muesli's Blog

Saturday night our DSL router died. The LEDs simply went off and even loud cursing and bashing against the wall didn't reanimate it. I'd like to forget about this piece of hardware as soon as possible anyways, so R.I.P Belkin. But please, never buy a Belkin router. I had to reboot mine every now and then, since I simply couldn't ping or reach it anymore. Also, the reallife bandwidth of this 54mbit wave-lan access point was a joke and competed with good old 10mbit coax.

So off to PC World and just get a new DSL router, right? That's what I thought. At first I came home with a shiny new Linksys WRT54GS. Luckily RJ discovered that a broadband router isn't necessarily able to connect via broadband before we opened the box. Their concept of broadband routing is to connect this Linksys to your DSL/Cable Modem - which we don't have. It was supposed to be in the router, that's why it's called broadband router. So back to PC World, returned the Linksys and bought a D-Link DSL-G624T. It features a real DSL-modem, that's the upside. It even runs a proper Linux kernel and BusyBox. That's another plus on my checklist. It even comes with proper QOS and ADSL2+ support. I'm impressed. But then it started... already the installation was weird.

First of all, half of the D-Link's web-interface is not functional with Firefox. It is slightly better with Konqueror and Opera seems to work for 90% of (the really extensive and featureful) web config. Seems to be a case of "Designed for Windows XP". Amusing when you know that it's driven by Linux But ok we got a Windows Notebook connected to it, so we managed to deal with it. Strangely enough we couldn't connect with any other wave-lan devices to it, yet the access control was disabled. After a few reboots of all our devices it suddenly started working. Fingers crossed. But guess what? This device, just as the old Belkin that died, starts randomly shutting down the wave-lan port every now and then as well. Oh the joy of rebooting.

Sigh.

Today I discovered Ketchup, a little command-line tool to manage your Linux kernel sources. If you're one of the weirdos, who is still compiling his kernel manually for whatever reason (like I do), I can only recommend it. Ketchup nicely eases up the entire process of checking for updates and applying them to your system.

Let's not hesitate and look at few usage examples... Want to know what's the latest version of a particular kernel-tree?

$ ketchup -s 2.6
2.6.17.7
$ ketchup -s 2.6-mm
2.6.18-rc1-mm2

Let's play with your kernel sources a bit. First of all, you surely want to check what version you currently got lying around...

$ cd /usr/src/linux
$ ketchup -m
2.6.17.6

Let's assume there is a newer kernel version available and you want to download it, bunzip it, revert the old patch and apply the new one. Nothing easier than that:

# cd /usr/src/linux
# ketchup 2.6-tip
2.6.17.6 -> 2.6.17.7
Applying patch-2.6.17.6.bz2 -R
Applying patch-2.6.17.7.bz2

That's really it. It will download the patches, revert and apply them, so all you will have to do is watch and wait
Switching to an entirely different kernel versions is just as easy:

# cd /usr/src/linux
# ketchup 2.6.16.2

Final note: If Ketchup should abort with a gpg error, then it couldn't verify the patch's or kernel's signature. Either add the 2.6 public key to your keyring (this is the proper solution) or call Ketchup with an additional -G parameter (this will override signature checking). I'd suggest the former, which is really easy to do by downloading it from a public pgp server:

# gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 0x517D0F0E

Have fun compiling,
muesli

Anyone out there, who can name a linux-tool (and url for) that splits a cue & its mp3 into several smaller mp3s?
Reply stranger!

Edit: Thanks to Mystix, who solved the riddle. http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today...A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose."

Now guess who said that originally?

Linus Torvalds? Wrong.
Richard Stallman? Wrong.
Muesli? No-ho.

Bill Gates? Just kidding. Oh no, wait. He did. He really did.
Maybe he was developing an opensource OS named Billux back then? Just guessing, though.

...muesli

Yeah, I guess Windows is better. Sarcasm and Irony might be hidden, though

http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/mcse2.htm

Have fun,
muesli

Linus writes:

"Ok, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus."

Thus begins a characteristically Torvaldsian e-mail to LinuxWorld News Desk sent by Linus Torvalds in response to our invitation to comment on the sensationalist claims this morning that he isn't, after all, the inventor of Linux.

"They (for obvious reasons) couldn't step forward to admit that they had gotten bitten by the computer bug, and had been developing a series of operating systems on their own during the off season. But when they started with Linux (which they originally called Freax - they do feel like outsiders, you know, and that's a whole sad story in itself), they felt that they could no longer just let it languish in obscurity. They started to look for a front-man, and since Santa Claus is from Finland and thus has connections to Helsinki University, and the tooth fairy claimed 'He's got good strong teeth,' I got selected."

Well, 2.6's pre-releases are out for some time now, but I refused to upgrade my desktop yet, since I couldn't find proper NVidia support.

Guess what - this changed and here they come: http://www.minion.de offers patches for the recent NVidia Installers.

There's a patching-HowTo, so it's quite easy to install it. This is what I did:

# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run --extract-only
# cd NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2
# cd usr/src/nv
# patch -p1 < ../../../../NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4496-2.6.diff
# ln -s Makefile.kbuild Makefile
# make install

The last make call already loads the nvidia module. Make sure you're going to load it on future system start-ups. You could also start the ./nvidia-installer binary, now!

After some heavy using, I'm pretty impressed of the early stability this kernel (test-11) provides. The performance is also great, although I was already used to the coolness of the preemptive patches, which you could apply to your 2.4 sources.

In the end I expected more problems from the whole kernel upgrading, but as it turned out, the only thing you have to take care of are changes in the modules namespace (e.g. usb-ohci is ohci_hcd now). Otherwise: just take your old 2.4 .config, copy it to your 2.6 tree, run make menuconfig, make bzImage modules modules_install and you're on the way

So much for now,
muesli

Commenting on your source code is one of the pleasures, a developer receives. In the beginning it's a pain in the ***. After a while, you're realising what comments are good for:

1. Giving you hints, extra information and guide others through your code.
2. Make fun of yourself and others.

Examples? Do this:
# cd /usr/src/linux ; egrep -ir "( fuck)|( bullshit)" *

Here are just some of the results:

drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.c: // bullshit
include/linux/netfilter_ipv4/ipt_limit.h: // Ugly, ugly fucker.
fs/binfmt_aout.c: // Fuck me plenty...
drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h: // Am I fucking pedantic or what?
arch/parisc/kernel/signal.c: // ARGH! Fucking brain damage. You don't want to know.

Funny operating system, I'm using...
muesli

Just shortly after Linus has changed his employer to get some more kernel development time, he already released a 2.6-test1! This is great news and in his announcement posting he also clarifies, that the progress till the final release 2.6.0 should not be as time-expensive as the 2.4.0 development was (7 months, actually).

Let's go testing. Hopefully I get the NVidia card running with OpenGL.

have fun,
muesli

Hey, finally I got my Bluetooth USB Stick running under Linux. Some packages had to be compiled till Bluetooth was working, and it was a bit tricky to find out, which channel IDs are used for which service.

So here is a small HOWTO, which helps you enabling Linux to send and receive files to/from your Bluetooth Mobile, too.

Installed lmule, a linux port of emule, today.
It was a bit tricky, but after all I found out,
that you might just need two hints!

Back again.

As described in my last blog entry, when I have the time and the right mood, I'm going to enhance my xBox. This night, I got my original xBox controller working under Linux. Now I can use it, to control divX, MP3 and DVD playback. Hooray

It's really easy, just three steps to take:

1. RTFM, here is the FAQ.
2. Get latest MPlayer sourcecode and ./configure it with "--enable-joystick"
3. Start MPlayer, plugin your xBox controller and practise the button usage

so long,
muesli