Take 2

This month, there were a good set of new Linux distribution releases.  The ones I was most excited about was Fedora 9 and OpenSuse 11.  This excitement was driven by a few things:

1. Improved hardware support with the 2.6.26 kernel
2. Package manager improvements (especially with OpenSuse)
3. The new Gnome desktop (2.22) runs snappier than previous versions
4. KDE 4

My initial project was to install Fedora Core 9 on the arcade system.  The installation was unique in that I decided to install to a flash drive instead of a hard drive.  This was inspired by the Fedora Live USB tools http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo.

Fedora is in a very interesting point in its life.  It is getting over being trounced in popularity by Ubuntu and learning to implement some of the features that make Ubuntu so appealing to so many.

I used the Windows version of the Live/USB creater tool first and it seemd to complete successfully.  However, the system would not boot fully to the device.  It seemed that the USB stick was assigned /dev/sdb which caused some errors.  I did get it to boot after typing some commands to mount the stick properly.

It was near sighted on my part, but I didn’t reallize that the Live USB stick would want to do hardware configuration on every bootup.  Perhaps a save hardware profile option would be a nice addition.  After realizing this, I decided that a full install to a the the USB Flash drive would be the best route.

The installer that is included with Fedora 9 is lacking when it comes to installing to flash.  There is no option to use jff2 as the file system.  This would’ve helped increase the life of the flash disk.  It took about 10 tries to get the installation going.  There were various problems with the disk partition tool that kept cropping up.  It, of course, didn’t like that I didn’t want to use swap space.  Also, any attempt to use the fat filesystem for the drive resaulted in a failure.

I ended up buying a 4GB drive to be the primary drive.  The Fedora installer fails if the drive does not have enough space (I think it was around 2.3GB) to copy the initial image.  The failure for this happens after the disk partitioning is done, so you have to go all the way back through the installer to correct this.

The Fedora desktop is really good looking and has been for most of there recent releases.  The hardware detection worked well and detected the atheros wireless card and loaded the driver correctly.  It surprised me since that was only recently committed to the Linux kernel.

Fedora package management has been its Achilles heel, in my opinion.  This release is, unfortunately, no exception.  Pup and Pruit have been ditched (yea!!).  The have been replaced with an installer that can only install one package at a time (boo!!).  This is a flaw that may just turn people against the distribution as a whole.  Installing yumex is a good interim solution for this issue.

There are a few ways that Linux distributions separate themselves from other distributions.  Here’s where comparisons should be made.

Type:  Desktop

Release Cycle: 6 months, supported for 1 1/2 years

Package Management:  Still slower than most, the default graphical fronend is missing the feature to install multiple packages.  This is the area where the distribution does the worst.

Feel: Good overall feel.  Theme is pretty and desktop is snappy.

Security:  SELinux is great.  It stayed out of the way while still prividing security.

License: It’s harder to find a “freeer” distribution than Fedora.  They and Red Hat are members in good standing with the open source community

Virualization: I didn’t test this on the arcade, but Fedora 9 does include the new paravirt_ops.

I will still use Fedora and check out the releases as they occur.  They are simply great at moving Linux forward with projects like PackageKit, AIGLX, pulseaudio, and paravirt_opts.  It’s hard not to want to support them.  Just please fix the installer and the package manager.

As you probably do not know, I am the proud owner of a Tech Romancer cabinet.  The cabinet’s life as a one trick pony ended shortly after the purchase, and it is now a very capable mame box.

There is one large issue with having a computer inside of a large, wooden box.  Where’s the power button supposed to go?  The easy solution is to run cables off of the current power switch to some other button that is placed in a more convenient location.  This approach was considered, but I didn’t like it.  I thought that remote control was the way to go with this.

Looking back, this may have been a just for fun decision.  Although, running wires and modding the computer would have been more work.  The main driver was that the computer could not easily be removed once the button was in place.  Also, the location to put button wasn’t obvious.

It is a little known fact that there are some always on power coming from the computer’s power supply.  IMon takes advantage of this and created products such as the Imon Inside.  This gives the ability to receive remote signals even when the computer is in a powered down state.  Once the motherboard’s power button is rerouted to the Imon Inside, the computer can power itself on remotely.  How cool is that?

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story.  The Imon device operates via infra red signals.  These don’t travel through 1/2″ of wood well.  My initial tests worked great when the computer was out in the open, but not when placed inside of the cabinet.

There is a solution to this problem too.  I honestly didn’t think I’d find a cooler product than the Imon, but I was happily mistaken thanks to the Next Generation Remote Control Extender. It turns out that they make an RF transmitter that poses as a AAA battery.  By replacing one of the batteries with an RF transmitter and putting the RF receiver in the cabinet by the infrared receiver, the signal was remote was now able to push commands through the cabinet.

Success was finally mine.

Materials

Imon Inside ~ $60  Purchased at Newegg
Next Generation Remote Control Extender ~ $33 Purchased at Amazon

Its been a while already, but it’s official. I’m up and running with a WRT-350N router now. The new mega version of the firmware includes openvpn and usb storage modules.

I did run into a configuration incompatibility upon loading it. The wireless was sitting in Ad-Hoc mode even though I had specified otherwise. The fix was just a backup of the config, a reset of the device, and then a load of the config. Yes, I know that is the lazy way out , but it works.

My router is now capable of thing that aren’t possible with routers that cost 4 times as much. Yee ha.

Rocks:

My computer has never run beter than it has today. My gentoo system just got a full update to the latest unstable AMD64 release and the difference is quite noticeable. The new kernel, 2.6.25 actually gave me a decent performance boost as did the move to the new gnome 2.22 desktop. I was previously thinking about investing in a quad core proc to get some speed improvement, now those thoughts are history.

Linux core2 2.6.25-gentoo #2 SMP PREEMPT Thu Apr 17 19:46:30 CDT 2008 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Sucks:

There are a few line items on why Linux sucks. These are the things that people keep sighting and then saying “Linux isn’t ready for the desktop”. If your needs are one of these things, then you may be right.

1. The new IPod Classic crashes Banshee and Rhythmbox — This one hurt. I was trying to show my mother how cool Linux was by syncing her new IPod. It didn’t work and I had to resort to using a mac to get the sync to work.

2. Skype video chat doesn’t work for me — I recently purchased a creative live cam video im pro webcam device. It works great with most Linux apps, but not with Skype. This is important to me as nothing else does what Skype does right now. I have several familiy members on the Windows version of it that I can’t video chat with.

3. Epiphany bookmark related crashes — I’ll post on this later in more depth. On my box, epiphany cannot even import its own exported bookmarks. There is a bug out there for this.

4. ATI video isn’t 3d accelerated — This is a work in progress right now. There is a lot of effort to get the specs that ATI released into a xorg driver. The two main efforts for this are the ati and radeonhd drivers. This will get there, it will just take time. xcompmgr still works fine so my desktop looks snazzy; its just slow.

Please don’t take these critisms harshly. I am in no way trying to dismiss or invalidate the great work these projects represent.

This is a current screenshot of my desktop. Buuf icons, silver cursor, murrine rounded metacity, and murrina eternal gtk theme.

You may already know this, but everything you do or say over a public channel is being recorded. Cnet has a good article that helps point this out and talks about how to get around some of it.

Mame is a great thing. The portable SDLMAME is an even greater thing. It’s hard to find where to get it. The official home page is http://rbelmont.mameworld.info/?page_id=163. It really needs a better home page. It’s not even the first site that comes up in a google search.

After downloading it, make sure to read the contents of the readme files. There is a lot of information in SDLMAME.txt that should not be ignored. For example, I missed the fact that I had to change a line in the makefile to compile it for a 64 bit processor. There is also information there about how to compile it on various targets such as the PS3.

Once the exectuable is created, it is time to play some games. You may want to think twice about just playing the games though. There are some options that will help make the games run more smoothly. To create a default mame.ini file run the command ./mame -createconfig. The result will be outputted to the mame.ini file. Look through the file to see if there is anything of interest that needs to be modified.

The multithreading option can really speed things up on machines with multiple cores. I recommend that it be turned on. The autoframeskip option is another one that I turn on. When it is on, mame will automatically add to the frame skip when needed so that the game will run at 100% speed.

There are a lot of games that don’t play fast enough to be playable. Don’t be suprised if you hit a game that just doesn’t run quite right. With the tweaks above, that number is greatly reduced. Have fun

This one comes as a result of Intel trying to stifle a humanitarian effort, OLPC.

From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Intel#INTEL_RESIGNS_FROM_OLPC.

January, 4 2008 - We at OLPC have been disappointed that Intel did not deliver on any of the promises they made when they joined OLPC; while we were hopeful for a positive, collaborative relationship, it never materialized.

Intel came in late to the OLPC association: they joined an already strong and thriving OLPC Board of Directors made up of premier technology partners; these partners have been crucial in helping us fulfill our mission of getting laptops into the hands of children in the developing world. We have always embraced and welcomed other low-cost laptop providers to join us in this mission. But since joining the OLPC Board of Directors in July, Intel has violated its written agreement with OLPC on numerous occasions. Intel continued to disparage the XO laptop in nations that had already decided to partner with OLPC (Uruguay and Peru), with countries that were in the midst of choosing a laptop solution (Brazil and Nigeria), and other countries contemplating a laptop program (Mongolia).

Intel was unwilling to work cooperatively with OLPC on software development. Over the entire six months it was a member of the association, Intel contributed nothing of value to OLPC: Intel never contributed in any way to our engineering efforts and failed to provide even a single line of code to the XO software efforts – even though Intel marketed its products as being able to run the XO software. The best Intel could offer in regards to an “Intel inside” XO laptop was one that would be more expensive and consume more power – exactly the opposite direction of OLPC’s stated mandate and vision.

Despite OLPC’s best efforts to work things out with Intel and several warnings that their behavior was untenable, it is clear that Intel’s heart has never been in working collaboratively as a part of OLPC. This is well illustrated by the way in which our separation was announced singlehandedly by Intel; Intel issued a statement to the press behind our backs while simultaneously asking us to work on a joint statement with them. Actions do speak louder than words in this case. As we said in the past, we view the children as a mission; Intel views them as a market.

The benefit to the departure of Intel from the OLPC board is a renewed clarity in purpose and the marketplace; we will continue to focus on our mission of providing every child with an opportunity for learning.

This basically says that Intel is far in the lead and therefore, will sit on their current platform instead of pushing the envelope further.

Santa Clara (CA) - Digitimes is reporting that Intel has decided to adjust its scheduled release of three previous quad-core CPUs due to the problems AMD has been having with their Barcelona architecture and launch. A significant errata in AMD’s processors, the temporary fix of which affects performance by as much as 20% on average, some applications see a 55%+ hit, is the cause of the delay. AMD has been relatively tight-lipped on answering questions relating to the impact, timeframes, etc.

According to Digitimes, Intel believes there will be little benefit to launching the CPUs now that AMD is significantly behind schedule. The three CPUs were Core 2 Quad Q9300, Q9450 and Q9550. The remainder of its 45nm lineup are on track for Q1 2008 launch, though no specific timeframe was given.

In another spastic decision, I’ve decided to see if whole home audio is possible on a budget.  A lot of people know about Sonos and how great it is, but what about people who don’t want to spend 3/4 of a leg to get there.

The primary media playing device is the mac that is connected to my tv set.  Apart from that, I have a Linux workstation that is connected to a 5.1 surround sound system in the 2nd bedroom.  I also have a Nokia n800 that could be moved from room to room to play media.  The solution would have to work with all of these devices.  It would also be a bonus if people at my house could tap into the stream and listen in with minimal effort.

For a very short time I flirted with the idea of using bluetooth to transfer the music around.  After testing bluetooth audio with a headset and finding out just how flaky the audio is, I through this idea out.
At first, I was looking at broadcasting sound by using the local sound server.  This looked promising at first, but it requires that all sound devices be running the specific sound server.  Pulseaudio is an example of this.  My mac just doesn’t run pulseaudio, nor does my Linux box at the moment.  This idea just doesn’t seem to work across multiple platforms.
I took the idea one level higher and looked into broadcasting the sound using icecast.  This doesn’t do exactly what I want either.  Icecast isn’t realtime.  There is processing that takes place to encode the capture from the soundcard.  This encoding creates lag in the stream and causes it to loose quality.  This idea does have some really nice perks though.  The biggest being that anyone can hop on the stream by simply going to a url in their web browsers.  I never got icecast to work.  It doesn’t listen on my sound card’s digital audio out for some reason.   On analog output I didn’t get any sound outputted to a client.  It also seams that icecast is out of date.  There hasn’t been an update in 2 years.  I was trying this using ices. if I go this route again, I’ll most likely try darkice instead.
In my searching for a software solution, I discovered Freecast.  It looks like a viable, simple option that would meet my needs.  It will most likely have the same realtime issues that icecast does, but it’s the most promising thing that I turned up to that point.

After all these failures, I started thinking about more traditional methods of distributing music.   I am currently looking at fm transmitters.  The one that is jumping out at me is the whole home fm transmitter.  My surround sound systems all have an fm tuner on them.  Even the Nokia n800 has an fm reciever.  Plus, I could use older clock radios to pick up the signal as well.  It is looking like this is the winner solution.  I realize that the quality of fm radio isn’t the best, but isn’t itunes selling music at a lower quality still?  This is the simplest solution as it uses fm as its delivery format.  There are no cross platform concerns.
I am currently playing around with darkice.  We’ll see how this turns out. Sara says I can’t buy anything till after the Christmas season .