André's Blog

Say hello to Windows 8 Developer Preview. I’ve installed it to my netbook (MSI Wind U100) last night. Yes, literally night… I think it was somewhere between two and three. lol

First having some problems, unrelated to windows. It seems, my external dvd drive refused to read the discs burned with my laptops internal dvd drive.

After fixing that problem… the installation dvd booted fine. I have installed the 32 bit version, since this model of the Atom CPU doesn’t support
64 bit. So… the installation program is quite similar to the Windows 7 installation, so I won’t spend much on that.

The first boot, took some time, saying things like building registery and preparing. Well… after some waiting… it was finished. So first thing to happen is asking for a computer name, and wifi setup. It worked immediately, so the driver for my wifi card was included on the installation media. Nice. After my connection worked, it asked for a Passport account, or… it’s called different nowadays, isn’t it? A Live account? Anyways, the thing you use to log in to MSN Messenger, (which nowadays is called Windows Live Messenger, isn’t it?) Whatever! Renaming the beast doesn’t make it a different animal! To me, it’s still MSN Messenger and a Passport account. Enough details. So… what it means, my windows login password is that of my passport account, and it also shows the name and photo I’ve used for my passport account on screen.

So, it shows the new start menu. So this is the Metro interface everyone is talking about? Well… First thing I tried was the control panel. So it lists a few options, and at the bottom it says for more setting use the desktop control panel, which refers to the control panel as it’s available on Windows 7.

This is where I shut my computer down yesterday, as it was getting late. Like I said, it was 3 or so, when I went to bed.

So, today I’ve booted the netbook… and it booted up really quick. This new boot process has been discussed on osnews a while ago. But I must point out, my WiFi connection wasn’t working. It showed as connected to wifi but no internet connection. I had to re-enable the wifi for it to work. I suppose some drivers haven’t been adjusted to the new boot process yet. But for being a developer preview, this was to be expected.

Anyways, a closer look at the control panel, shows, I can now enable and disable the support of 16 bit applications. With Microsoft pushing 64 bit versions, which do not support 16 bit applications at all (due cpu architecture) and by making the support of 16 bit applications in the 32 bit version of Windows 8 optional, I think this will be the end of the 16 bit windows application.

Something more interesting to observe is a look at the Device Manager, which shows that there is no driver installed for my video card. Yet, do I have the fancy GUI. This is something that has bothered me in Windows Vista/7, you know, how they handle older, pre-directx9, vga cards. I am no gamer, and I don’t see the point of buying a new graphics card just to see some fancy gui effects in my OS.

Well…. the metro start menu. It seems, only the control panel and the desktop button do something. all the other buttons, including the metro version of internet explorer, don’t seem to do anything at all. Well… it’s a preview after all… but I had expected to see something from the metro internet explorer.

Speaking of which… the desktop internet explorer 10 seems to be using the internet explorer dialect of the javascript xml handling. Still… the dialect. Microsoft seems to be heading towards HTML5, right? Wouldn’t it be nice they’d do certain things the same as the rest of the world? Ok, I admit this is a pre-html5 issue, being around since, well… the rise of AJAX. But still…

So.. like the other BSD’s I needed to configure my xorg.conf file to enable the correct resolution. Well… what’s next, play some sound. No sound card found. It seems I have to manually add the driver in the /boot/loader.conf file. So after adding driver to the configuration and rebooting, it works fine.

Well… some other things… which I did yesterday. My external hard disks… (which are ext3 formatted). On my FreeBSD, they appeared as icons on my xfce4 desktop. Double clicking it gave me an error. It seems, I had to add permissions to /usr/local/etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf, and now it works right away. Cool!

I haven’t got this working yet on the other BSDs. On the other BSD’s I can mount the manually of course. Please note on NetBSD the device is /dev/sdXe (e=0,1 etc) and on OpenBSD it is /dev/sdXi to mount the first parition on the external HD.

I think there was no dbus on NetBSD, (trying all three, but I don’t think I am mixing them up) but there was hald. But hald complains not being able to start since dbus is not running. And therefore the automatic mounting will not work.

I suppose this requires some more playing around with. For example to get TV-out working. I guess I’ll have to poke the xorg.conf for this again, and look at the driver to use.

Please note the video card in this system is a NVidia GForce 4 MX 440. To “modern standards” this is old. But the point is, for FreeBSD, NVidia provides a driver. For the other systems not. The Geforce4 in this machine is the NV17 core, which is supported by the nouveau driver, but looking at the supported systems section of the nouveau drivers reveals they only support Linux and FreeBSD, which are also supported by the NVidia drivers, so apart from being open source, this doesn’t add support for systems not supported by NVidia.

According to the man page of nv (FreeBSD), this driver supports my card, so it’s not using vesa I assume. I should check what the other BSDs support as well. Anyways on FreeBSD this nv driver manpage doesn’t show anything about TV-out, but I guess I could use the nvidia or nouveau driver, at least on FreeBSD.

So… I have this, I guess, about two year old Android phone. A T-Mobile G1, which is in fact a rebranded HTC Dream. So… for this phone there are no upgrades available since Android 1.6. And I must say, after I upgraded to 1.6, the GPS functionality of this phone stopped working. It was really after the 1.5 to 1.6 upgrade.

Well… looking at the upgrade guides, which tell me to root the device, tell my I must downgrade to exploit the bug in 1.0. Yeah…. the 1.0 version which was on there when I bought it. But googling a bit around got me this http://software2tech.com/tag/d​ownload-universal-androot/ which gave me root without having to reset everything.

You see… the guides on http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/HTC_Dream:_Rooting tell me to backup *before* rooting, using apps which require root. So not that handy, isn’t it? Anyhow… so I got the root with that app…

Following the guide mentioned above… a new recovery rom is required. the amon ra is recommended for my phone, however the flash tool is missing. Perhaps it was only found in the ancient 1.0 rom? Well… I tried the other, not recommended one, and it installed fine.

The radio version of my phone was the radio version mentioned, so I don’t think I needed to upgrade it. I remember my phone prompting to upgrade this thing some time. However I did it anyways… tried to install the DangerSPL right away but it failed. rebooted the phone. it booted fine but the clock went back to 2009.

Trying to enter the recovery again to attempt to install this SPL thing again… but nothing seems to happen this time… just the icon remains on the screen, the menu doesn’t appear like it did previous time… I cannot continue without this danger thing, as it needs to repartition the flash to be able to flash larger images, so I can upgrade my Android version.

Why would I need a new phone, I can upgrade my old phone. Well… It doesn’t agree with me yet… but it will bow for me, I am root, after all!

So, I am continuing my *BSD series, on my old Pentium 3…. cramping three operating systems on a 20 GB hard disk… well… not that much space, and in the partition for a *BSD OS, there are disk slices… so I have a ~ 6 GiB space that I must devide in slices again. There I made a little mistake earlier, not giving enough space to the root slice on NetBSD.

Well… today it’s the turn to FreeBSD to be installed. The installer in menu driven. First it offers a IBM style disk paritioning tool, and after that a slice editor. Since I had already created the IBM style partitions for all OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD beforehand using sysresccd, a linux live cd with rescue stuff like partition editors and so.

When I entered the slice editor, I already saw some configuration. Some slice sizes were defined, but not their mount points/file systems. These were different values then the auto configure values it gave me when I choose this option. I wonder where did these values come from? I am not sure.

After copying the files it asks some questions, to enable ssh server, ftp, nfs, and so on. After this it offers some options to install software from the ports collection. I have looked for my window manager xfce4, but it didn’t appear in the list of window managers. However I observed separate entries for gnome and kde in the list, not under the window managers. Anyways, I choose to install the X server and drivers. Please note it is still installing from the installation DVD, not from internet sources, so this might explain the small software list in that ports collection.

After copying the files, it offers the option to add users to the system. This is again menu driven, including the entering of the password. The setting of the root password is a normal passwd change password action.

Now the system is installed and booted, let’s install some software,
in the FreeBSD manual, it says the pkg_add program supports the -r
parameter where it automatically sets the correct ftp server. So I
don’t have to set it like I did on NetBSD and OpenBSD. I suppose I
should check if NetBSD and OpenBSD support this option too, but I
guess not as I haven’t seen it mentioned.

As referenced on the pkg_mgr site, the OpenBSD package tool, the
FreeBSD program sysinstall, which also did the installation of
the system is responsible for package management with a menu.

So far, FreeBSD…. rooting my android is the next topic.

I have mentioned this issue before, but sadly, it was on Facebook comments. Try to find a status post with comments you’ve made a long time ago. Facebook currently doesn’t implement a reasonable way to search your own ancient statusses and comments.

So, I had to re-create the procedure. It’s not staight forwards, and it seems more people are suffering from this issue. So I’ve decided to put it here on my blog.

So, I want to record a video with my webcam. For this purpose I use Cheese Webcam Studio. Now the problem is, the first part of the video contains some audio problems, causing the file to go out of sync. A way to fix it is to skip the first 30 seconds of a recording.

Using ffmpeg you can do this by

ffmpeg -acodec copy -vcodec copy -ss 30 -i input.ogv output.ogv

We just copy the video and audio stream to a new file, and skip the first 30 seconds. Playing it locally using mplayer now correctly displays the video.

Now, uploading it to youtube will fail. It seems, YouTube doesn’t correctly handle the Theora codec in an Ogg-container. The solution to this is copying the video to a Matroska container instead. So we get

ffmpeg -acodec copy -vcodec copy -ss 30 -i input.ogv output.mkv

Now, playing it locally with mplayer shows the aspect ratio is messed up. So, trying to ass the aspect ratio

ffmpeg -acodec copy -vcodec copy -ss 30 -aspect 4:3 -i input.ogv output.mkv

But this had NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER. It seems, ffmpeg is sensitive to the order of the parameters, and only accepts the -aspect parameter as last parameter, just before the output filename. So

ffmpeg -acodec copy -vcodec copy -ss 30 -i input.ogv -aspect 4:3 output.mkv

will do the trick and produce a video file that’s correctly synchronised, and ‘compatible’ with YouTube.

My laptop started acting weird. All net tabs in Chromium immediately crashed. So, I tried to start midori instead, but nothing happened. Trying to start it from a terminal, which happened to be open, gave some weird errors. It couldn’t even load the executable.

It seems, the hard disk went offline. (Windows would just have BSOD’d, Linux keeps running even without harddisk)

Looking at dmesg. I couldn’t |tail is, this would give a “bus error”, due the hard disk problem. So I had to get the entire log…. but I couldn’t save it to a file without running hard disk. Scrolling in the terminal window also stopped working, so I could only get the last few lines in the log, which were these lines

sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 17 9f 9c 36 00 00 08 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 396336182
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 1b 17 24 e1 00 00 08 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 454501601
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 1b 17 24 e1 00 00 08 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 454501601

Now… what does this mean? Something wrong with the hard disk? the controller? or is this a bug in the kernel?

Besides, my battery is really starting to get bad. I don’t get it. One day it says ninety-something % capacity, and then a few days later is was fourty-something. and now it’s down to 36%. Why *suddenly*? Does it enter self-destruct mode after warranty expires?