of the time, accessing the guide on MythTV seg faults, the bathroom toilet isn't flushing, I have a flat tire on my bike, etc.).
7. I managed to get a bootable system using Linux From Scratch back in 2002. I would really like to do that again. I haven't decided how I am going to pull it off, but I am hoping to.
   

That is the current plan. I will be summarizing my MythTV stuff very soon. Mainly so I don't forget what I have done. I have a feeling I will be reinstalling/reconfiguring in the near future.