Matt Daubneys Blog

Having had MythTV running on a monitor for a little while, complete with it’s scheduling fantasticness, I finally caved to getting a machine to play it out to the big TV. An obvious candidate for this was the, very affordable, Acer Aspire Revo.

The spec of the machine itself is not that impressive when compared to modern desktops, a 1.6GHz single core Intel Atom, a lonely GB of RAM, a 1Gb LAN connection, an atheros 802.11n wireless chipset and no real expansion capabilities. The saving grace of all this is he Nvidia ION chipset inside the box. Using a media player that can utilise libvdpau this means that using the onboard hdmi port it can play HD video quite happily at 1080p \o/

The machine I purchased supposedly came with Linux pre-installed, but when I first switched it on all it did was through a screen full of “99″’s . This didn’t bother me overmuch as I’d already intended to stick Mythbuntu on it. Sticking Mythbuntu on a bootable USB stick and then installing it took about an hour in total using the fast connection in my office. Once installed, I plugged it into my TV at home, booted it up and …. nothing. It just didn’t appear on the TV. A little reading around the interwebs and it appears that the HDMI connection is not discovered unless the TV is switched on before the machine is booted. So switch on the telle, stick it on the correct channel, reboot and it just works!

After connecting it to the wireless network and letting the mythtv frontend find the already running backend. Turns out the onboard wireless doesn’t play nice with my existing router. While playing back SD stuff was fine, there just wasn’t the bandwidth stable enough to stream HD stuff across the network. A little research and a touch of thought later, I had my hands on 2 Devolo 200Mbps ethernet over powerline adapters. These have allowed me to watch HD content I can get from the BBC iPlayer on the big TV!

How cool is that \o/

Having seen other peoples success of growing chillis from seed (specifically theopensourcerer) I thought this year I’d have a go. So in what could possibly be said to be a familiar style…..

Packets of Chilli Seeds

I’m only attempting three types of chillis this year, cayenne long hot, navaho and scotch bonnet. In the interest of science I’m trying theopensourcers method of germinating the seeds, and tomorrow evening will be attempting some in plain pots with compost in a heated propagator. This may mean I end up with an absolutley enormous glut of chillis, but I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Here are the seeds ready for the airing cupboard.

Seeds Ready for the airing cupboard

I’m also in the process of building an automated watering system for these once they’re in the greenhouse using arduinos, and hopefully connecting to a server in the house using an easy radio link to report the conditions in the greenhouse Many thanks to theopensourcerer for the information he’s posted on his blog.

A couple of weeks ago now I bought myself a new laptop. My poor Dell had been battered too much and was finally giving in to it’s poor treatment. Dead pixels, missing keys, noisy fans, it just had to be put out of it’s misery. So now I have a shiny new Packard Bell.

I’d actually been in the market for a Thinkpad, based on their reputation of being practically indestructible. I soon chaged my mind after being promised deliveries that never arrived by a few online retailers. I ended up going to PC World, pretty much ignoring the sales staff and wandering around with my Pre checking compatibility and pricing on the interwebs. I’ve been a bit skeptical of the build quality of Packard Bell for a little while, but this seems quite a solid machine. Time will tell whether it remains that way or so I must admit, but one can hope!

Spec wise, the machine is a 2.2GHz Core2Duo (T6600), it comes with 4GB of RAM, a 320GB HDD and an nvidia Geforce G210M card with 512MB of dedicated graphics memory. It’s got a broadcom wireless chipset (b/g/n) and a gigabit ethernet port. All of this works out of the box with Ubuntu bar one. The driver for the NVIDIA card has a nasty bug. It doesn’t seem to detect the EDID information correctly for the monitor, so some hackery is required in the xorg.conf to prevent you getting 6 miniscreens instead of 1, or for getting a horribly fuzzy screen. Nvidia has recognised this bug, so hopefully it’ll get fixed soon. The open source nv driver doesn’t have this bug, but you lose a lot of the shiny 3d effects and so on, which is a bit of a downside.

The webcam in he lid also works out of the box.

All in all, it seems quite an able machine, but time will tell if I made the right decision or not!

Friday marks the beggining of a new year under the gregorian calender, so it’s a good time to reflect on various things from the last year, and suggest some changes for the next.

Last year was, for 6 months at least, a rubbish year. With Uni going rapidly down hill, being diagnosed with depression, and everything generally going wrong, I’d rather forget most of it. The last few months have been significantly better. Acquired myself a CCNA, and a job doing things that I enjoy.

So what needs to change next year? Well, in no particular order:

1. One of the downsides of having a job that is largely programming is that I don’t get that much exercise any more which has led to me putting on some weight. Ideally I’d like to turn this around, but would initially be happy for it to be stemmed. Hopefully a bit of Wii fit every other night will help this while it’s dark in the evenings, and as it lightens up I’ll try and start doing some walking or some such.
2. Start putting away more moneys, now my debts have gone (hooray) I can start to put away some pennies for the future.
3. I intend to increase my participation with Ubuntu community in the coming year as well. Hopefully culminating in gaining Ubuntu membership. In order to achieve this, one evening a week will be dedicated to contributing to Ubuntu, be it through support, bug squashing, testing or whatever. This will probably be aimed at Wednesday evenings, but will shift around a little as real life things will undoubtedly get in the way.

I think 3 is enough to be getting on with. Hopefully this year will be better than the last

I finally got one of those mobile broadband dongle thingies in the post this week, and I’m impressed. Admittedly I don’t get any 3 signal at home, so it’s a bit useless there, but once I’m out and about its fantastic. I’m sat in
starucks writing this on my eee and it’s really quite quick. Much quicker than hanging the eee of my mobile, whic
h I used to do previously.

The dongle I’ve got is a ZTE MF627, which was a bit of a fiddle to set up on chruncheee, but I’ll do a screencast
later on showing how to do it. Anyway, my coffee is getting cold!

It’s been etched into my diary now, so I’m going to both Lug Radio Live 2009 and Oggcamp. Both of these will be quite exciting for me as they’ll be the first large scale linux events I’ve been too, however judging from the general community populace, both should be quite friendly and cool!

I’ll be travelling up to wolverhampton from the Newbury/Reading area, so if anyones heading up from that area as well, let me know and see if we can organise some kind of lift share. Hope to see a lot of you there!

Well, now that Uni has finished, I need a job. Having been doing a Physics degree at Swansea, I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that I don’t really want to go into a Physics field, and would rather move across into a computer networking position. This comes with a few problems. Firstly, I have no professional experience with this kind of work, I do have lots of amateur experience, having networked my house and helped administrate the University Computer Societies network. I have been exploring the option of doing a CCNA to give me a kick start into a career, but these are expensive.

Why does this mean anyone should hire me? Well, I’m incredibly eager to learn. Having no professional experience means I will have to learn fast, and I fully intend to do so. I’m more or less convinced I want to do a CCNA, to the point where I’m willing to fund it myself and just need to find the funds to do so. I have heaps of experience with Linux servers, I’ve administered several for friends over the years and attempt to help people fix their Ubuntu machines in #ubuntu-uk and on the ubuntu-uk mailing list. I also have experience mending windows machines, again largley for friends and family. I am incredibly enthusiastic and really want to get on and work, having been sat on my bum for the past 2 weeks just applying for jobs, I’m now reaching the point where I just want to get on and work. I’m reliable, hard working and eager to get involved.

My CV can be found here in pdf and here in MS Word format, so if anyone has any opportunities going, please let me know!

Where do you find inspiration for designing a new website or redesigning an old one? How did you learn the simple graphic design skills to do this? I’m redesigning this place and am a bit stumped. Any help is much appreciated!

Thanks.

Every so often people ask for help and are not sure where the problem lies. When diagnosing problems in Ubuntu, and some of these tips should apply to other linux distros as well, there are a few places you should look at.

System Log Files

Linux distributions have fantastic logging capabilities built in. If there is a hardware fault it will more than likely appear in the system log.  The most useful log files are kept in /var/log/ and can be accessed directly or through the Log File Viewer (System -> Administration -> Log File Viewer.)

System Log Viewer

The one thats most useful is the dmesg log. This can be found in the log viewer or on the command line by typing dmesg.  There’s normally lots of information here and depending on what the fault is with depends on what’s not working. If you have a non-functional USB peripheral, like a USB wifi card or a printer, a look at what dmesg says before it’s plugged in and after it’s plugged in can supply you with some information to start hitting google, the mailing lists or IRC with. Sometimes it will tell you what needs to be done, for example I have stuck a dodgy memory stick in one machine which didn’t automount, dmesg quite happily told me the stick had errors and to check it. Fantastic!

The Tops

Is something slowing your machine down to a crawl? There are a few tools that can help here, largley from the “top” family of applications. Starting with the ones that are graphical, you can use the System Monitor (System -> Administration -> System Monitor) and have a look under the processes tab to see which process is eating the most cpu. Easy peasy.

System Monitor Tool

The next one is top itself. Open a terminal and type “top”. This gives us a nice list of running processes and how much cpu/memory it’s using and its pid (process id). You can kill processes by hitting k and then typing in the pid.

top

The main reason I introduce people to top is because it is installed by default on most distros. A better version is htop, which while still in the terminal, is much easier to read.

htop

As you can see, it gives you all the info top gives you, but in a slightly nicer, more intuitive layout. What if somethings really giving your hard drive a bad time? Want to find out what process is doing that, simply install iotop (sudo apt-get install iotop).

iotop

This gives a list of the processes running on the machines, who’s running it and how much io it’s using.

Other Useful Things to Know

Along with these diagnosis tools, there are also a few tools which can identify what hardware is connected to your machine. These are all in the terminal, and are “lspci”, “lsusb” and “lsmod”. These will give you a list of hardware connected to a pci like adapter, a usb like adapter and the modules loaded into your running kernel. If you’re asking for help somewhere, you will more than likely be asked for the information from one of these.

Rounding Up

The purpose of giving access to all this information is because diagnosis is half way to a fix. If you know what is causing the problem you know where to start looking, and what to start google-ing for. Hopefully this post will be helpful to someone I’ll write a few more in the future going into a bit more depth into each of the commands listed, but a useful place to find more info on them is in their man pages, in a terminal simply run “man <command>” where<command> is the command you’re running.

Last night was the Welsh Release party for Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. 6 people turned up in total, which isn’t bad in my oppinion for a team that only formed a few months ago.

Attending was Nrrd, Suave, Ianto, a chap called Nathan who isn’t on IRC, Brace (?) and myself. It’s always interesting to meet new people, and these are probably the first group of Ubuntu people I’ve met since I bought my Eee PC from Popey

Everyone seemed to arrive at the Central Bar in Cardiff, skipping Starbucks (that may be a lesson for next time) and we sat, had a few drinks and nattered away quite happily. An enjoyable time was had by all it seemed.

Since I was paying for a train ticket into Cardiff, I thought I’d have a wander with my Camera too. The pictures I took over the whole day I was there are in the flash slide show below. Enjoy