Category Archives: Linux

So much for a long-weekend (to replace Queen’s Birthday, when I was on-call) without going near a computer. On Saturday, I picked up a Dvico Fusion Dual Digital 4 HDTV card, destined for the PVR that I’ve been intending to build for a while now.

I’ve been holding off buying one of these cards until there was Linux support for them, and that finally appeared in the last couple of months (including modifications to the firmware to make it work properly in Australia). There’s a good tutorial on getting it going here, and I had the card working in my computer within an hour or so.

I was quite surprised that I was able to pick up both the ABC and SBS with just a shoddy rabbit-ears antenna; even the ABC HDTV broadcast worked reasonably. Normally any sort of radio reception in my house, without an external antenna, is pretty horrible, due to the number of RF-noise-generating devices I have (and analog TV is just terrible, even with the antenna).

The next step is to find an extremely quiet case and power-supply to build the PVR with. If anyone has any recommendations of these that can be purchased in Australia (preferably inner Melbourne, but mail-order is ok too), I’d welcome any comments. Wouldn’t mind trying to make the system as low-power as possible, too…

Once I’ve got that built, I’ll start looking for DVB-S cards that work under Linux, to hook up to my satellite dish.

Anyone tracking Debian unstable should be aware of this bug in xserver-xorg-input-kbd. Essentially, the old ‘keyboard’ driver has been replaced by ‘kbd’ but the package doesn’t alter your xorg.conf file when you install it.

You’ll probably be totally unaware of this until you reboot your computer, as I did, and find that X is not working … most likely, at the least convenient moment.

The solution is quite simple. Replace:

Driver “keyboard”

with:

Driver “kbd”

…in your xorg.conf file.

Well, here’s a first. I’ve dabbled in python before, but never released anything publically, and I’m sure when people look at the code, they’ll see why 😉

Podsnort is a simple, command-line podcast downloader. It seems to work for me, but as usual, YMMV.

(Oh, and it’s version 0.2, because version 0.1 was written in Perl, and I decided to dump it and start it again when I turned it into a huge, nasty mess).

…is just a touch overzealous:

# vgremove 
  Volume group "vg_data" successfully removed
  Volume group "vg_system" still contains 7 logical volume(s)

I’d expected it to act like lvremove, and just give me a list of options.

There’s a bug in initramfs-tools under Debian sid that can render your system unbootable, if you’re using Xen (specifically, I think it occurs if you have libc6-xen installed).

The patch supplied on the bug page fixed it, for me.

Finally got my Lighttpd tutorial finished. It’s a nice little webserver, and seems to be the flavour of the month at the moment.

As a bonus, it doesn’t use XML-based configuration files … or even pseudo-XML configuration files, à la Apache.

The following patch adds a Control-L hotkey to Liferea, for marking all feeds as read:

Firstly for version 1.0.27:

<br /> — liferea-1.0.27.orig/src/interface.c 2007-03-17 23:14:01.000000000 +1100<br /> +++ liferea-1.0.27/src/interface.c 2007-03-17 23:02:03.000000000 +1100<br /> @@ -223,6 +223,9 @@<br /> gtk_widget_show (mark_all_as_read2);<br /> gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (menuitem2_menu), mark_all_as_read2);<br /> gtk_tooltips_set_tip (tooltips, mark_all_as_read2, _(“Marks read every item of every subscription.”), NULL);<br /> + gtk_widget_add_accelerator (mark_all_as_read2, “activate”, accel_group,<br /> + GDK_l, (GdkModifierType) GDK_CONTROL_MASK,<br /> + GTK_ACCEL_VISIBLE);</p> <p> image2934 = gtk_image_new_from_stock (“gtk-apply”, GTK_ICON_SIZE_MENU);<br /> gtk_widget_show (image2934);<br />

Secondly, for version 1.2.7:

<br /> diff -urN liferea-1.2.7.old/src/ui/ui_mainwindow.c liferea-1.2.7/src/ui/ui_mainwindow.c<br /> — liferea-1.2.7.old/src/ui/ui_mainwindow.c 2007-01-09 10:24:34.000000000 +1100<br /> +++ liferea-1.2.7/src/ui/ui_mainwindow.c 2007-03-31 09:21:56.000000000 +1000<br /> @@ -207,6 +207,10 @@<br /> return TRUE;<br /> break;<br /> case GDK_period:<br /> + case GDK_l:<br /> + on_menu_allfeedsread(NULL, NULL);<br /> + return TRUE;<br /> + break;<br /> case GDK_n:<br /> on_next_unread_item_activate(NULL, NULL);<br /> return TRUE;<br />

Both versions apply cleanly to the Liferea source packages in Debian etch/sid and experimental, respectively

Some photos from the Ballarat Linux Conference. Russell and Donna have good posts on the conference.

First picture: