Category: Geek (page 33 of 36)

April 24, 2007

dd-wrt rocks

If you have a supported wireless AP or gateway and want to have fun extending it without getting too deep into building software, give dd-wrt a try.

I have a collection of Linksys wireless junk, enough that I should consider becoming a stock holder. When we moved into this house I was thinking of running cables from the basement up to the 2nd floor. But this house does not have a simple means to run cable from the basement to the attic and I really don’t want to punch holes in the walls.

So I setup a Linksys WAP54G in the basement, another WAP54G in the guest room, and a WET54GS5 on my second floor where Lily and my computers are. Eventually I purchased a WRT54G v5 and replaced the WAP54G in the basement. I think I wanted to play with the idea of using the WRT54G as a replacement for my Linux gateway. The old WAP55G got put away on the shelf.

The second floor WET54GS5 was a 5 port switch bridge; it seemed like a good idea at the time. The thing is simple to setup but it spontaneously reboots often and support for it is really non-existent. It’s a dead end product.

The shelved WAP54G only has 8MB of RAM and 2MB FLASH which in the past excluded it from hacking. Now the website www.dd-wrt.com has a replacement firmware v2.3 SP2 micro image which fits and is a stripped down. Using these instructions, I installed the image on the WRT54G v5. It works really well and I’ve replaced the 5 port switch bridge with the WRT54G.

On the WRT54G the WAN connection is now configured as just another LAN port. I configured the device as a “Client Bridge” and connect it to the AP in the basement. At the WRT Wiki is a pretty good description of how to set it up. It’s been running without a hiccup for over two weeks now. My game consoles, the laptops, etc. all work fine.

April 17, 2007

Ubuntu working fine

I’m running the beta of Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) with no problem at all. Everything is working fine and I’m keeping it on the T40.

April 15, 2007

Harmony 720 and Vista

Costco has the Logitech Harmony 720 on sale and I picked one up Saturday. Don’t bother looking for it on Logitech’s web site, it apparently does not exist there.

It’s a programmable IR universal remote with a color LCD display and is programmed via a USB cable to your PC. You create an account on Logitech’s web site, download the 7.2.1 version of the software and program the remote.

The downloaded software is not 100% Vista compatible. When you run it, it causes the window system to go from Aero Glass to the Vista Home Basic look and feel. Everything still works but the eye candy is one of the few appeals of Vista.

Easy to fix. The software is written in Java and includes a copy of the 1.5 JRE which is not Vista friendly. Azureus had the same problem.

Download the Java 6 JRE and install. Just the JRE not the whole kit.
Using Explorer go to the Directory “C:Program FilesJavajre1.6.0_01” (Java 6 updates might have a different directory) and copy all the contents.
Now go to the “C:Program FilesLogitechLogitech Harmony Remote Software 7” directory and rename the jre folder to jre-old (just in case).
Create a new folder “jre” and paste the contents from jre1.6.0_01 (step 2) there. The folder should look like this.

Harmony 720 with jre 1.6

That’s it. The software runs fine now and I’ve used it to re-program my Harmony 720 already. Eventually Logitech will update the software (the web site says April 2007) but until then this works.

Now if I could figure out how to do this trick in Ubuntu, then I’d be satisfied.

April 14, 2007

Gears of War

Gears of War from gearsofwar.com I’m slow on getting the latest games. A few weeks ago my pal told me he got Gears of War for his Xbox 360 and loved it.

He and his son completed it on coop play. He described it as having fantastic graphics and great game play. The fact that if you don’t get cover, you’re dead was a nice touch.

I told him I’d get the game this weekend. I picked it up last night. I moved the Xbox 360 into the bed room so the kids would not get woken up by the carnage.

Except for Call of Duty 2 on the PC I’ve never seen a game where cover was required. And even on CoD2 ducking for cover is not done well. GOW handles getting cover and poking out from behind cover amazingly well. When the game started I opted for the tougher way to get out of the building. I picked up a couple of weapons and hit the game.

This game is done so well that I’m not sure a keyboard and mouse would make the play better. And the graphics were amazing. This game shows off the Xbox 360 so well that if I had gotten this game before I picked up the PS3, I might not have bought the PS3 at all. The shooting from cover is amazingly fun. You dart from cover to cover trying not to get shot.

What makes the game more fun is that the enemy does the exact same thing.

If it were not late and Lily did not remind me that today we have lots to do, I’d have played for a few hours.

April 11, 2007

Upgraded Linksys to dd-wrt

Upgraded my WAP54G and WRT54G v5 to dd-wrt v2.3 SP2. So far so good.

April 7, 2007

Google 411

Google 411 Google’s Voice Local Search is an experimental service where you can dial their 411 information number 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) and look up businesses by voice.

I just used it and got connected to a local restaurant.

I was on speaker phone, there was a lot background noise, and the voice prompter understood what I was saying. It’s your typical voice recognition setup, just the back end is data collected by Google. The prompter was easy to understand and reacted correctly when I would interrupt it to cut to the chase. It read to me the business I selected and connected me to the restaurant.

Of course I gave the phone to Lily for making reservations. It’s not like I want to speak to a real person…

Google Labs logo lifted from their website.

April 7, 2007

Ubuntu and Steam

So far so good. I have tried the following with my Ubuntu installation:

Tried to get Compiz running on my laptop
Updated Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy to 7.04 Fiesty Fawn
Get Steam working on my laptop running Ubuntu

Compiz works badly. I think it’s the xserver I am using. I’ve un-installed it already; my laptop probably just lacks the horse power to drive the effects.

Ubuntu 7.04 will likely be better. But I fat fingered something and ended up putting back on 6.10 Edgy.

Steam works so far. In the past I purchased Transgaming’s Cedega cause I really like what they’re doing. But this time I’ve installed wine using

sudo apt-get install wine

Steam now installs via a .msi file. So to get it installed I downloaded SteamInstall.msi from http://www.steampowered.com/ and Googled to locate tahoma.ttf font file.

I moved the tahoma.ttf file to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/ and ran

msiexec /a SteamInstall.msi

The mouse worked but I could not get the keyboard focused on the installer. Everything I typed ended up in the terminal I used to run wine. I ended up running winecfg and unchecking the “Allow window manager to control the windows” which was enough to get it installed.

Later on I put that option back and ran wine again with this on the command line:

WINEDEBUG="fixme-all" wine "C:Program FilesSteamsteam.exe"

This was lifted from a Ubuntuforums.org page. BTW I just pasted the snippet from the web page into the WordPress TinyMCE window. All formatting was taken care of, very cool. All I did was use the Code tab to adjust the width of the box.

The installation of a Steam game created a link on my desktop complete with icon. Later on I just double-clicked that link and the Steam app is installing my copy of Condition Zero.

The only problem I have is that the Steam window stays on top all the time. I will see if I can get that fixed.

April 1, 2007

Ubuntu 6.10 on a IBM T40 laptop

Update: Well the keyconfig extension no longer works despite hacking the install.rdf in the file. I had to follow the instructions located at this website.

On my Ubuntu laptop I did the following at a bash shell prompt:

cd /usr/share/firefox/chrome/browser/content/browser
sudo vi browser.xul

Did a search for “mainKeyset” and right after the line

<keyset id=”mainKeyset”>

I added the following two lines:

I then saved the file and the two IBM keys worked fine. This requires the lines in ~/.Xmodmap below. I’m not pleased with this solution because I have to update the main firefox package files. I will have to figure out how to do this in my home directory.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

That was way too easy.

I installed Ubuntu 6.06 from the Live/Install CD I had and ran the updater to get all the patches. I played with it for an hour or two and then ran

sudo “update-manager -c -d”

in a terminal window. This permitted me to upgrade the laptop to Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy. I added some more software using Synaptic and was good to go.

Everything worked except in Firefox the keyboard navigation keys for previous/next page did not get recognized. So I added ~/.Xmodmap and put in the following two lines

keycode 234 = F19
keycode 233 = F20

I was all set to do the keyboard macro dance of death when I located and downloaded the keyconfig firefox extension. This extension lets you remap or assign functions to keys in Firefox. That’s very cool since I only was interested in making the keys work in Firefox.

I ran “xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap” and used the extension to map Back as F19 and Forward as F20.

If you download animation or watch video clips, get and install Automatix2. All my vids work due to getting the correct codecs. I’m finding Totem to be a good player.

The real test of if this will work is Lily. She has used the laptop once or twice for browsing and I have even used this laptop to connect to my work’s remote desktop in a browser solution. It’s all working fine.

If she has no issues I’m leaving Ubuntu on this laptop.

March 31, 2007

Laptop committed XP suicide

Cool Ubuntu logo from www.linuxextremist.com For about a week my IBM T40 laptop has been acting bizarre.

It boots, complains about different problems, and none of the network connections work at all. Using the few tools I have for XP, I can’t get the thing to work.

It’s gotten to the point where I have to dig out the IBM CD’s and re-install XP and the utilities from the CD. I don’t think it’s a virus but the laptop has ticked me off to the point where I’m “Let’s just buy a new one!”

Without slip-streaming an updated copy of XP, that means I have to do the factory re-install and download a few hundred megabytes of patches. It’ll take hours to do.

X-<

As a rule I don’t keep anything important on my laptop. I have a USB key fob and keep copies of the important docs on my servers. Since all I plan to do is use the laptop for browsing and ssh’ing to my boxes, I am installing Ubuntu.

As I am typing this on another virtual desktop, I’m currently installing Ubuntu 6.06 from a live CD. That’s just not an option when installing XP.

This should be good, I will see how long I keep it.

Cool logo found on www.linuxextremist.com.

March 21, 2007

Easy server upgrade

I gave up on running my blog on a VPS. It was just too problematic and I got tired of trying to get it working well. So I opted to put the blog on my old basement server.

My old basement server was a Dell PII 450 MHz machine with 256 MB of RAM. It was a good example of how Linux can extend the life of your hardware. It works well as a Internet gateway and mail relay but for serving dynamic web page pages it was a little slow.

When I purchased my XPS 700 monster I shelved the old PC. That one was a P4 3.2 GHz with 1 GB of RAM. For running Linux it’s great.

At first I was bent on getting a fresh install but I ended removing the old hard drive and putting it into the new server. The worst that I had to deal with is the network interfaces were named wrong (one was coming up eth2).

After a little searching I found the file

/etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules

and fixed the names from

SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, SYSFS{address}==”00:0c:5a:b4:b2:d2″, IMPORT=”/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth2″

SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, SYSFS{address}==”00:0c:5a:b4:b2:d2″, IMPORT=”/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth0”

The udevd daemon is great but I hardly ever looked at it.

Page generation on WordPress went from 1.7 seconds on the old server to 0.234 seconds on the new one. That’s not too bad an improvement and all it cost me was a server that I was using as a door stop.