Monthly Archives: March 2005

Gentoo Sparc kernel 2.4 Xorg and Sun Type 5 keyboards

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I noticed from the web search terms in Awstats for my blog that some of the hits I’ve been getting is from people searching for help with Sun Type 5 keyboards, 2.4 kernels and Xorg 6.7/6.8 on Sparc(64), in some cases, using Gentoo.

For that reason I’ve decided to make another post on this as I’ve done some more digging around, but still don’t have a solution. The point of this post is to point people searching for this problem at the stuff I’ve found.

It seem this is a known issue with Xorg, 2.4 series kernels and Sun Type 5 keyboards. I refer you to Gentoo Bug 61940. I’ve read the bug report and all of the comments and it seems theres no quick workaround at the moment.

The issue is that for Xorg 6.7/6.8, the old keyboard driver is deprecated and people needing that driver should use the new kbd driver. Unfortunately, the kbd driver doesn’t work properly with Sun Type 5 keyboards.

The best solution seems to be to use a Gentoo 2.6 kernel (apologies if you have this problem and aren’t using Gentoo) but this doesn’t look straightforward (but possibly easier than installing Gentoo in the first place ;)), or compiling Xorg with the deprecated keyboard driver, but I haven’t looked into how to do this yet. I guess it’s just a question of having the time to do it for me. I guess using XFree86 is another option but I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, I’m not sure if Gentoo are still shipping it.

In the meantime, I offer a list of Gentoo Sparc links:

Misc Sparc Wiki.
Gentoo Sparc Development.
Gentoo Sparc forums.
Sun Type 5c keyboard Sparc forums thread.
Ferris McCormick (Gentoo Sparc guy).
Ferris’ notes on the keyboard problem (at the bottom).

I aim to make more comments/updates as I work out how to sort this out.

Ubuntu Jingle released

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It’s not great, it’s not pretty but I have finally made the Ubuntu jingle for LUG Radio. To be honest, after all the fanfare thats been made about it, it’s not even very good.

You can download it from here.

Well it’s been a nightmare to produce. 3 soundcards, 5 machines and 3 operating systems have been used during the process (Ubuntu, Dynebolic and ahem… Windows (for testing my soundcard against Linux)). It’s taken me 3 and a half months to get around to finishing it. Mostly due to other commitments, but there was a great deal of hassle with soundcards and machines.

The final version was done under Dynebolic Linux, although the drum track was made under Hydrogen in Ubuntu. It’s a completely open source project. Unfortunately Ubuntu just did not like recording a live voice from a microphone.

Well there it is. It’s done. Maybe sometime in the future I will get around to cleaning it up a bit. The vocal tracks need compressing and probably a bit of EQing as the B’s of Ubuntu tend to boom a little. In fact I just remembered that I didn’t add any echo or reverb so it will sound pretty dry. Perhaps for v 0.2?

In short it’s a bit crap and it’s been a pain in the ass to do, but I did it. At last.

V

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Wow.

Does anyone else remember the V sci-fi mini-series from the 1980s?

Maybe this will bring back some memories:

V

I used to love this show as a kid. I used to have to beg to stay up to watch it, I was about 7 or 8, it started at 10pm and ran for an hour. It really captured me at the time. There was the original mini series featuring the pilot and a second episode, followed a year or so later by the 3 part V: The Final Battle. These were shown in the UK on 5 consecutive nights during the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984. They proved so popular that after much pressure, there was eventually a weekly TV series that was never shown in the UK, but by all accounts it was rather poor and cancelled after the first series.

I last saw it when I was 17, a friend of mine had it on video. I came across a video clip last night and did some googling around it. It turns out that the series is still popular and has a quite an active following. The most detailed site at the moment seems to be http://thevisitors.info/ aswell as http://www.the-v-files.com/, Ilana’s V Celebrity Site and this one . It seems that most V sites are garishly decorated…

People are trading props and outfits from the show, it seem the original costume maker is still making the costumes to order (for several hundred dollars). There also appear to be several games based on V. There is a Commodore 64 game unsurprisingly called V (and isn’t very good), a Battlefield 1942 mod and V – Resist or Perish, a graphical adventure game which is as yet incomplete.

I really wish that some games company would see the potential of a proper 3d V game. I used to wish for a good V game, I even intended to write one myself when I was about 14. I imagine the ideal V game being something like a cross between the stealth and problem solving elements of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Deus Ex, the team elements of S.W.A.T and some network shooter action like RTCW or Wolf ET. Oh and some kind platform portability like RTCW and Wolf ET would be nice so I could play it on Linux.

Another thing that struck me while casually flicking through some of this stuff: some of these guys are real space nerds. Now I’m a Linux guy and there are is a real undercurrent of geeky, daylight fearing, text mode adventure playing, War Hammer card game owning obsessives in the lower echelon of the Linux world and I think quite rightly they get thoroughly derided by ‘normal’ people, but space nerds are another thing completely. Some of the bulletin board posts are signed using alien phrases from the show and they obsess about the fine biological details of the aliens. Someone had to actually point out that it was only a TV alien fantasy.

While I’ve never been a Trekkie or any kind of space geek, I think I could be persuaded to wear a V Shock Trooper outfit as I think it would get me laid by loads of weird space chicks 😉

V Shock Trooper outfit

It also appears that a new version of V, either a remake or a sequel is under development. Maybe I will try to apply some pressure to people like Activision or ID to make a game to coincide.

Soundcards, disk imaging and life in general

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My new Creative Labs Soundblaster Live 5.1 soundcard arrived today and… It works. Kind of. I have sound and no boot errors so thats a good thing. What I don’t seem to have is 5.1 surround sound on my 5.1 surround sound speakers, I just get left, right and bass woofer, all of which are on speaker output 2. Outputs 1 and 3, which are front and left and right rear respectively don’t seem to get any output. Maybe ALSA doesn’t do surround sound or you have to pass parameters to the module or something I don’t know.

The mic input, which is the point of buying a new card, seems OKish, but not perfect. I can hear myself through the speakers, but when recording in Audacity I get the same deeeeeeep, bitty ouput I had on my old Dell machine under Dynebolic when I mounted the hard disk as /home. Imagine a cross between an audio cassette being played back slowly and a video clip that is playing at the right speed but dropping frames like nobodys business. Something like that. Weird. I am optimistic however. The main problem under Dynebolic on my Dell machine was that it only had 128MB RAM and it ran out after about 4 or 5 audio tracks. At least on my main machine I have a GB to play with and should be able to do a reasonable job.

As a side note, Woo from Wolves LUG brought Agnula to my attention the other day. It’s a European Commission funded project to create an Open Source audio and multimedia development platform for both business and consumers. I’ll have to take a look some time when I’m not trying to escape the ever growing list of university work I should be doing.

I spent ages today trying to create a disk image of my laptop so I can just wipe it and install Ubuntu. After all of the aggro I had with Tiny, I’m keen to keep a disk image of the OEM Windows install they did in case they ever give me problems about it again. So, first off, Norton Ghost doesn’t do PCMCIA network cards so I can’t do it that way, so I’m down to my 2.2GB mini USB hard disk. This was kind of ok, just slooooow. Plus the disk images were bigger than the USB disk so I had to unplug the USB disk move it to my desktop, copy the image over and then put it back in the the laptop to get the next part of the image. The pain in the ass was that for the last part of the process, it asked for the first image file, which meant copying the last part onto my desktop, putting the first part back on the USB disk, letting Ghost do it’s business and then copying the image back across to my desktop. This is fine but each transfer took about 8 minutes or so. Nevertheless I made a pretty comprehensive backup set. A little extravagant even.

I made an image of the restore partition, an image of the main partition with my own preferred setup, then one of the entire disk, should anything ever go wrong. The only problem was that the last image took something like 3 hours to create, including the copying process and then when I had to put the first image back in so Ghost could (I assume) write how many image files the whole image spans into the first image, it couldn’t recognise the USB disk again no matter what I did. I had to reboot it in the end and lose the image. I’ll try again at some point when I have time to burn (some time next century).

On that topic, I’m seriously getting snowed under with uni work. I think I might be in serious trouble soon, I’m getting further and further behind and I’m getting really worried. I would have tried one of the open source disk imaging options I listed the other day but I just didn’t have the time to learn the idiosyncrasies of a new piece of software, I needed to get it done, this wasn’t quite the case in the end of course, but that wasn’t the point…

As a final thing, I notice that U-Turn is on TV as I write this. Thats one of the weirdest films I’ve ever seen. The first time I saw it, my friend and I just sat there looking back and forth between the TV and each other going, “???”. We thought it was just shit. Or we had completely missed something and it was in fact a work of genius which we just didn’t get. But we were pretty certain it was the first option and told everyone who would listen. Then I saw it a few years back and it’s actually pretty good, if you can surivive how odd it is. It’s a really weird film crammed with huge names and uncomfortable cinematography. The opening paragraph of the above review captures the film almost perfectly. Weird film…

How to install Linux on a large scale

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I’ve been thinking about this for a while to be honest. I worked in an organisation with around 600 machines for over a year, all Windows of course. A copy of Windows was installed on each type of machine (there were around 5 different types, with all machines within each type having exactly the same hardware), tweaked the settings to make them use the correct settings for Windows domain and the file shares, used Norton Ghost to make a copy of the disk and put it on a server, then used Ghost book disks to drag the disk image over, then change the machine names, set up a domain account and set up any extra peripherals.

We could roll out a machine in 30 minutes tops, mostly unattended and one person could do the whole organisation in about 4 weeks. I’ve been wondering how this would be done in the Linux world. How do you deploy 600 Linux desktops like this?

I vaguely recall Red Hat having a thing where you could perform an installation on a machine and save the setup configuration somehow so it could be used to perform the same installation on other machines in a mostly unattended way, but that means using Red Hat. It seems that there is no open source vendor agnostic tool to do this. Either buy Norton Ghost or use Red Hat.

I read the HOWTO Clone Disk Images on Linux Booted from a Network artcile from The Linux Documentation Project, but it seemed a bit messy.

So I googled and found the following links and articles.

g4u
Patagonia
Mondo Rescue
Dolly and
this Linux Gazette article.

After a quick browse of these projects, I’d say that g4u looks the most like something that would be bearable to use.

I think it would be interesting to look at how to reduce maintenace time too. I think it’s not uncommon to use Linux as a thin client system on larger installations, using something like the Linux Terminal Server Project, like they did at Handsworth Grammar School but it would be interesting to see how thin is practical, what network file systems people use (NFS, Samba, Coda?) for best results and how to handle network logins (do people really still use NIS, how much of a pain is it to synchronize smbpasswd with /etc/passwd on a large multi-user network etc).

I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has experience of deploying Linux on a large number machines, or who has experience of using any of these tools, particularly in comparison to proprietary products like Norton Ghost, Power Quest Drive Image or Acronis True Image.

LUG Radio Bastards!

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The latest episode of LUG Radio came out today, Season 2, episode 10, their 1st anniversary episode. Congratulations guys 🙂 I’m listening to it right now.

As usual it’s a massively feature packed episode, not confined to talking about the Hula Project, LUG Radio Live, GNU Classpath (an open source Java implementation), talking to Jeff Waugh about Kubuntu and loads of other stuff.

Aside from all of this, I am publicly barracked (bare in mind that the last episode got about 14,000 downloads) for my failure to produce the Ubuntu jingle that I promised nearly 8 weeks ago and it is claimed that I blame it all on Linux. Not strictly true.

I blame it on my crap soundcard, on Creative for making 2 completely different Soundblaster Lives and then ALSA for not specifiying that there are is more than one Soundblaster Live, one which works and one which is under development using a different driver – to which end I checked compatibility and not realising there was 2, bought the wrong one. Bleh.

But in the spirit of the show I will take the boiled down version of the facts on the chin. I still haven’t fucking done it.

LUG Radio Bastards!