The Treehouse Blog

Since Oak has never had a DVD drive, and likely never will, I haven’t been able to play DVDs using MythTV. Unlike TV cards, MythTV has no means of sharing DVD drives between machines. Using GNBD (thanks to its inclusion in FC4) has given me the ability. GNBD works perfectly as advertised, however since the means of reading CSS keys from DVDs is apparently odd (ie, it generates errors), that part would not complete. For some reason, running mplayer on the machine with the DVD drive caches the data (apparently) allowing the remote mplayer to then play without difficulty. I demonstrated the process last night, and I scripted it tonight… ready to watch DVDs now! I had been going through Nemesis-decompression-scene withdrawal.

I’ve spent maybe 10 hours on this now (not all this week, mind you, but still). Getting WPA-PSK w/ TKIP certainly isn’t as easy as it should be, but that is probably entirely due to driver issues. Seems you can’t buy a great 802.11g card for Linux.

I had tried various versions of the Linux IPW2100 drivers, 1.1.0 most recently, and always ended up getting errors saying that the IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT ioctl was not available. This is a symptom of a driver that doesn’t have the WPA support, but lsmod clearly showed the TKIP and other encryption-related modules loaded. Google suggested using the load and unload scripts provided with the driver, and to check the initrd for an old driver that might be overriding the freshly-compiled one. modinfo confirmed that the new drivers were getting loaded… still no luck. That’s where I was for a long time, retrying every once in awhile to see if anything was happier.

As it turns out, there is a problem in the way the drivers are compiled as modules which can be fixed with this patch (local cache). Keep in mind that the post I’m referencing here is only two weeks old… so, I’m probably not the only one having this issue. I’m somewhat amazed (and very happy) that Google has indexed it that fast.

Now, technically, that was enough to fix my problems. However, I spent the next 45 minutes or so trying to figure out why my connection would reset several seconds after coming up… which turned out to be another instance of wpa_supplicant in the background screwing things up. Tip: run one wpa_supplicant at a time.

The Mid-Atlantic ACM Regionals are now over. Looks like our team isn’t going on this year (you can see the whole results here). My teammates were complaining that problem ambiguity was partially to blame, but I’m not sure how that would be, given that all teams had the same set of problems.

I have Oak and Cedar upgraded to FC3 as well, now. NFSv4 is feeling happier regarding permissions mappings, however the particular reason I avoided NFSv4 in the past seems to still be present… Gnumeric locks up on saving a file to an NFSv4 share. I’ve worked around this by mounting that particular share with NFSv3 and everthing else with v4. Evolution also is a lot faster in FC3, however it is also uglier. I’m not a big fan of the Mac-like folder interface that leaves out the lines between folders that I’m so fond of.

The gigE card arrived today. The kernel shipping with FC2 has broken drivers for it, but the updates take care of it. I was able to push about 15 MB/s out it to my switch (same file to two machines) which pegged the CPU on Oak. Upgrade in the works, but not sure to what.

I’ve pretty much given up on S3 ACPI suspend on my Thinkpad R40, despite getting a kernel compiled that mostly works after resume, this suspend mode seems to use way too much battery. I’ve got the swsusp stuff working tho, slow but effective.

Done with DS9, too.

So, instead of watching DS9 or making my laptop more usable, I spent last evening trying to do APRS in Linux. Linux has drivers for using your soundcard for doing AFSK1200, but they are hardware-dependent, requiring a plain SoundBlaster or Windows Sound System-compatible card. Since I don’t believe I have any of these anywhere at the moment, let alone in a usable or mobile form, I started looking for alternatives. Soundmodem is a user-mode sound card interface for Linux that can do various encodings and interfaces with the Linux AX.25 stack, or can behave as a TNC sitting on a pty. It seems to work really well (and has awesome configuration tools) but it also consumes 25% CPU on my 1.5GHz Pentium-M… which is way too much, I think. Multimon, which is written by the same guy, uses almost no CPU, but can’t do transmission or interfacing with other things, just provides text output of what it decodes. The oscope feature it has crashes my box badly if you try to close it… no clue why, but I’m teaching myself to always disable that option.

Doug and I were talking on Thursday about the slowness of the Linux boot process, and it seems some guy at IBM has already discribed the parallel service starting that we were theorizing. I’ll have to ask Ian if Gentoo has implemented anything like this yet.

I won a Netgear GA620 (1000BaseSX) card on eBay last night for <$10. If works out OK, I might need to get one or two more. It seems appropriate that I’ll have gigabit in my house before CTI does at Trindle Commons… Fiber cable looks pretty cheap on eBay too, but there’s more singlemode than multimode it seems.

…And Ship’s 24TB 1.2M$ SAN has been moved from the basement of a dining hall to the computer center. Monday we’re moving all of KLN’s Sun boxes in preparation of its installation.