One of the things I missed on my Nokia N73 was the ability to sync pproperly with my linux enviroment, the tattoo runs android and syncs perfectly with google, wich in turn syncs nicely with other things. Of course the downside is that it syncs with google, but for now that is necessary evil.

So far I am pretty impressed, mobile e-mail, Facebook, flogging etc. All work like a charm. Even Eduroam, the WiFi used at the university works out of the box! That is not even the case on my laptop!

This message was of course written on my tattoo.

She already has a webcam build into her webcam. Not great quality but good enough for skype. Also there was an old webcam which was bought approx 5 years ago, a Creative Webcam NX Pro, now I have not yet figured out what is so “pro” about it but it works like a charm!

The GSPA ZC3XX driver is the one I need! After that some programs need to be compiled with video4linux (2) support but that is to be expected. The only problem I ran in so far was skype itself! For some reason skype does not work with v4l2 so in order to run skype I have to use the following code:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

Long story short. The webcam works like a charm and thanks to the hard work of many people I had it working in no time!

It seems there are still some problems with the wifi but we have a dedicated acces point for that. Which means the required software is not even installed on the router. This is a good thing since there is very limit storage on the router.

While I was playing with the router I wanted to, finally, get OpenVPN running on it. Not that I really need the VPN but it is a matter of principles! So I started out with the OpenVPN Howto which guides your pretty much trough the whole setup.

However since room on the openwrt is limited, the easy-rsa (for key generation and signing) is not included. So I used my server to generate the keys and certs.

The ethernet-bridging is not necessary in my scenario but it seems the best way to go, espessialy since I want to implement it for some people that want to browse the samba shares. It is however important to note that you should have different local subnet and remote subnet.

So a productive weekend. It still feels cool that the router (which coasts only 55 euro’s) can be pimped so you can ssh to it, work with IPtables and act as an OpenVPN server! Embedded linux rocks

It is a very simple program using bluez for the bluetooth connection with the WiiMote (which we need, obviously) and XTestFakeKeyEvent. This has as a side effect that it will only work with X running. But that should not be a problem since well. Who would want to control his terminal with a WiiMote?

The very very basics is done. The D-Pad on the WiiMote generates up/down/left/right-keyevents. I just need to find a use full meaning for the other buttons. But maybe a control file in which the user can specify all is a better solution.

Currently it is not published on-line (yet) since I need to clean the code a little.

I am aware some other programs can do what I want but after checking out the sources they just seem to complex. I want it all simple, clean and small..

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?

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….

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

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.

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.

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