java plugin problem

In spite of following the instructions given at Mandrivausers there seems to be some problem with the java plugin on the Acer, probably due to the update to Firefox 2.0.0.4 . Interestingly, Konqueror is able to pick up the plugin from the /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins folder, and java is working fine with it.

blogger issue with captchas

There seems to be some issue with blogger captchas after the auto-save is introduced - every single time it refuses the captcha first entered with "ERROR - Enter the letters as they are shown in the image." if the post has been auto-saved.
Edit: searching for captcha on the Blogger help group led me to this thread, so now I've submitted the review form noting that I'm not a spam-bot.

solving audio quirks

My first laptop post was perhaps overly euphoric. There's an issue with the audio - plugging in headphones doesn't automatically mute the speakers. Thankfully, there's a solution, from linux-on-laptops.net The Acer Aspire 3680 entry noted that muting the "Surround" in the mixer, Kmix in my case, mutes the speakers, with sound still coming in the headphones. Also, the function keys - Fn-F8 for muting, Fn-DownArrow for decreasing volume and Fn-UpArrow for increasing - don't work. Another tweak which was required was to change the "Master Channel" by right-clicking and choosing 'Select Master Channel' - it was PC speaker, changed to PCM. This is so that now a single click on the Volume Control should be enough for controlling sound, without needing to open the full mixer.

Another nice link from linux-on-laptops was via the forum to this page - nice links to free audio software including Ardour.

installing java plugin

Surprisingly, Java plugin was not installed properly on saispace2. After the upgrade to firefox2, did that too. The arcana was from http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/faq.html#q2.2 and in my case, the command was

ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

found by doing

rpm -ql jre

video player shootout

checking out media players on Mandriva 2007: Mplayer aspect ratio seems to be broken - seems to assume a 4:3 screen, and since the screen is not 4:3, is skewed. VLC and xine were OK. Totem and KMplayer seem to have a gamma problem - picture is washed out. And the players have problems with 3D desktop enabled. With Metisse, mplayer doesn't play without changing the vo option. VLC gets blocky - pixel interpolation seems to have gone for a six. Xine and Kmplayer with xine develop an interlacing problem. With Compiz and Beryl, VLC plays ok in windowed mode but black-screens on giving full-screen command. Xine is OK.

Mandriva 2007.1 on Acer Aspire 3684NWXCi

Got this machine for A - supposed to come pre-loaded with Linux, but the naughty dealer has put in an OEM version of pre-activated XP. 80 GB hdd was partitioned into 20 GB pieces, so the easy way out was to just leave everything as it was except to pop in Mandriva 2007.1 Free DVD and install it, removing the "D:" partition.

First looks - very impressive, with 3D desktops in three different flavours, each one configurable till one drops... Everything tried till now has worked out of the box - even the usual suspects ACPI battery monitor, sleep, WiFi, etc. The display was 1024x768 on first boot, but on opening drakconf and going to Hardware -> Change screen resolution , it prompted to change driver to the accelerated 915 driver, and then on X restart changed to 1280x800 as it should be. Then the 3D desktops - quite nice eye candy... More later.

using the dialup - backup connectivity

Leased line failure, had to go back to dialup for a week. Dnj helped PB to locate the modem in the server room itself, with a long telephone cable connection over lan cable laid in just 30 minutes. kppp on krishna connected OK, but for the connection to work, the eth1 had to be disabled - it had the default gateway. For using from another machine, connected over eth1 - like me, for example, instead of disabling eth1, just commented out the

GATEWAY=...

line in /etc/sysconfig/network . Since I'd also commented out (actually deleted) the line

FORWARD_IPV4=true

after the leased line came back online, I had to restore it using drakconf and later disable shorewall.

sssu.edu.in

The new domain sssu.edu.in is now operational. There was an error with the mail server: I'd forgotten to add to main.cf as per the readme and another thing was that I'd used a CNAME as the MX record which is not allowed, according to dnsstuff.com. Corrected.

making NTSC / PAL changes persistent

Using the video camera for skype as mentioned earlier, the NTSC setting was not being saved in the video source settings - it was reverting to PAL on reboot, when skype restarts. Googled and found a solution here. Downloaded VideoWDMControl v2.2, put it in the startup so that as soon as the machine boots up, the source can be set. But still, it would be better if the changes could remain after a reboot.

PDF Split and Merge

Via freshmeat.net, a freeware for splitting and joining PDFs for R - another idea for doing this was to print to pdf stating print pages 1-3 or whatever. This guy has a nice revenue model - asks for donations for the compiled version of enhanced version, while giving away the source, and the basic version, free.

skype with video

Over the last few days, some activity on skype, tried out the webcam feature using the Sony Handycam TRV-36. Nice, full-motion video, good even in full-screen mode, unlike Yahoo.

DVD Decrypter for reading DVDs with errors

DVD Decrypter's nice retry feature and error correction mechanism are pretty robust. In case some file is not readable otherwise, copy to hard disk using "File" mode and then run DVDShrink if necessary in "Re-author" mode to create ISO file. This way, files which Fair Use Wizard can't encode directly are also made available.

mounting various large hard disks

Some days back we'd mounted a 250 GB hd on developer on the linux machines using samba - the fstab entry is

//path/to_share /path/to/mount/folder smbfs rw,credentials=/path/to/credentials.txt,uid=500,gid=500 0 0

where the uid and the gid are the user and group ids of the user who needs rw access to the share. For finding a user's uid and gid, the command is

id username

On our Jo'berg server, the hard disk is on the same machine, so the fstab entry for mounting it is given in a previous post.

helping TB with another domain

Spent an hour with TB's manager's domain from nettigritty. Authoritative name servers for the domain were not configured properly. Logging in to http://domain.nettigritty.com/customer

In the Management console, clicking Domain Registration, Clicking on Modify Name Server in the second row, changed the name servers from ns11.nettigritty.com etc to
dns1.interactivedns.com
dns2.interactivedns.com
dns3.interactivedns.com
dns4.interactivedns.com

This did the trick. Dns changes took approx 10-15 minutes, then it started working.

copying missing files to Jo'berg hard disk

From the daily email "SGHBACK 846 : Automatic Audio files Statistics Check for SGH" copied and pasted to kwrite and made appropriate find/replace so that the lines were like

nice -n +10 cp 'ANN_BHAJANS_SWAHILI_END.mp3' ../audio -v

copied to audioold, did chmod +x and ran. Also, the new audio has noexec, since it is mounted as user. So, any such stuff needs to be run from some other partition with the full path.

new hard disk install at Jo'berg

Added to fstab

/dev/hdd1               /home/sgh/audio2         ext3    rw,user,owner   1 2

Had to do a

chown -R sgh:sgh audio2

since the files had some other ownership stamp. Stopped playout, umounted audio, mounted hdd1 as audio. Unfortunately the process was complicated by many files being missing in the new drive. Copying from the audioold directory....

iptables firewall config

saispace was giving too much trouble - bad network cable? - so connecting directly now instead of through NAT. So, set up firewall. Important part is the default

-A INPUT -i eth0 -j REJECT

just before the last COMMIT in the *filter table.

accessing Win2003 shares with Samba

The shares on Win2003 were not being seen on saiwaves komba2. Tried smbclient commandline, able to see those shares which require password. So, made share with permissions not set only for "Everybody" (which is the default), but also added the particular username for which I had the password. Then the share is seen, can be mounted. Added to fstab so that it mounts on boot. Useful info at http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Samba

The uid gid of a user can be found with id -u username and id -g username as given at http://kb.iu.edu/data/adwf.html

The encryption problem mentioned at http://allinthehead.com/retro/218/accessing-a-windows-2003-share-from-os-x is not an issue in our case, with the encryption being turned off before I started checking this problem, probably because the machine is not a domain controller.

wireless networking

Played around with the Linksys WAP54G which had landed at PDS mapping the signal strength with the Acer laptop - reaches nearly 200 feet in open air when kept outside the window. Upto corridor of our building too. But practical use? Not really - typing into USB key far easier for my needs.

problem with google apps start page

TB had some trouble with "verify your domain" in google apps start page creation. The google apps help group had this info:

I was having the same problem that you are having and I just got a
response from the Google Apps Team saying that you need to have the
"Next generation" control panel activated for "Start page" and "Docs &
Spreadsheets" to work, if you have the "Current version" control panel
activated you still can see the option for "start page" but you can't
activate it.

Steps to change control panel:
1. Log into your account and go to "Manage this domain".
2. Go to "Domain settings" (it's under "Services").
3. Go to "Advanced settings" and click on "Edit"
4. Under "Control Panel" you have the option to change to the "next
generation" control panel, select it.
5. Click on "Save Changes

After you should be able to activate the Start page.

Did that and it worked.