rullzer

Yesterday Sander and I released a new version of QtMPC (0.4.1).

However when thinking about some of the features we would like to have in QtMPC we once again got annoyed by the MPD protocol. One of the main issues we had was that it is not event based, or even publish-subscribe. You have to ask for every little detail you want. This is a choice and it is true that this way you do not get unwanted messages thus generate unwanted network traffic.

But we feel that some sort of event based protocol will do a better job here. Lets say in the default nothing is send as well. That way mobile clients can still control the player without receiving anything unwanted. Or just subscribe to events related to playback. This way mobile clients are still supported but again. They do not have to request the status ever x seconds. They just get a message once had changed.

For full blown clients event bases is also a positive thing. For example the reaction time. When adding a new song. Right now this has to be noted by the client when requesting the version of the playlist. A simple message from the server saying playlist current newsong …….. (or something like that) could be send right after the song is actually added. It just makes things easier.

Another thing that kind of bother us that there was no inotify support. This would be great however. Lets say you have a music server running on your server. And add some new music to the collection. It would be best of course if it would find the new music. Add it to the database and notify the clients of a change in the music library.

Now we have not written any code yet. But we are thinking about it. For the music playback part we are planing to use gstreamer. Since well it already supports a lot of audio formats. And why reinvent the wheel right?

So at my fathers work the pc’s had to be replaced. It took a while since he works at a the CWI a semi goverment thing in the Netherlands. However for a soft price I could get 2 pc’s. Compaq’s. 2Ghz, 256mb RAM. So pretty nice desktop pc’s for my sisters. And well since they are almost identical I can build binary packages on each system and use them on the other.

Now I won’t stop compiling all my pacakges but this gives great advantages If I (might come soon) have to handle some homogenous systems. Since well if they are identical in hardware and you want to do the same stuff of them why not reuse the packages that are already build.

Now with those two computers this brings the total number of computers at my folks at 7. I’m secretly building my own server farm to take over the world in case you are wondering.

Now abut those 7 computers:

• Desktop downstairs - Running Windows
• Mothers laptop - Running Windows
• My old laptop - Running Gentoo
• Server - Running Gentoo
• Oldest Sister Computer - Running Gentoo
• Youngest Sister Computer - Running Gentoo
• My testbox - Running Gentoo

Now the two windows boxes are in a Domain controled by samba. It works. However the gentoo boxes connect all much easier. Man i love nfs!

Ofcource I have my current laptop which is also running gentoo. So linux is taking over at least over at my folks. I’m guessing it takes only a couple of months before I can confince my dad to move to linux to That would be a great day….

So my base system is running smooth. Distcc and crossdev are up and running and the server is doing a great job compiling everythin for it. NFS is running which safes a lot of space and keeps me from cleaning the distfiles every day. Since well 4 gb is not a lot :P.

Other than that I’m supprised how fast the system boots. I guess it is because there is not much hardware to detect. Other than that the kernel is also very small and when I get over at my folks tomorrow I can get it even smaller I believe.

Right now KDE is compiling since I promised my gf’s father to check what the old thing could do. currently I’m at packag e 146 of 192 since this morning. So that will be done tomorrow. And it will be time to run KDE…. that would be the ultimate test. Howver I feel fluxbox or something will run a lot smoother. But maybe I’ll test that later.

I’m wondering what I could do with the laptop. Cause it would be nice to put it to good use. Now useing it for presentations or something would be great. Or other than that using it for some basic school stuf for one of my sisters or something could also be the case. Ah well I’ll check it tomorrow

So this weekend my girlfriend father pointed out that they had an old laptop lying around. I decided it would be fun to run gentoo on it and use it for anything I could think of. First to give you an impression

Compaq Armada 100s
550 Mhz Cpu
56 meg ram
8 meg video-ram

This laptop is old so that means the CD-ROM does not react that well to CD-R’s. This is bad when you want to boot from a CD-ROM. But I got it working. Now after booting the kernel (nofb ofcourse, and more options). An error messgae kept spamming my screen wich was caused by udev loading the usbmodule (while I gave nousb as one of the options to the kernel). This is not what should happen so I filled a bug (#206954).

The solution was easy just rmmod uhci_usb and it stopped. So that ment no USB support into the kernel. The USB port (yeah only 1) is know to be broken on this laptop I read on other sites.

Now since I wanted to use the laptops full potential I ofcourse changed the CHOST etc. But a downside ofcourse was that gcc and glibc needed to be recompiled….. It is compiling gcc for 10 hours straigt now. And I have no idea how long it will keep on going. But if it isn’t finished in another 10 hours It will be killed and I have to think of something else.

I’ll keep you posted on the process with this laptop.

First of all Happy Hollidays. Christmas is almost over and I hope you all had a good time. However on this second Christmasday I found myself at my girlfriends parents waiting for the other guests to arrive. Since it would take roughly 3 hours before they would come I figured I’d better do something. So after reading up on some blogs and articles I found wondering what to do next.

They their projector popped into my head. It has an USB-port. My laptop has an USB port. It did not take me to long to find out that I could do some nice things whit that. Acer has some software under windows. I was hoping they would have just posted the protocol online. But no. Ofcourse not. After browsing the Acer website and google. I could not find anything usefull about what command to send to the Projector (it does not help that Acer also creates a whole lot hardware).

So It was time to hookup my Laptop to the proejctor. Everything still works. And I was monitory /dev for any changes. The first thing to catch my eye was a bunch of new stuf in /dev/input. A mouse was automatically recognised. And it even worked. Moving some sort of analog stick around made my mouse move! Isn’t that magical!

However it is nice and all that I can use it as a mouse but who really cares? Now also tty12 was created. Which seems a lot more interesting. However I had ofcourse no idea what to send to the Projetor in order to get response. Now maybe I’ll hijack a Windows Laptop tomorrow and sniff some of the command send trough the USB port.

Ah well a nice project to work on during this vacation.

Today I found myself listing to my ipod when a project I read about some time ago poped into my head. ipodlinux yup that is right linux on your ipod. So this morning I decided to give it a try.

The first thing I encounterd was that the GUI install program reguires libcrypto.so.0.9.7 and well 0.9.7 is not even in portage anymore that was out of the question. However I think else I also would have done the manual install since well then I can control all the aspects of the installation myself :). But the guid was very clear and in no time I had ipodlinux running. And well I got to tell you it is quite a kick when you see those kernel messaages scrolling over your ipod screen.

However not everything was as good as it seemd. The ipodlinux guys do yet support the 5G ipods so I had no music player. I could still boot the original ipod but well what was the point then. So I decided to install rockbox which was recomended me by Sander.

Installing rockbox was even easier then ipodlinux. Just configuring the bootloader of ipodlinux was enough. Man all things should be that simple! A huge advantage of rockbox is that when a new version is released just extracting a new verion on the ipod will be enought to get it running.

But now comes what I like most about rockbox. No more weird apple database! I can just store the files on my ipod. Now amarok did a nice job in managing my ipod database but now I can do it all easy from the console. So I can only describe that as a big plus! Other than that a lot of more audio formats are supported plus ofcourse it is open source.

Now you are wondering why I even installed ipodlinux right and not just rockbox? Well Ipodlinux has some nice features that I also really really like. For example iBoy. It allows me to play gameboy games on my ipod. Now I realise that some games will be a lot harder than others to play on it but I can for example play Final Fantasy! Just playing RPG games on my IPOD! Hell yeah.

I was already using my ipod a lot but it seems I’ll be using it even more now

So after all the wonderfull stories Daan has told me about Compiz-Fusion I decided to try it out myself. Why now all of sudden? Well because of the AIGLX support in the new fglrx drivers from ATI. So after compiling and messing with the settings it is now all working. And well I got to say it looks good.

However I’m most of the time not that excited about eye candy in my daily work compiz does have some nice features. The cube rotation, expo and a lot more. They look nice but also provide nice previews. Which well is works nice

Ofcourse a nice extra side effect is that I can showoff to all the windows users. Man that feels nice

So this week the new ati drivers were released. Ofcourse some of the ati using gentoo users came together on bugzilla (Bug 196820). Now I tried the way described in there however I got random atifacts. Today I installed the ati-drivers from the ati package and well they worded out of the box and everything went smooth. So I geus it is time to check what ati does what the ebuild doesn’t. Now my homework for this week is finished so I gues most of my saturday will be spend on playing with ebuilds and the ati-drivers and hope to get the thing working as it should.

Ah well. I’ll keep you posted

So I just compiled warsow. Since I wanted a nice FPS to play with my friends. Ah well anyway. When I was in full screen I noticed that I wasn’t able to change the volume of the sound. So I spend some time playing with acpid to get it to react to my FN keys. Well that all worked. Getting the volume up and down was easy. Thanks to the nice program amixer. However toggeling the mute took some time to figure out. Well not the muting and unmuting itself that was easy. But to toggle it. So I ended up writing a simple bash script:

#!/bin/bash
numid="2" #Find by running amixer controls
volume=$(amixer cget numid=$numid | grep
volume=${volume: -3}
if [[ $volume = 'off' ]]
then
amixer cset numid=$numid on &> /dev/null
else
amixer cset numid=$numid off &> /dev/null
fi

Maybe it is of good use for you to

So I finally got Dual head working. As in that I now have 2 seperated screens. This is nice since that is what I wanted. The only thing now if I unplug the external monitor it still “thinks” that I have a 2nd screen. Wich can make my mouse disapear. Ah well. This weekend it probably is time to do some fine tuning on that. But damn this rockz