bitwalk

Hello World from my new iMac 24″

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:30:48 +0100

This is my first post from my new iMac 24". I'm totally in love with this wonderful machine. Below is a snapshot of the desktop.

Resumable VNC sessions in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:51:34 +0100

Ok, I've written about how I managed to get resumable vnc sessions working in feisty before, now I've upgraded to Gutsy Gibbon and ofcourse it stopped working. Apparently the fonts have moved on disc, so I needed to change my Xvnc.conf file to reflect this. The font parameter should look like this:


/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc

source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=122402&page=37

Truecrypt on Ubuntu 7.10

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 01:26:03 +0100

Found these clear instructions on how to get truecrypt running in Ubuntu 7.10. Worked like a charm!

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon now on my tx2xp

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 01:25:01 +0100

Now I just need to figure out how to grab a screenshot with this fancy desktop cube enabled.

Support for the Special Vaio buttons

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:52:49 +0100

There is a great site about linux on laptops and over there I found a guy that have been writing a guide for linux on TX3XP a laptop very similar to mine. But I think that is a bit old. Most of the things in his article is already working on my install of feisty. But while googling for the special vaio button drivers I found this interesting page where work are being put into enhancing this support. So I ran the acpidump tool and published the dump from my laptop in the named thread on ubuntuforums. If you have a vaio laptop you should do the same!

Experiences from running linux on Sony Vaio TX2XP

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:55:06 +0100

I've started a new category. It's about my experiences from running linux on my Sony Vaio TX2XP laptop. I'm currently writing this from said laptop and at the moment Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) is the distro of choice. I had to try a few times to get it to install, but it might have been due to a bad disc, dunno, but don't get worried just yet, except for that I'm pretty happy with the experience so far. Stay tuned for more news and I promise I'll post screenshots of interesting bits. On my first day I've managed to get the necesseties listed below out of the way.

Wifi
Turned off synaptics mouse tap
Turned off synaptics touch pad while writing
Adobe Reader
Java
Eclipse

Basic screen commands

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 17:24:44 +0100

To connect to a detached session (rtorrent for example):

screen -dr rtorrent

To detach from the actual session (rtorrent for example):

ctrl-a ctrl-d

more...

Always suspect a recent security update before anything else.

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:53:05 +0100

For some time I've had the problem I sometimes can't open .chm's. I just get a missing page message no matter what book I click in the table of contents. I've been puzzled about it, but I haven't really thought about what could be the problem. Today, when I realized none of chm's seemed to work, I decided to ask google about it. At this point I wasn't even surprised when it turned out that some of the recent security updates from Microsoft had removed the ability to browse these from a networked resource. Duh! In order to solve the problem just add this to your registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
"MaxAllowedZone"=dword:00000004

Lesson learned: Always suspect a recent security update, before anything else.

Resumable VNC sessions in Ubuntu feisty

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:15:33 +0100

Had some problems getting this guide to work, I just got a simple grey X screen, but from this excellent guide I found the new parameters '-extension XFIXES' to add to Xvnc configuration and that solved it for me!

Installing elfspe2 solved compile problems

Mon, 28 May 2007 23:46:07 +0100

I used to have problems compiling Geoff's spe samples. But now I'm suddenly able to compile them without errors. The only things I have installed since my last failed attempt is 'ed' and 'elfspe2'. Let's assume elfspe2 is the solution until proven otherwise. I found an interesting thread when browsing cell forums on ibm yesterday that suggested you'll have to install elfspe2 manually. So here's what I did:

wget http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/cellsimulator/sdk2.1/elfspe2-2.1.0-0.ppc.rpm
rpm -Ivh elfspe2-2.1.0-0.ppc.rpm

Configure Samba

Mon, 28 May 2007 22:12:47 +0100

In order to work effectively from a windows pc a samba share on the ps3 is very handy. First make sure samba is installed.

rpm -q smb-client

If not install samba.

yum -y install samba

When samba is installed edit the configuration file.

nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Change the following settings:

workgroup = WORKGROUPNAME
security = share
[tmp]
   comment = Temporary file space
   path = /tmp
   read only = no
   public = yes
[andreas]
   comment = andreas's home
   path = /home/andreas
   public = yes
   writable = yes

Start the samba server.

sudo /etc/init.d/smb start

Now you need to add a user, you'll be asked to provide a samba password for the user. Remember the user has to be a user on the machine.

smbpasswd -a username

After you've added a user you need to restart the server in order to reflect changes.

/etc/init.d/smb restart

At this time it's a good choice to make sure samba will be started every time you start your system. Add smb to both runlevel 3 and 5.

/sbin/chkconfig --level 35 smb on

Then you can verify it's on by issuing the follwing command.

/sbin/chkconfig --list smb

Enjoy!

Add a user

Mon, 28 May 2007 21:46:46 +0100

These simple commands adds a user that's able to su to root.

adduser username -g users
echo 'username ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers
passwd username

Fedora Core 6 on PS3 with Cell SDK 2.1

Thu, 17 May 2007 23:39:47 +0100

This is a new attempt to document my setup of Fedora Core 6 with Cell SDK 2.1. If you try to follow this guide and you find a problem. Please let me know.

Fedora 6 iso

I know, there are other guides out there, but I really want to use the latest addon from geoff. This guide assumes you'ge already performed a minimal fedora 6 install according to 'How To Enable Your Distro' from the addon disc docs. Now, the first thing I do after logging in as root is insert the fedora 6 dvd and issue the following commands:

mount /mnt/cdrom
cd /mnt/cdrom/Fedora/RPMS
rpm -Uvh dhclient*
cd /
dhclient

At this point we should have internet access (wired) so let's install and start open-ssh server:

yum install openssh-server
service sshd start

From this point I continue work from a windows pc with cygwin and the following command:

ssh root@192.168.0.131 <- replace with the IP you got from dhclient command earlier

At this point I want to get the CellSDK21.iso to the ps3 box. This is a download that requires registration on the IBM site so I haven't found a smooth way to download this from the linux terminal. Instead I download it from my windows box and put it on my WD Passport 120 usb drive and then connect that to my ps3 like so:

mkdir -p /mnt/wd120
mount -t vfat /dev/sdf1 /mnt/wd120
cp /mnt/wd120/ps3linux/ibm/sdk/CellSDK21.iso /home/root

In order to get to the cellsdk installscript we need to mount the sdk iso:

mkdir -p /mnt/cellsdk
mount -o loop CellSDK21.iso /mnt/cellsdk

At this point you check what dependencies are left to install from the sdk's point of view:

cd /mnt/cellsdk/software
./cellsdk depend

This will give you a list of all missing packages and since IBM knows you and I are lazy it even suggests the command to install them all:

yum install freeglut freeglut-devel libXmu-devel lib Xext-devel gcc make rsync 
flex byacc netpbm netpbm-devel mesa-libGLU-devel libX 11-devel 
numactl numactl-devel tk-8.4.*

When I run the depend command at this point the script find all it's dependencies and instead it is missing some SDK files and suggest to download them to /tmp/cellsdk-2.1 and again as we are very lazy this question has no other answer than yes:

Would you like to attempt automatically downloading these files to /tmp/cellsdk-
2.1? (y/n):y

When all downloads are complete, I get a message saying that all dependencies are in order. So I issue the install command:

./cellsdk install --nosim

After everything is installed I'm greeted by this message:

 Cell SDK Install complete.

 Please read the README.txt file in the root directory of the ISO image.

before building the samples you need to do a few more things. First I've had problems with the version of glibc that comes with vanilla Fedora Core 6. So start by issuing the following to upgrade glibc: At this point when trying to install

yum -y update glibc
yum -y install glibc-devel

If you try to build the samples at this point, it is likely that your're missing one more thing.

yum -y install ed

You should now be ready to build the samples by executing './cellsdk build [--gcc|--xlc]'. If you get an error about GL issue the following command and try again.

yum -y install mesa-libGL-devel

Now you can also try to build the vsync-sample that comes with the addon disc:

cd /usr/share/doc/vsync-sample-1.0.2
make

Don't run this last sample though if you aren't physically connected to the screen.

Japanese Xbox 360 gamertag

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 13:58:28 +0100

Today I created myself a japanese gamertag using this guide. No fun at all though. The only thing I could find being any different was that there was a few japanese trailers available. But I found no XBLA games I haven't seen before which was the original reason I went out and tried this.

Xubuntu installed on PS3!

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 22:00:45 +0100

This is the first post I write on my PS3 and I'm running Firefox on Xubuntu. This is the third distribution I try and if anything doesn't go wrong soon, I think I'll stick with this, as this is by far the best yet. I followed this guide and picked Xubuntu desktop as the PS3 doesn't have much RAM available. This snapshot of available memory was taken with a terminal, gftp, firefox and the gimp running. It's responsive and fast as long as memory is available, but unfortunately most applications use a lot of memory these days.