Nokia 6301 and Linux Part 2

I noticed that I have a couple of dozen visitors hit my earlier posting on synchronizing linux systems with a nokia 6301, and given that I am on a bit of high after just posting my previous note about connecting to the net through the the GPRS and bluetooth functions on the nokia 6301 I figure I will follow with my latest discoveries fiddling fun.

I must be turning into a google zealot because everytime I turn around there is another google service available which I want to twiddle. Let me explain.

Currently Evolution does not support synchronizing itself in any sane fashion against a syncml device like the nokia 6301. So all my contacts living inside my client have become increasingly disconnected with the contacts listed with gmail and the contacts that I have on my cell phone.

Obviously the context between these three application is somewhat different in each case. Like I often want to be able to grab a map of my next intended target from the evolution address book, but rarely want to do this inside of gmail itself, and I usually cannot be bothered with any of that rigamarole on the cell phone. Nevertheless, it would still be nice if they were synchronized.

So here steps in google to the rescue with its online syncml service, along with instructions on how to configure the sister device of the 6301 (6300 in this case) to use its service. Note that the Nokia 6301 and 6300 are S40 series Symbian OS devices.

I won't go into the details of the configuration since they are adequately specified elsewhere, but figure I will get to the point, thanks google for providing a working sync service.

Next I want to point out that gmail is available as a binary application on most recent nokia phones including the slightly older models such as the 6301. As a side note, this works with Google Apps as well.

Check out http://m.google.com for all the goodies, including google maps.

Sigh, I can feel the tendrils of zealotness swirling around me... Somebody kick me if I go too far.

Anyways, while this isn't exactly a Nokia 6301 and Linux article, the same results can be achieved, so I figure it is a good enough equivalent.

Linux, bluetooth, and GRPS internet

Currently I am sitting in Austin's Neighborhood Pub across the street from my little condominium here in Calgary, Alberta. Although I can see a number of wireless networks in the area, none of them are unsecured and for their own reasons, the pub itself is not particularly interested in providing wireless connectivity to its patrons.

So this leaves me with the need to be creative in how I connect to the internet. What's more, in a couple weeks I am leaving for my second major cross country bicycle tour of Canada, and will likely be more or less completely away from the gentle caress of the net for most of that time.

Anyways, as I mentioned, I need to be creative with this whole connectivity thing, and my solution is via bluetooth, to route packets through my cell phone and connect to the net via the phones GPRS (and EGPRS in some areas) data connection.

The thing that impressed me is that this technology is alreadly quite nicely supported in linux, albeit with a bit of work on the commandline (not much, just check out pand, bnep, and of course ifconfig and dhclient). If you want some fairly superb documentation on this check out the bluetooth article gentoo wiki.

I imagine that other operating systems like the BSD's would support this as well, but I haven't confirmed it.

Congrats to the bluez folks for delivering a working network bluetooth stack for linux.

As a side note from what I read on Dan Williams' Blog, this functionality will eventually make its way into network manager itself sometime around the release of 0.8.

This makes me want to move to a phone that actually supports 3g data connections to make this all a bit faster than dialup... However, at this time there is nothing available on the market which will do everything I want from a phone (3G. UMA, Bluetooth and supports a native binary gmail application). My current Nokia 6301 does all of this except the 3G thing, so I am going to stick with it for the time being.

Take Care, and hopefully I will post back here before I leave for my tour, but then again, even if I don't then so be it, I will be able to post from the road.

Please enjoy responsibly

Pulseaudio Stereo Server

Ever since the speakers on my laptop decided to die, I have been looking for ways to get audio out of the machine.

There are a couple options:

• Don't have sound
• Use headphones, or a speaker connected to the headphone port
• Use a network sound server

Given that I love the concept of tinkering around with weird technical thingamajigs, I decided to give the latter a try.

So here is what I want to do.

My mythtv frontend in the living room is connected to a very decent speaker system, also, there are other "always on" machines around the house which are hooked up to speakers.

I want my laptop to auto-detect the existence of the sound systems on these machines and connect to them at a push of a button, then route all of my computers audio through those speakers.

Anyways, I have not been able to get my laptops pulseaudio client to connect to a system wide instance running on the media server. If anyone has gotten a similar system running, I would love to hear about it.

Let me know.

-Ted

Install mythtv on openSUSE 11.1

Last night I had one of those tinkering fits that occasionally over take me, and I updated my mythtv operating system to openSUSE 11.1. Since there aren't any really good instructions for this procedure (even the mythtv wiki is a bit stretched), I figured I'll post my instructions here.

My backend (and frontend) machine:

• Pentium D 920
• 1Gb Ram
• Hauppauge PVR-350
• 900 Gb hardware RAID 5 (4 x 300 Gb) with Areca ARC-1210 controller
• Geforce 7300 GS

With the exception of the video, all the components in the machine here have good out of the box drivers.

Anyways, I chose the basic X11 installation from the DVD, since I wanted to avoid installing too much extraneous software.

The majority of the install is done from the command line so here goes (As best as I can remember):

zypper ar http://packman.unixheads.org/suse/11.1
zypper install mythtv-backend mythtv-doc myththemes mysql
rcmysql start && mysqladmin -u root password mysecretpassword

mysql -u root -p < /usr/share/doc/packages/mythtv-doc/database/mc.sql

mysql -u root -p mythconverg
   grant all on mythconverg.* to mythtv@"%" identified by "mythtv";
   flush privileges;
   quit;

Then with a running X session run the setup program, and there is plenty of documentation available for this on the mythtv wiki

mythtv-setup

Next I created a user "myth", installed gdm, and configured the autologin, note that no password was set here for the user "myth"

useradd myth -m
zypper install gdm
sed s/DISPLAYMANAGER="xdm"/DISPLAYMANAGER="gdm" /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager
sed s/DISPLAYMANAGER_AUTOLOGIN=""/DISPLAYMANAGER_AUTOLOGIN="myth" /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager

Next I started yast and from the run level editor, I added both mythbackend and mysql to the start in run levels 3 and 5

Finally to get the frontend to display upon boot I edited the file /home/myth/.dmrc to read

[Desktop]
Session=mythTV

Restarted the machine to test all was well, and I was up and running.

Not bad, as far as time goes either. In total the installation took me about an hour and half.

-Ted

More bugs in openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1

Although I haven't done another major test run at openSUSE 11.0, I did have noticed that Bug 343858 (gdm packages downloaded with control-center upgrade use resolution specified for external monitor) is mostly fixed. I did hit the problem with maximized windows in metacity not filling the screen in certain circumstances. All should be well on this front.

Having xrandr extend my desktop to an external monitor is currently not possible without explicitly using the Virtual keyword in xorg.conf. I filed bug 381765, however the problem is apparently inherent with RANDR 1.2

Oh well.

I still have not grasped how the new pulseaudio stuff is supposed to let me record things from my microphone. There are too many switches to play with for my emotional well-being (or something... Anyways I haven't learned it yet).

Testing a SD card in the 700m's onboard reader was problematic. An icon for the card flickered on and off the desktop about 100 times with lots of pop up windows trying to let me know of deep seeded grief, and checking dmesg shows numerous IO errors. I have not filed a bug yet, but I will sometime this week.

Anyways, it seems that the system is starting to now formally stabilize; and while this release won't meet my every wim (working nouveau? autoconf 2.62? ifolder? bongo?), I will definitely be migrating most of my machines after the release. Unless something dramatic occurs, the media server probably won't change until support concludes from Novell for 10.3.

More later.

-Ted

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 on Dell 700m

My laptop is in the process of updating to the latest Factory release of openSUSE 11.0.

Certainly I have been hitting a couple major bugs:

• Bug 376742 - Wireless doesn't work (wpa_supplicant doesn't get run)


• Bug 343858 - gdm packages downloaded with control-center upgrade use resolution specified for external monitor

Since Alpha 2, I have been running the weekly (zypper update -t package).

Certainly things are starting to stabilize now. For instance, I have no problem using the machine as a workstation.

I have to say that the Dell 700m laptop is well supported along with a good portion of my other extraneous hardware, the majority of the core functionality works very very well.

That said, I notice that Hibernate and Suspend/Resume used to work in SUSE Linux 10.1, it doesn't anymore. I wonder if there is a way to revert to whatever mechanism was being used before...?

Also, I am unsure if the SD Card reader works or not. By working I mean, I plug an SD card into the onboard reader and a windows pops up in GNOME and asks what it should do with it. I'll test this again tonight; I think that the last time I looked into this was back in the 10.2 days, so things may have changed since then.

Next is the modem. I have never been able to successfully establish a dial-up connection with the modem. I am really not quite certain as to what the problem is. Again, this will be something that I will test out tonight.

I have also never tested the firewire port. Does anyone have a firewire external harddrive that they want to lend me?

Hmm, the last thing is the microphone. On the 700m there is a defect in the motherboard design that creates static on the microphone port. I have tested this a couple of years ago with a Windows XP install. There is certainly some sort of configuration problem with 11.0b1 and esd which won't let me turn on gnome-reclevel so I can't test this properly at the moment.

Certainly I need to do some research into the new pulseaudio stuff.

Meh.

That's a problem for another day.

Anyways, that's my experience with openSUSE 11.0 and my laptop.

openSUSE 11.0 and autoconf 2.62

So autoconf 2.62 missed the boat just by a couple weeks to be included in openSUSE 11.0.

Sigh.

I have been anticipating this release for quite a while now. 2.62 has a number of enhancements that affect what I do.

openmp support, along with support additional tests for the c99 stuff are a couple changes that jump mind.

hmmm

Anyways, I guess I'll be waiting for either SLED 11 or openSUSE 11.1.

Sorry httperf, you'll have to make due with 2.61 for another release.

Sigh.

hahaha

Thoughts?

-Ted

Installing opensuse and some thoughts

So I am just wrapping up my third opensuse 10.3 installation of the evening.

Certainly the installation can take quite a while (about 2.5 hours for a GNOME desktop with along with updates).

That is of course just for the base system.

After that comes, the (inevitable?) binary nvidia driver, media codecs, dvd playback and then the various development tools that I use to do what I do (icc for example).

This entire process wraps up in about 3.5 hours, and I have a working system that does pretty much everything that I could want a system to do. Notably, this takes about 2-4 hours less to complete than a comparable installation of Windows XP.

If the US would ever get its software patent nonsense in order we could finally see quicker and easier installs, and I would feel comfortable giving a disk to my parents with the expectation that they would be able to install a working system.

For me, the biggest bug that I am running into is the lack of good built-in support for the nvidia cards that seem to proliferate my life. This is one of the reasons that I am strongly considering diving into the nouveau project.

Lastly, I just want to point out that I have absolutely no complaints with opensuse. The project has been very good to me and my needs.

Thoughts?

-Ted

So what's going on with ifolder?

The ifolder project is a really interesting way of synchronizing data between users and locations. I personally used the project for over a year against SuSE Linux 10.1.

Back in 2006 I filed an enhancement request for openSUSE 10.3 to include the open source ifolder server with the distribution. There was fair degree of interest on the mailing list.

To date, there has been no action by Novell to include this software with their open source distribution. This is interesting because they wrote it in the first place. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would think that they are holding it back from the open source community just so that their enterprise distribution (OES for example) would be more value added than their community distribution.

Lucky thing I could care less about conspiracy theories.

So Novell has not put more than a token response into this request since the original request was made. Indeed I have just spent the day on IRC (#openSUSE-factory) waiting for a response to this question.

I'll try to be on their next status meeting to pursue this further.

OpenSUSE 10.3 Package Management and some other stuff

Well, I have been using the development versions of OpenSUSE 10.3 since alpha 5. The operating system has certain stabilized quite a bit now at Beta 3.

In one week (Sept 20) the first release candidate will be pushed out the door. I am expecting only a few changes between now and then.

One of the real big *Behind the Scenes* changes, has been with the package management system. If you have been following the development of the OS since 10.1, you will surely have heard that there have been numerous complaints with the system.

Primarily the complaints have been associated with the the integration of the red carpet technologies into the software management stack.

Essentially in 10.1 and 10.2, there were two package managers. The traditional yast stuff, and the newer red carpet stuff (zmd/rug). I personally blame a lot of the problems on the necessity to synchronize (and failure thereof) between the two technologies.

Anyways, with 10.3 looming in just under a month, the *new* package management stuff seems to have more or less hit its stride.

ZMD has been removed from the OpenSUSE distribution and the old yast and red carpet packaging stacks can finally be said to have a full grown healthy child. zypper. So far, I have no major complaints here at all, although some of the error messages are somewhat oblique.

Also in the news is that the people at AMD have released a good chunk of the specifications for the ATI R500 graphics chips. Currently the documentation (894 pages so far) mostly reflects the necessary information for implementing proper two dimensional support for applicable cards. Supposedly, the three dimensional register information will be available some point next week.

I am by no means an expert at graphics driver implementations, but from what I have read, this seems to be fairly promising. One could certainly hope that it will be possible to make the applicable cards *less evil* as time moves along.

Anyways, I won't be making any purchase in the graphics card domain for the foreseeable future.

Keep on swimming :)

OpenSUSE 10.3 and mythTV and how to do it

I was recently passed a link as to how to install mythtv on OpenSUSE 10.3. As I migrate from my current SUSE Linux 10.1 setup to a shiny new 10.3 installation I will be submitting contributions to that page.

Come to think of it, I had better migrate to the schedules direct tv listing service pretty quickly here because I only have scheduling information left for 3 more days... eep!

-Ted

openSUSE bug slashing weekend wraps up

So the opensuse bug slashing weekend has wrapped up. The original purpose of the exercise was to get a lot of community involvement into addressing persistent older defects in earlier editions of the distribution. However, since the release of opensuse 10.3 beta 1 was on friday, the weekend also focused on testing.

The builtin reporting abilities of bugzilla are unfortunately quite dismal so producing accurate reports on the number of bugs opened and closed is a little difficult. However, I estimate that approximately 200 new bugs were filed, and about 160 were closed against all products since 10.0. Pretty good if you ask me.

Hopefully we can do this again before the release of 10.3.

openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 5 thoughts and hopes

Since my main desktop/workstation operating system is openSUSE, I have been following the development for the upcoming 10.3 release. It looks pretty certain that 10.3 will release with the 2.6.22 kernel, which is pretty good news for many mythtv users. As I have mentioned before, the the ivtv driver (for hauppauge TV tuner cards) has been integrated directly into the kernel for this release, thus removing many of the problems associated with out of tree drivers.

Alpha 5 seems to have some stability problems in the new GTK+ edition of YaST. Continually, I am receiving X warnings about missing theme elements. Also, pidgin seems to be missing from the installation DVD (although libpurple is included); thus I had to manually download and install pidgin from the Factory repository.

As usual, the latest evolutionary updates have been integrated for most packages.

Now in Factory, GCC has been updated to version 4.2. As a software developer, this is one of the most important behind the scenes changes for me. Specifically, this release finally brings support for OpenMP to C and Fortran (which I don't use). Since openSUSE is the base platform for all software that I write, I plan on taking full advantage of this technology (sorry if you're on a system that hasn't updated to GCC 4.2 yet, or otherwise doesn't support OpenMP). Essentially, this will simplify the development of paralizable code for use on multi-core processors. I hope to see all major OSS vendors migrate to at least GCC 4.2 in the next year or two, to take advantage of this new technology.

However, if I am going to be writing software that will use OpenMP, I need to be able to configure the compiler to use it with the autotools. The development version of autoconf (upcoming 2.62) has support for detecting the necessary configuration options for detecting how to tell a compiler to build with OpenMP support enabled. With any luck, the autoconf guys will be able to release the update before the software freeze for 10.3.

The only other package that I am interested in is x.org. Keith Packard has shown some pretty fancy stuff with hotplug input/output. Very cool for laptops, as well as people with USB tablets. Hope that the timing works out here with x.org 7.3 and openSUSE 10.3 as well! Current estimates are for x.org 7.3 to arrive in August, which may just squeeze in before the package freeze.

Anywho, I have had enough.

Goodnight

openSUSE 10.3 might finally meet my requirements

I have been running openSUSE as my primary desktop OS since the 10.1 release. For the most part the experience has been positive, but definitely not for the technically challenged.

I initially started using openSUSE as the platform for my mythtv media server. That server sports a Pentium D 920, 1GB of RAM, a Hauppauge PVR 350, a 80GB system drive and a Hardware RAID 5 array using the Areca 1210 PCIe Raid Controller. Total RAID capacity is 900GB (4x300GB drives).

The first major problem that I encountered was that the arcmsr driver was not included in the upstream 2.6.16 kernel used by 10.1. This meant that it was not easily possible (believe me that I tried) to install onto the RAID array, since the driver is needed at BOOT time to configure the array.

The second problem that I encountered was the absence of the firmware for the hauppauge TV card in the default install. Moreover, the default ivtv driver was buggy and hard crashed the system whenever I attempted to change channels.

So cutting short the long story of how I manually built and installed updated drivers and dealt with multiple configuration issues we arrive at openSUSE 10.2.

Guess what....

The arcmsr is STILL not in the upstream kernel (2.6.18 this time) mostly because Erich Chen at Areca dropped the ball and didn't push the driver into the kernel (disappeared from the mailing lists for months at a time)

The ivtv driver is not yet ready for integration into the mainline due to numerous missing APIs in the V4L2 universe.

So I did not bother upgrading. Primarily I felt that I would only have to deal with those same problems all over again.

That brings us to the present day.

I have upgraded my Laptop and Desktop Workstation to openSUSE 10.2, and things are more or less totally peachy on both those systems. The MythTV Media Server is still somewhat stable at 10.1.

More or less, my present configuration is very pleasing. Except for the stability issues on the Media Server.

So what next?

openSUSE 10.3 Scheduled for October 4, 2007

Finally with enough community grumbling and pushing, the arcmsr driver was included in 2.6.19 so I can reliably install onto the RAID controller of my media center.

If the development schedule gods are in a good mood, then openSUSE 10.3 will include a shiny new 2.6.22 kernel. If they are in a slightly grumpy mood, then openSUSE 10.3 will include the old fashioned, and slightly ruffled 2.6.21 kernel.

Why am a cheering for 2.6.22? Well, the ivtv guys have done a spectacular job of integrating ivtv into V4L and also worked with intel/hauppauge to provide a very sleek firmware redistribution license!

This should make the upgrade of my media server one of the sweetest things to watch.

Now if only I could get a discrete graphics accelerator from Intel with Open Source drivers...

-Ted