Linux and the Treo

I got a new notebook a while ago and put debian on it. While I had my treo running on my old notebook running debian without a problem I couldn't get my new notebook to synch using jpilot or any of the other standards. I just tried again and now I know what I was doing wrong.

I had jpilot and pilot-link etc and I'm running the 2.6.28-1 amd 64 debian standard linux kernel. Each time I would press the hotsync button on my palm, I'd get something like

[245227.264134] usb 6-1: USB disconnect, address 9
[245228.000084] usb 6-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 10
[245228.166546] usb 6-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[245228.171749] usb 6-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0830, idProduct=0061
[245228.171755] usb 6-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=5
[245228.171761] usb 6-1: Product: Palm Handheld
[245228.171764] usb 6-1: Manufacturer: Palm, Inc.
[245228.171768] usb 6-1: SerialNumber: PalmSN12345678

And if I hotsynched again then the address would go up by 1. The instructions I found told me to select a /tty/usb? device with jpilot.

Today I found that I'm supposed to use usb:

Then it works fine :-) I don't know whether this option wasn't there last time I tried it with earlier versions of the kernel or whether I just found really old howto documents. Anyway now it's on this blog next time I forget I can find the answer...

Solaris Patches

I'm making a solaris patch for a package. This has been a very educational experience.
Either Sun haven't documented this very thoroughly or I'm just managing to miss the current accurate howto document. Looking at other people's posts it looks like others are in the same boat.

Some notes on what I've found:

- All solaris patches have a unique id. They have to be of format XXXXXX-YY where X is a 6 digit unique id identifying what your patching and YY is the version. It also allows you to put capital letters infront which means you can put your company infront and not have to worry about clashing with anyone else.

- read the /usr/lib/patch/patchadd script - it contains the error codes information like the allowed version id format.

- If you doing a patch add and getting something like:

The patch or patch_list 123456-01 cannot be found in
/opt/mydir.

Check your error code you are getting error code 34 which is "Incorrect patch spool directory". It may mean that like me you haven't added a .diPatch file.

Thinkpad Wireless Switch

I was really tired, had been at work all day on a Sunday, booted up the Lenovo Thinkpad X60 and no wifi. I kept getting this message when I tried to enable from the wifi icon it that it was switched off in the Bios or on the wifi switch. What wifi switch I muttered. After about 10 minutes of looking in the Bios, checking drivers and swearing I had a look at the warning message again. It had a little icon on it that looked like the wifi icon on the F5 key. Slowly my brain switched on.... I looked at the top of the notebook, on the sides and finally turned it over.

There's a slider switch on the lip of the notebook. If you look down at your keyboard, in the middle of the closest edge to you is a slot which the lid clips into. If you look under the notebook in the same position, there's a slider switch. One side has the little wifi icon - the computer with the little curvy things round it. The other one doesn't have the curvy thing. If you slide it from one side to the other it enables or disables wifi. Who new...

Maybe you all knew that but I didn't.

Swans Nest

We went for a walk along the Zurichsee and saw a Swan building a nest. I filmed it with my digital camera and made my first youtube video.




I found a creative commons licenced mix: Stop (blue mix) by Ghost_k and used it as a soundtrack.

I found it on ccmixter which describes itself as a

a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons

. Another very cool site.

Watching Twitter

I was checking the Twitter timeline today for a little bit. It's worryingly addictive. Someone posted something like "just sent boyfriend out to shop for more cheese". I was checking back looking for the matching "buying more cheese" post but if it turned up I missed it.

I justed twittered that I was blogging about twitter and Dear Reader just got it as an SMS :-)

Online Music Stores

As I said in my last post I read review of online music stores. On Sunday we bludged around the house and I went to visit some of the DRM free stores they mentioned. Most cleverly promote themselves as iPod compatible :-)

emusic

At the moment emusic has a great big logo on the front and most things you click just have a register screen. After clicking on various of the smaller links at the bottom of the page I finally found a way to browse the site. I don't think that's a good marketing plan - how will I know if I want to register if I can't see the site.

Once I got to it's browse tab I thought it provided a lot of different ways of categorization of their music - genre, era, regions etc. I'm not sure I liked the idea of a subscription model. Although having 25 free downloads as their hook in is fairly clever - they you can get addicted before you have to pay any money.

AmieStreet

Amie Street is the one I decided I'd probably most likely use. It's pricing model is quite cool. Tracks start as free and then go up in price based on how much they are downloaded. People can make recommendations and if the track becomes popular get credit. The recommendations becomes reviews on the songs. I think it would be a fun game.

Magnatune

Magnatune has a "pick your own price for an album" model. The bottom price is $5. So this is a more an honesty system. They had some very nice classical albums. Magnatune is a also or actually a record label. They provide good statistics on their sales.

They also do a good business in licensing of the music. They've got really great non-commercial terms for web-sites and podcasts and also have a really easy way to licence music for commercial use. My only reservation with this model is the guilt - what is a fair price. The angst.


SongSlide
It's similar to the model mentioned on the Freakonomics blog in the article on "How much is that song? It's up to you which was about SongSlide. SongSlide said they were doing a minimum price per song but at the moment had only low volume.


My Favourites So Far

I thought Amie Street had the most immediately rewarding sales gimmick - you could buy tracks for free but still help the artist - free stuff plus warm happy glow from immediate gratification - very nice :-) Plus I liked most of the sample music I clicked on.

Magnatune had a lot of different ways of promoting their music - encouraging sharing of songs, encouraging podcasts, easy licensing. That was cool - it said somewhere on their excellent write up on their statistics that 40% of their sales (ish) were classical even from people who came looking for something else.

Online Music and DRM models

There was an interesting review of online music stores posted on slashdot today.

It was a review of some of the popular online music stores and their approach to DRM.

I find it interesting that I buy books online with DRM for my palm pilot but I won't buy DRMed music. I prefer Baen's model which is DRM free. Plus they've got their free library where they put some back catalogue book. This model has sneakily gotten me to buy a lot of their online books of authors that I would probably not have read otherwise.

For other publishes, I do get mobipocket and palm reader DRMed books normally at http://www.fictionwise.com/.

I think my internal logic is if I want ensure an artist gets at least some money with my purchase and it's music, I can buy the CD, rip it and get it into my preferred format - and we're both happy. The CD isn't very big.

Books are different. I don't have enough room in my bookcases for all the books I read as it is. At the moment I'm in Switzerland. Each time (twice now) we've returned home we've had to post back books that we wanted to keep that we've bought for going on planes or trains. Plus I like reading on my palm pilot - I don't have to carry a book around, I don't have to worry about finishing one because I can always have some more. I can always download them from the site again.

So I download a lot of books. The only way to download a book and ensure that the author gets at least some money in most cases is to get a DRMed copy. Plus the DRM on mobipocket is based on my palm pilot ID and as I've had palm pilots since about 2000 now, it's not been a major problem for me.

I was talking about that with Dear Reader yesterday and hadn't manage to formalize my reason. I feel better now :-)

Blog Camp

We went to blog camp today . Only briefly as we slept in and missed registration. We went to an entertaining talk from Nicholas Berg from www.xing.com. He talked mainly about how peoples timeshare of media had changed to incorporate the internet. I liked his jokes.

Treo 680

Just before we left Australia I got a Treo 680. I've had a Treo 600 for several years now and was now getting crappy static all the time. Well I wasn't the people listening to me were. So I got myself a Treo 680 and I really like it.

Dear Reader instantly took my old Treo, looked on the net, opened it up and wrapped some aluminium foil around the bit that needed shielding and now it works like a bought one. Well almost.

I'm glad I got the new one. It's easier to do things to the insides of your toy if it's not the only one you've got :-)

Things I was particularly pleased with:

- the upgrade of the software worked fine again. I have data in my palm dating back to 2000 and my Vx and it's still there.
- I like the new screen and the keyboard and phone quality.

VMWare Troubles Solved

I am running running VMWare Server on a windows box with a linux client. I set up networking with NAT and could almost instantly get from my linux client out to the network. I had no problem accessing other servers on the network or pinging my windows host os. My problem was I had was that I could not access my linux client from the windows box. Ping did not work. I tried a couple of times to fix it and gave up. I tried again yesterday as things are a bit slow before Christmas and I got it to work.

I had a few strange symptoms I could find no mention of on Google. The first was that if I went to Host/Virtual Network Settings and looked at the "Host virtual Adapters" tab, VMnet8 the default one for NAT said "disabled". If I tried to enable it, it would switch back to disabled when I hit the Apply button. The other strange thing was the ipconfig output did not list a VMWare adapter. If I'd known more about practical windows networking, this would have been an obvious clue to me but after a while I decided that this was probably highly significant. I did not see any description of my problem on the net but it was possibly that people answering questions had written in Networking Admin and I was reading their answers in programmer.

I looked at the windows networking settings in control panel and it said that VMNet8 was there. It did not have any of the "items' with a tick against it - it wasn't using tcp/ip. It was very important that I not break my working connection to the outside net and I was a bit nervous because I had seen no mention of this in the vmware documentation or any google searches but I finally clicked "tcp/ip". Suddenly it worked.

So somehow, the host network that is supposed to be setup automatically with VMWare had been setup without tcp/ip enabled which meant that although all the NAT behaviour was working properly, I had no local virtual ethernet adapater available for my host to connect to it. Simple when you know the answer :-)

Freevo Setup

We watch our tv on Linux using freevo. It works very well most of the time but late last week, we had a hard drive suddenly start making ominous noises. We had the OS on one hard drive and we save all of our data on another and luckily the system drive was the one that decided to sound very ill.

Dear Reader gently copied all the data off it and then quickly turned it off. He scrounged another drive and so we spent part of our public holiday reinstalling the system drive and configuring it all to our liking using the backup as a template.

We had been running the 2.6.16 debian kernel and are now running that again. After trying to use 2.6.18, it panicked in something to do with ACPI and so we went back to a kernel we knew worked.

I'm just writing these notes so that next time something happens, I have something official to refer to.

We have two digital video cards a Twinhan bt878 clone and a Nova-T clone.

lspci -v says:

00:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
       Subsystem: Twinhan Technology Co. Ltd VisionPlus DVB card
       Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 5
       Memory at e2000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
       Capabilities: [44] Vital Product Data
       Capabilities: [4c] Power Management version 2

00:09.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
       Subsystem: Twinhan Technology Co. Ltd VisionPlus DVB Card
       Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 5
       Memory at e2001000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
       Capabilities: [44] Vital Product Data
       Capabilities: [4c] Power Management version 2

00:0a.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7146 (rev 01)
       Subsystem: Technotrend Systemtechnik GmbH Technotrend-Budget/Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T DVB card
       Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 12
       Memory at e2002000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]

With this debian kernel they almost work out of the box now. You need to blacklist a module for the saa7146 module. You add this line to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.

blacklist stradis

Then you add the dvb-bt8xx module to the bottom of /etc/modules file because it doesn't know which one to load or something equally funky.

The other thing to do is to download the kernel source package, untar it and in the /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.16/Documentation/dvb directory, run

./get_dvb_firmware tda10045

for our version of the card and copy the downloaded firmware file to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware.

Then you can run tzap on the two cards and check that they work. You'll need a channels.conf or to do a scan like normal - I could just copy from the old box.

We also had to set up X to talk to our tv and go through our freevo settings.

What's great is that it's the first time that box has had a clean install of the os in ages and it had a lot of cruft of stuff we'd tried out over the years. It seems to be running a lot faster.