Entries Tagged 'linux' ↓

So I have been macless for almost a week and the switch over to my desktop is almost finished. I have all my thesis writing, all my music and movies, all the odds and ends that I carry from computer to computer. I have my iPod, Casio Camera, and scanner working without a problem. I bought buzzco’s Cerwin-Vega’s and hooked them to my Panasonic SA-XR25 run through my computer, iPod, and tvtuner. The crowning jewel, Mail.app saves all it’s mail in the standard unix mbox format, so I was able to save all my mail in evolution.
I still need to get my hp photosmart 7760 working and my wacom tablet doesn’t behave quite right. I also have one outstanding problem someone might be able to clear up for me. I have my camera, usb stick, and iPod that all use scsi emulation of usb. Every time they grab the first available device, since I’m usually only using one at a time they always grab /dev/sda, I would like them to consistently use the same device. Any hints?

SO I have a second machine I’d like to play around with some, problem is we already used the 4 ports on our router. Rather than either set two cards up in my primary machine or get a switch or something I decided to get a wireless card for my extra machine. I picked up a D-Link 802.11b USB Adapter. Works great, really easy to set up. Pretty much I just downloaded linux-wlan-ng, selected the 4th configure option (prism 2.5 USB support), then I made it. TaDa. It’s nice when it’s that easy.

So far I’ve gotten my printer, my digital camera, my music and movies workking on my desktop. Which is cool. I almost have the iPod working. That means I have to still get the scanner working (might not happen), also I’m running out of usb ports…

So I have decided to sell my g4 iBook. I don’t need it anymore really and someone should have it. Plus it wouldn’t hurt to have the money. I have to say I’m writing this with a bit of sorrow. I had a lot of trouble with my last iBook (a g3 with 4 major hardware failures in a year before I could get apple to replace it). However I have enjoyed the current one a lot and will miss a lot of the ‘just freakin works’ parts of it. Almost more I will miss all the really interesting software that people make for this platform. I am heartfelt in my suppport of open software, I just hope the community can become more innovative with the software they write.

Blah. Anyway, my new side project is moving all my devices over to my desktop. The current list is:

-iPod
-casio digital camera
-little hp printer
-canon scanner
-all my music and movies
-usb tv tuner … myth tv …

Yeah. As soon as I can access all my devices I’ll be putting this laptop on ebay. If anyone is interested let me know, mattfinlayson at mac dot com. (Can’t spam scripts get around that by now?)

Ok, so my mouse at work bites and I decided to pick a new one up. I got the Logitech MX700 (the same as steve) it is a wireless optical mouse with a charging station which is nice. Ok, so to set it up in linux:

1. compile imwheel and install
2. add the following lines to the top of your ~/.xinitrc:
/usr/X11R6/bin/xmodmap -e “pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5″
imwheel -k -p -b “67″ -f &
3. Edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config file. Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Mouse0″
Driver “mouse”
Option “Protocol” “ExplorerPS/2″
Option “Device” “/dev/mouse”
Option “ZAxisMapping” “6 7″
Option “Buttons” “7″
EndSection
4. Lastly, you need to modify your ~/.imwheelrc file to your liking.

This is my imwheelrc file. That gives me working pgup and pgdown buttons on my mouse and scrolling. Still can’t use the applications or back/forward buttons. If someone figures that out let me know.

In other news I posted a bunch of old zn photos to my gallery.
http://unsure.org/albums/thezetanus

[Preface]: I wrote this last week when I was supposed to be doing other stuff. It’s a little odd but I need content.
So I haven’t really used OS/2 except when it is running on an HMC on a z/series which is not a good example of a working OS/2 environment. One of the things I’ve heard about it that was fantastic was graphical pipes. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I’ve been trying to imagine how that could work and be really useful. This is how I’m visualizing it.
When you are working or scripting in a normal unix environment you have access to lots of small useful programs that you can chain together to create tasks, cat, less, awk, etc. It would be nice to have precreated visual representations of these tools as widgets that you could visually chain together.
This kind of tool could be employed in two ways, one as visual scripting allowing an administrator (or a home user) to prototype scripts that they would like or need. You can imagine writing a pretty simple log parser quickly just dragging together and wiring up a visual cat to a visual sed object.
Perhaps this idea is more useful for actual application development. The tasks these little unix utilities handle for you are very useful in a CLI form but in many cases there is no equivalent widget for the same function. If you think about it scroll bars are similar to less, a text canvas is similar to cat, and a file selector embodies ls and cd. Where is the equivalent widget for sed and awk for example?
In either case this reminds me very much of javabeans (not enterprise javabeans). They allow you to visually create reusable interfaces yadda yadda. I think the missing piece of this is tying those reusable interfaces to unix tools that users are used to.
So there.

Hey all, this is my gnome tip. Just cause I really hate the splash screen that comes with gentoo’s gnome.

gconftool-2 –type=string –set /apps/gnome-session/options/splash_image

Where filename is the name of an appropriately sized PNG. Next time you log into gnome you’ll have a nicer gnome splash screen. IM me if you want the one I have.

Here is a quick howto on setting up your orinoco card to work with kismet.
Normally you need to patch pcmcia-cs however with gentoo it is already patched. Sweet.

Now you just need to patch your orinoco drivers with the appropriate version of the patch found at http://airsnort.shmoo.com/orinocoinfo.html. You can find the version of your orinoco driver by looking at the header of orinoco.c found in /usr/src/linux-2.4.22-gentoo-r4/drivers/net/wireless/. I am running orinoco-0.13d. If you are running a different version just make the appropriate changes below.

Now download the patch to that directory and run:
patch -p1

You know I like my thinkpad a lot now that I have a decent battery and wireless on it. The only thing that absolutly enrages me is the placement of the esc key. It’s directly above my F1 key. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hit it by accident while working in vi and launched the gnome help browser. Feh.

So I’ve wanted to get wireless working on my work laptop because I work nights a lot and I have been planning on getting rid of my Mac so it would be nice to have a laptop that I can use in different places. I bought a linksys that was supposed to work but the tricked me. They changed the chipset and didn’t change the model number, they just stuck a v4 on the end in little type. It didn’t work.

I went back and returned it. Best Buy doesn’t have a wide selection really I could choose between a Linksys, D-Link, or Microsoft. I was leaning towards the D-Link but Buzzco told me to try the Microsoft instead. He doesn’t have a great record with wireless cards but I went with it anyway. Turned out to be a good call, it uses the orinoco drivers found in the Linux Kernel and setup was relatively painless. So here we go:

Using a Microsoft MN-520 under linux
cardctl ident

Socket 0:
product info: “Microsoft”, “Wireless Notebook Adapter MN-520″, “”, “1.0.3″
manfid: 0×02d2, 0×0001
function: 6 (network)

—————————
build the following modules
—————————

Network device support
Wireless LAN (non-hamradio)
Hermes chipset 802.11b support (Orinoco/Prism2/Symbol)
Hermes in PLX9052 based PCI adaptor support
Hermes PCMCIA card support

—————————
/etc/pcmcia/config
—————————

device “orinoco_cs”
class “network” module “hermes”, “orinoco”, “orinoco_cs”

card “Microsoft Wireless Notebook Adapter MN-520 1.0.3″
version “Microsoft”, “Wireless Notebook Adapter MN-520″, “”, “1.0.3″
bind “orinoco_cs”

/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart

iwconfig

dhcpcd eth1

edit /etc/conf.d/net
add iface_eth1=”dhcp”

cp /etc/init.d/net.eth0 /etc/init.d/net.eth1

i needed to edit my resolv.conf to get dns working