by siyb

After a HDD disaster this morning at approximatly 7 o’clock, xlernt.dyndns.org is offine. I have to find out what exactly happend, either it’s a headcrash or the HDD’s engine is fucked (lets hope for the second one). If everything fails I will have to setup a new system. Either way I hope xlernt.dyndns.org will be online again by the end of this week. If you were using the webchat, please use this alternative instead.

UPDATE: It seems that the electronics of the HDD are fucked. I am trying to recover old Backups from another HDD if this won’t work I will try and replace the broken parts if possible. I exchanged the broken HDD anyway and already installed Debian on the server again, but my priority now is to recover as much of the data as possible, after that I am going to setup a temp system, so that you can use Ixion’s services again. I am not sure when all services will be online again but I am working on it. The server is still offline because I am checking the harddrive for badblocks, just in case. Wish me luck :>

by Zhenech

oder vielleicht doch
Pimp My ThinkPad? Wie auch immer:

So sieht jetzt mein Laptop links in der Ecke aus. Wo das Designed for Debian ist, war früher ein Designed for Windows XP, aber das ist leider freiwillig abgegangen ;-)

by siyb

I installed my Hauppage WinTv-PVR 350 on my Linux box yesterday, this howto explains almost everything there is to do (I assume that you have build a kernel module before and that you have all required packages, like module-assistant). It took me less than 10 minutes to install the card, take your time and read this guide carefully, so that your installation will be as fluent and quick as mine.

Install the kernel headers to you current kernel, the ivtv source and utils, do that by running:

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` ivtv-source ivtv-utils

Change into the kernel header direcotry and build the ivtv kernel module

cd /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r`
m-a a-i ivtv

Ok, we installed everything we need and build the kernel module, but before we actually load it we need to copy the firmware into /lib/firmware/ or /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/ (second choice is depriciated). I uploaded the firmware onto our server, feel free to use it. I DON’T GUARANTEE THIS FIRMWARE’S INTEGRITY AND TERANETWORKS.DE CAN NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY HARM THE FIRMWARE CAUSES. If you are still willing to use it you can find it here, you may also look for it on the net, your choice.

tar -xf firmware.tar
cp ALL-FILES-OF-TAR /lib/firmware/ or /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/

Now load the module and check if everything is ok

modprobe -v ivtv
dmesg

lsmod | grep ivtv should return something like that

ivtv 155344 0
firmware_class 9600 1 ivtv
i2c_algo_bit 8424 1 ivtv
cx2341x 10308 1 ivtv
tveeprom 13840 1 ivtv
videodev 21120 1 ivtv
v4l1_compat 12036 2 ivtv,videodev
v4l2_common 20448 6 msp3400,saa7115,tuner,ivtv,cx2341x,videodev
i2c_core 19680 10 msp3400,saa7127,saa7115,tuner,ivtv,i2c_ali1535,i2c_ali15×3,i2c_algo_bit,tveeprom,i2c_ali1563

If this tutorial does not work for you please let me know, any questions? Feel free to leave a comment or write an email to siyb at projectx-thegame.de.

Thanks to Zhenech for correcting some parts of my howto.

by siyb

Two weeks ago I was looking for a pen to label a Debian netinstall CD. I went to my sister’s room and while looking for a suitable writing device, I found the camcorder she had gotten for Christmas some years ago. I convinced her to lent me the cam, because she doesn’t really use it, but she also warned me that it was hell to cut and edit the videos, due to the fact that the format JVC uses to store video content could not be read by her computer.

I connected the camera to my laptop using the provided USB cable and copied one of the movie files (.MOD file) to my hard drive. Perhaps you should know that I am using windows at the moment, anyway I tried playing the file in VLC, which did not work at all. I read around a bit on the net and found out that .MOD is in fact an audio file format and that the .MOD format used by some JVC and Panasonic devices is appears to be MPEG-2 format. After renaming the file endings to mpg everything worked just fine.

The question is why big companies like JVC and Panasonic impose such barriers to their potentially ignorant costumers. For some people it’s hard enough to turn on the camcorder, what is the point of renaming mpg files to mod, in the end there is always someone who needs to rename them back. In this case I am that “someone” and I’m pissed, 50 video files need renaming … excellent work.

by Zhenech

Yesterday I’got my sexy Sharp Zaurus and what a geek might do? I wanted to install Linux on it.
Actually, it already had Linux, but never trust things from eBay, so I decided to reinstall (or reflash…).
I’ve chosen Hentges’ OpenZaurus ROM, because it seemed to be a bit better than the stock OZ ROM.

God had I fun reflashing it every 10 minutes. It seems the device istn’t good if you use only 32MB RAM. Now I have flashed it with the 64-0 image and it is much smoother than before, but still hangs on ipkg upgrade. You need to upgrade it in stepps of 2 or 3 packages, than it works.
AND BACKUP YOUR ipkg.conf, the update of ipkg-collateral seems to kill it :/

Actually, my Zaurus won’t boot, I’ve messed something up with the init-scripts. Will give him another try tomorrow.