rullzer

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.

It has been some time since my last post where I wrote I had the need for a Project in the vacation. And well I found one and altough the vacation is already over for a week I’m still (when I’m nog busy for school) working on it with Sander. For more info about why and the program see his blog.

But in shoort. We are working on a Qt4 frontend for mpd: QtMPC. So far it is already useable. Sander even kicked apache from his media PC since he didn’t use it anymore. We are far from supporting everything MPD supports but we are getting there. Soon (I hope) 0.3 will be released since we are making good progress but ofcourse the svn is available all the time

svn co http://qtmpc.lowblog.nl/svn qtmpc

Working on QtMPC made me realise that I had way to many music files. So maybe it is also time for me to get a media PC. However the budget is limit. But after talking to Sander yesterday I realised that an old pc would also work. However they make way to much noise. So right now I’m looking for some kind of old thin-client or something like that. Since crosscompiling can be done on the server or on my old laptop.

Now I could ofcourse get a cable and connect it to the server and the stereo but I’d rather not have alsa running on my server. Also if it is a pc with lets say 300 mhz. That would be more than enough to play music. It would consume much less power than my old laptop (wich is currently hooked up to the stereo). So that is again a big plus.

Ah well maybe when my next salary arrives.

So since it is vacation, Christmas is over and I have some time to fill. I have been thinking about some projects to do but could not really think of something doable in a few days. Since well I do not mind long term project I just want something where I have something working in a few days.

I had a nice idea that I borrowed from Tobias Koenig about bus-services. So I checked the transport company in Amsterdam. Wrote them a nice email if they have a way to communicate with the database. XML-RPC or something like that. Since I do understand they would not allow me directly on the database. An email came back that they do not have such a service and indeed could not allow me on directly on the database.

That is all understandable but the departure times are all available on the internet so I decided to give it one last try. A dump of the departure times from the database. But again they could not help me. Now I wonder why is that. I wrote a nice email that I just wanted to make a nice program. Why can’t they share that stuff with me? Or anyone else?

Now I could ofcourse parse the whole stuf by myself. But that would mean I had to write some ugly parser in their web of html. Which I do not like.

So that project won’t work for me. Then a friend of mine suggested a simple bittorrent client. That can run on a server and a nice client program to connect to it. So It can run while you are asleep or whatever. However after looking at a bittorrent file and the protocol I figured that would not be something I could have working in a few days.

So no project now. If you have any suggestions drop a comment please.

Qt has not even released a final version of Qt4.4.0 but 4.4.0_rc1 is already in portage. What does that mean? Well first of all that some people that complain that gentoo is now always up to date with its versions are proven wrong. Just run an ~arch system and you won’t really get more bleeding edge than that.

But the other thing Qt4.4.0_rc1 is that qt is that we now have qt-core. This means that you can compile and run qt programs on machines without X. I find this a huge advantage since I really like coding in Qt. First of all OS independancy this isn’t the most usefull feature for me since I only run linux but it is always good to know more people can use the things you create.

However the most usefull thing I find is the easy use of sockets and string modulation. It currently is masked ~M on x86. And not even keyworded on the other arches. However I added the amd64 keyword and compiled it on my home server. Compilation went smooth and a simple hello world program worked like a charm. So soon I can write some nice usefull (at least for me) servers in Qt wich should safe me a lot of time. Which is always a good thing

Yet another reason why I just love Qt.

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.

So after putting rockbox on my ipod it was time to fill that baby up again. However I discoverd that my music collections is quite big now. Over 200 GB.

So I pulled out amarok again. Before I mainly used it to store files on my Ipod. But now it is time to actually get it to manage the music files. I have always like the amarok interface. However storing over 20.000 tracks in an sqlite database did not seem the best idea. So compiled amarok with mysql support. Configured the database and scanned my collection.

It works faster than I tought it would work. Searching is no problem but also track info is displayed in no time.

Now it is time to tag the untagged files….

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

I had some contact with the SABnzbdplus maintianers today and it tuns out that the program is still called SABnzbd. So I switched the name of the ebuild and all reverences to SABnzbdplus are removed. This does mean users will have to chown their custom download dirs again. Sorry for that Chris.

Changes to the ebuild:

• All templates in the original package are now installed
• More info at the end of the ebuild
• Passes repoman, well not totally since it uses local use flags.
• Changelog enty

If you have the time please grab the ebuild here and give it a spin.

It is 40 minutes past midnight. However I did not want to keep this from you!

About a week back I saw that in my feed reader all the messages from the SABnzbd project were empty. Which means that there was no activity for a very long time. So after browsing trought the forums I found that SABnzbd was abbandond. It made me sad. But the good thing is that I saw that a new group of people has started a succesor for SABnzbd, SABnzbdplus.

SABnzbdplus: Binary Newsgrabber written in Python, server-oriented using a web-interface. The active successor of the abandoned SABnzbd project

Now what does this mean for the SABnzbd users? Well it comes down to that their usenet download tool is supported again and actively developed. So you can expet new features. Bug fixes etc. So all good news. (for current changes see the changelog).

Now the response I got to my SABnzbd-0.2.5 ebuild (see original blog post) was quite a lot. People thanking me and sending in suggestions. Unfortunatly the ebuild never made it into gentoo portage. But times have changed. Currently Cherrypy-2.2.1-r1 is in portage. So that means this ebuild does not need any other ebuilds.

Having said that I must admit that is not entirely true. It still need yenc if you want that. However we come to that. Since well that package is quite small and only a few python script being installed. It should be no problem getting that into portage. However I do not yet feel quite ready to sumbit my new ebuild to portage since it needs some testing and some features (like the included Nova themes) are not yet available after installing the ebuild. So it will need a lot of fine tuning. However that is proces that will take some time and I could really use your help. So please if you got some spare time emerge the ebuild, try it and let me know how it works out.

I now have only tested it on amd64 but since it are all python scripts it should work on any arch that has the required deps. As stated you will need the yenc ebuild. Other than it should all work fine.

Now if you were using my pervious ebuild be sure to unmerge that first. Else you will get file collison!

And finally here the ebuild can be found.

So my server does his job quite well. Serving files for the network. Acting as a rsync mirror for the network. Downloading my usenet stuf. But I decided to expand its function a bit more. So I compiled transmission (which is in portage) compiled it with daemon support but no graphical interface. Since well what do I need that for? After that I downloaded torrentflux. A nice webbased interface.

You can just follow the instruction in the package to get it running. Quite simple actually.

Now the main use of this is so I can download some torrents every once in a while wihtout having a full blow torrent client running on my laptop. Plus now I can help out the gentoo community a little more by seeding some gentoo stuf. Always nice to do that to.