Hacking ebuilds

Hacking ebuilds

from the prod-it-until-it-works dept.

Added another portage overlay to my laptop from Ycarus to get a few other little goodies, but the ebuilds I've tried so far (SharpMusique, Beagle) have been broking, requiring some manual editing of ebuilds and fixing dependencies. In the case of SharpDevelop, there's a Mono compile error that I'm surprised nobody spotted earlier (use of unassigned string variable if a certain code path is followed). Do people actually test ebuilds before releasing them?

[Listening to: sinikol - dynamic dosage]

Continued problems

Continued problems

from the Getting-Fed-Up-With-This dept.

The hardware fault on my laptop is back with a vengeance, taking me longer and longer to boot my laptop properly. So far, around an hours worth of retries. I wish I could afford to repair/replace it.

Cisco VPN Client for Linux

Cisco VPN Client for Linux

from the Making-New-Connections dept.

After trying several incarnations of their software, I finally managed to get the Cisco VPN Client for Linux woking on my Gentoo box. Ok, I admit I didn't RTFM properyl first, and upon testing this remotely, disconnected my remote connection to home. Doh!

Anyway, the good news is that now this is working, I can use it together with my Remote Desktop client to work from home under Linux. Yay!

[Listening to: Underfoot - Gnomemix 27:Metatron + On + On]

Amusing company name

Amusing company name

from the You-Called-It-What? dept.

Wandering off to lunch spotted a company van parked by the side of the road, with this company name on the side...



Pretty amusing - especially for a lift company!

Mouse gun

Mouse gun

from the Bang-Bang-You're-Fragged dept.

Found via Slashdot was this unusual concept mouse which looks ideal for first person shooter games....

Upgrading the Netgear DG632 Router

Upgrading the Netgear DG632 Router

from the Router-66 dept.

Last night I attempted to upgrade the firmware on my Netgear DG632 ADSL Modem/Router. Seemed simple enough via the web interface. The instructions warned not to interrupt the process until the modem had reset and come back again, so I decided to leave it running overnight. Looked at it again this morning and it still hadn't got back to me, so hard-reset it and that seemed to do the trick. Having backed up my config setting before performing the upgrade, I went to restore them, only to find that it had now locked me out of the admin pages - neither my previously saved password nor the factory default seemed to work. In the end, I used the reset button again, dropping it back to factory defaults, and restored my config again manually - by typing in the required details again.

Sounds all a bit of a chore, but the one advantage I gained was that I can now open ports on my firewall to specific IP addresses or ranges, whereas with the odl firmware, a port was either open to everyone, or closed. A definite improvement. They just need to improve the logging functionality now to make them a little more user-friendly.

Schism soundtracker

Schism soundtracker

from the tunes-for-the-people-by-the-people dept

For those of you who used Impulse Tracker, Chisel has made a new tracker that works on Amiga OS4, MorphOS, Pegasos, osX, and lesser i386 architectures that run FreeBSD or Linux. For people using Windows, Sir Garbagetruck made a version that runs on Knoppix - so if you have a knoppix CD, you can boot to that, load schism tracker from floppy or usb stick, and track away.

The main site has packages for most systems/distros, but I put together a Gentoo ebuild for people on that distro.

[Listening to: X - Ray - Bulimia ]

Penguin Remixed

Penguin Remixed

from the Doing-The-War-And-Peace-Polka dept.

Work are doing a promotion at the moment, whereby they're inviting members of the public to submit remixes of audio books. At Penguin Remixed you can download samples from our audiobook range to use in your mixes, and then submit them back set to music. Great little idea I thought....

First iTunes purchase

First iTunes purchase

from the Free-The_Music dept.

Bought a track from iTunes this morning, using PyMusique. It came down as an M4A file, which is Apple's AAC format. I prefer MP3 format myself, so I found the following three scripts to do the conversion

#!/bin/bash
# convert m4a to wav using mplayer (so you need mplayer installed!)
for i in *.m4a
do
mplayer -ao pcm "$i" -aofile "$i.wav"
done

then

#!/bin/bash
# convert wav to mp3 using lame (so you need lame installed!)
for i in *.wav
do
lame -h -b 192 "$i" "$i.mp3"
done

and finally

#!/bin/bash
#
# Remove extrenuous extensions.
for i in *.m4a.wav.mp3
do
x=`echo "$i"|sed -e 's/m4a.wav.mp3/mp3/'`
mv "$i" "$x"
done

and now I have a nice mp3 file I can play in pretty much anything.

Apples' taste in music

Apples' taste in music

from the where-is-all-the-goa-trance? dept.

Getting an open-source fair-use iTunes client for Linux - good
Contents of Apple's catalogue - bad

Can't find anything I like, bah!

Can't get you out of my head

Can't get you out of my head

from the Dirty-Old-Git dept.

Watched Kylie's Showgirl tour on TV this weekend, and was surprised by two things :-

• How not-very-revealing her costumes have become


• How many of her songs are familiar when you hear them, despite not owning any Kylie albums

Blog tweaks

Blog Tweaks

from the Shameless-Slashdot-Ripoff dept.

Added a new "department" heading in the style of Slashdot, mostly because I can.

More Linux tweaks

More Linux tweaks
Now that I've got my internet connection shared out to all my machines via my new ADSL router thingy, I've optimised my Gentoo setups a bit. My desktop machine now acts as an rsync mirror and http replicator. This techie-speak basically means that the desktop machine gets the latest Gentoo updates from the web, and all the other machines (ok, currently just one other machine) get the updates from that machine over the LAN, saving on internet bandwidth. Damned faster over a local LAN too.

Next things I'm working on are getting wireless networking and Bluetooth working on the laptop under Gentoo.

Internet for grown-ups

Internet for grown-ups
My new ADSL modem and router turned up today, which means I can have a proper, gown-ups solution to my connectivity at home. Just plug this baby into my 10/100 ehternet switch at one end, and my ADSL line at the other and away I ago. Built in DHCP, NAT firewall and intrusion detection means I just rendered my Smoothwall unnecessary - which will probably please Alison as its another old PC I can get rid of

Windows and why it sucks so much

Windows and why it sucks so much
Been working on a friend's laptop. Its the usual problem with Win machines - spyware, adware, trojand and virii up the wazoo.

So far I've thrown AdAware, Microsoft AntiSpyware, Norton Antivirus 2005 and Kerio Personal Firewall at it, and still there are some malwares that persist. Even tried a few selective registry edits, terminating processes manually and deleting rogue programs from the command line.

Currently installing Windows XP SP2 in the hope of closing a few more holes in the OS, but next job I think will be to boot the machine from a Knoppix Live CD so I can delete some more crap without it being reinstalled by some in-memory process.

God I hate Windows!

Editing menus in GNOME 2.10

Editing menus in GNOME 2.10
Thanks to Amaranth from Ubuntu Forums, its now possible to edit GNOME 2.10 menus, with his tool SMEG.

Packages available for Ubuntu (sort of makes sense, given it came from their forums), but there's a source tarball available too (requires Python and pyxdg), which I successfully installed under my Gentoo installation

New Linux discoveries

New Linux discoveries
Discovered how to do more things on Linux this last few days, some of which as part of my upgrade to GNOME 2.10 last night.

Firstly, I now have an applet for switching the CPU frequency on my laptop, which means I can finally get better battery performance when I am on the train.

The other useful thing I learned how to do was using cdrecord to burn CDs (once I learned that I need to make an ISO image of the contents using mkisofs first!).

While on the train this morning, I knocked together a couple of scripts to switch my network settings from home to work and vice-versa, so instead of having to edit a couple of config files, I just run a shell script and it does it for me. Nothing to advanced, I know, but does prove useful.

Pretty much getting to where I wanted to be with Linux on my laptop - able to do everything I was previously able to do under the Windows XP installation that it came with. Heck, I don't even dual-boot it any more!