Author Archives: Jeff Pabian

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Fedora (fc8) releases a new kernel

… and saves me a ton of work.  Tonight, I got the notification that there was a new kernel in FC8:  2.6.23.14-107.fc8.  If you have been reading a long, you might know I was trying to roll my own kernel and modules to get my super-compact wifi usb dongle working.  Well, tonight’s kernel release includes the elusive module, zd1211rw.ko AND my sounds is working, so I am really good to go.

We’ll see how the suspend / resume works on my laptop, since that’s been a little goofy.

I got to say I feel a little put off since I’ve put so much reading into how to build a customer kernel, modules, and recompile various the modules via the SOURCE rpm’s; sprms’s.  So a good learning experince nontheless, but I am just happy that it appears that it will work.  I can spend less time polishing my hammer!

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Sound on Fedora fc8… SOLVED!!!

I apologize for lack of a snappy post title. I am just giddy to get my sound working… better than I had before. In my last post regarding my sound issues:

I mentioned how I finally got the OSS sound driver to work. It worked okay… not perfect. No where near perfect. Finally, I had enough. I finally figured out how to get everything working natively.

In my previous post, I mention that I have an Azalia SB600 and it has an ALC268 chipset. I read somewhere that you can recompile the kernel modules for the ALSA drivers. I began searching for some more specific clues and found this:

# yum groupinstall “Development Tools”
# yum install mercurial
# cd /usr/src

# mkdir alsa && cd alsa
# hg clone http://hg-mirror.alsa-project.org/alsa-driver alsa-driver
# cd alsa-driver
# hg clone
http://hg-mirror.alsa-project.org/alsa-kernel alsa-kernel
# ./hgcompile && make install

reboot!

I also modified the following line in modprobe.conf:

options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=toshiba

It worked! I couldn’t believe it. How easy! I spent hours on this in the past. Granted, finding this solution took some work, but I am very thankful.

Edit: 01.16.08: I happened to see others with Toshiba laptops that had sound problems over at the Fedora Forums. For reference, I have a Toshiba A215-S7411 with the ALC268 chipset.

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what’s your inspiration

I’ve written in the past about things that get my creativity going. I think in my last example, I went on about Mel Brook’s History of the World, Part I. What a great movie. There are other movies that just knock my socks off. Young Frankenstein is an other example of a super creative movie. I’ll admit, I love anything that has well done, double entendre. I even like it more when I say something that is double entendre, and half the people get it, and the other half have blank looks on their faces. Hilarious… Okay, I’ll get my mind out of the gutter.

Innovation and creativity are funny things. For me, I find it can be a balancing act. There have been times in my life when I feel like I am on fire and I am really being innovative and rocking. Then, something happens, and it feels like a punch in gut and I get “thinkers block” and I am paralyzed. In the past, this paralyzed feeling has in some cases lasted years. For example, I used to try to work on my Mom’s house when I lived there. Nothing would work and I felt like a worthless handy man. I eventually gave up trying to do things around the house. Years later, I realized my shortcomings as a handyman were really lack of experience (naturally) and the builder took a lot of shortcuts. When my wife and I bought our first home (which was built in 1947), something clicked and I became the handyman that I always wanted to be.

When I was in high school and in college, I worked on my own cars. Then something happened and I became an inept mechanic and I felt like I had no business under the hood. When I had my old Mercedes diesel, (I still wish I had that car), something happened and I was back under the hood changing glow plugs and brake pads. Now, with our modern cars, (a Volvo and VW Eurovan), I am back to changing brakes pads and rotors and saving thousands of dollars in dealer repair costs and offering to help others with their cars.

Sure, part of it is confidence, but I don’t think that’s just it. I remember when I read “Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and the only thing I remember is how the author said something along the lines of “I have a motorcycle, it makes sense to me to understand how it works and to learn how to work on it” and he said one of his friends just let the repair shop deal with the problems.

Part of it, is also just being willing to try it… figure it out… make it work. I’m lucky. My wife tolerates my experiments. I heard her tell the kids one day, “Don’t worry, Daddy can fix it. Daddy can fix anything.” Wow, not only was that a boost in my confidence, but it showed me that my family thinks I can fix anything! I felt like a Super-fix-it-man!

I’ll give you another example how this translates into my life. If you have kids and pets, you probably already know the value of a carpet shampooer. I’m not talking the professional kind you rent, rather the consumer grade ones. We’ve had one for about six years. The hose, that allows you to use the hand attachments broke where the handle tilts back. We can easily afford a new shampooer but otherwise the unit still works really well for cleaning the carpets. The other night I was out for a run and it happened to be trash night in our neighborhood. Someone was throwing out a newer version of the shampooer we have. My first thought was, “Cool, maybe I can use that hose…” and I went and gave the discarded shampooer the once over. As I titled the handle back, I saw that the hose ripped in the exact same place so I wasn’t interested.

My point with all of this, is that… well I don’t know. I guess since my family thinks I can fix anything, I feel like I can.

Back to the creativity and innovation thoughts… The other night, I was watching TV with the kids. I was really tired of cartoons so I was trying to find something we could watch, (deep sea creatures and sharks are always a big hit with the kids). In a rare occurrence, we tuned to catch the very beginning of the Pink Panther movie. I grew up with these movies and remember seeing them in the movie theater in Chicago with my Grandma. I forgot how clever and creative the beginning segments are. I’ve always like the Pink Panther cartoons. He’s very expressive and can make you laugh without saying a word. So the opening credits were great. The kids loved it. It made me think where I got my sense of humor from.

Over at Chris Brogan’s blog, he’s got a neat post about the “Bucket Meme” and it was something I was going to write about here, but my time is already short this morning so I’ll have to get it in the next post.

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what’s the story, wishbone…

Man, I haven’t updated in a while but I have been dying to post something.  You know, I keep having ideas that I want to write about, then I start a draft, and either whatever I started to write is just plain wrong or I come to realize it just isn’t as important as I thought it was.   Oh well.

I’ll just shotgun all the updates I have.  Usually, I tend to write more about these topics as time marches on.

First, I feel like I lost a good friend.  My iPod died.  It really died.  I had a 40GB 4G iPod.  It was actually a HP iPod; you remember when HP resold iPods?  Me neither, it was a speck on the historic iPod timeline.  Well, I loved it and literally used it every day.  This year, the hard drive started to make click and whrring shoulds. I could bang it on the table, (don’t laugh… I read about doing that in a forum) and it would work.  Now, the hard drive is crunching and the iPod isn’t booting up.  Oh well.  Once I find a new job, I plan on getting an 8GB Nano since I like to run with my iPod.  I would like to try the Nike+ product.  A good friend told me it was really cool.  I figure that and a heart rate monitor might really make for some serious training. (Rumor has it, you don’t really need the Nike+ shoes… any shoes will do.)

I’ve been playing around with Munin and Nagios on my laptop (which is running FC8).  Again, I started to write a page about getting Munin working with Fedora and SELinux but I still don’t have it all worked out.  However, I am becoming more knowledgeable about SELinux in troubleshooting.  That’s cool.

I’ve also been continuing my Ruby on Rails education.  I love it.  I really want to be an expert.  I got a couple of personal projects on deck that should really help me solidify my foundation.  I just wish I had more time these days.

I split a crap load of wood with a log splitter (not the hydraulic kind, the kind you swing, over and over).  It felt great to do some work like that.  And now we just need some nice cold weather here in Atlanta, so we can have a fire.

We got some nice, new wheels on our 2003 VW Eurovan.  Anyone want to see pics?

I have, I guess what you would call a 2nd interview with a really cool company tomorrow, (Friday).  Wish me luck… these guys are really cool and I am totally blown away by their tech.   It would be a dream job.

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Fedora Werewolf (fc8) on toshiba laptop… the sound saga

Following up on my previous posts regarding my new Toshiba A215 laptop with the goofy sound card :

In my previous posts, I mentioned that I was having a hard time getting the sound working under linux/fedora. In case you don’t know, FC8 uses Pulse Audio which is new. There have been reports of various sound problems related to permissions, users, and other items.

  • Fixing Broken Sound in Fedora

Out of the box, Fedora is using ALSA sound drivers. For all intents and purposes, every looks like it should work.

  1. all daemons start
  2. sound card is detected
  3. kernel modules are loaded
  4. test sounds appear to be played, yet no sound is heard

I even went as far as downloading the source for the ALSA drivers since I had seen some mention of a bug with my sound card I have an Azalia SB600. I lived with it for a couple of weeks now and I was really missing my music. So, one a whim I tried the OSS (Open Sound Service) drivers. Any you know what? It works.

Now, it doesn’t work like you’d think. Pulse Audio doesn’t appear to use it and Gnome doesn’t find any sound cards, (Actually, Pulse creates a faux ESD process that Gnome uses). Who cares. I got sound and it works good. All apps I’ve tested work; stand alone and webbased.

Ah, but how to control the overall master volume to direct sound only out to the headphones. The OSS drivers some with their own utilities. There is an ossxmix‘er that works superbly.

Still, not as easy as a Mac, but a lot of fun!

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Fedora Linux (fc8) on my new laptop… the wireless saga

I love it when a plan comes together but hate it when I can’t think of a catchy title for a post. Oh well. In my last post regarding my new laptop, things have been progressing.

My last statement in that post said something about how there is something to be said about having a Mac “just work out of the box” but I’ve seen lots of people post saying that part of the fun of Linux, is trying to get things to work. It can be downright frustrating, of course, but when it works, it works well.

My laptop is a Toshiba A215 (which I just added another 2GB of ram). It’s a great laptop. Vista works well with it. I can’t complain about that, but I’ve been wanting to run Linux full time on it. One of the quirks of this laptop is that the wireless device shows up as an usb device, which is something very strange:

[jpabian@stoshua]~% lsusb
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:8197 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.

This wireless device is indeed a Realtek RTL8187B. Some people have gotten it to work and others have just given up on it. Those of the people who got it to work have hardcoded the wifi settings in a config file. I wanted to have the nifty wifi-selector that “NetworkManager” provides. I don’t want to hardcode anything (like the Mac). I searched and searched and tried everything I could find to do. I found a lot of really great resources but nothing worked. This was one of the best sites:

  • Realtek Linux wireless driver project

I mean it, I was pulling my hair out. It shouldn’t be this hard. I began to be disappointed with my otherwise ideal laptop. I started to read about other wireless USB devices that work with linux. I came up with a plan. I checked out Circuit City’s, Best Buy’s, and Office Depot’s websites to see what they had on sale AND what wireless USB devices worked under linux.

One page I had found (and you know, I can’t find it now!), had a list of pretty much all the wireless USB devices and if they had kernel support or if drivers existed. But it also had a column that reported if it “worked out of the box” or not. Each of the stores I mentioned above had a Linksys on sale, AND it was reported to “work out of the box!” I was excited but also very nervous whether or not it would work. I saw a few posts around where people where having problems with. I picked up the Linksys® WUSB54GC Wireless-G USB 2.0 Network Adapter for $50 after “instant savings.”

wusb54gc.jpg

So when the moment of truth came, I plugged in the WUSB54GC into one of my USB ports and say the following message:

Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> wlan1: Device is fully-supported using driver ‘rt73usb’.
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> (wlan1): exporting device as /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Device/4
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> Now managing wireless (802.11) device ‘wlan1’.
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> Bringing up device wlan1

It worked! I didn’t have to do anything! Sure enough, NetworkManager presented me with both my wireless networks (and my neighbors’). I couldn’t believe it. It works great. It works good on the suspend and resume functions of my laptop.

Sure, I really wish that the onboard wifi worked under Linux, but from I’ve read, they’ve only just merged the driver support into the very latest kernel sources so I suspect that support will continue to get better. But for now, I’m very happy with this device.

Now, the only lingering item is sound. Fedora 8 went to using Pulse Audio for the default sound server. Sure looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work and I’m not the only one; there are several threads over at the Fedora Forums talking about it. But FC8 is still bleeding edge. It will work sooner than later, I’m sure.

I’ll save that for another post.

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Linux, Vista, and my new laptop

OH YEAH! (He says like the Kool-aid pitcher as he smashes through the wall!)

My new laptop finally came yesterday.  We missed FedEx on Tuesday and I waiting all day for them to come back yesterday.  I got a Toshiba with a dual core AMD 64 Athalon X2; it was a Thanksgiving day purchase (an early Black Friday deal that I happened to catch in time).  It’s a beaut and came with Vista Home Premium on it.

If I had my druthers, I would have told them to hold the OS; as I was going to install Fedora Linux on it as soon as I could.  I burned my x86_64 DVD with anticipation of its arrival.

It came right at 1PM.  By 2PM I was booting off the Fedora DVD and getting ready to install.  I knew on the Ubuntu LiveCD, it has Gparted on it, so I assumed this would to.  It did not.  A quick websearch recommended using a virtual term to use ntfsresize and fdisk.  I was too impatient and found the Gparted LiveCD and thought I’d use that.  The drive was 160G so I thought 40G for Fedora and 120G for Vista since I could always mount the NTFS partition in Linux.  I quickly downloaded and burned the image to disk.
Well, as luck would have it (or my impatience) the README on the LiveCD had something like this to say:

 You can’t use Gparted to resize Vista partitions.  You have to use nftresize and fdisk

It gave some basic examples and I followed them and it looked like it worked.  I rebooted and got the message that “No OS found” and the laptop tried to do a network boot.  So I began to install Fedora.

During the installation, I realized that I forgot to set the Vista partion to active/bootable.  I used fdisk to fix that and after the installation, I had a flawless dual-boot system.

It seemed like the install took forever.  My previous Fedora installations had been from CD not DVD so there was a lot more stuff installed locally.  After the install, I had something like 77 updates to download and apply.  That did take a long time.  I couldn’t install the other stuff while the package manager was running so I watch Mythbusters and chatted via Pidgin.

I  wasn’t getting any action from my wireless.  I was using ethernet cable.  Turns out, that Toshiba used a Realtek wireless card that shows up as an USB device.  WTF?  It’s a Realtek RTL8187B.

Poking around in the forums it seems some ingenious guy got the source for the driver and patched it for Linux, or Ubuntu specifically.  It seems to work, as it shows up as wlan0 and I can manually assign an IP to it, but wpa_supplicant doesn’t see it.  Honestly, I ran out of time to tinker with it, but I think I am about 95% of the way there.

I also installed the fglrx drivers for the ATI x1200 card.  This also works great and I got my tiny resolution I’ve been craving.  I now have a nice wide, large workspace.  I plan on getting about 1GB or 2GB of RAM; I’ll just wait until it is on sale.

So, here’s the links I found useful:

I’ll follow up if and when I get my wireless working.  I am pretty confident I’ll get it.  I also received a suggestion via the Skribit widget to do a post about Mac vs. Linux.  That’s a good idea.  There is something to be said about having everything “work out of the box” but I don’t mind the tinkering.

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tmobile wing with a new modded ROM

It was hard to come up with a flashy title for this post, but I figured that I get a lot of traffic from people looking for info on the Wing.

As it stands, ActiveSync stopped working some time this week. I installed some apps and thought that one of them could be the culprit, but searching the forums and Googling clues proved to be fruitless. In the end, I resorted to a hard reset (since at this point, it was really important I sync’ed my contacts) and ActiveSync worked just fine.

So, I headed over to Howard Forums to see what the latest was. Actually, I couldn’t remember how to do a hard reset, (couldn’t remember which button to push) and stumbled into the slipperly slope of installing a modded ROM.

First, if you have a Tmobile Wing, you need to read this thread as it is a treasure trove of tips, tricks, and improvements:

On my Wing, I’ve been using the HTC Touch skins on my phone. I really like the improved look and launcher of the phone, but by doing a hard reset (like I had to do to sync again), I need to reinstall all my mods. This isn’t my screen capture but it looks like this:

 

I liked the look so much better. Then tonight I stumbled upon this link and it was a breeze following the directions:

  • Newbs guide to Herald modification *updated* 11/02/07

For those of you guys that don’t know, HTC Herald is the same as the Wing. That thread has a ton of great info in there for you to check out. If you are new to the Wing or wanted to learn more about hacking it, then you need to READ IT COMPLETELY before attempting anything found therein.

Again, this isn’t my screen shot but my Wing now looks like this. I love it:

 

There is a fair amount of customization you have to do, but it isn’t too bad or hard.  I was again able to resync all my data and contacts so it’s good to go, but still have some minor tweaks.

Make sure you check out Part 2 of the FAQ.

 

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it’s all crab grass and clover

Lucky you, two posts in a day.

Tonight, I took a trip down my memory lane.  I used to be really into a band called Bongwater.  I don’t remember how I first heard of them but I do remember the first time I heard their CD.

Bongwater is made up of Kramer and Anne Magnuson.  Yes, that’s right.  Anne Magnuson… that’s what I said.  You’re probably wondering why that sounds familiar.  She’s an actress that was in many movies in the 90’s including “Making Mr. Right.”  I never saw it, but knew she was in it.

With the invention of the iPod and owning a decent set of earphones, I hear things in my music that I maybe hadn’t heard before; more background sounds, someone talking, a riff, etc.  So listening tonight to Bongwater was a real treat.

I don’t think I can do it justice to describe it.  Kramer is a genius and Anne sounds really good.  The songs are complex as they are clever and it’s unlike anything else I’ve got.  Sure, there are similarities but the music stands out supreme.

I used to listen to Bongwater when I was in art school working on my BFA in graphic design.  This was in the early 90’s.  Typically I’d be up almost 24 hours and this would be a perfect thing to listen too in that state of mind.  So listening tonight I am reminded of the creativity behind this music.   It is really creative and produced with such regard, it’s very impressive.  I can only suggest you check it out in Pandora.

I had seen B.A.L.L in the 80’s in Atlanta at the Metroplex.  Kramer was the drummer.  At one point in the show, he simply got up and left.  I think he went to get something to drink and the band played on realizing he was gone I think one song later.  I felt it was like an honor to have seen him.  At that point in time, I thought of him as one of the most prolific and creative people I had every heard about.

I had also seen King Missile here in Atlanta at the Masquerade.   At that point in my life, I had worked at a record shop and the girl who was our label rep at the time was going to have John S. Hall crash on her couch. I was invited to go but was with my little sister and felt like it would have been irresponsible to take her.   John S. Hall and Kramer did a spoken word album called “Real Men.”  Great stuff.

Kramer had a record label called “Shimmy Disk.”  I went on a bend to buy anything I could find on Shimmy Disk.  I got a pretty impressive collection and have all the Bongwater CD’s.  Since I worked in the record shop, I was able to order anything I couldn’t find locally and get my employee discount.

Kramer’s Wikipedia page is a really good read.  I remember when he dropped out of sight.  I always wondered what happened to him.  As I read the page tonight, I was really happy to see that he is still around and successful. I’m sorry that he had some hard times but in the pictures on his site, he looks really happy and I am genuinely happy for him.

I was really interested to see what other bands Kramer was involved with.  They are all bands I really like.   To quote wikipedia:

Mark Kramer, known professionally as Kramer, is a musician, composer, performer, record producer and founder of the NY record label Shimmy-Disc. He was a member of such diverse musical entities as Butthole Surfers, Shockabilly, B.A.L.L., Bongwater, Ween, Half Japanese, The Fugs (1984 reunion tour), and Dogbowl & Kramer, and he also performed regularly with John Zorn and other improvising musicians of New York City’s so-called “downtown scene” of the 1980s. His most notable work as a producer has been with bands such as Galaxie 500 (whose entire oeuvre he produced), Low (whom he discovered and produced), Half Japanese, GWAR, King Missile, The Tinklers, Alice Donut, Danielson Famile, Will Oldham’s Palace Songs, Daniel Johnston, and the hit single for Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Urge Overkill’s “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon”.

I was also very surprised to see what else he had been up to.   It was interesting to see his involvement in the whole “Slowcore” movement.  I have always liked Low and have seen Ween (before they had  drums, keyboard or bass), numerous times so it was cool that this is all interconnected.

One of my most prized possessions is  a CD someone gave me.  It’s called “Smack My Crack” and is a various artists compilation.  There is a Butthole Surfers song on there that is not anywhere else, (best of my knowledge), and I remember reading somewhere that Kramer was in the band when their song was recorded for the album.  I can see it.  The song is great.

smack_f.jpg

As I read these Wikipedia pages, my jaw drops as I see how much Kramer has touched or influenced over the years.  I also find it slightly eriee that 80% of the music I really like has some connection to Kramer.

Kramer, I love you, man! sniff sniff

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i love fedora

It’s been a couple of months since I had to turn in my Powerbook when I was recently let go due to downsizing.   I actually went through a sort of withdrawal as I really enjoyed using my Powerbook and was really sad to turn it in.

I had an old laptop that I installed Ubuntu on and it was my Linux Webcam server.  I liked having the webcam server on the laptop since I could move it around and easily capture the action, wherever it was.  But now I found I needed something to actually do work on while I was on the job hunt.

Now, I really liked Ubuntu, but there was something about it that left me wanting.  It was hard to explain but as best as I could put it is that it did EVERYTHING.  I wanted to get my hands dirty and I wanted something that was a little more “advanced.”  Even on my Mac, I used Fink and used an xterm  with the command line  often.  Everything on Ubuntu was just too easy.

I cut my Linux teeth I think on Debian 1.2 (I still have the CD I bought).  I used Debian for years.  At work, we used Digital Unix which became Tru64, a bsd-type of Unix.  Then, somewhere along the line, I used FreeBSD as my desktop for years… that is until I got my Mac.  Even up to that point, I used XEmacs/Gnus as my newsreader and email client for work.  At home, I read mail on my FreeBSD box and used Pine until I went to IMAP .

So, fast forward to today.  On my old crappy laptop, (with 16MB of video), I needed something to get by and I didn’t want to install WinXP since I don’t have a license.  I am also learning Ruby and relearning PHP.  So now I have a L.A.M.P. laptop and I develop anywhere the mood strikes me.  Despite the lacking power on this laptop, it was workable.  I really liked it.

I went with Fedora 7 and was in heaven.  In fact, I don’t want a Mac any more.  I want a new laptop running Fedora.  I’ll even go dual-boot with Fedora and Windows.

Fedora Linux

While I find myself in this transitional period, I feel like I am re-honing my skills with the latest flavors of Linux, learning new development skills, and learning the latest in tools.  For example, I have a subversion server that I am using.  I began using Eclipse as an IDE for Perl and PHP.  I am learning, engaged, and feeling somewhat productive.  I’ve began reading USENET again and getting back to the core parts of the Internet that I really enjoy.

I tried the various flavors of Linux before deciding on Fedora.  I tried Ubuntu of course, Gentoo, SuSe, and was going to try Solaris 10 x86 but I have that on DVD and my crappy laptop doesn’t have a DVD-Rom.

The tools that I enjoy using are:

I love it.  I’ve also been turned onto some really slick Firefox plugins.

(Note: I was going to link to the Firefox plugins but the site is down right now.)

Now, I just need to find more  quiet time to really get into it.   If you got other ideas or tools, or even methodologies you find useful, I’d love to hear them!