a kit i’d definitely like to mess around with:
http://www.ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x/index.html
i could buy it piecemeal..
haven’t soldered anything in forever should be a fun experience.
more interesting kits here:
http://www.adafruit.com
whenever i have $
darkstone (pc)
darkstone is from 1999. i think that’s the year i first played it. it’s an rpg like diablo, but with 3d graphics. i can’t recall if i ever finished it back then or not.
the bad stuff: pretty cheap voice acting. the good stuff: fun to play
to be continued…
NAS ideas
ever since i installed debian on my nslu2 i’ve been overjoyed by the results. previously, i had relied on old pentium3 PCs to become my always on linux boxes. but now i’m obsessed with the idea of super low power ARM devices that aren’t loud and noisy, and don’t take up a lot of space.
…and so my nslu2 has become a NAS+ device, it’s providing services and functions outside of its original purpose. and like i’ve said i’m very happy with it. today i was researching what would be the next evolution of the nslu2. i looked to linksys’ site for storage solutions and found some pretty looking NAS devices. seems to be a huge focus on multimedia in these devices now. i also looked at a solution from seagate-maxtor. all these products appear to be linux based, yet geared towards windows users and people that use SMB shares. not shocking news.
but i’m not even sure if you can SSH into them, probably not? they have a canned feature set which most of is cool, but i’m not interested in. and as of yet i don’t see any full-linux-firmware communities built up around these devices yet. so now what..is there no true successor to the nslu2? true i could settle for a SMB-only device without any freedom in features, but i don’t want to. i’ve been spoiled by what i can do with an nslu2.
i finally found an article regarding QNAP devices and installing debian on them. the devices look great but way too pricey for me. and then i came across the sheevaplug! a device i happened to know about already from slashdot and filed away somewhere in my brain. this device (or something like it) would be awesome for a new “NAS+” device. and it’s so cheap and supposedly going to get cheaper. hopefully i’ll get one sometime in 2010 to mess around with.
here is _the_ site for installing debian on some of the above mentioned devices: http://www.cyrius.com/debian
mandriva 2010
i upgraded my laptop to 2010 last friday and spent most of the weekend sort of tweaking things. the laptop has been through many a mandriva upgrade.. so it’s far from a clean slate. i can’t remember certainly but i think i first installed 2008.1 on this laptop then 2009 > 2009.1 > 2010.
crisis #1 – due to my own stupidity…i didn’t check to see how much space i had left in /boot prior to the installation. there wasn’t enough space for the new kernel..so the upgrade finished okay but i could not boot the new kernel. no surprise there. i resolved this by booting my pre-install kernel (thank goodness) and cleaning up /boot and then uninstalling and reinstalling the new kernel. problem was solved.
crisis #2 – the perl installation was upgraded and at least one app was broken by it. i couldn’t run zim, which has become a very important and useful app for me. zim was still referencing perl 5.10.0 and not 5.10.1. turns out this was easily fixed by altering /usr/bin/zim and changing the paths at the top of the file to /usr/bin/perl5.10.1. one further step was needed to get it zim to run which was to empty /tmp. i found this tip here – http://public.sheet.zoho.com/public/anderigs/tux-opensuse11-usage?mode=print. thanks very much to the author.
so far that doesn’t seem like much of a crisis until i admit the other things i tried before coming to the solution..
basically i wiped out /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.10.0. which broke, i think, every perl app. in mandriva the mcc and urpmi are perl tools…
to resolve this disaster i copied all the perl rpms to a USB key and would force a removal of each rpm like so:
rpm -e –nodeps perl-XML-LibXML-Common (for example)
then would reinstall each component again from the USB key. i got urpmi working again and then finally the mcc.
last bad thing is that i’m affected by one of the official errata bugs..seems like it’s always my luck that i get 1-2 of them.
the bug is “USB removable storage devices and internal HD partitions can’t be mounted from Dolphin or Nautilus”, which is preventing non-root users from auto-mounting removable media. which sucks..i haven’t had to manually mount USB keys in a long long long long time. i’m sure it will get resolved in a patch soon.
update 1/23/10: this bug has been resolved by an update to the consolekit package – http://www.mandriva.com/security/advisories?name=MDVA-2010:017
….and now the good things. my sound system works great. virtualbox is awesome. i’ve finally begun migrating my vmware workstation VMs to it. soon as that’s finished i’ll ditch workstation for good. not because it sucks but because vbox is OSS. i threatened to do this a long time ago and now that vbox is version 3.x i’ve decided to do it. also KDE 4.3 is really nice. it took me about 15 minutes to tweak the theme settings and such to get it the way i liked, but the end result was sweet. QT 4.x is very sleek. …and oh yeah i had a post a while back about how i didn’t like that there was no desktop icons in KDE4. in 4.3 at least it was very simple to change the desktop to “folder view” and i got my beloved desktop stuff back. i dont know if that setting existed in previous releases or not. maybe i just missed it.
p.s. don’t install the tomoyo/ccs-tools packages unless you know what you’re doing. if you did anyways..then boot a rescue and delete the related init files from /sbin. don’t ask how i know this…
update 12/4/09: i’m also affected by these bugs – “Using Install & Remove Software (aka rpmdrake) gives an error about missing packages” & “After a fresh install or upgrading to 2010.0 you may see an notification to upgrade to 2009.1”.
update 1/23/10: if totem is crashing immediately then disable visual effects. this bug is also listed in the 2010 errata.
ESXi as a guest OS
i haven’t done a lot with ESXi yet except make a VM running it. just for future notes ESXi needs a SCSI disk and i think with a LSI logic controller, also it needs at minimum 2GB of ram, and an intel 1000 NIC.
the vmx file can be edited to achieve these settings (i know i got some of this info from googling, but i can’t remember the original sources).
vmx file entries:
scsi0.present = “TRUE”
scsi0.virtualDev = “lsilogic”
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000”
ethernet0.present = “TRUE”
the vm ran, but seemed to consume a lot of my laptops resources..which is fine it was just a test. a see if it really could be done kind of thing. i’m done messing around with for the moment…i’m sure i’ll revisit it sometime again in the future.
battlefield2
just recently began playing bf2 again. here’s a reminder…for setting up the dedicated server w/ bots you need at least patch 1.3+ (i believe). i used to know that years ago but forgot.
the game is not as cool as i remember it, that’s probably because i’ve played call of duty 4 since then. COD4 as of right now is the best FPS gameplay i’ve ever experienced. things that suck about the bf games: vehicle control, bot AI. very good stuff: squad/commander tactics.
ideally it would be great to play without bots, but you’d need at least 6vs6 to have a good game. 8v8 even better. bf2 is still a good game just suffers from being outdated. i haven’t tried the bf2 expansions yet nor bf2142.
wisdom?
i’m just a few years from turning 30. i’ve noticed i have changed some of the ways i operate. some of it comes from age/experience and some of it comes from having a different job role.
quite honestly when dealing with IT-related problems in the past…often i had been impetuous in trying to find a solution. and i’ve been burned by that recklessness..not very often but it happens. and it’s a horrible feeling of dread when something goes wrong and you’re the person to blame. this hasn’t personally happened to me very often, but it has happened…and it does kind of scar you.
you remember to test things thoroughly before putting something out in the wild. and then at least if something goes wrong you know you tried as much as you could to prevent it. you still will feel horrible if it all goes wrong, but at least not as bad.
anyways, when structure breaks down in troubleshooting.. non-guru IT people (such as myself) often rely on not so much trial-and-error, but moreso intelligent guessing. and very often it’s an effective tactic. just nowadays i’m much less opt to experiment on important data or systems. i’ve become way more conservative than i used to be, and that’s a good thing.
now i like to know that safeguards are in place before i experiment..snapshots, data backups, cloned environments, ample time to figure out what went wrong if it does, etc.
and really i think this stuff can only be infused in you the hard way, that’s by experiencing a disaster or two. that’s just how life goes.
and as always there’s an extreme to this type of thinking…like extreme conservatism…when you are so fearful of making a change without talking about it for a month, planning, testing, or whatever…that you end up with way too much _inaction_.
a moderate stance is the way to go.
thoughts on pulseaudio
from my understanding redhat threw pulseaudio into their fedora releases fairly early on. and then all the other major distros followed suit. i don’t think redhat can be faulted for this because they don’t really care about the desktop market much anymore. but the distros that have a large desktop following i.e. ubuntu should have maybe reconsidered.
and i don’t mean that like pulseaudio is a bad thing…as which seems to be the way the majority of people feel.
i just believe it went prime-time before it was ready, before ALSA was ready for it, and before apps were ready as well.
so there’s some breakage and i was mildly irritated like i imagine most people were. but me, i’m practical.
i’d rather have a bit of breakage for progress to happen. and i imagine with all the genius audio programmers out in the OSS community reviewing things..that pulseaudio must indeed be a good thing. whether i will use its features or not.
it’s progress.
and really the early adoption just puts the pressure on everyone to get their stuff working quickly. so i think after like 2 more release cycles of the major distros that this whole thing will be put to bed. and audio will “just work” again. but people will probably still needlessly hate pulseaudio. which is stupid. if you can’t suffer a little bit for a good thing then use another OS…or create your own linux sound infrastructure and alter the apps to use it.
sshd for windows
i’ve been looking for openssh for windows for quite sometime. just stumbled across this today:
http://www.itefix.no/i2/copssh
i’ll try it out sometime soon.
update 11/9/09: tried it out on a winxp vm. it works fine, it’s actually not a native port but rather runs from within cygwin.
update 11/29/09: tried another alternative called “freessh”, it’s a lot more snazzier than copssh, but freessh is freeware and not OSS 🙁
sshfs
in the past i usually used samba or NFS for file shares on linux. samba made sense when i still used my windows machines primarily. nowadays it’s almost all linux…so i transitioned over to NFS. everything was all great from linux to linux box.
then i decided to introduce a windows machine, vista to be exact. and i attempted to use the native NFS client that comes with vista. the mounting syntax was somewhat different than i was used to, but it worked fine.
until….i messed up something with my NFS server config/client mount options/or unmounting/or any combination of those. and just plain crap happened to that ext3 volume because of how i was mounting the share from windows.
so lesson learned there. don’t mess with NFS on windows until you really know what you’re doing. or even…if you don’t know a lot about NFS in general don’t use it.
the good part – i finally stumbled onto sshfs. by far the best way to do simple sharing in your LAN. no need to run extra daemons (since everyone is probably already running sshd). i couldn’t find an easy enough to use implementation of sshfs for windows, which i’m sure there’s one out there somewhere. so for the time being i’m using a non-OSS product called “ExpanDrive” which works great (this product is not free). i found this just now: http://dokan-dev.net/en/download
not sure how mature and well-maintained that package is though. i’ll keep an eye on it.
update 12/12/09: more people than usual are reading this particular post because of me referencing the dokan-dev site. so here’s some more information. i have tried the dokan software on windows xp..installation is as follows:
install microsoft visual c++ 2005 redistributable package
install the dokan library (on the same site)
install dokan sshfs
it’s very easy to use, has a GUI similar to expandrive. dokan is like a FUSE implementation for windows. i could be wrong here…but it appears that the dokan library is open source, yet dokan sshfs is not. dokan sshfs appears to be freeware. i’ve done a lot of looking around on this subject and dokan, at this point, appears to be the only free sshfs for windows program out there.
final thoughts..dokan functions well enough, but it appears to still be in the early stages of development. personally, i don’t think i’d use it for any “important” data until it matures a little more. my thanks to the dokan author for working on a much needed product.
update 5/1/16:
for some reason today i decided to revisit sshfs on windows and i’m glad i did. it looks like there’s a very capable windows solution available. it is win-sshfs that relies on the dokan library. to be precise i’m using a fork of win-sshfs that is updated since it looks like the original project has been stagnant for several years. the original project is here:
https://code.google.com/archive/p/win-sshfs/
the software is very easy to use and for whatever reason the file transfer performance is considerably better than that of expandrive.
links:
updated win-sshfs (fork) – https://github.com/dimov-cz/win-sshfs
dokan library – https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/releases
dokan home page – https://dokan-dev.github.io/