I collect things, videos, audio files, documents, images. Managing my collections is always something that is time consuming and tedious.

About two years ago I first started playing with Freevo. I was impressed, and started building up fxd files with loads of info about all my media. I figured i’d keep the work from then and build upon it, building a full blown media PC running Freevo.

The hardware:
Dual Core AMD 64bit
1 gig RAM
80 gig SATA Seagate Disk
CD/DVD-R
cx88 based TV Tuner

First attempt at getting this off the ground was with the 64 bit version of Ubuntu.. Which as ubuntu often does, frustrated me to no end.

Moving past this I stuck in FreevoLive, based on Mandriva. I gave up on Mandrake at version 10, before the Mandriva thing happened… the Live based distro based on Mandriva’s live thingie reminded me why I don’t like it. Package management is horrible (i’m a Gentoo user, and Debian on my production servers, so most package management annoys me. Hail mighty apt, praise thee, emerge.)

enter OpenSUSE, stage left

The install is neat, flexible, but unobtrusive. It has been one of the most enjoyable new distro installs i’ve used in along time. I’m installing 10.3 - I had the media handy.

The install timed out a fair bit on package and repository info; but my internet connection has been a little flakey the last few days. Manually having to retry when it did meant the install wasn’t entirely unattended for the most part.

No Gnome.

People who know me know that I like feet. Thats all feet except for the Gnome-foot, and the rest of Gnome in general. The ones made of clay with red hats are however quite nice to have around. So I selected xfce in the install. xfce is a good compromise - i’ve just gone back to IceWM on my primary desktop.

The default login picked fvwm for me… ehh. shrugs.

Thats where I am now… I’ve added the 3rd-party Packman repository, the package management system has let me pick freevo and the bits I want… I’m about to configure the TV Tuner… wish me luck…

I’m an avid IRC user, sitting 24×7 usually connected to 5 server and 12 regular channels, and the only client I’m completely satisfied using is irssi. I run irssi on a remote server so I can easilly connect to it via ssh from wherever I am. I run it under screen so that I can re-attach to the same session from where ever I am and even have the same session shared across all my home PCs so i can look in and see whats happening whenever I want.

Recently I began playing with dbus alot, including libnotify. I found some irssi plugins for people running irssi locally to integrate with libnotify, but all the solutions by people for doing this remotely involved re-establishing ssh connections for each message and various other overheads that I was not comfortable with. The solution was obvious, to me - ssh needed dbus forwarding support. Well I don’t have the time nor experiece with the ssh code base to do it, a workaround was needed.

It didn’t take long for one to become apparent.

Nobody I know uses a relatively unheard of terminal capability known as terminal printing. This allows control characters sent to your terminal to turn on/off a locally connected printer. The content isn’t displayed by your terminal, but captured. Excellent, we could utilise this functionality for carrying a payload to the local machine, the connection is already there and the facility should be available in most terminal emulators (I’m a purist and use basic xterm which supports it).

What do I need?

• You need a terminal emulator that supports local printing. I’m using xterm 229
• libnotify and libnotify-bin, this includes the notify-send package
• a libnotify daemon (I’m using notification-daemon-xfce)

Obviously you’re already using irssi as an IRC/IM client, and you’re probably running it over ssh (and hopefully screen too if you are). But that is outside the scope of this article.

How is it done?

First thing we do is install the local handler script. This is the script that we configure xterm to pipe the content to be “printed” to.

Here is the script:

Grab it from here and put it somewhere sensible and make it executable.

The next thing that is needed is to configure XTerm to locally print using the script above. I use X resources for this. Infact I define a class in my Xresources called irssi and start xterm with a ‘-class irssi’ option for my IRCing.

If you don’t want a seperate class for irc, you can use the following lines. If you do want a class specific for your IRCing replace XTerm with the class name you like. The printer command should also point to wherever you put the script above.

The last thing you need is the irssi plugin. I’ve uploaded it and attached it to this document, you need to download it and run it with /script load notify.pl inside irssi.

It is written by Luke Macken and Paul W Frields, i’ve adapted it deliver it’s payload to STDERR wrapped with ESC[5i (turn printer on) and ESC[4i (turn printer off)

notify.pl.gz

Happy IRCing!

We’ve been looking at buying a new MiniPCI Wifi card for binky (Kate’s Laptop), and we’ve decided on the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG (or similiar, maybe a 2915ABG, anything supported by the ipw2200) card, which seems to have really good Linux support.

One of our requirements is WPA-PSK, for use on the network where we are both working at the moment. There are a couple of references to a HOWTO for using wpa_supplicant with the ipw drivers (it has been at http://www.bughost.org/ipw/wpa_howto.txt) but the server appears to be down.

Google cache found a copy for me; which I will put up online as it would be very sad for a resource like this to be lost. You can find my mirror here.

I’ve spent some time recently tweaking kate’s laptop’s X configuration.

The display is an ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY, using a Synaptics TouchPad.

The system is currently running Gentoo, Kernel 2.6.16 (r12) and X.org 7.0.

The major changes to the configuration have been due to an upgrade to Xorg 7.0, the fact that the nipple (Trackpoint) was not working under the previous configuration, and a general clean up.

Xorg.conf

Here is an X.org configuration file for a Dell Latitude C610 Laptop using an ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY video card. This configuration uses the stock standard X.org ATI driver, however an upgrade to the ATI closed-source driver shortly is anticipated. It’s running on kate’s laptop.

Download atiradeon_mobility_m6.txt

Update: The configuration file has been updated and can be found here.

Both my partner (Kate) and I enjoy a fairly minimalistic environment when it comes to our X setup/configurations. She got me hooked on Gentoo, while I got her rather attached to IceWM as a Window Manager.

IceWM has loads style for little cost, it all fits in minimal memory, it’s quick and very useable. We don’t need, nor particularly like the featureset of “desktop environments” and the Windows-wanna-be approach that Gnome and KDE tend to take. Taking this a step further, we both use xdm as a Display Manager, and yes - it is ugly. This is how I’ve made it a little more asthetically pleasing.

You should be able to find all of the configuration files for xdm in /etc/X11/xdm or somewhere similiar depending upon the distribution you’re using.

Firstly, make sure you’re actually using xdm (as opposed to gdm or kdm or one of the others), under Gentoo you can do this in /etc/rc.conf, look for the environment variable DISPLAYMANAGER, it should be set to “xdm”.

Starting with the /etc/X11/xdm/Xresources file, we first want to make the login box look a little prettier:

xlogin*greeting: Identify Yourself
xlogin*namePrompt: User ID:  
xlogin*passwdPrompt: Password:  
xlogin*fail: ACCESS DENIED!

xlogin*greetFont: -*-clean-bold-*-*-*-15-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
xlogin*font: -*-clean-bold-*-*-*-15-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
xlogin*promptFont: -*-clean-bold-*-*-*-15-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
xlogin*failFont: -*-clean-bold-*-*-*-15-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

xlogin*width: 300
xlogin*height: 120
xlogin*x: 10
xlogin*y: 10

xlogin*borderWidth: 2
xlogin*frameWidth: 0
xlogin*innerFramesWidth: 0
xlogin*shdColor: black
xlogin*hiColor: black
xlogin*background: #333333
xlogin*greetColor: yellow
xlogin*failColor: red
xlogin*promptColor: #ffffff
xlogin*Foreground: red
xlogin*Background: black

xlogin*useShape: false
xlogin*logoPadding: 0

You can leave the xlogin.translations bit as is, unless you particularly want to play with it), you can leave the Chooser section as is as well, unless you particularly want it customised.

Now to add a touch of interest to the root window while we’re waiting for someone to login. I decided to use the glslideshow component
to add some movement and interest. xdm generally runs as root, so you may want to copy your .xscreensaver file from your home directory to root’s to keep some configuration options (like the directory for glslideshow to pull it’s images from with xscreensaver-getimage).

Next setup your Xsetup_0 file, I tend to remove the xconsole entry, I find it annoying and if I want to check the console log, I’m more then capable of doing it myself. So I first black the screen, then start a glslideshow of images:

#!/bin/sh
# $Xorg: Xsetup_0,v 1.3 2000/08/17 19:54:17 cpqbld Exp $
xsetroot -solid black
/usr/lib/misc/xscreensaver/glslideshow -root -duration 26 
   -letterbox -zoom 50 -pan 4 -fade 5 -delay 0 &

You could of course replace glslideshow with anything, even tuxracer if you wanted to!

Enjoy your slightly prettier xdm configuration.

When I was visiting recently, I needed to have my MAC address added to your firewall configuration to be allowed to access your network, how did you do this?

The simple answer to this question is that I actually use Shorewall running on my Debian-based router. It has a maclist configuration file with a layout that looks like:

eth0  00:50:22:E7:3A:B2  192.168.1.2    # usajii
eth0  00:0F:EA:B3:A9:64  192.168.1.101 # tachan
eth0  00:06:5B:E5:6F:BD  192.168.1.102 # binky

Of course, I also only give DHCP addresses to registered mac’s as well, and ensure that the address corresponds to the host it is assigned. I haven’t automated the update of both Shorewall and DHCP configuration files, yet. That’s something thats on that extremely long to-do list of mine!

So, DHCP configuration for these hosts (just for interest) looks like:

host usajii { hardware ethernet 00:50:22:E7:3A:B2;
                 fixed-address usajii.home;
                 server-name "usajii.home"; }

host binky  { hardware ethernet 00:06:5B:E5:6F:BD;
                  fixed-address binky.home;
                  server-name "binky.home"; }

You don’t want to run Shorewall? That’s fine. It’s still possible of course. I am just particularly fond of the way that Shorewall works. I like it’s flexibility and general approach to doing things, so I use it. If you prefer raw iptables or something else, good, go for it. Here’s how to do it with pure iptables:

# iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -m state --state NEW -j macfilter
# iptables -A macfilter -s 192.168.1.101 
        -m mac --mac-source 00:0F:EA:B3:A9:64 -j RETURN
# iptables -A macfilter -s 192.168.1.102 
        -m mac --mac-source 00:06:5B:E5:6F:BD -j RETURN
# iptables -A macfilter -j REJECT

You would have to change the INPUT rule to insert the rule in a relevant spot in your INPUT chain, you probably don’t want it below a rule that rejects everything first! (check the manpage for iptables for how to do that one). You can leave out the –state and -m options if you want to check every packet, but I feel safe enough only checking the first packet of every connection the host makes, you don’t really need to check every packet sent for a 800Mb samba transfer for instance!

The following rules instruct iptables to ‘return’ to the calling chain (the chain which used -j to jump to the macfilter chain), so these packets get processed by the upcoming rules.

If the packet manages to fall through all the rules granting a ‘return’ it hits a ‘REJECT’ rule, which will reject all packets that get to that point. You could be mean and ‘DROP’ them instead, or you may wish to insert some logging prior to it:

iptables -A maclist -j LOG --log-prefix "MAC Filter:" --log-level 7

You will want that before the ‘REJECT’ rule, otherwise the packet will get rejected before it gets logged, and therefore not get logged.

If you don’t want to restrict particular mac addresses to particular IPs you don’t have to. You can leave the IP section out of both styles - the shorewall config is happy without them and so is the raw iptables way, e.g.:

# iptables -A macfilter -m mac --mac-source 00:06:5B:E5:6F:BD -j RETURN

Hope this helps you secure your network a little further.

The reason I originally setup mac filtering on my network was for my wireless subnet, which isn’t up and running at the moment, but I expanded the idea to be the whole network when I started sharehousing and not being sure I could trust just anyone plugging into the network.

I promised in a recent article to publish my “struggle” getting NVidia GeForce2 MX400+ TV Output working on my X setup, however there was no struggle, it ended up being a rather simple exersize.

First, before doing any of this, you must be running the closed-source “nvidia” GLX driver (not the open-source “nv” driver), details on this can be found here.

To add TV-Out support, a couple of lines of configuration change are needed to define two completely seperate Layout’s, one for TV-Out the other for CRT Out (this was when I implemented it a few days ago going to be a transient configuration, however I got so attached to having a loungeroom PC again, and missed my work PC so much that I had to dedicate a lounge room PC, more on that project soon!)

I’m in Australia, so the first thing to make sure that I have set is my TV Standard:

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "geforce2tv"
  Driver      "nvidia"
  VendorName  "nVidia Corporation"
  BoardName   "NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400]"
  BusID       "PCI:2:0:0"
  Option      "TVStandard"            "PAL-B"
  Option      "ConnectedMonitor"    "TV"
  Option      "TVOutFormat"          "SVIDEO"
EndSection

The section for my Television was defined as:

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier   "TV"
  VendorName   "TV"
  ModelName    "TV"
  HorizSync    30-50
  VertRefresh  60
EndSection

Second last, we have the “Screen” definition:

Section "Screen"
  Identifier "tv"
  Device     "geforce2tv"
  Monitor    "TV"
  DefaultColorDepth 24
  SubSection "Display"
    Depth     24
    Modes     "800x600" "640x480"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

And one last one being the appropriate Server Layout:

Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier     "tvout"
  Screen          0  "tv"         0 0
  InputDevice    "Mouse"          "CorePointer"
  InputDevice    "Keyboard"       "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

It worked remarkably well, and I had no issues using it for watching movies, surfing the net (and even emailling occasionally over the weekend).

Getting the NVidia GeForce2 MX440 video card to work successfully with GLX on Gentoo Linux wasn’t as difficult as first seemed, however there were a few hurdles I ran into.

You will need the kernel and X packages emerged (you can grab the settings package as well if you like). The glx package in Gentoo requires the kernel package, so all you need to do is emerge the nvidia-glx package.

This resulted in the following packages being emerged from portage:

• media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.6629-r4
• media-video/nvidia-glx-1.0.6629-r6

I then edited my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and simply changed the driver to nvidia (from nv), however this caused major issues when X next restarted.

I continued playing with various settings for a while and eventually found running startx would work but xdm would fail miserably when starting (causing screen flashing and putting the machine in a state that only a hard reset would fix!!)

My full XOrg.conf file.

The important points with configuration are:

• Turn off dri support
• Keep your initial configuration simple (my struggle with TV out will come soon!)

The Ubuntu Saga continues. Today we look at getting the fiddly bits of playing multimedia files to work.

There are some neat packages in the plf (see yesterdays article), but still some of the movies I hoped to play haven’t worked. Let’s take a look at how to get them to.

• libavifile-0.7c102
• w32codecs
• gstreamer0.8-alsa
• gstreamer0.8-multiverse
• gstreamer0.8-misc
• gstreamer0.8-mad
• avifile-divx-plugin
• avifile-win32-plugin
• avifile-xvid-plugin
• avifile-mad-plugin
• avifile-mjpeg-plugin
• avifile-vorbis-plugin
• avifile-utils
• realplay
• lame
• lame-extras
• libxine1
• xine-ui

In order to get these to install using ‘apt-get’ I had to add some additional distributions to my sources.

My ubuntu sources line looks like:

(You can see the entire file here)

After you update your sources, make sure you run:

I prefer xine as a player, add to that the atitvout package (for ATI card users anyway, using a ATI Mobility M7 on a Dell Latitude notebook) and switch-to-tv works perfectly.