The Musings of the Kat

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:01:00 GMT

I still prefer the usability of Smart Package Manager over Fedora's default package management programs, so here are my Fedora 12 RPM Fusion channels for Smart Package Manager.

rpmfusion-smart-channels-fedora-12.tar.gz

Posted by Kat Crichton Thu, 09 Apr 2009 08:58:00 GMT

Seems I was a little hasty in demanding the head of light entertainment on a spike.

It turns out that the solution to the retuning of MythTV after the Rowridge frequency changes is to delete and recreate the entire Capture Card using mythtv-setup. I have done this and now all my channels work as they used to.

There must be some metadata that is incorrect for the new channel locations.

Posted by Kat Crichton Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:23:00 GMT

I’d been using the Smart Package Manager instead of the standard Fedora/RedHat offerings for the last couple of years, as it seemed to do a better job of sorting out RPM dependancy problems.

However, on installation of Fedora 10, I thought I’d give PackageKit a try. It had been running nicely for two and a half weeks when an update caused any PackageKit use (even searching) to throw errors like this…

There is a long thread on Fedora Forum about it, but after some hacking about and a general failure to get it sorted, I’ve decided to put Smart back on.

This went without hitch and in the process, I created some Smart channel files for RPM Fusion, the new third party software repository that merges Dribble, Freshrpms and Livna.

rpmfusion-smart-channels.tar.gz (864 Bytes)

Just put the .channel files in /etc/smart/channels/ and Smart-GUI will pick them up.

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:42:00 GMT

I originally set up a Fedora 5 Linux box which worked reasonably well. I had some traffic shaping and a limited number of ports open. However it was getting out of date (we’re now on Fedora 9) and I heard good things on the Ubuntu UK Podcast about IPCop, a firewall-only Linux distro.

I have now installed IPCop. It does have some security improvements over my existing set-up, although it doesn’t double-up very well as a mini server since it only includes the parts of the OS required for a Firewall. I think I’ll have to move my Subversion server onto my MythTV box which is always on – although I’m now tempted to give GIT a try, which I’ve also heard good things about.

I think I may have another issue which is muddying the waters as far as my firewall goes. Previously I had very bad connectivity with the old firewall, which went away after a few weeks. When I first set up the new IPCop firewall, I had the same problem, which now seems to have gone away too. It may be just freak network traffic. It may be I have a dodgy network adaptor in the machine (one of the four). More research is required…

Posted by Kat Crichton Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:37:00 GMT

I just bought an Ubuntu based Elonex WebBook from Carphone Warehouse. It costs £239 (although it was listed on many review sites at £219), or comes free with a £25/month Orange mobile broadband package.

Vodafone offer an identical mobile broadband package for £15/month, so the “free” cost of the laptop is £360 even if you do cancel the contract after the obligatory 24 months.

The DVD has been placed to show scale. The WebBook does not have a CD/DVD drive. As yet there is no official way to backup or restore the OS. Apparently details will be posted on the Web soon.

The Linux version has the best price and performance. It’s a full blown Ubuntu distro rather than a cut down OS as found on other ultra-portables like the Eee PC. It’s great to see that all power-saving and wireless options work as they should, although it seems not to support Bluetooth in spite of the presence of a button on the keyboard. I’m not sure if this is a compatibility issue or just an absence of Bluetooth hardware!

I bought the iPod-like white model (black also available).

Three USB ports and an SD/MMC card make this usable as a photography off-line storage and manipulation tool.

Memory is a little low (512MB), but email, web browsing and document creation don’t seem to suffer at all. It only has one memory slot, so upgrading will involve throwing some memory away – not a major concern when it only costs about £20 a gig!

The keyboard has reasonably sized keys and is usable for touch-typing. The Function button (annoyingly where the control key should be) gives access to a shared numeric keypad and hardware control keys for paging, screen brightness, volume and wireless. The mouse pad works well and provides scroll-wheel functionality when its right side is stroked.

The machine is pre-installed with Open Office, Evolution for email/calender, the GIMP, some educational software, Wine (for Windows compatibility) and lots more. Being Linux, this only takes up about 2GB of the 80GB drive, so you’ll have plenty of space left for other applications and data.

The Screen is bright and clear and just about manages full screen video playback (depending on codec) once you configure the player to use X11 video rather than XV. This seems a bit of an oversight as, out of the box, most video playback will show as a black screen! Flash installed seamlessly and played back youtube videos with ease

Overall, this is a really useful ultra-portable at a great price. Highly recommended!

Posted by Kat Crichton Sat, 19 Jul 2008 08:18:00 GMT

I switched to Fedora 7 a while back and as a Beryl user, I was glad to find that Compiz Fusion was included by default.

After making sure I was using the latest nVidia graphics drivers, everything worked fine. But a lot of the plugins didn't seem to be installed - particularly Expo, a plugin that zooms out to shows you all your desktops at once and even allows you to move windows between them while zoomed out.

I worked out today that all the Beryl plugins are installed, but the control panel no longer gives to access to them.

All the options are available in gconf-editor, under /apps/compiz. To enable a plugin, add its name to /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/active_plugins.

I really don't know why the Fedora chaps haven't put in a friendly interface for this stuff, at least there doesn't seem to be one in the repos.

I think this sort of eye candy is one of the things that could draw people from Windows to Linux, so let's not hide it!

Note: I've since found the package that installs the GUI compiz setup tool. It's called ccsm, and can be installed from Add/Remove Software.

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:48:00 GMT

Wahey! This is the pot of gold at the end of the Google-phone rumour-rainbow. The Open Handset Alliance have released the first API and SDK for the Andriod platform.

Android is an Open Source mobile phone platform based on a Linux kernel and written under an Apache 2.0 licence. The OHA is led by Google and includes members such as HTC, China Mobile and other huge players in the mobile market.

First impressions are good. The SDK includes an emulated handset running the operating system and tools for creating your own Java based applications that take advantage of the proposed hardware.

The emulation looks good, including basic phone software but strangely no messaging support yet (SMS/MMS/e-mail). It does however have a Google Maps application and some developer demos and tools.

Overall the GUI has the simplicity of design that Google tend toward, though not quite so much as Apple does with the iPhone. We must however remember that this is a first developer preview release. It's unusually slick for a version zero Open Source project, but then I'm sure Google has been pumping cash in to get this party started.

Anyway, this could be the next big thing, so I'm off to try creating an application for it...

Posted by Kat Crichton Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:39:59 GMT

I've realised that I can connect my STB to the through port on my DVB-C card, and it still receives an excellent signal. I conclude that my cabling is sufficient.

DVBShop say that the Linux drivers don't actually report signal strength correctly. I don't know if that means that they somehow diminish the actual signal. It seems unlikely, but I'm no expert.

I suppose I'll have to pull the card out again and put it in a Windows machine to see if the signal is significantly better.

Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:11:00 GMT

I've been trying to get my TechnoTrend C-1500 DVB-C card to connect to Virgin Media and tune in the FTA channels.

Linux detected the card and configured it automatically. The TechnoTrend card has been available for some time now, so support is good.

It took a while to work out the correct numbers to give to the tuner program, but I eventually found out how to boot into the Engineering menu of the Samsung SMT-2100C STB, which contains the current settings. I used DVB-Tools on Linux to scan the channels. Here is the config file for scandvb:

# Virgin Cable (UK)
# freq sr fec mod
C 666750000 6952000 NONE QAM64

This worked well, detecting 344 channels, 94 of which were unencrypted (Freeview channels and radio).

My main problem now is signal strength - I'm getting 0-1%, which is just not enough to watch most of the channels. I think the quality and shielding of the cable I've used (TV aerial RF) is much less than Virgin's and I'm connecting to the end of a fairly long extension. I'll try to get a better one this week and give it another go on a machine nearer the Cable access point.

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 25 May 2007 00:25:00 GMT

Yay, my Cable TV card has arrived! It has an add-on CI reader, into which I can plug a module that will read the smart card used to decrypt paid-for Virgin Media TV channels.

It may be some time 'till I get it up and running with MythTV, but I'll post when I do.