European Wafaa

Strange thing happened earlier today on one of my 11.0 machines - PulseAudio decided it was no longer connected to any server and therefore I could get no sound other than system beeps

With thanks to Jigish Gohil I was able to return things to normality. Below are the steps I took to fix things, hopefully they will work for you too :

As root (either su - or sudo whichever floats your boat):
Get rid of PA's temp files rm -rf /tmp/pulse-*
Then kill any residual PA process killall -9 pulseaudio
Then restart the sound server rcalsasound restart

Then as the good ol' user start PA - pulseaudio&
When you start PA, the chances are you'll get some output similar to
W: core-util.c: setpriority(): Permission denied
E: pid.c: Daemon already running.
E: main.c: pa_pid_file_create() failed.

Don't Panic Captain Mannering This is quite normal You may now return to your listening pleasure.

This applies to anyone running the 2.6.25 kernel and above if you're not you may happily ignore - but if you plan on running 11.0 in the future take note.

Due to changes to the videobuf API the r5u870 driver fails to build. A new release is due very shortly which will address this issue, and It incorporates several changes:

Use constant naming of 'Disabled' for no powerline setting.
Added missing IOCTL query for Night Mode paramter. (thanks to TJ for these two)
No kernel log spew about ioctl.
Very limited support for 1812 and 1810 cameras - these may require a proper UVC device driver instead.
Updates to project README regarding change in infrastructure (bug tracker, mailing lists).

I'll have it packaged as soon as it is out.

My freebie elfin eeePC-701 arrived last week, and I went straight ahead with geekifying it. Problem was I never actually gave the bundled Xandros based distro a chance. So I dutifully restored the machine to it's factory state, and looked around.

My first impression is that the child friendly tabbed interface is quite nice, my big gripe with it is the fact that they chose to rename the applications. For instance they have an icon for "Web" which is actually FireFox and most applications suffer the same fate, the other thing that would have been good would have been to use a standard icon set - along the lines of Tango or Oxygen would have been much better than their home grown Anime cross. Also why not make a descision on what DE they want to use, it is a real mix of GNOME and KDE - not necessarily a bad thing but the version of GNOME looks butt ugly and old (I may be spoiled with the sexy openSUSE masterpiece ), they have Thunderbird installed as the "E-Mail" client yet they have Korganizer (and friends) installed as the "PIM", surely it would have been better to use Kmail? Wow, I really sound bitchy. I honestly do like it and it suits the mass market audience pretty well, my 4yr old son could easily manage his way round it.

I have installed openSUSE 10.3 on to the machine but in a dual-boot setup, keeping the bundled distro on the built in 4GB SSD and putting the glorious green god onto an 8GB SDHC card. Why have I kept the (Xan)dross installed? Simple - a fall back should I bork something and want to confirm my breakage, also helps with upgrading the BIOS and keeps my warranty intact I'll post my trials/tribulations/tears/triumphs shortly. I'm almost 100% happy with it so I'll look at putting 11.0 on it soon, my 16GB card is on route to me which will be the new mainstay card till the 32GB cards come down in price.

No that isn't a spelling mistake
!! Warning, long post ahead !!

So I've been using openSUSE 10.3 on my eeePC for a while now, and yesterday was the first time I took it with me to London to try out how portable and usable it was. The answer to the question is bugger me is it usable and portable!!

As I mentioned earlier I have a dual boot setup, I am tempted to change this in the near future but for now it stays. I'll try and set out the exact steps I took to get a usable openSUSE with GNOME install in a dual boot setup here. There is a page on the wiki about getting openSUSE on the eeePC, which I used pretty heavily, and I do regurgitate some of the steps mentioned. I would be super keen on hearing of other people's experiences, and also any tips/tricks. I am trying deperately to create a decent USB image via KIWI for 11.0, but keep stumbling :-/

First steps is to get openSUSE installed (yeah I know that it's obvious, the question is how). You have several options here - use an external USB CD/DVD drive, use a USB image (using the funky KIWI), or using a USB Memory Stick as a DVD drive. My first attempt at getting openSUSE on my eeePC was successful if not a bit clunky. I chose to use the USB image that is mentioned there. Once you download the tarball you need to extract it and then get the raw file onto the USB stick so that you can actually boot from it using dd:
1) Insert your memory stick
2)Unmount your memory stick, right-clicking and selecting "unmount" is fine
3)Put openSUSE onto the USB stick and make it bootable
dd if=/home/andrew/tmp/eeeSUSE-liveusb of=/dev/sdb bs=4096
You will of course have to change the if= (input file) parameters, and potentially the location for the of= (output file) which is your memory stick.


Continue reading "Fun With The Geeeko"

No this has nothing to do directly with Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl unless of course you wish to edit them

Thanks to prusnak who so kindly pointed out that my build of Geany were old, I have now corrected that (with his help). You can of course get Geany from the GNOME:Community repo or take the clever option and click

There is one item that the eeePC doesn't have by design - an optical drive. So this caused an issue for me as I wanted to get 11.0 running on the thing. I had heard (rightly or wrongly) that doing a live upgrade was not possible and not recommended. Well recommendations are just that, things you can ignore

!!!This is by no means a definitive guide as to how to do it, and I accept NO responsibility if it pops a cap in your machine!!!

So to get the goodness that is 11.0, I first added the new Zypper repo and then the Factory repos (you can change this to the official 11.0 ones ina week) in a disabled state for OSS and Non-OSS. I then removed any 10.3 repos (you can disable them instead if you prefer).

From a terminal I just ran zypper up -t package which then pulled in the new zypper and libzypp backend, it also removed all YaST packages. Once the new zypper was in place I then enabled the Factory repos by zypper mr -e $REPONAME and disabled the Zypper Backport repo with zypper mr -d $REPONAME to get the name of the repo just zypper lr. Before you upgrade all packages you need to upgrade rpm to take into account the new lzma compression zypper in rpm, if it tries to pull any deps they will fail - just take a note of them and install them after rpm is done. You may now happily run zypper dup to upgrade everything.

If you want YaST back (who wouldn't) do a search for it zypper se yast and then choose what you want zypper in $PACKAGE1 $PACKAGE2 etc..

Remember peeps, this is a definite YMMV

Alex announced earlier today that version 0.11.1 of the r5u870 webcam driver. It is currently building in the Build Service drivers:webcam repo. For those that are interested here is the Release Notes:

- Use constant naming of 'Disabled' for no powerline setting.
- Added missing IOCTL query for Night Mode paramter. (thanks to TJ for
these two)
- No kernel log spew about ioctl.
- Limited support for 1812 and 1841 cameras - these may require the use
of the 'uvcvideo' kernel module for communication, and r5u870 for
uploading of microcode. These apparently work correctly after a
warmboot.
- Project infrastructure has now been provided - for example, a bug
tracker and mailing lists.
- Resulting image on some VCC4 cameras appeared reversed. This was
because the camera is installed in reverse in the laptop. Enable
H-Flip by default only on the subset of models that have it installed
incorrectly.
- Support for building on late 2.6.25 kernels and upwards (tested on
2.6.26-rc5 prior to release).
- Fixed firmware for some Pavilion laptops.

Some known issues:

- 1803 webcam is unsupported (we have the firmware, however). This
should be implemented before the next release. (issue16)
- 1812 and 1841 webcams need to be properly sorted out. (issue1 and
issue3)
- If you're running webcam software, suspend, and resume with the
software still running, you may oops the device driver. (issue13)
- VIDIOCCAPTURE is not handled (issue5)

He also added a little piece which was quite good timing considering we were talking about Lord K-H's kernel talk at Google on Friday:

Now that this release is out, I'm also going to attempt to see if I can get this merged upstream with the V4L guys. Stay tuned for updates.

So what does that mean? Well in a nutshell, he's hoping to get the r5u870 accepted upstream into the kernel so you will be able to get things working without any additional kernel modules etc !!!