coyote's lair

Howto: Remote SSH tunnelling on Ubuntu

2011-11-26T20:50:00.000-08:00

On the server, install openssh-server

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

if you have firewall on the server, open port 22

if you want to access the server outside the router, port forward port 22 to the server's ip address also.

From the client,

ssh -Y remotemachine -l

commands issued will be started in the remote machines

eg.

nautilus

Setting up network printer in ubuntu 11.10

2011-11-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

Oddly, the usual simple gnome printer setup application is missing from Ubuntu 11.10's interface.

One can still go to terminal, type

system-config-printer

My printer is connected to the Asus RT-N16 router & the configuration to enter is as follow, where 192.168.0.1 is the router's ip address.

ATI linux drivers, room for improvement still...

2011-04-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

Discovered another bug on ATI graphic chip linux driver.

Some of you may have noticed, if you install 32bits ubuntu 10.10 with 4G ram, it will automatically use the PAE kernel, which is a patch to the 32bits kernel to address all of the 4G ram. Sweet you may say.

Things took for a downward spin for my ATI chipset pc. After the ubuntu 10.10 install with 2 sticks of 2G ram, naturally the PAE kernel is in placed. My 2D desktop started giving lots of artifacts which made me ran to the shop couple times to change the board & ram thinking it's either the Biostar A880G+ board or the Kingston ram are having compatibility issue. 2 sticks of 2G ram with onboard graphic showing artifact, that is nothing new, so I thought. Unfortunately, new board & rams did not solve the problem. So I lived with the problem by using the 3D desktop, which miraculously has no artifact problem. Weird. And that was with the open source ati driver.

Lately, I tried to enable hardware accelerated HD video playback with the proprietary ATI driver & now the 'hardware accelerated' full HD playback is displayed in an even bigger mess... dropped frames, artifacts, messed up colors, tearing... I tried ATI driver version 11-1, 11-2 & 11-3 & no matter what I do, the problem persisted.

Then it daunts on me that the PAE kernel was at work. So, I reinstall ubuntu with 2G of ram alone & sure enough it installed the non-PAE kernel. What do you know, all the artifact, discoloration are gone... other problems like non-optimized hardware accelerated HD playback & high cpu utilization persisted. But those are, again nothing new for the poorly written ATI linux drivers.

So, could it be linux PAE kernel's problem, one ask? Not at all. I checked my other pc with 4G ram running the same version of PAE kernel, the 2D desktop, 3D desktop, hardware accelerated HD playback are all silky smooth, cpu utilization is low & stable. I even finished most of the Starcraft2 campaigns( except the final one ) on the onboard graphic chip, an it did all that flawlessly in linux with the PAE kernel & with 2 sticks of 2G ram.

It's nvidia 8300 onboard graphic chip. Kudos to nVidia.

Most people already knew ATI's windows drivers are a pain to install/remove compared to nVidia. I just have to say, ATI's linux drivers are even more buggy & much room for improvement.

A lesson to learn for the linux community. nVidia chipset is more linux friendly, always.

Bad news though, nvidia has since dropped out of the onboard graphic chipset race for DIY motherboard business. Intel won't let them in on their motherboard chipset business from i3, i5 & i7 series onward, except the OEM laptop & netbook segment. ATI won't let them in on their motherboard chipset business for obvious reason.

So, now the linux community is left with the buggy ATI graphic chips. Let's hope ATI will improve their linux support & give a better linux experience with their their graphic chips.

Let's also hope, Intel delivers the graphic drivers for their shinny & new Sandy Bridge chips soon. Words has it that, graphic support is only available from ubuntu 11.04 onwards. Which is another set back for the linux community.

Hardware Accelerated HD Video playback with ATI graphic card - Part 2

2010-11-07T08:35:00.000-08:00

To install mplayer

1 cd /usr/src
2 wget http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/mplayer-vaapi/mplayer-vaapi-latest.tar.bz2
3 tar xvfj mplayer-vaapi-latest.tar.bz2
4 cd mplayer-vaapi-20091106
5 aptitude build-dep mplayer
6 ./checkout-patch-build.sh
7 cd mplayer-vaapi
8 make install
9 ldconfig

To install smplayer

1 cd /usr/src
2 wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/smplayer/smplayer-0.6.8.tar.bz2
3 tar xvfj smplayer-0.6.8.tar.bz2
4 cd smplayer-0.6.8
5 aptitude install qt4-qmake ibqt4-dev
6 make
7 sudo make install
8 ldconfig

Configure smplayer following this link

http://www.loggn.de/ubuntu-mplayer-inkl-smplayer-mit-vaapi-unterstutzung/

Here is the playback of a HD video snippet using ATI HD 4250 onboard graphic & a Phenom II 3.2GHz unlocked Quadcore. Notice the high cpu speed scaled to full 3.2GHz often & the relatively higher cpu utilization % in the 30~42% max on the system monitor tab.

Here is the playback of the same video snippet using nVidia onboard 9300 graphic chip & Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz. Notice the cpu never really need to scale up to full 2.8GHz, mostly stayed low at a mere 1.6GHz & the cpu utilization is always in the low 20~30% & stable.

While you cannot see the video playback because video overlay is not captured by screen recording, playback were smooth in both cases.

This serve to demonstrate how nVidia's vdpau hardware acceleration is much matured, well implemented & superior in linux than ATI's vaapi. Nevertheless, it is a big step forward for ATI's to have hardware accelerated HD video playback in Ubuntu 10.10. Things should get better in future.

Hardware Accelerated HD Video playback with ATI graphic card

2010-10-27T08:12:00.000-07:00

Hardware accelerated HD Video playback has been around for a long time in Windows OS. Previously, PC & laptop with slow processors were too slow to playback 1080P Full HD videos just by the slow processors in them. With graphic card accelerated HD decoding, all the PC & laptops with slow processors are suddenly empowered to playback 1080P Full HD Video. This is especially helpful in laptops with slow processors to extend battery life, while the onboard ATI/nVidia graphic chip are powerful enough to decode Full HD video with ease.

nVidia has to be commented for it's collaboration with the linux community & enabled hardware accelerated HD video playback with their integrated graphic chip or discrete graphic card. This is done through VDPAU & can be enabled by installing vdpau plugin for mplayer.

ATI however, has only recently enabled hardware accelerated playback via VAAPI support. And implementation in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick still requires some tinkering with libraries and etc.

Here is how to enable VAAPI in XBMC media player for ATI graphic card/chips in Ubuntu 10.10.

ATI proprietary driver flgrx must be installed & activated via 'Additional Hardware drivers' under System tab in Ubuntu 10.10

Obtain latest libva files from

http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/libva/pkgs/i386/

libva1_0.31.1-1+sds4_i386.deb
libva1-dbg_0.31.1-1+sds4_i386.deb
libva1-dev_0.31.1-1+sds4_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Add xbmc development ppa from

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc-svn/ppa lucid

(lucid is used here because the corresponding maverick xbmc ppa is not ready)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get build-essential
sudo apt-get build-dep xbmc

sudo apt-get install -f
svn co https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk/ xbmc
cd xbmc
./bootstrap
./configure
make
sudo make install

sudo mv /usr/bin/xbmc /usr/bin/xbmc.bak
sudo mv /usr/bin/xbmc-standalone /usr/bin/xbmc-standalone.bak
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/xbmc /usr/bin/xbmc
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/xbmc-standalone /usr/bin/xbmc-standalone
sudo reboot

Now when you reboot xbmc should have VAAPI option under video playback.

On my AMD test rig running a PhenomII X2 555 unlocked to quad core 3.2GHz with integrated ATI 4250 graphic chip onboard, a snippet of 1080P Avatar was playback at 40~60% cpu utilisation without hardware acceleration in VLC & MPlayer. Cpu utilisation drops all the way below 20% when the same video clip was playback with Vaapi enabled XMBC.

( implementation of vaapi in mplayer & vlc to be further explored ... )

Buy two & get two free!

2010-10-12T07:08:00.000-07:00

Buy two & get two free! Sounds too good to be true? Read on.

Wafer manufacturing process in microprocessor production is never perfect. While manufacturers prints a 4 cores cpu chip on to the silicon, some of the cpu cores can sometimes ended up malfunction or dead at the end of the manufacturing process. Instead of throwing away the chip with the remaining 2~3 cpu cores functioning perfectly well, manufacturer can disabled the malfunctioned cores & 'marked' the chip as a dual-cores or tri-cores cpu & sell them as it is. With such practice, it makes sense for cpu manufacturers to print more of the chips in 4 cores & test to 'bin-out' the chip into dual-cores, tri-cores or quad-cores chip, depending how well the silicon is yielding.

There were possibility also, in a situation when the yield is exceedingly good, a lot of the chips had all 4 cores fully functioning but the demand/order for dual-cores chip outstripped that of the quad-cores chip, manufacturers 'marked' some of the chips with 4-cores fully functioning as a 2 cores chips & sell as it is.

One of the chip I bought last week, an AMD dual-core PhenomII X2 555, may well fall into such category. It is a 4-cores chip that may well have 2 of the cores not meeting the stringent functional testing specification of AMD, and had two of the cores 'disabled' & being sold as a dual-core chip. Special motherboards like the BioStar A880G+ I bought, came with an 'ACC' option to unlock the disabled cpu cores. And viola! I have a chip with all 4 cpu cores fully unlocked at a flip of a switch on the motherboard bios. More extensive stress testing is definitely needed to know the 4 cpu cores are really fully functioning well. A simple test run of a HD video playback without gpu acceleration however, showed the 4 cores taking turn, 'speed-stepping' between 800Mhz to 3.2Ghz decoding & playing back the HD video. There were also no noticeable increase in temperature of the chip, hovering around 41 degree Celsius, same as when it was running with just 2 cores activated.

The chip I have is labelled 'Black edition' reflecting probably a die from a good yielding wafer that can either scale high gigaherz in speed or meeting the stringent testing specifications well. Of course, there is no guarantee that any chip, whether 'Black edition' or not, can successfully have the hidden cpu cores unlocked. Also, I cannot vouch for the reliability & functional aspects of such unlocked cpu cores. While there were many cases of successful stories of folks unlocking the cores & running it well without problems, it is equally not uncommon to hear folks have unlocked the hidden cores & found the system became unstable or not functional at all, most just flip the switch back & run it as dual-cores chip as it was originally intended.

The chip manufacturers definitely marked the chip as dual-core for a good reason. We may never know why. And if you don't try, you'll never know why.

So, here we have, a too good to be true, 'Buy two get two free' case, depending on how lucky you are.

Here, you see the chip I have, with 4 cpu cores in action, running on Ubuntu linux.

Here is a shot of the Black edition, AMD Phenom II X2 555 cpu chip, that had the 4 cores unlocked successfully.

Here is a shot of the BioStar A880G+ motherboard that made the unlocking trick possible.

Disclaimer: The writer shall not be liable to any damage to your computers by following the guide above. Try at your own risk.

VPN Server Implementation & Illustration in ubuntu 10.04 LTS

2010-09-12T08:07:00.000-07:00

Been managing a remote ubuntu server for a long time using VNC. To further enhance security measures, I have ventured into VPN implementation.

VPN Server implementation:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server pptpd

pptpd is Microsoft Point to point Tunneling Protocol, chosen as such to maintain compatibility with both linux & Microsoft windows clients.

Reboot server.

sudo gedit /etc/pptpd.conf

add the following two lines to end of pptdp.conf

localip 192.168.0.234-238,192.168.0.245
remoteip 192.168.1.234-238,192.168.1.245

Above specify corresponding local & remote ip for the VPN connection.

sudo gedit /etc/ppp/pptpd-options

change the host name if you wish, default is pptpd.

sudo gedit /etc/ppp/chap-secrets

specify the user name, server, password & ip addresses allowed for connection, * for no ip address restriction.

eg.
# client server secret IP addresses
username pptpd password *

To enable ip-masquerading

sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

add the followings above 'exit 0'

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

To secure SSH server against brute force attack.
add the followings above 'exit 0' also.

iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name SSH
iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 8 --rttl --name SSH -j DROP

Do check which ethernet adapter you are using for connection

ifconfig

Mine uses eth1 & I have to change all entries of eth0 to eth1 in /etc/rc.local

sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

uncomment the line "net.ipv4.ip_forward=1"

Reboot server.

Router configuration:

To enable VPN pass-through on your router, do the followings

forward 1723 TCP port to your VPN server's ip address,
on some router, it is simply enabling 'pptp',
on some Dlink router, protocol is TCP & set to 6, with 1723 TCP port.

forward GRE to your VPN server's ip address,
on some Dlink router, protocol is Other & set to 4, with port field greyed out.

enable 'PPTP' & 'IPsec'.

VPN Client implementation:

On ubuntu 10.04 LTS, network-manager-pptp is needed & installed by default.

if it is not install, type in terminal:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp

Left click on network-manager, VPN connections & select configure VPN

Enter connection name, gateway, username, password

Gateway can be local ip address of your server if you are connecting within same subnet.

Gateway can be your dynamic dns hostname like myvpnserver.dyndns.org, assuming you are using dyndns's service to track your dynamic ip(not covered in this article).

Select 'Advanced', check 'Use Point-to-Point Encryption (MPPE)'

Once setup correctly. Select network manager & your vpn connection name to connect to the server.

If everything is setup correctly, you will see the connection established.

ifconfig should give result as follow:

ppp0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
inet addr:192.168.1.234 P-t-P:192.168.0.234 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1400 Metric:1
RX packets:20 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:32 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
RX bytes:1251 (1.2 KB) TX bytes:1778 (1.7 KB)

Note: 192.168.0.234 will be the server ip address used in subsequent client connections examples.

On Windows XP client, open network connections & select 'make new connection', 'connect to work place' & 'VPN connection'. Enter details as above & you should be connected to the server in no time.

Testing the VPN connection:

Assuming you have setup NFS server, VNC server(remote desktop) & Samba(windows share in linux) in the ubuntu server correctly(again, not covered in this article). See examples as follow:

1. VNC:

On ubuntu client pc, open 'Application', 'Internet', 'Terminal Server Client', enter the ip address of the server, select VNC protocol & click 'connect'.

In-secured connections =

ip address = 192.168.0.8

(assuming my VNC server is on 192.168.0.8 in the same subnet)

Secured connections =

ip address = 192.168.0.234

2. Windows File Sharing

On Windows client pc

Open 'My Computer', 'Tools' & select map network drive:

Similarly,
In-secured connection =

\\192.168.0.8\250g hdd or
\\callisto550\250g hdd

Secured connection =

\\192.168.0.234\250g hdd

On Ubuntu client pc using Samba

Open 'Places', 'Connect to server' & select 'Windows Share'

In-secured connection =

Server = 192.168.0.8

Secured connection =

Server = 192.168.0.234

3. NFS:

In-secured connections =

Open 'terminal', type:

sudo mount 192.168.0.8:/vpnserver/sharedfolder /clientpc/localmountpoint

(assuming my NFS server is on 192.168.0.8 in the same subnet)

(replace appropriate shared folders in your server & mount point in your client pc accordingly.)

Secured connections =

Open 'terminal', type:

sudo mount 192.168.0.234:/vpnserver/sharedfolder /clientpc/localmountpoint

One common mistake in nfs implementation is in the /etc/exports configuration

To allow access of share folder to clients within the same subnet, entry in /etc/exports should be

/tmp/sharedfolder 192.168.0.1/24 (ro,async)

To allow access of share folder to remote clients via VPN, the client pc's ip address
should be 192.168.1.234, as per example above. So, one need to modify the entry to allow access by clients in 192.168.1.1 subnet as follow

/tmp/sharedfolder 192.168.1.1/24 (ro,async)

To illustrate the encryption taking place, same files were transfered from NFS server to the Client PC using both the 'Secured VPN connection' & the 'In-secured connection' over my gigabit network.

In-secured file transfer = ~55MByte/s
Secured VPN file transfers = ~9MByte/s

So, the encryption process reduced the throughput to slightly less than one fifth of the In-secured file transfer. Of course, there is little motivation to have encrypted file transfer within a home or small office. Above example is just to illustrate encryption is actually taking place.

VPN is to be deployed for remote users to be connected to the home network as if he is locally connected. Under such implementation, the bottleneck is more likely the internet bandwidth & ping at both end of the server & client. I transferred a file from my VNC server in Singapore with a 3Mbps cable network to a client PC 550km away in Malaysia with a 1Mbps ADSL network & net a 56KByte/s throughput.

Have fun with VPN.

Linux Friendly Auto Focus Webcam - Prolink PCC8020A

2010-09-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

Tested with ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the Prolink PCC8020A works right out of the box, with auto focus functions & resolution at 1280x1024. Image quality is significantly better than it's predecessor PCC5020A, which also works right out of the box, but image quality is worse in linux compared to windows. Prolink PCC800A is highly recommended for linux users.

Defeating the final boss in Final Fantasy X

2009-10-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

I know FFX is kinda old, coming to 4 years now. Oh well, I just started couple weeks back.

And finally, after some levelling up & customisation on the sphere grid, defeated Braska's Final Aeon without much problem, that is the last boss of the game.

Basically, teleported Tidus to end of Auron's sphere grid & given him many strength +4 so that he can do 9999 damages per hit also. Characters were armed with stone proof or stone wards to protect against Jetch's beam. Tidus casting hastega to speed up everyone's attacks. Auron & Tidus on overdrives. No chance to even unleash more funky stuffs like Yuna's Holy magic or Lulu's double casting flare or summoning Overdrive Aeons like Anima & Magus Sisters. May have a chance to use it on Omega weapons later though.

Enjoy the video.
[YOUTUBE][/YOUTUBE]

Linux Friendly Webcam Prolink PCC 5020

2008-09-07T00:34:00.000-07:00

As a long time linux user, I know from personal experience that, it is difficult to find a webcam that works with linux. Nevermind about the french guy who created many linux drivers for many cheap webcams, but finding one that matches his drivers is like finding a needle in a haystack, no less.

http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html

The fact that I chance upon this Prolink PCC 5020 webcam during the PC show 2008 & surprised to find it working relatively easily in linux. Here you go..

Although I got it for S$25 from the PC show, cheapest I found in Singapore's Sim Lim Square is S$42 from Laser. I got another piece of this cam from a PC shop in Ipoh, Malaysia for RM$60, which is around S$25. KL LauYatt should have this for around the same price, if not cheaper.

From Skype in linux, I see this as "Vega USB 2.0" webcam. It is enabled by the linux kernel with ubuntu 8.04 or Fedora 9. Even the onboard mic will be enabled as Vega USB 2.0 mic & can be used in Skype.

So, if you need a linux friendly webcam, this is it. I feels the resolution is slightly worse than when it's under windows... not sure if there is anything I can tweak though... to make it better. Overall, it's a sure fire in linux with acceptable image quality.

Just doing my part for community service.

Cracking Singnet issued Thomson ST536V6 modem to work in M'sia

2008-08-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

Gotten a second hand Singtel issued Thomson ST536V6 modem from the local forum for S$20. Purpose is act as backup for my mum's ADSL connection in M'sia. M'sian generally stays in terrace houses which has poorer lightning protection on the phone line. So, burning of telephone wires or modem by lightning stike happen to my mum's home once every couple of years. Telephone line surge-protector helps. Getting a cheap second hand modem sounds like a good idea also.

However, I was immediately met with problem that the modem came with a customed firmware from Singapore Singnet & the settings cannot be changed the 'usual way'.

Here is how I flashed it with the "international 7.4.3.2" version of firmware such that one can change the VPI & VCI settings to 0 & 35 for use in Malaysia.

My sources of information are from the threads/sites below:

http://simontay.blogspot.com/2007/11/thomson-speedtouch-585v6-modem-woes.html

http://mirror.opensourcehub.com/pub/speedtouch/utilities/UpgradeWiz/v4.4.2.1/

http://www.speedtouchforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=1089#8355

http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=1619875

http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=2025432&highlight=st536v6+firmware

http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=1511654&highlight=st536v6+firmware

After the successful firmware upgrade,

The default gateway address changed from 192.168.1.254 to 10.0.0.138.

I can set the VPI/VCI to Malaysia's 0.35. Or on some other modem, it's 0 & 35 respectively. Of course, I can't test it here right now when I'm in Singapore, but I assumed things will be easy from now, when I can change all the settings on the modem.

Singnet's firmware served to
1. Make things simpler for people using Singnet with 1~2 computers.
2. Make things difficult for people to use it as 'bridge mode'. The need to burn a 'residential
cd is ridiculous & make things unnecessarily complicated.
3, Make things complicated for people trying to configure it for use in other countries.
The need to burn a 'residential cd' to change VPI/VCI is again ridiculous.
4, Setting the administrator password with the 'residential cd' is also too complicated.
The default 'user' without password does not confirm with what the modem's manual says & took me so long to figure out.

Let's hope the international firmware will make all things simple for this modem.

Last but no least, the administrator's account name & password is case sensitive.
The user name is actually 'Administrator' & NOT 'administrator'. Again, took me a while to figure that out.

Side note:

1. The sole purpose of the 'residential cd' is to change the modem settings with the ISP specific firmware, where many settings are intentionally omitted to avoid tempering. The cd works only in windows where some of the autostart.inf files are automatically loaded. Linux did not detect those files at all & so the cd does not work in linux.

2. Since the 'residential cd' is 'windows only', I ran the firmware upgrade software in windows also. I did not test whether it will work in linux via vmware or wine. Do so at your own risk.

First purchase from US online store

2008-07-12T06:54:00.000-07:00

First of all, all those advertisements from ISP saying a broadband internet connection will let you purchase from any online stores all over the world, forget about all those. It's just not true.

To purchase from an online US store, one needs

1, a US shipping address, because most us stores simply won't ship overseas &
2, a US issued credit card, because most us stores does not accept overseas credit card.

After searching high & low for the low power AMD 4050e around the region without success. The only last resort I have is to shop online from US.

Solution is to subscribe to VPost from Singapore Post Office, where it will issue you a shipping address in US. Next is to search for a US online vendor which will accept overseas credit card. In this case, PC Universe @ Amazon is the selected vendor. So, the purchase is via PC Unverse @ Amazon & paid with a Singapore issued credit but shipment is to a a US addressed issued to me, by VPost USA.

Order processed by Amazon on Jun 6, 08 & the merchandise arrived in Singapore on Jun 20, exactly 2 weeks later, after much hassles.

And the two 45 watts ultra low power AMD X2 4050e cpu are set to replaced two of their older siblings, the 65 watts low power AMD X2 3600+ cpu.

In case, the merchandise is only available from a US store that only accepts US issued credit card, the purchase can only be made via VPost Concierge service. User need to provide the exact url address of the US store pointing to the merchandise. The concierge service staff in US will place the order for you & arrange for shipment to delivery to their US addresses. The concierge service will accept the goods in US on client behalf & subsequently ship it to the client Singapore address. The price to pay for the concierge service is S$20 plus 5% of the price of the mechandise .

Cracking ubuntu 8.04 to work with nVidia 8200 chipset motherboard

2008-06-08T01:39:00.000-07:00

Upgraded my 2 years old nVidia 6150 motherboard to the new nVidia 8200 motherboard recently.

Using the latest ubuntu 8.04 installation, Hardy Heron's 2.6.24 kernel simply don't work with the new chipset. The basic SATA2 controller, onboard LAN & the onboard 8200 3D chip are all not supported under the 2.6.24 kernel. Although ubuntu 8.04 can be installed with a all_generic_ide option, performance should be degraded substantially & also, no amount of tweaking with the settings can get the onboard LAN & onboard 8200 3D chips to works

The nice surprise is that, Fedora 9's 2.6.25.5 kernel works flawlessly with the new 8200 chispet. SATA2 controller & onboard LAN. The onboard 8200 3D chip requires the latest nVidia 173.14.5 to work though.

It was understood that nvidia 173.14.5 driver will support the 8200 3D chip but will not work with the 2.6.24 kernel in ubuntu 8.04.

So, here is my attempt to install customer kernel in uBuntu to work with my latest motherboard acquisition.

Following the guide from

http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_ubuntu

I've compiled & installed the 2.6.25 kernel in ubuntu.

And with the new kernel , one can finally remove the 'all_generic_ide' option from the kernel option to take advantage of the new SATA2 controller. Edit the grub boot options as follow:

sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

And to install the latest nVidia 173.14.5 driver, one need to boot to native console to install.

In Fedora, one will edit /etc/inittab to change run level from 5 to 3 to boot to native console.

In ubuntu however, one needs to issue

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

then do

sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.05-pkg1.run

to install the latest nVidia driver.

Upon reboot. Viola, finally have the nVidia driver working with the 2.6.25 kernel.

Update Jun 10, 2008,

It seemed my custom-compiled kernel has missed out some sound modules & ends up the onboard sound is disabled in ubuntu.

According to the Master Kernel Thread at [url]http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=311158[/url]

Troubleshooting:

--------------------------------------------------------------
Q. My High Definition sound (Azalia) does not work with the new kernel!:

A. This took me a long time to figure out because I didn't have sound either. You have to enable the Intel HD (Azalia) module in Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, even if it isn't Intel.

--------------------------------------------------------------

So, after recompiling the kernel enabling Device Driver, Sound, PCI Device, Intel HD Audio option, the sound is ok & the OS is perfect now for my nVidia 8200 chipset motherboard.

Fixing Fedora 8 wireless network problems

2007-11-18T03:20:00.000-08:00

Fixing Fedora 8 wireless network problems

Fedora 8's wireless is really disappointing.

So far, bugs findings include

1. wpa_supplicant is buggy & cannot connect.
2. default ath_5k driver conflicts with madwifi driver from livna
3. network manager is also buggy.

I have a DLink G520 using the atheros chipset. Here is how I managed to get it working.
Note: This method will give you a fixed ip 192.168.0.17(or dhcp ip if you like) & the startup
files will connect you to your preferred wireless network without any manual intervention by users
like using network manager, which does not work anyway.

1. Blacklist ath_5k in /etc/modprobe.conf & /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.
2. Installed kmod-madwifi from livna
3. disabled network manager as it will interfere with the configuration below.
4. updated wpa_supplicant

Tricky steps:

5. Previous version of Fedora before 8, atheros chipset is recognized as ath0. In
Fedora 8, this does not work. Atheros chispet is recognized as wlan0. So, I have
changed all previous reference to ath0 to wlan0.
6. I removed the ath_5k driver from kernel as some suggested. Not sure if this is
absolutely necessary though.
7. At /etc/rc5.d, there is this file SXXwpa_supplicant. My case, XX=12. Change it to a bigger
no. I changed it to 98. Reason being, wpa_supplicant was started before other services &
so it does not work. S98wpa_supplicant makes wpa_supplicant starts after most other services.
8. 4 files to be modified/created

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0
/etc/dhclient-wlan0.conf
/etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant
/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

My configuration files are as follow:

# /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0
# Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC
DEVICE=wlan0
ESSID=fedoragroup
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
PEERDNS=yes
PERSISTENT_DHCLIENT=Y
DHCLIENTARGS=-nw
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
DHCP_HOSTNAME=
IPADDR=192.168.0.17
DOMAIN=
TYPE=Wireless
USERCTL=yes
IPV6INIT=no
CHANNEL=6
MODE=Master
RATE=Auto
GATEWAY=192.168.0.1
------------------------------------------------------------

# /etc/dhclient-wlan0.conf
interface "wlan0" {
# Don't bother with NTP over a radio link
request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, routers, domain-name, domain-name-servers, host-name;
}
-------------------------------------------------------------

# /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant
INTERFACES="-iwlan0"
DRIVERS="-Dmadwifi"
# old config is INTERFACES="-iath0"
# old config is DRIVERS="-Dmadwifi"

-------------------------------------------------------------
# /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
# ctrl_interface_group=wheel
network={
ssid="fedoragroup"
scan_ssid=1
#psk="mypasskey"
psk=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
}

USB memory can't mount on kernel 2.6.22.1-27.fc7 & above

2007-07-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

It is sad that yet another critical bug is found in Fedora 7. The symptom is simply, some USBthumbdrive or USB harddisks are not automatically detected & mounted since kernel 2.6.22.1-27.fc7.

The bug is documented here

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=249282

And the solution as suggested on comment#25 works.

In /etc/udev/rules.d/05-udev-early.rules

Commenting out the line below does not work & it also disabled the sound card.


ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="?*", ENV{MODALIAS}=="?*", RUN+="modprobe
$env{MODALIAS}", GOTO="skip_wait"

Moving the line

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi", WAIT_FOR_SYSFS="ioerr_cnt"

to before

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="?*", ENV{MODALIAS}=="?*", RUN+="modprobe
$env{MODALIAS}", GOTO="skip_wait"

solved the problem.

Fedora 7 in operation

2007-06-03T05:23:00.000-07:00

Fedora 7 was released May 31 US time, that means Jun 1 at this part of earth. Downloaded & installed it & here is my checklist on what works & what not.

1. nVidia proprietary driver from freshrpms does not work. nVidia proprietary driver from livna works flawlessly though.

yum install kmod-nvidia

2. java

follow instructions from

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f7.html

java plugin for firefox 2.0 does not work. Updating firefox to 2.0.0.4 fixed that.

3. gaim renamed to Pidgin & works.

4. skype for fedora core 5 works fine in fedora 7

5. mplayer from freshrpms works.
(my mplayer essential codec from 20061022 does not play real media, copying windows-essential codec from 20060611 to /usr/lib/win32 fixed that.)

6. Realplayer works following installation instructions from

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f7.html

7. Citrix ICA client works

Download Citrix ICAClient-10.0-2.i386.rpm from

http://www.citrix.com/site/SS/downloads/downloads.asp?dID=2755

8. Azureus(fedora distro) works

9. DVD media with Chinese characters in label/filesnames ejects when eject button on DVD is pressed. (Hell, it does not work in FC6, I had to do a right-click & eject from the desktop to
eject a DVD)

10. SCIM installed by default, to be activated by

System --> Preferences --> Personal --> Input Method

change to 'use custome input method SCIM'

Relogin needed to have the option activated.

11. "Invisible mouse pointer" bug from nVidia driver for 6150 onboard VGA card

This is not a new problem. It was first discovered in Aug 2006 with FC5. nVidia linux driver for 6150 chipset somehow repeat this problem again in FC7. The following was excerpt from my blog in Aug 2006 on solving this very same problem. And it still works today.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From time to time, I will encounter a strange issue at X, where the mouse pointer becomes invisible. The mouse is obviously still working & it's movement can still be seen when it moves over menu or items on the desktop. It's just invisible.

A search on the net found this bug 182517 filed at redhat. The problem traced back to the nVidia driver. The problem is still unsolved even with nVidia graphic driver release 1.0-8762.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=182517

The problem can be patched by adding

Option "HWCursor" "off"

to the VGA driver section at /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Hopefully, it will be resolved in the next nVidia driver release.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My xorg.conf looks like this now:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"
Option "HWCursor" "off"

12. Recording from mic for use with Skype in Linux

(Excerpt from my blog dated December 2006)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After many months of full conversion to linux. I was disappointed yet again with a terrible bug in alsa mixer.

Firstly, I noticed that Skype cannot capture any sound from my mic, despite I can hear my own voice from the mic very clearly.

The first & most down to earth solution was run the followings at command promt:

a. alsamixer
(select capture by pressing 'tab')
(move to mic and press 'space bar' to select capture from mic)
b. for Sound blaster live users, you need to make sure 'AC97' tab volume is not zero.
(move to AC97 & push up-arrove to raise volume close to 90%)
c. /usr/sbin/alsactl store

Now, the method above surely works but it posted another problem. The setting of alsamixer is always reset upon every reboot & it just never remember to 'record from mic'.

Found the methods from the sites below but they just don't work somehow.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=206782
http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=66544

After all attempts to set alsamixer settings permanently failed, my friend suggested to create a simple script to set the mixer settings to capture from the mic.

Finally it's done as follow :

a. Create a script file like 'Record_From_Mic' with the content below

amixer sset Mic,0 80%,80% unmute cap

b. At command prompt, do

chmod +x Record_From_Mic

c. From Gnome's menu, goto 'System.Preference.Personal.Sessions'
At 'Startup Program tab', click new & add 'Record_From_Mic' as startup script.

Finally, the settings is overriden at every reboot with the little script above. Thanks to
Thomas.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Record_From_Mic is as follow:

amixer sset Mic,0 75%,75% unmute cap
amixer sset PCM,0 95%,95%
amixer sset Master,0 80%,80%
amixer sset AC97 Capture, 0 85%,85% unmute cap
amixer sset AC97, 0 85%,85% unmute cap

13. k3b, works. Previously device buffer status not shown during DVD burning. Now everything is displayed.

14. Firewall settings
Under System-->Administration-->Firewall and SELinux
Adding port 5900 for VNC server no longer works. Root of problem unknown.
Work around:
a. vi /etc/sysconfig/iptables
b. add the following line for port 5900

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 5900 -j ACCEPT

c. System-->Administration-->Server settings-->Service--> Restart iptables

Installing nvidia driver for legacy nVidia graphic card from livna.

2007-04-18T06:02:00.000-07:00

From livna's repocitory

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Friday, January the 19th: Announcing kmod-nvidia-96xx and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx

The new 1.0-97xx series from nVidia drops support for any card with a chipset below NV30, such as all GeForce2 and GeForce4 cards. However don't worry! Livna has forked the original xorg-x11-drv-nvidia and kmod-nvidia packages to create ones named xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx and kmod-nvidia-96xx. These will be kept at the 96xx series of drivers and the original driver will be updated to the 97xx series. If you are using one of the cards named above, you can install 96xx like this:

yum remove kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
yum install kmod-nvidia-96xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx

Setting up NFS server in FC6

2007-04-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

Here is my notes on setting up the NFS server in FC6 for my home network.

Setting up the server:

1.
For a start one need to go to System, Administration, Server Settings, NFS.

Under Basic settings.

Directory : /home/coyote/Archive
Host: 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0
Basic Permission: Read-only/Read/Write.

1st line: means sharing /home/coyote/Archive on the server
2nd line: all pc under the subnet 192.16.0.0 are allowed acces
3rd line: Read-only or Read & Write access.

Alternatively, one can edit the file /etc/exports to enable the same
settings manually. My /etc/exports looks like this:

/home/coyote/Archive 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0(rw,sync)

2.
Create the file "/etc/sysconfig/nfs" and add the following contents:

STATD_PORT=4001
LOCKD_TCPPORT=4002
LOCKD_UDPPORT=4002
MOUNTD_PORT=4003

3.
Append the following to the file "/etc/services":

rquotad 4004/tcp # rpc.rquotad tcp port
rquotad 4004/udp # rpc.rquotad udp port

4.
Restart the nfs services:

/etc/init.d/nfs restart
/etc/init.d/nfslock restart

5.
Run /usr/sbin/rpcinfo -p and make sure all the ports above have changed.

6.
Next go to System, Administration, Security & Firewall

Check NFS4 as 'Trusted Services"
Under other ports, add the following ports

111:udp
111:tcp
2049:udp
2049:tcp
4001:udp
4001:tcp
4002:udp
4002:tcp
4003:udp
4003:tcp
4004:udp
4004:tcp

That pretty much sums up all the work to be done on the server.

Next, mounting the NFS volume from the client computer:

First, one need to create a mount point of your choice.
I created one under /home/username/nfsserver

using mkdir /home/username/nfsserver

To mount the volume manually, with root access,

mount -t nfs 192.168.0.9:/home/coyote/Archive home/username/nfsserver

where 192.168.0.9 is the ip address of the nfs server.

To mount the volume automatically, add the line to /etc/fstab. Mine looks like this

192.168.0.9:/home/coyote/Archive /home/username/nfsserver nfs ro 0 0

To enable the access over the internet, both the ip addresses of the nfs server & the nfs clients are to be replaced with corresponding dns names. Example above is valid only for access across a local network.

One can register domain names for the nfs server & nfs client from dyndns.org. After that, replaces the ip address of the nfs client with the new dns name. This is to be entered into the 'Host' section in the server's settings. Replaces the ip address of the nfs server with the new dns name. This is done during the mounting command or in /etc/fstab.

Note also, if your nfs server is running behind a router or a firewall, one will need to open up port 111:tcp, 111:udp, 2049:tcp & 2049:udp to the nfs server. That is done via the router's setting.

There, that concludes my learning in setting up a NFS server in FC6.

My new toy, Samsung 940T LCD monitor.

2007-03-31T20:43:00.000-07:00































Sometimes back, I bought a 22" Samsung wide screen
LCD monitor & eventually had a full refund from the
shop shortly after. Reason was the 1st panel has
a semi-bright dot & the replacement also has a semi-
bright dot.

So, it seemed until now, even reputed manufacturer
like Samsung does not offer zero bright dot warranty.
Phillips & LG does for restricted models but at a
huge price premium. So, I was looking at second hand
LCD monitors which I have the option of checking for
bright dot or dead pixel before payment. After a long
time of searching for good offer & the slow & draggy
bidding process...  I finally gotten my second LCD
monitor, a Samsung 940T.

I was lucky enough, the seller sold me a 8bits LCD panel
for S$250 & he wasn't even interested in bargaining &
just want to get rid of his LCD at a price. Reason? He
has another 22" & 27" Samsung LCD monitor that he has yet
to open up & start using. And after checking thoroughly
for about 10~15 minutes, no bright dot or dead pixel.
The LCD is 1 year old & still has about 2 years warranty
to go.

Why I go back from 22" to 19" was that, 22" aspect ratio
is 16:10, when I watch TV series on my LCD (which is what
I do mostly), there is a bar on both side of the video.
If I force the video to 4:3, then all the characters will
look fatter. So, going back to 19" 4:3, I can watch TV
series in fullscreen without any black bars again.

Advantage of 19" over 17" LCD, both 19" & 17" LCD has the
same native resolution of 1280x1024. For any LCD, text
will appear the sharpest when it's displayed at it's native
resolution. For a 17" LCD, text will appear too small on a
1280x1024 resolution. I use my 17" at 1024x768 resolution,
which the text will be bigger, but it will not be as sharp
as 19". Of course, we all know 19" is bigger in size & will
be better for watching movies or TV series.

Something I think only LCD experts with sharp eyes can tell
about such 8 bits LCD panels. Accordingly, 8 bits LCD panels
produce true color or 16.7 million color. Normal 6 bits panels
uses software algorith to produce true color & the result is
16.2 million color. Due to that, 8 bits panels normal only can
do 20ms response time while 6 bits panels can do less than 10ms
easily. Personally, I can't tell yet how the color of this 8 bits
panel is nicer than my older 17" 6 bits panel, both from Samsung.
May be next time will have some of my LCD experts friend to show
me.

I shall get second hand LCD panels only. Just to avoid the hassle
of getting bright dots or dark pixels in a brand new LCD monitor.

Travelling tips in Japan

2007-03-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

Due to business reason, I travelled to Kawasaki, Japan lately.

Here are some tips travelling around. Firstly, here is the site name to check out detailed schedule of trains around Tokyo.

http://www.hyperdia.com/cgi-english/hyperWeb.cgi

Secondly, the fastest way from Narita Airport to Tokyo is by Narita Express. Narita Express will start from Narita Airport Terminal 1, pick up more passengers from Narita Airport Terminal 2 & then go straight to Tokyo with no stop in between. Ticket price is about 3000+ Yen. There is 1 such Express train about every 30 minutes. So check your flight schedule & train schedule in detail. I managed to come out of the arrival hall, buy a ticket from the booth which is right in front of the arrival hall & boarded the Narita Express in 15 minutes. Note also, ticket for Narita Express is specific to the exact batch of the train. The counter told me, if I miss the particular train, I can go back to the counter & they can change it to the next available one. The trip from Narita Airport to Tokyo is about 63 minutes.

There are other cheaper alternatives taking normal JR trains. These trains stop over at other train stations between Narita & Tokyp & take about 1 hr & 30 minutes to reach Tokyo. If time is not a concern, you can check out the site above. Usually it will show you the alternative routes in details.

At Tokyo Eki(station), before you come out from the station, what you can do is to go to the counter & show them your narita express ticket & tell them you want to change to a JR ticket to say, Kawasaki. And the counter will issue you another ticket. For Kawasaki, I have to take the Tokaido line towards Yokohama & Ofuna.

I supposed it is possible to go to the JR counter at Narita Airport and tell them you want a ticket from Narita Airport to Kawasaki taking Narita Express. I did something like that on my return trip from Kawasaki to Narita Airport. The counter should issued me 2 tickets, 1 from Kawaki to Narita Airport & another Narita Express ticket from Tokyo to Narita Airport.

Lastly, for business travellers who claim transport allowance, you will want to keep the train ticket. Before you exit from any train station. You can just tell the security that you want to keep the tickets, they will put a stamp on your ticket & you can pass through the gate without using the ticket.

Legacy nvidia linux driver for GF2 MX from livna

2007-01-19T22:18:00.000-08:00

As nVidia has stopped supporting linux driver for GF2 MX. Users of GF2 MX card has only to rely on the legacy linux driver from livna repocitory.

Upon updating of linux kernel, one has to update the legacy linux driver as well.

yum --enablerepo=livna update kmod-nvidia-legacy kernel

And on my linux wireless system, I need the matching madwifi driver from livna as well.

So the appropriate command becomes

yum --enablerepo=livna update kmod-madwifi kmod-nvidia-legacy kernel

Reflection on 2006: PC stuffs that I bought in 2006 & total spending.

2007-01-02T02:57:00.000-08:00

It's the beginning of the year & as usual, it's time to summarise my spending on pc stuffs in 2006. As it stood I spent about S$2613 in the whole year of 2005 & pledged to cut that spending in 2006. Let's see how I fared in 2006.

1. HEC 380W power supply - S$75
2. InWin Z583T casing - S$45
3. Western Digital 160G SATA2 harddisk - S$119
4. Nokia 6230i cell phone - S$228
5. Foxconn 6150K8MA-8EKRS - S$129
6. XFree XE233 2.1 Speakers - S$30
7. TDK 16X DVD media 25pcs - S$15
8. TDK 16X DVD media 25pcs - S$14
9. IDE USB 2.0 3.5" enclosure - S$30
10. DVD-ROM TS-H352 - S$29
11. 901BB Barebone casing - S$69 - S$30 from sale of Z583T casing
12. 901BB Barebone casing - S$67 - S$30 from sale of V564G casing
13. MAHA MH-C204W charger with 4X MAHA AA 2700mAh rechargeable batteries - S$49
14. 4X MAHA AA 2700mAh rechargeable batteries - S$15
15. Ricoh 8X DVD+R 100 pieces - S$50
16. Creative technology SBS240 speakers - S$15
17. A1Pro wireless optical mouse - S$17
18. Galaxy HP-7 headset microphone - RM$15
19. LG DVD ROM 16x 52x - S$33
20. Kingston PC2-4200 DDR2 512MB 533MHz - S$87
21. A64 AM2 X2 3600+ + Asus M2NPV-VM - S$368
22. sold MSI K8NGM2-FID + Venice 3000+ - S$230(+)
23. sold 2X 512MB Twinmos DDR400 rams - S$150(+)
24. sold 4-pc-to-1-monitor manual KVM switch - S$25(+)

Total - S$1019 + RM$15.

There, I have more than halved my spending of S$2613 in 2005 to S$1044 in 2006.

Recording from mic for use with Skype in Linux

2006-12-21T09:03:00.000-08:00

After many months of full conversion to linux. I was disappointed yet again with a terrible bug in alsa mixer.

Firstly, I noticed that Skype cannot capture any sound from my mic, despite I can hear my own voice from the mic very clearly.

The first & most down to earth solution was run the followings at command promt:

1. alsamixer
(select capture by pressing 'tab')
(move to mic and press 'space bar' to select capture from mic)
2. for Sound blaster live users, you need to make sure 'AC97' tab volume is not zero.
(move to AC97 & push up-arrove to raise volume close to 90%)
2. /usr/sbin/alsactl store

Now, the method above surely works but it posted another problem. The setting of alsamixer is always reset upon every reboot & it just never remember to 'record from mic'.

Found the methods from the sites below but they just don't work somehow.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=206782
http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=66544

After all attempts to set alsamixer settings permanently failed, my friend suggested to create a simple script to set the mixer settings to capture from the mic.

Finally it's done as follow :

1. Create a script file like 'Record_From_Mic' with the content below

amixer sset Mic,0 80%,80% unmute cap

2. At command prompt, do

chmod +x Record_From_Mic

3. From Gnome's menu, goto 'System.Preference.MorePreference.Sessions'
At 'Startup Program tab', add Record_From_Mic as startup script.

Finally, the settings is overriden at every reboot with the little script above. Thanks to Thomas.

Fedora Core 6 & X2 3600+

2006-11-10T03:13:00.000-08:00

A quick update on my latest upgrade & migration to Fedora Core 6.

Received an email from my sister that her computer can no longer boot up. After some troubleshooting over phone. I have confirmed the motherboard is dead. So I decided to pass my sister my current pc & took the opportunity to upgrade to a AM2 X2 3600+ myself.

The old config:
MSI K8NGM2-FID socket 939 Venice 3000+, 2X 256MB dual-channel DDR400

The new config:
Asus M2NPV-VM socket AM2 X2-3600+, 1X 512MB single-channel DDR533.

As both motherboard were essentially using the same nVdia 6150 chipset, all I did was to swapped the harddisk to the new motherboard & viola. Everything just fires up without encountering any kernel panic whatsoever. I installed the smp kernel & upon reboot, the 2 processors are detected & in operation. The only gripes it seemed is that, mplayer somehow crashed with the smp kernel for unknown reason.

Today, I had some time & took the opportunity to reinstall the OS changing from Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 6. To my surprise, the installation is much smoother compared to FC5. Few of the tweaks needed are as follows:

1. Enabled freshrpms repocitory to install proprietary nVidia driver by:
yum install nvidia-x11-drv

2. Install mplayer from freshrpms repo by doing
yum install mplayer mplayer-skins mplayer-fonts mplayerplug-in
copy the mplayer-codec to /usr/lib/win32 & mplayer is ready for use.

3. Install Realplayer by
yum install compat-libstdc++-33 (the old library is still needed)
rpm RealPlayer-10.0.8.805-20060718.i586.rpm

4. Installing ICA client:
The old ICA Client patch is still needed. You can get it from
http://co-lo.night-shade.org.uk/packages/fedora/5/i386/libXm3-stub-1-0.i386.rpm
rpm ICAClient-9.0-1.i386.rpm will then proceed & install ICA Client 9 properly.

5. Install skype by launching the skype FC5 rpm package.

6. Sound card tweak needed for CreativeLive soundcard to enable the recording from mic for skype:
Go to volume control, preference & enable AC97 in the volume bar & make sure the volume is not
zero.

There, my system is up & running perfectly. As I mentioned, FC6 is much more refined than FC5 were. And I am glad the transition is so smooth.

Getting Sound blaster live to work with skype in Linux

2006-08-19T07:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, from my last blog, I have gotten WarCraft III to run in linux & everything was fine. However, during some intensive game play, with some prolonged sound of the battle horn or repeated sounds from a spinning crusher machines, these sound will hang my 8 years old Yamaha YMF724 sound card.

As from my other ealier posts, RealPlayer cannot work with my nVidia HD audio chip using the ALSA driver. And that still does not work with the latest 10.0.8 version of RealPlayer released in Aug 2006 still. Quite a major disappointment I must say.

So, I have gotten a second hand SB Live 5.1 sound card, thinking that it should be old enough for RealPlayer to recognised it & play correctly without hanging my desktop again. So it did. But I was met with another more silly problem that the SB Live 5.1 simply won't record my voice in Skype. And that works flawlessly with both my onboard nVidia sound or the Yamaha YMF724 PCI card.

After some major search on the net, the solution was simply adding 'AC97' in the "Volume Control" tap & make sure it's not muted. Now, everthing goes. No more hanging of WC3 during intensive game play or with prolonged sound of battle horn or repeated sounds. And skype works also.

But to think even the most established sound card manufacturers hardware has such nifty gritty glitches with linux. I am really disappointed.

Playing WarCraft III in Linux(wine)

2006-08-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

Ok, I kinda missed all the good times I had with Warcraft III's tower defence game. After I wiped out my Windows installation. I can't really play any PC game per say.

Today, my hands gotten itchy & so I installed wine & trying to play WC3 in wine.

The documentation can be found here:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Warcraft3

Installing wine by

yum install wine

is pretty straight forward.

Installing WC3 under wine has gotten a little tricky.

First of all, the command line as stated in the link above no longer work in FC5. The reason is because, FC5 uses a new mounting method. For all CD mounted, in will display the mount as the lable of the disc itself. In this case, Warcraf III disc is mounted as 'Warcraft III' & you can imagine, doing a 'wine /media/Warcraft III/install.exe' will result in error cos, command line does not recognise a space between 'Warcraft' & 'III'. After searching on the web for a long time with no avail, I launched 'wine file' & sure enough, I can install warcraft3 in 'wine file' just by double-clicking on the file browser.

Next up, patching the file according to the instructions in the above link can be done in 'wine file' again, much the same way. The problem follows next is with doing the 'no-cd' patch. Now, as mentioned in the link above, this is not piracy. This is necessary simply because detecting the original CD simply won't work in wine. So, I downloaded the 'no-cd' patch & I was met with another problem. Where did wine put all the files? After some long & tiring search. I finally figured out that, wine will be installed under

/home/username/.wine

directory.

And all files, should be installed under

/home/username/.wine/drive_c

which will appears to be under C: drive in wine.

All drives appeared in wine will be listed under

/home/username/.wine/dosdevices

So, finally, I located the Warcraft III programs are installed in

/home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Warcraft III

and that is where the 'no-cd' patched war3.exe files should be unzipped to.

Ok, that should have worked for most installation. But the complication of the nvidia graphic driver need to be highlighted here. First & foremost, the closed-source nVidia linux driver must be used to get the game working.

First problem is that, the game won't start with my main pc with a nVidia 6150 onboard graphic card. The error returns simply says a violation has occured as the game driver accessed an area of the main memory which is not 'writeable'. nVidia 6150 onboard graphic card shared the main memory as graphic memory. So, this should explain why the game would not start when it sees a violation. I am not sure, if this problem should be fixed with a newer version of wine or with a newer nVidia driver. Hopefully, it will be fixed eventually.

So, I tried the same installation on another linux pc with a 6600LE card installed. Sure enough, WC3 fires up flawlessly on first attempt & it even works flawless playing online connecting to battlenet's server. As that second pc is dual-booting with windows & it has a nVidia 6150 3d card onboard anyway, I moved the 6600LE card to my main pc, which has only Fedora Core 5.

So, I tried the same thing again on my main pc, expecting WC3 to work with the addition of the 6600LE card. Unfortunately, it somehow retained the old settings telling wine that it's accessing the main memory again & crashed, despite the nVidia driver already reflected the 6600LE card is in operation. I tried uninstalling & reinstalling nVidia driver & uninstalling & reinstalling wine. All don't work. Miraculously, I edited my /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and changed the lines from

Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge" <-- This is the old lable for the nVidia 6150 card

to

Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "nVidia Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600 PCIe]" <-- Copied from the seocnd pc.

Then, I reinstalled wine, warcraft 3 & all.

Eventually, it all pays off. And here you see WC3 is installed successfully.

So, I played couple rounds of Tower Defence online & finally completed a 42 levels tower defence in 3rd position. All remaining 5 players simply failed to complete the game.

So finally, I am back with some gaming fun in Linux

It's good game after all.

nVidia driver bug for 6150 onboard VGA card

2006-08-06T07:01:00.000-07:00

Almost 9 months after the release of nVidia 6150 chipset, it's linux driver is still far from bug free. From time to time, I will encounter a stange issue at X, where the mouse pointer becomes invisible. The mouse is obviously still workin & it's movement can still be seen when it moves over menu or items on the desktop. It's just invisble.

A search on the net found this bug 182517 filed at redhat. The problem traced back to the nVidia driver. The proble is still unsolved even with nVidia graphic driver release 1.0-8762.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=182517

The problem can be patched by adding

Option "HWCursor" "off"

to the VGA driver section at /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Hopefully, it will be resolved in the next nVidia driver release.

My xorg.conf looks like this now:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge"
Option "HWCursor" "off"

See how my little niece fending off her grandma & her mum

2006-07-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

While my little niece clearly has learnt how to use the spoon without her grandmas knowing it. She is so busy fending off her grandma & her mum putting more food into her plate as well as into her mouth... this is so cute. She is 1 year & 8 months old now.

The making of the FC5 home theater box

2006-07-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have a spare pc lying around & so I decided to put it into better use then just collecting dust.

I have some collections of realplayer video that I can only watch on the small pc monitor. So I decided to convert the spare pc to some sort of home theatre box so that I can watch the realplayer video on my 29" Sony WEGA flatscreen TV. Ok, I know someone is going to suggest to upgrade to a LCD TV. Well, that is almost a certainty in the not to distant future. I am sure.

Let's see what I've got to make a FC5 home theatre box. My spare pc has a duron 1000 MHz processor running on a AsRock K7VM2 board with 512Mb of rams. Though the board has a VIA onboard VGA, I needed a video card with TV-out to output the video to the TV. So I pulled out my good old nVidia Ti4200 3d card to do just that. The pc is fitted with a DVD-rom to read the DVD disc where I store most of my video collections. And to complete the hardware list, I plugged in a DLink G520 wireless network card. A wireless network seemed unavoidable for most home theatre box. For my case, my TV is far away from the rest of my wired network. Most people will throw in a 5.1 sound card for their home theatre box. For my case, I am just going to connect the sound straight into the TV. So I just use the onboard stereo sound card instead of spending money to buy extra.

Fedora Core 5 is used, simply because it is the one linux os that I am familiar with. The objective is simple, the pc is to output the video through the TV-out to the TV. The sound output from the sound card goes straight into the stereo-L & stereo-R input of the TV. And the pc has to be connected to the rest of the network via the wireless network card.

Installing FC5 on a such an old motherboard should have been idiot-proof. But strangely, I was met with a strange kernel panic on first boot after install with an unrecognised file system error. I suspect the driver for the VIA IDE-controller was accidentally missed out from the default FC5 kernel. I solved this by booting into 'linux rescue' mode with the FC5 CD & did a live update with yum. That upgraded the kernel to the latest 2.6.17-1.2157_FC5 & the system sprung to live.

To enable the TV-out, I installed the nVidia geforce linux driver via the livna repocitory. You can refer to the Stanon-Finley guide for FC5 on how to do that. It's at

[url]http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installation_notes.html[/url]

Once installed, you can see the NVIDIA Display Settings under the 'Applicaton', 'System Tools' menu. To enable the TV-out, I used a S-video-To-composite-out convertor to connect the S-video out from my video card to the video-in of my TV. That is because my 7 years old SONY WEGA did not come with S-video. Next, go to 'System', 'Administration' menu & select 'Display'. Go to the 'Dual-head' tab & select 'Use Dual Head'. On the 'Second Monitor Type', select a standard CRT monitor that is 1024x768 or 800x600. The second monitor setting is for the TV actually. I choose 800x600 for my TV's resolution & 'Spanning desktops' for my 'desktop layout'. On exit, I was prompted to restart X Windows for the dual-head settings to take effect. On logging out of X Windows, I was prompted with multiple error messages asking me to reconfigure X. Ignore all errors & just proceed to reboot your FC5 box.

On reboot, I was happy to see displays on both the monitor as well as the TV-out. Once I get into X, I have a 'spanning' desktop from my 17" LCD monitor to my 29" SONY TV. I have to choose the resolution of 800X600 for both the LCD & the TV to align the desktop on both display. 800X600 is choosen because the text is too small & not very legible on a 29" SONY TV. As you can imagine, you can't read the text well on a old TV which has a very low resolution. You shold not have this problem if you are using the latest LCD TV. To work on the desktop, simply launch the video player & drag it to the TV desktop & maximise it. I use both RealPlayer for Linux & MPlayer. Why 'spanning desktops' is used instead of 'individual desktops' is because it seemed RealPlayer will crash once it's started playing in the TV desktop under 'individual desktops' mode. I think it's should be a bug in the current release of RealPlayer dated Feb 2006. Mplayer works well in both 'spanning desktops' or 'individual desktops' mode. RealPlayer seemed to work fine in 'spanning desktops' mode & so it is what I am using now.

Getting the wireless network to work is quite a chore in linux. I followed the livna's wpa_supplicant guide from below to get wireless working. You can download the pdf file from the link below for detailed procedure.

[url]http://www.terena.nl/mail-archives/mobility/pdfOhjc0QiMpF.pdf[/url]

So, now I have a FC5 home theatre box that plays video straight to the TV. And if need be, it can also play video files from any computers in my network via the wireless network. That is not bad for a low cost linux multimedia pc.

Some intricate problem with linux

2006-07-14T19:56:00.000-07:00

I have one weird problem with my 6~9 months old AMD64 computer. FC5, apparently installed without problem. Then i noticed that, my computer will somehow hang the GUI randomly. Sometimes, it happens after I used RealPlayer. Sometimes, it happens after I used skype & sometimes, it happens after I used either Skype or Realplayer & wanted to start another application from the pull down menu. Mysteriously, the open-sourced Mplayer works absolutely well, no matter how long I watch movie with. So I know, it's not a hardware issue at all.

Eventually, I found the root cause being the outdated, close-sourced RealPlayer & Skype software, and the solution, hilariously, is by changing the hardware. Let me explain.

So, I have some 6~9 months old nVidia motherboard, which is considered very new in linux's context. By now, all the drivers for nVidia 6150 VGA, nVIdia Gigabit network & nVidia HD audio are all installed very well by the various repocitories. However, one noticed that Realplayer's version is still stuck at Feb 2006, & skype, for heaven sake is still stuck at Skype for FC3!!!

So, the problem is that, RealPlayer will somehow work with the latest sound card driver but occasionally, it just hang the GUI when you start another application that activate the sound driver also. In this case, clicking the menu will create an audible sound also. The situation with Skype is the same, it works well for me to talk online. Again, after the skype talk, if I click on the menu & invoke the desktop sound, it will hang the GUI also.

Hilariously, the solution is nothing more than putting an old sound card like Yamah YMF724(atleast 7 years old) or a old sound card(by linux context) like Sound Blaster Live 5.1 digital into the system. It simply uses a driver that RealPlayer & Skype are 100% compatible off. So, now, there is no more hanging of GUI desktop after RealPlayer or Skype.

One thing to note though, when I install the addon sound card. FC5 is already advanced enough to detect two sound cards & let users to choose which to use. Bad thing is that, RealPlayer is still not updated enough to switch between the sound cards. And so, I have to disable the onboard sound to force Realplayer to use the addon sound card & finally working flawlessly. And RealPlayer is still needed to play some of the buggy real video clips that is stuck halfway. You can use the scroll bar to skip the stuck part in realplayer. On mplayer, it simply hangs the mplayer & you have to restart, which is not quite a viable solution still.

So, this is a strange dillemma of linux users. 6~9 months old hardwares are considered old by today's standard. Incidentally, AMD is already announcing the end-of-life of my AMD64 3000+ socket 939 cpu. Good enough, FC5's kernel is already at 2.6.17 just few days ago & to be fair, all drivers are fully operational now for my hardwares. Bad enough still, closed-sourced applications like RealPlayer &
Skype has till very slow update for linux & compatibility issues are till not catched up to the open-sourced community.

I think, this is worth putting in my blog...

My mum is using Linux!!!

2006-05-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

My family is Chinese, and as my mum is the earlier generation in this region(Singapore/Malaysia to be specific), she is hardly English literate. Not least computer literate. But she does have one motivation to use the computer, that is to talk to my sister over skype. She is in M'sia & my sister & I are in Singapore. That is 530km away or a good 6 hours of drive at 110km/h.

So she was compelled to use a computer that I put up at her home running 24/7 and doubling up as some sort of a server. I have recently converted her windows pc to a Fedora Core 4. Few problems encountered were as follow:

1. Running Azureus with the correct java version. This is fixed by installing Sun's java & removing
the version of java that came with FC4.
2. Configuring VNC server for my remote access. Remote Desktop is built-into FC4 & what I needed
to set it up are:
a. Setting a password in Remote Desktop & disabling 'confirmation by user'.
b. Enabling VNC server in 'services'.
c. Adding 5900:tcp to selinux's firewall rules.
d. Getting ddclient to update the dynamic ip assigned by my isp to dyndns.org.

ddclient was also available from yum install, but I couldn't get it working right after few trials with the settings in the /etc/ddclient/conf. Eventually, found the dynamic dns updating feature in my netgear WGT624 router. And so ddclient is no longer needed & all I have to do is get the router to update it's ip to dyndns.org.

And so, now, my mum is learning to get used to the new interface of FC4 & using skype in Linux.

Also, it turns out that, when I do a VNC to that pc in M'sia from Singapore, FC4's vnc server is much more responsive than vnc server in windows. And that pc needed atleast 768MB+ to run without lag in windows. Now, it runs even smoother in FC4, with the same sets of softwares in both OSs.

With the last few glitches in FC5 I resolved today, soon I will be converting her pc to FC5, when I have the next chance to go back to her home in Malaysia.

Switching to Fedora Core 5.

2006-05-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

Switching from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5 turns out to be not as straight forward as I have expected it to be.

On first installation, here are the few glitches that I didn't managed to resolve within the first couple of weeks. And it does look silly what I didn't do right previously, now that I found the fixes or solutions. Here are some of them:

1. The previous way of mounting FAT32 partitions for read/write access in Fedora Core 4 no longer work. After weeks of trial & error. Here is how it finally worked my case(not exactly sure what I did right this time, but it sure works):

/dev/hda1 /home/coyote/cdrive vfat rw,nouser,auto,uid=500,gid=500,umask=0000 0 0
/dev/hda5 /home/coyote/ddrive vfat rw,nouser,auto,uid=500,gid=500,umask=0000 0 0
/dev/hda6 /home/coyote/edrive vfat rw,nouser,auto,uid=500,gid=500,umask=0000 0 0

2. FC4 used to remember my desktop on every shutdown & now it no longer does in FC5. It took me weeks to figure out that, actually the options are present in 'System.Preferences.More Prefrences.Sessions'. Just enable saving of current session & also, add Azureus to the list of startup programs. Now, it will automatically starts Azureus, Gaim & Skype when the system bootsup.

3. The most teething problem it seemed, is getting ICA Client 9 to work with FC5. I need this to connect to my office network to do my work from home. Apparently ICA Client 9 needs libXm.so.3 while FC5 uses libXm.so.4. I have downloaded the following 'stud rpm' that make a symbolic link libXm.so.3 to libXm.so.4. That allows ICA client 9 to proceed & complete installation in FC5.

http://co-lo.night-shade.org.uk/packages/fedora/5/i386/libXm3-stub-1-0.i386.rpm

I have also downloaded the following 'stud rpm' that supposed sets the selinux context on all the ICA Clients libs, according to

http://support.citrix.com/forums/thread.jspa?forumID=16&threadID=74837

http://co-lo.night-shade.org.uk/packages/fedora/5/i386/ICAClient-selinuxfix-1-0.i386.rpm

Apparently, it still won't work for my case, until I set selinux enforcing = disable. Hopefully, this will be fixed in future releases of ICA Client.

4. Last but not least, FC5 allows the coexistence of multiple java platform by switching between them. It is unfortunate that Sun's java is not the defacto java that came with FC5 as it's not open source. And yet, most java applications like Azureus works well with Sun's Java. Following Stanon-Finley's guide for FC5 at

http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installation_notes.html#Java

Here is what needed to enabled Sun's java support in FC5:

Downloading jre from Sun & do

chmod a+x on the *-rpm.bin

./*-rpm.bin

will install java the usual way.

Linking of java's plugin for Firefox 1.5.0.2 is done the usual ways as follow:

ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_06/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
/usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.2/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so

To enable switching between java different java plotforms, do the followings:

vi /etc/profile.d/java.sh

and add th following two lines into java.sh

export J2RE_HOME=/usr/java/jre1.5.0_06
export PATH=$J2RE_HOME/bin;$PATH

be sure to enter a carriage return after these lines.

Enter at terminal

source /etc/profile.d/java.sh

which java

The output should read

/usr/java/jre1.5.0_06/bin/java

Enter at termianl

/usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jre1.5.0_06/bin/java 2

/usr/sbin/altermatoves --config java

The output should read

There are 2 programs which provide 'java'.

Selection    Command
-----------------------------------------------
*  1           /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj/bin/java
+ 2           /usr/java/jre1.5.0_06/bin/java

Enter to keep the current selection[+], or type selection number:

Select 2

to verify the current java platform selected, do

/usr/sbin/alternatives --display java

The output should reads:

java - status is manual.
link currently points to /opt/jre1.5.0_06/bin/java
/usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj/bin/java - priority 1420
slave rmiregistry: /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj/bin/rmiregistry
slave jre_exports: /usr/lib/jvm-exports/jre-1.4.2-gcj
slave jre: /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj
/opt/jre1.5.0_06/bin/java - priority 2
slave rmiregistry: (null)
slave jre_exports: (null)
slave jre: (null)
Current `best' version is /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj/bin/java.

Now, you are ready to use Sun's java for applications like Azureus.

DLink gaming router & 108Mbps wireless card in Linux

2006-04-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

About a month or so back, I posted my experience about how most of today consumer routers are incapable to handle heavy bittorent traffic on a local forum. It generated quite some interest & discussions. Ended up DLink has chosen me among few other users to try out their latest gaming router, the DLink DGL4300.

Sure enough, couple weeks later, the delivery guys arrived with the router & a pair of DWL-G520, the 108Mbps wireless PCI network card. The special thing about the DGL4300 is that it has the capability to prioritise traffic between BT or online gaming applications such that it doing BT on one computer does not slow down your online gaming experience on another. It also has a Gigabit switch built in & a fast cpu to ensure a fast throughput.

First experience is that, doing heavy BT do not slow down my internet surfing experience, which I encountered on my previous years-old SMC 7004 router. Getting the DGL4300 working in windows is really nothing. So I shall share my experience in getting it working in Linux.

First of all, the DGL4300 uses WPA-TKIP security encryption which is not supported natively in most Linux distributions today. As I type, Fedora Core 5 is just released about 2 weeks back & the support for WPA-TKIP encryption is not built-in.

They are two parts in getting it working: 1) Installing the linux drivers for the DWL-G520 network card. 2) Getting the OS to be support WPA encryption, such that the card can connect to the router using the protocol.

1. Installing the driver:
Same as the Netgear WG311T, the DLink DWL-G520 uses the Atheros 5212 super-g chipset, and so it's supported by the very popular madwifi driver. I'm using Fedora 4 as testbed and the easiest way to install the driver is via the yum update via ATrpm or Livna repocitory.

To enabled ATrpm repocitory, I added the followings to /etc/yum.conf

     [atrpms]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/fc$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable

To retrieve the public key for ATrpm,

rpm --import http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms

That took care of the repocitory for yum in Fedora Core. Installing the madwifi drivers can then be as simple as

yum install madwifi

For my case, I have yumex(GUI for yum) & I just choose madwifi & yum will take care of the dependency & install three modules namely:

madwifi
madwifi-hal-kmdl-2.6.15-1.1833_FC4
madwifi-kmdl-2.6.15-1.1833_FC4

If you choose to install the individual rpms manually, please note that the modules must matches with the appropriate kernel version currently in used. After a reboot, your computer should see the ath0 listed in network configuration stating it uses the Atheros AR5212 chispet. Trying to connect the ath0 to my router prove to be futile as the network configuration GUI is not WPA aware at this stage.

2. Installing & configuring wpa_supplicant
As your linux box already has the ATrpm repocitory in yum.conf, you only need to do

yum install wpa_supplicant

and wpa_supplicant will be installed to enable WPA encryption in your linux pc. Wpa_supplicant support a multitude of wpa_encryption protocols & in my case, I only need to get it working with wpa-tkip such that my G520 can connect to the DGL4300. Wpa_supplicant is configured using /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. After some fiddling, I commented out all other options in wpa_supplicant.conf & left it with only the followings:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
ssid="myssid"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
psk="my_psk_key"
}

For wpa-tkip encryption, a psk-key is used & you need to key the same passkey in the DGL4300 router. To activate the G520 with wpa protocol as stated in wpa_supplicant.conf, the following command is used.

wpa_supplicant -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -iath0 -Dmadwifi -B

and to effect a network connection, giving dhcp ip addres & dns infomation to the G520 network card, the following command is used

dhclient ath0

Once that is done, you should see your wireless network is up & kicking.

Dad & Mum's Singapore visit Feb 1~5 2006

2006-03-04T22:23:00.000-08:00

Here is short account of mum & dad's travel in Singapore during Chinese New
Year 2006.

Feb 1, Wednesday
Went for last visit to Dr. Tan Eng Keong at Ipoh specialist hospital. Took
to the road at 11am. Pick up my friend, Lim Kee Hong at Sungai Buloh Bridge
restaurant on the high way at 1pm+. Reached Singapore around 6pm & went
straight to dinner at 10miles junction with Lim Kee Hong. Song Fish head,
deer meat & etc. Simple dinner. Send Kee Hong to MRT & back to Shen Xiong
supermarket at Ten Miles junction for shopping. Mum commented that fishes
& prawns are cheaper at Shen Xiong, but not necessarily the best around.
Reached home around 10pm. Took quite some time to unload all the stuff from
the car.

Feb 2, Thursday
Took mum to Yew Tee central for breakfast & left them there to shop at wet
market. I went home to do some office work while mum & dad shop at the wet
market. They walk home on their own. Mum even had she hair washed & bought
toto & 4D on her own. 1pm, took them to Marsiling MRT & tried the very nice
fried pork & duck. After lunch, went to Marsiling to buy more 4D for mum
cos the uncle who helped her filled up the form forgot to buy 'small' for
her.  After which, I brought them to old woodland centre for some shopping.
Mum bought some cloths for Xuan Xuan & we went home for a rest. Later
afternoon, brought them to City Square at Kitchener road to see the show
flat of the condominium I bought. Then proceed across the street & bought
the return bus ticket from 88. It's dirt cheap at S$19.90 each. After that
meet up with Ah Pui at  Weng Xiong & ordered steamed red garouper for
dinner. Very nice as well. After dinner just walk across the street to OG &
bought some shirt for Ah Yan, Ah Keong &amp;amp; a pillow for Ah Pui.

Feb 3, Friday
Mum & dad went to wet market on their own & brought back some pork ribs,
prawns & dau dai chong. At noon time, we took lunch at the hawker centre
acroos my block & take the 'sam lou hor fun'. For the first time, mum said,
 'This one can come back for more.' Then we went home & took more rest.
Later afternoon, brought them to Four horses street to make prayers at the
Guan Yin temple. Made some donation at the temple & took some photographs
for them around the streets. Then we went to the four horses street hawker
centre to take some rest & mum had some 'red bean ice'. After that, we went
up to second floor to do the usual shopping for dried sea food, fish  mall
& as usual, some photographs also. After which, we went back to OG & picked
up a King-size bedsheet for mum also. As the time is still early, we went to
Prinsep street to take the very famous Rochor road 'tau fu far' while waiting
for Ah Pui to finish work. While waiting we went to Sim Lim Square's basement
& bought more Toto & 4D. This time round, aiming for the 10million grand
prizes on Feb 10.  After picking up Ah Pui at Little India's MRT, we went for
the MellBen Seafood Restaurant at Block 232, Ang Mo Kio Ave 3 (St. 22) #01-1222.
The amazing thing is that, we queued for 20 minutes before we got seated & then
waited for a total of 1hour 20minutes before food is served. The very fresh &
tasty Crap soup mee hoon is really worth the hour long waiting. It's so fresh
& tasty. We had chillie crap as well. Each crap is longer then a human head &
it's claws are so huge. Awesome Sri Langka craps indeed. Reach home around
10~11pm, but every feel very contended. Every just can't help wondering, 'After
this awesome dinner, any food tomorrow will probably taste very bland
tomorrow...'.

Feb 4(Saturday),
It's "Man day" in Lunar calendar. Again, woke up late & didn't do much in the
morning. With help from Ah Pui, mum made lunch with the dau dai chong fish & etc.
After that, we decided that mum should not miss China Town. And so we went to
China Town for some photo shooting & bought some slacks for sister & father & some
shirt for mum also. Couldn't find those knee-length short pants for brother.
Nearer to 5pm, we took off & went to CarreFour also, surprisingly, there weren't
much good deal at CarreFour, probably because the CNY sales is just over. Didn't
buy anything & proceeded to the fountain terrace to wait for Wai Kuan, Mei Kuan
& her boyfriend. The queue at the 'The Mouth Restaurant' is awefully long.
Supposedly, it's a birthday for everyone & many people will have long dinner at
restaurant. While most people have seated, none of the bigger table are available
for 7 people. We waited from 7.20pm till 8.20pm before getting a table. The 'Sam
Sui Chicken' is not bad & took more photo of mum & dad; mum & wai kuan, mum &
Mei Kuan & etc. It's well over 10.30pm when we left Suntec City. Before we left,
grap one more t-shirt for brother still. Went home & do some last minute packing
& stuff.

Feb 5(Sunday),
Had some simple breakfast across the road & sent mum & dad straight to Keitchener
road to board the bus at 88. Amazingly, there were no jam whatsoever & they reached
home at 5pm+.

End of Mum & Dad's Singapore trip 2006.

Reflection on 2005 : Pc stuff that I have bought in 2005 & total spendings.

2006-01-07T05:43:00.000-08:00

Here are pc stuff that I've bought in 2005 & their prices. It surf as a reflection for the past year & hopefully I'll spend less in 2006.

0. AsRock 939-A8XM bought & subsequently sold.
1. Inno3D 6600LE - S$155
2. AsRock 939S56-M & Venice3000+ E3 - S$359
3. Gigabyte K8N51-PVMT-9 & Venice3000+ E6 - S$394
4. Sempron 2400 socket A - S$113
5. Kingston Hynix 512MB DDR400 - S$81
6. Acbel I-power 450W - S$119
7. LG 4167B with 25pieces of DVD media - S$89
8. LG 4163B with 25 peices of DVD media - S$98
9. Samsung 40G portable harddisk with casing - S$118
10. HEC 250W mATX power supply - S$60
11. Genius microphone, 3 pieces - $24
12. InWin V564T mATX casing - S$48
13. TwinMos Dual-channel kits 512MB x2 - S$149
14. C&C General Zero Hour - S$17
15. InWin V564T mATX casing - S$53
16. Microsft basic keyboard -S$7
17. Microsoft basic optical mouse -S$13
18. Creative 240 speakers - S$15
19. Verbatim 4X DVD R 25 pcs S$20
20. Richo 8X DVD+R 10 pieces S$10
21. TDK CD-R 50 pieces S$19
24. Ricoh 8X DVD+R 25 pieces S$24
25. Ricoh 8X DVD-R 25 pieces S$23
26. TDK 8X DVD+R 25 pieces S$16.
27. TwinMos Dual-Channel kits 256MB X2 - S$99
28. Samsung 710T LCD(DVI) - S$490

Total - S$2613

Linux woes with new hardwares.

2005-12-26T23:17:00.000-08:00

As I fiddle with computer hardwares often, I usually have pretty decently new computer hardwares. Lately, migrating to linux became part of my past times as well. Those two have proven to be a fatal combination. A combination destined to cause trouble, and I mean lots of troubles.

Hardware compatibilities & drivers for linux are often hard to come by. Drivers availability & maturity in 6~9months times after the product being launched is pretty common. Problem is that, after 6~9 months when the product is matured enough to have good linux driver support & most compatibility issues ironed out, the product is probably no longer on sales in most computer shops around you. That is the dilemma. If I used new hardwares, I have poor linux drivers support. If I wait for 9 months for the product to mature, I probably cannot find the product any more.

The only way it seemed to bridge this gap is to patch & compile my own linux kernel to get my hardwares working. It's tough. Real tough.

One of my new motherboard uses SIS756 chipset, which has yet to have very matured driver support natively in the open linux kernel. Just to get it working I have to

1. Use a 5 years old PCI S3 Virge VGA card to install FC4. Cos FC4 failed to start graphic install with a nVidia 6600LE 3d card. And text install is even more buggy with other problem. Kinda tricky, but not that big a deal still, provided you still have a PCI VGA card in your storeroom. Hello, 2005's coming to an end & 2006 is just round the corner. PCI VGA card??

2. Download the latest kernel & modify the entry of the SIS IDE 5513 controller in the driver file & recompile it to get DMA enabled for the onboard IDE controller. The problem is rather silly that some one thought SIS5513 is compatible with SIS511 & identified them as SIS551X. Without DMA-enabled, disc access speed degraded to <3Mb/s & applications like TV-tuner will stutter when multiple applications are reading the harddisk simultaneously. Enabling it will return disc access to about 58Mb/s. How on earth do you think anyone will ever discover this? I have no idea. I only chance upon it from some forum to realised such silly problem with the linux kenel.

3, Onboard SIS190 network card is not recognised by the default FC4 kernel. And to solve this, I have to first wait for the FC4 kernel 2.6.14.1 to have support for the SIS190 chip, plug in a SMC network card to enable live update to upgrade FC4's kernel to 2.6.14.1. After which the SIS190 nic works, well sorta. Still I was met with another strange problem that all https sites failed to connect. Only lately, by chance that I said let's try getting the SIS190 linux driver from SIS manufacturer itself & overwriting the SIS190 driver provided in the open kernel source & recompile the whole kernel & see. Surprisingly, it finally solved this teething problem once & for all. And the cause is no other than a buggy driver released in the public kernel source.

So, now, I have resolved most, if not all of the hardwares compatibility problems with that motherboard. The effort, I must say is tremendous. And many a time, you need some luck to find the real solution. Who ever said that linux is ready for the consumers mass market? I shall shut him out from now on. Linux is really not for the faint hearted, unless you have say atleast a year old computer hardwares & the driver support for such hardwares are mature.

That is Linux, in reality.

Fixing linux network problem with https sites

2005-12-26T08:25:00.000-08:00

For years, I kept encountering problems with https sites with various networking hardwares working in linux. Just to name a few, yahoo mail, my company's remote access using a secure https access with citrix client & the https secure online banking facility from Maybank2u.

The problems lies with the various linux nic drivers that is mixed & matched between different hardwares chipsets. The details is as follow:

I'm using a SIS190 onboard NIC from my flashy & new motherboard. And the default 2.6.11 kernel in Fedora Core 4 simply does not know & support this SIS190 network card. To solve that, I plug in a S$1 SMC network card & the machine is immediately up & alive. With that, I managed to live-update FC4's kernel to 2.6.14.1 & viola, the new kernel regconised the sis190 lan chip. Upon removing the SMC network card & rebooting, the SIS190 nic seemed to work fine. However, I kept having problem with connection to any https sites, from yahoo to Maybank2u sites. No amount of tweaking with linux's firewall or selinux helps. Even doing a self-compiled 2.6.14.4 kernel does not help, although it works with any non-https sites.

Today, I finally took the plunge & downloaded the SIS190 driver, from no other than the manufacturer SIS Taiwan instead. I unzipped the sis190.c file into

/usr/src/linux-2.6.14.4/drivers/net

overwriting the sis190.c driver obtained from www.kernel.org.

So I recompiled the whole kernel with the above & upon reboot, viola, all the https sites are working fine now.

This conclude that, the problem lies in the default sis190.c driver in the public kernel. The sis190.c driver from www.sis.com.tw works fine. Now that I recalled, I had similar problem with a Intel onboard lan chip years back, presumably the problem is the same. A problem with mixing & matching of lan chip drivers naming vs the actualy chipset used.

Linux tips: Guide of recovering GRUB after reinstalling Windows

2005-12-09T20:17:00.000-08:00

Assuming that you dual-boot between windows & linux on the same pc. After re-installing windows, the GRUB bootloader will be replaced with ntbootloader & your linux os will not be accessible though you know it is still there.

Here is how you restore it. Before resinstalling windows, do

vi /etc/grub.conf

For my case, my linux partitions looks like this:

title Coyote's Custom Kernel (2.6.14.2)
root (hd0,6)
kernel /bzImage-2.6.14.2 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet enforcing=0

root (hd0,6) means, my linux os lies in hd0(first harddisk) & partition 6.

After finished installing windows, your grub bootloader will be overwritten. To recover do the followings:

Boot up with the first CD of your linux OS, for my case, it's Fedora Core 4's CD 1. At boot: type

linux rescue

to go into rescue mode.

When at the sh# prompt, do

chroot /mnt/sysimage

to gain root priviledge. Then

do

grub

to enter into grub. Type

root (hd0,6)

setup (hd0)

The first command, root (hd0,6), sets my linux root to (hd0,6), that is 1st harddisk & partition 6. The second command, setup (hd0), instruct grub to rewrite the MBR.

Upon completion, the output reads 'Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+15.../grub/grub.conf"... succeeded'

Type 'exit' twice. Once to exit grub & second time to exit rescue mode & reboot the pc.

There, my FC4 recovered. Now, I can reinstall my windows as many times as I like, without ever loosing my linux os.

Linux tips: Installing FC4 on nVidia 6150 chipset motherboard

2005-12-08T23:14:00.000-08:00

After some pretty bad experience with installing FC4 on the SIS 756 chipset motherboard. Finally I had some better experience with installing FC4 on the nVidia 6150 chipset motherboard. Finally, it has proven yet again that nVidia is among the chipset manufacturer that has the best linux support. Thumbs up for nVidia.

Popping in the FC4 cd & booting up the computer, it feels so freshing that FC4 did not recognised the new 6150 onboard VGA chip & started graphical installation with the vesa driver. So everything is just smooth sailing & installation was hassel free.

Upon rebooting & getting into XWindows, the first thing I noticed was that the onboard nVidia LAN chip is not recognised by the default 2.6.11 kernel. As I usually do, I popped in the ever reliable SMC network card with the accton chipset & rebooted FC4. Sure enough, FC4 auto-configured the SMC nic & the network is up.

Doing a

yum install yumex

simply install yum extender package manager. This way I can select to update only the latest kernel for testing first.

Doing live-update using yum extender finally installed the latest kernel 2.6.14-1.1644_FC4. Upon rebooting, I see the forcedeth nVidia onboard lan chip detected. After removing the SMC nic & restarting the FC4, the system is up with all network connections up & running with the nVidia onboard lan chip.

Did a check on

vi /var/log/dmesg

& found that the nVidia's ide controller are all installed & well with dma enabled.

Next, I downloaded the nVidia graphic driver 1.0-8174 for linux. 1.0-8174 is known to be first nVidia driver to support the 6150 in linux. Installation was as simple as doing a

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8174-pkg1.run

Sure enough, X started with the latest 6150 linux driver & the desktop response speed is notedly faster then the VESA driver mode, obviously.

Finally, the only problem seemed that the onboard nVidia sound chip's driver is still not in 2.6.14's kernel yet. It's only a matter of time, the next live update or so will get the onboard sound working with FC4 as well.

Thumbs up for nVidia for such good linux support. Undoubtedly, the best hardware manufacturer with the best linux support.

Another AMD64 3000+

2005-12-08T20:31:00.000-08:00

On Dec 4, I finally bought the AMD64 3000+ with the Gigabyte K8N51-PVMT-9 from the local computer shop, Bell. The promoter told me it's the last 3 pieces of AMD64 3000+ in their shop. When I leave the shop at 5pm, after making payment, only 1 last piece of 3000+ left. After dinner, I went back for leisure browsing & when I leave the building at 6.15pm, the last piece of 3000+ is gone.

It was rumoured that AMD will stop making the entry level AMD3000+, 3200+ & 3500+ for their mainstream lines of socket939 cpu. Most shops in local computer shops have little to no stock of such cpu.

First encounter with Mandriva 2006

2005-12-01T09:05:00.000-08:00

In the midst of a planned upgrade & moving some computer parts & harddisk around. I decided might as well try out the Mandriva 2006 on my spare Duron 1000MHz cpu computer.

Few things I noticed.

Pros:
1. Download of the installation CD from the local mirror averse net is very fast. 1.4G in 1.5hr.

2. averse net is listed as an official live update site. Live update is very fast, ~3 minutes for 100+Mb of update.

3. Installation & startup of Mandriva on my 1000MHz Duron cpu is even faster than Fedora on my AMD64 3000+ cpu. Think this is part of the kernel optimization effort by the Mandriva team.

4. Sun java 1.5.0-05 works for MayBank online banking.

Cons:

5. All the touted benefits of skype & realplayer integration into Mandriva are removed from the free download community version. It's only available from the paid member version. And I still don't know how to get realplayer working in Mandriva. More time needed.

6. Live update by rpmdrake is largely controlled by Mandriva. And as a profit generating company, Mandriva has all the reason in the world not to release things like RealPlayer & Skype to non-paying customer. As we know, live update by third parties like freshrpm are usually much faster & answers to many more user needs without the burden of 'profit'. If you know of any agent like apt-get or yum for Mandriva, do let me know. Again, not enough time to explore.

Linux tips: Recompiling Kernel 2.6.14.2 to enable DMA support in SIS 5513 IDE controller in AsRock 939S56M motherboard

2005-11-15T08:51:00.000-08:00

On the very same day I successfully installed my first linux kernel 2.6.14.1. I notice from kernel.org that 2.6.14.2 is released. Another 2 days later, Fedora Core 4's live update is ready to update kernel to 2.6.14 while strangely Fedora Core 3's live update is still stuck at 2.6.12.

Nevertheless, that does not warrant a recompile of my kernel from 2.6.14.1 to 2.6.14.2. However the info from this thread here actually prompted me to do so.

Basically, the device ID of the SIS 5513 IDE controller is not identified correctly. And it rendered the kernel to turn off the DMA support for the harddisk.

To check the kernel boot log, I did the following.

vi /var/log/dmesg

It indeed reveal that the detection of the SIS 5513 IDE controller returned a -1. And from the very same thread, user sinthetek found that the problem can very well be fixed by adding the following entry in /usr/src/linux-2.6.14.2/drivers/ide/pci/sis5513.c

{ "SiS5513", PCI_DEVICE_ID_SI_5513, ATA_100 },

It was added right after the entry

{ "SiS551x", PCI_DEVICE_ID_SI_5511, ATA_16 },

Seemingly, the 'SIS551x' isn't the same reference for the SIS5513 controller.

Since I need to recompile the kernel to include the SIS5513 support, I downloaded the latest 2.6.14.2 kernel & made the modification above in sis5513.c & had the kernel recompiled.

Upon rebooting & from /var/log/dmesg, now I can see my sSIS5513 is DMA enabled now. To check disk access speed, I use

hdparm -t /dev/hda

output is as follow

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 176 MB in 3.00 seconds = 58.66 MB/sec

prior to that with DMA disabled, the output reads

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 176 MB in 3.00 seconds = 2.90 MB/sec

Hopefully, this glitch is fixed in the next kernel release. Looks like I can start to like this linux os more now.

Extract of my new /var/log/dmesg with DMA enabled as follow:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
SIS5513: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:02.5
PCI: IRQ 0 for device 0000:00:02.5 doesn't match PIRQ mask - try pci=usepirqmask
SIS5513: chipset revision 1
SIS5513: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
SIS5513: SiS5513 ATA 100 (2nd gen) controller
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: WDC WD800JB-00FMA0, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Probing IDE interface ide1...
hdc: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-4167B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: Host Protected Area detected.
current capacity is 156299375 sectors (80025 MB)
native capacity is 156301488 sectors (80026 MB)
hda: Host Protected Area disabled.
hda: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)
hda: cache flushes supported
hda: hda1 hda2 <>
hdc: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM DVD-R-RAM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide

Extract of my old /var/log/dmesg with DMA disabled as follow:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
SIS5513: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:02.5
PCI: IRQ 0 for device 0000:00:02.5 doesn't match PIRQ mask - try pci=usepirqmask
SIS5513: chipset revision 1
SIS5513: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
SIS5513: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:02.5
PCI: IRQ 0 for device 0000:00:02.5 doesn't match PIRQ mask - try pci=usepirqmask
SIS5513: chipset revision 1
SIS5513: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
SIS_IDE: probe of 0000:00:02.5 failed with error -1
Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: WDC WD800JB-00FMA0, ATA DISK drive
Probing IDE interface ide1...
hdc: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-4167B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: Host Protected Area detected.
current capacity is 156299375 sectors (80025 MB)
native capacity is 156301488 sectors (80026 MB)
hda: Host Protected Area disabled.
hda: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63
hda: cache flushes supported
hda: hda1 hda2 <>
hdc: ATAPI 79X DVD-ROM DVD-R-RAM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide

Linux tips: Compiling & installing the linux kernel

2005-11-12T05:34:00.000-08:00

In as many years as I've fiddle with the linux os, I've shun the ordeal of compiling my own kernel. I mean it's like rocket science to me more than anything else. I'm a hardware guy. I would rather overclock my cpu & if it failed, atleast I would know immediately. Rather than compiling codes for hours & only to find that it won't work cos I missed out something, hours later.

Today, however, I have finally taken that big step for once, to compile my own kernel. Not that I have suddenly amassed enough courage or what, but rather, I have no choice, cause I can't get linux work with my new hardwares.

Just so that I can remember what I did. I shall blog this down, as suggested by my friend yewfai.

Background:

To start it off. My hardwares are AMD64 3000+(Venice core) on a AsRock 939S56M mATX motherboard. So the first problem I encountered with linux is that the SIS 190 lan chip won't work with any existing version of kernel. I mean I've tried doing live update of kernel in Fedora Core 3 or 4, todate, they are only at 2.6.12 & 2.6.13 respectively & it looks as if I'm not going to get the chip working for a long while. From this thread. I learnt that I could actually get it working with a manual install of the 2.6.14 kernel .

Starting off: Resources & HowTo

After googling around, I found the Digital Hermit's guide to be comprehensive & so I used that. Kernel source was downloaded from www.kernel.org's mirror.

Working on it:

I supposed the procedure of installing kernel is documented in many sites & so I shall be brief. First go to /usr/src & do

tar xfvj /where/you/store/linux-2.6.14.1.tar.bz2

The tar command above will unzip the kernel source file into /usr/src/linux-2.6.14.1 After which, change directory to /usr/src/linux-2.6.14.1 & before we start, we do a

make mrproper

That will wipeout all previous configuration & resetting the source directory to a pristine state. The main reason for doing this is that some files do not automatically get rebuilt & resulting in buggy kernel. After which, we start by configuration what should be included into the kernel by doing

make menuconfig

That select the hardwares suitable for my system. Few things to note is to selecting the correct cpu type, like Opteron/AMD64 cpu & enabling the PREMPTIVE mode to speed up desktop response. And of course I made sure that the option of sis 190 lan chip is there. Just to make it even more idiot proof. I choose to built it into the kernel instead of as a loadable module. That is changing the option from 'M' to '*' in make menuconfig.

After that, I do the following to compile the kernel, make the modules, install the modules & generating initial ram disk, that pretty much concluded the work on 'compiling the kernel' . One thing to note that, I was confused with the need of ram disk & missed out the mkinitrd step. Ended up, I couldn't boot the the new kernel due to missing initrd-2.6.14.1.img file.

make clean
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.14.1.img 2.6.14.1

Installing the kernel.

The new compiled kernel is named bzImage & stored at arch/i386/boot/. The following steps are necessary to move it to the appropriate directory.

cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/bzImage-2.6.14.1
cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.6.14.1
ln -s /boot/System.map-2.6.14.1 /boot/System.map

Configuring grub bootloader

To start off grub.conf is at /etc directory. Edit it to include option to point to my newly install kernel at /boot/bzImage-2.6.14.1. You can see my grub.conf below. Note the locations of the root (hd0,6) & root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet locations. It may vary depending on where you put the /boot partitions & which file system one uses. I just copied the same from the existing FC3 entried in grub.conf.

default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,6)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.12-1.1381_FC3)
root (hd0,6)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.12-1.1381_FC3 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.12-1.1381_FC3.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.9-1.667)
root (hd0,6)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img
title Test Kernel (2.6.14.1)
root (hd0,6)
kernel /bzImage-2.6.14.1 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet enforcing=0
initrd /initrd-2.6.14.1.img
title Other
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Rebooting:

On rebooting, I encountered 3 problems.

1, kernel file not found. That is resolved by changing

kernel /boot/bzImage-2.6.14.1 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet to
kernel /bzImage-2.6.14.1 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet

As grub assumed to read from /boot directory.

2, initrd-2.6.14.1.image file not found. That is resolved by running this

mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.14.1.img 2.6.14.1

As mentioned above, that is what I missed ealier. It simply generates the ramdisk file for the new kernel.

3, kernel panic with 'Enforcing mode request but no policy loaded'. That is resolved by adding 'enforcing=0' in grub.conf.

kernel /bzImage-2.6.14.1 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet enforcing=0

Final words

There it goes. Now I have my SIS190 lan chip recognised & blogging it from the very same mahchine.

One may wonder, if my lan chip isn't working. How do I get all those resources from the net? Oh well, that's where a S$1 SMC network card came to the rescue. After the install, I just take out the SMC card & plug the cable into the SIS190 & viola.

Job done. Boy, all that trouble for a network card??? One wonders.

Best bang for buck socket 939 mATX motherboard recommendation, November 2005.

2005-11-07T09:26:00.000-08:00

Please refer to table above for a list of shortlisted motherboards & some of their features for your consideration for your next upgrade.

PSU pins count is important for people upgrading & whether you have a 20 or 24 pins psu to go with them.
Max FSB in bios is important for people who like to have some basic overclocking feature to push their Venice 3000+.
Onboard 3D/VGA is important for people who don't game or light gaming & save some cost on a dedicated 3D card.
Onboard-TV out is important for people who want to turn their rig into inexpensive media pc.
Onboard-DVI is important to people who want to maximise their extra spending on a DVI-capable LCD.

For more details. Please refer to the original posting in this forum thread.

Running errand...

2005-11-04T03:27:00.000-08:00

Finally taking a day off from work after months. Fully utilised the day to run my own errand that were long overdued.

1. Banked in a cheque that was atleast a month old.

2. Paid up a credit card bill, which the inter-bank giro(payment) facility is not approved & activated yet.

3. Renewed my Singapore re-entry permit today. Thanks to the very friendly staff at the Singapore immigration office, I had it renewed although I did not have all the required documents. I only found that I needed a company letter for reference to renew my permit, when I was given the form. The staff there suggested me to call my employer & ask them fax the company reference letter to their fax machine. And they can help to process the rest. Also thankfully, I had some CPF(central provident funds) & income tax assessment letters in my car. So after making some phone calls & getting some documents from my car. It took only about 10 mintues for the officer to issue me a renewed re-entry permit. That is something really commendable. Excellent services by the Singapore immigration department.

4. Also, two pieces of my Twinmos ram were causing some random crashes of games like a month or so back. Running a memtest diagnostic tools reveal that the ram is failing at test #5. And the best part about getting Twinmos ram, they have lifetime warranty. So this is the first time in many weeks do I have time to go back to Twinmos's office for RMA(return material authorization). And as I experienced before. The service is again excellent. The staff just took my rams without questions(no receipt needed by the way), and couple of minutes later, came back with two pieces of flashy & new rams. I told her probably only one of them is faulty & she gladly change both for me, so that I can run them in dual-channel still. Excellent service as usual.

5. Finally, bought a replacement flushing mechanism for my toilet which started creating problem a day ago. Took me like 20 minutes to fix it up & tighten everything to ensure nothing is leaking.

A very tired day indeed, but atleast got all of the long overdued tasks done in a day.

Linux tips: enabling & disabling graphic boots

2005-11-03T06:17:00.000-08:00

This may sound silly, but comes in handy when installing graphic card drivers in linux.

You will need to boot to native text mode to install say nVidia graphic card driver in linux.

Most linux dristibution will enable graphic boot during installation. To toggle between
graphic & text mode upon bootup.

edit /etc/inittab

change default runlevel from 5 to 3. As per extract from inittab below.
Level 5 is X11 graphic boot, level 3 is text mode.

#
# inittab This file describes how the INIT process should set up
# the system in a certain run-level.
#
# Author: Miquel van Smoorenburg,
# Modified for RHS Linux by Marc Ewing and Donnie Barnes
#

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
# 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
# 1 - Single user mode
# 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
# 3 - Full multiuser mode
# 4 - unused
# 5 - X11
# 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:3:initdefault:

# System initialization.

Linux tips: accessing FAT partitions from Linux

2005-11-03T06:06:00.000-08:00

For those dual-booting between Windows & Linux. It's very common that you have files you stored in your FAT partitions that you want to read from or write to, when you booted into linux.

Here is how you do it:

First, identify your fat partitions

The first partition in first harddisk should be identified as /dev/hda1.
The second partition in second harddisk should be identified as /dev/hda2.

So on & so forth.

My single harddisk is partition into 5 partitions

So my c: drive(primary partition) will be identified as /dev/hda1
My extended partition occupy /dev/hda2
My d: drive(1st logical partition) is identified as /dev/hda5
My e: drive(1st logical partition) is identified as /dev/hda6

To access my c:, d: & e: drives. I create 3 mount points under my linux
directory /home/coyote, and named them as cdrive, ddrive & edrive accordingly.

edit /etc/fstab & add the following lines. Upon reboot, you should have full
read & write acces to your fat partitions.

/dev/hda1 /home/coyote/cdrive vfat umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda5 /home/coyote/ddrive vfat umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda6 /home/coyote/edrive vfat umask=0 0 0

Recommendation: Preferred way to mount new AMD64 heatsink fan on AMD64 cpu.

2005-10-30T06:16:00.000-08:00

I would like to suggest the followings:

1. If you are those who buy a new diy pc, fix it up & won't touch it until the pc is dead or obsoleted. Then you should not bother about reading option 2 below. Just mount you heatsink fan on the cpu with the default AMD64 with the default thermal paste on the heatsink & have fun with your new computer.

2. If you are like many of computer hobbyists who like to change cpu every now & then. Let me start by suggesting you do this. When you get your flashy & new heatsink with the thermal pad, don't mount it straight on to the cpu surface. You should use some alcohol or thinner(can buy 1 big bottle from hardware stores for S$2) to slowly dissolve the thermal paste & wipe it clean with cotton buds. Then you should use some softer thermal paste like those soft white paste provided by OEM heatsink fan.

Rationale of doing that is that, many of us experienced difficulty removing the heatsink fan from the cpu, if it's mounted with the hard thermal paste from the default AMD64 heatsink fan. If you apply hard enough force, you can remove the heatsink from the socket. Normally, that will also pull the cpu out from the socket, without the level being lifted loose. So you stand a chance of bending some pins or worse breaking some while ripping the cpu out from the socket.

If you belongs to the 2nd category, I'll suggest you do so. Cos I learnt my lesson. Luckily, no pins were bend or broken. The cpu got pulled out from the socket when I take out my HSF, it stuck so hard to the heatsink fan cos the thermal pad is air-tight. So you are fighting against the atmospheric pressure to seperate the cpu from the heatsink.

Oh and regarding the aircon. I spent S$1793.60 at CarreFour for a system 3 split unit aircon with 20500 btu. And the good thing about CarreFour, it provides 24months interest free installment via credit card. So that's a good S$74.73 per month for the next 2 years. Probably the best deal in town.

Buying air con

2005-10-29T21:20:00.000-07:00

Buying aircon in Singapore is quite different from other countries. Thanks to the Saturday's news paper, it makes buying anything very easy. That's the good thing about city lifestyle.

You just flip open the Saturday's paper & see all the advertisement from supermart like Carrefour, courts(I supposed a local brand in this region) & compare all the prices. They called them 'system 1, 2, 3) here, meant for 1 room, 2 rooms & 3 rooms split unit aircon.

This my first blog. Strange it feels like talking to myself....damn this is not healthy.