Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T (DVB-T)

In a break from our regular program (prism54 and linux) I spent a little while playing with my Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T card in my main machine, tom.

I occurred to me that the Red Hat kernel might be causing me some problems (I couldn't even compile linux-dvb...). So I copied vanilla 2.4.22 from the laptop (sylvester) to tom (via ethernet, because the wireless network isn't working). Guess what? Compiled and installed the dvb modules first time.

I went to bed a smug happy git.

prism54.org

Things look up for my network card as the groovy hackers involved have made some headway in integrating the two different card types, renamed the module and purchased their own domain name (the important bit !)

Now prism54.org is the place to go for all things prism54 related...

Loving your work folks.

A gratuitous waste of space and time

Richard Dzien has pointed out that no-one has ever or will ever read this and that its even more boring than his journal/blog. True.

Wireless closer

It looks as though I'm close. The card is detected and iwconfig once showed that it had seen the AP. Apparently I've got to play with the setoid command. (Looks like a low-level, dirty hack, but it gets your card working).

All this, so I can have 54Mb arount the house (and still 56k to the outside world!)

Wireless update 2003

On Tuesday afternoon I rebuilt a stock 2.4.22 kernel (+ ISL3890-0.1.0 patch, obviously) with /usr/bin/gcc32 and it can see the card fine, but I wasn't willing to take my laptop home on the bus, so it'll have to wait until tonight to get some proper testing.

At least with Linux, when something fails you can dig around and get it working. With XP (best desktop version of Windows or "Glorified service pack"[1] depending on your opinion) you're just plain f*cked.

[1] As my colleague Richard Dzien put it

Wireless shmireless

A bit quick off the mark there.

The card will not work under XP (despite the fact it is meant to). In fact XP seems a bit shit with respect to adding hardware. (The Hauppauge Win Nova-T card I have at home doesn't work under XP either).

As for Linux - I have been a miserable failure in getting this working with Red Hat's Fedora kernel. Bugger.

Wireless update

dabs rock! ParcelForce delivered the goods within 17 hours of my order. Some other online retailers never manage such a quick turn around.

Setting up the WG602 access point was a piece of cake. I already have a DHCP server (and BIND) on my main machine at home (tom) so I just added the MAC address to the DHCP server and, hey presto, web access to the router. All totally configurable from Mozilla. Excellent - it took under 20 minutes to secure the AP.

The PC card (WG511) installed seamlessly under Windows 2000 Server on my laptop (sylvester) and again once I (finally) overwrote that with Windows XP Pro.

Under Linux (Fedora 0.95) lspci recognises it as a D-Link DWL-g650 (which has the same chipset). In fact a quick google shows that these dudes have drivers and firmware for this card. Let's see if it works.

Wireless

So I decided to waste some more money and splash out on some (cheap) wireless kit. Why? You may well ask as I only have (and thanks to the total inadequacy of BT and the cable providers, only can have) a 56k analog line at home.

The reason? So I can surf when Debbie is watching something I don't like on the TV, or do the shopping at Tesco without buggering off upstairs.

I ordered a Netgear WG511 card (rumoured to work under Linux) and their WG602 access point from dabs. Fingers crossed it'll all work.

It's a shame that only Apple make a Wireless Access Point with a built in modem, and that it costs a whopping 180! (Over twice as much as the Netgear). So I'll have to have the upstairs PC acting as a router (like I do on the Ethernet network at home).

Fedora 0.95 doesn't use RHN

PBKAC Alert! Disregard my previous comment about RHN and 0.95. This comment on the fedora-test-list says that you just use the yum channel.

An advantage to that is that you can get updates from your favourite mirror (e.g. mirror.ac.uk). Cool!

Fedora Core 0.95 / RHN / up2date amusement

The new up2date 4.1.5 in the latest Severn beta updates allows you to talk to apt and yum repositories which is really cool.

More amusing is that once you've updated the redhat-release RPM you can't access RHN via up2date anymore as it (currently) doesn't recognise 0.95 as a valid version number! Fairly amusing, and I'm sure I'll be able to connect tomorrow.

XHTML

Updated my own website to XHTML 1.0 Strict from HTML 4.0 Strict. Pretty painless. Although obviously the site is still pretty ugly, difficult to navigate and ultimately pointless.

Trying to do the same at work to a site I wrote 5 years ago is a bit more painful, but I expect I'll get there.

I used Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards book to learn about XHTML.

Personally, I think the book contains too much talk and not enough reference material, but it's not so much aimed as standards zealots like myself but other so-called "Web professionals" who write web-sites that only IE can parse. Still, due to the chatty, backgroundy-nature of the book it does explain some of the harder parts in great detail, where a reference manual might have just confused me.

Fedora Core 0.94

Following on from yesterday's blog entry...

Today, I've taken my machine up to Fedora Core 0.94. /etc/redhat-release states that this version is:

Fedora Core release 0.94 (Severn)

Owned by the confusingly named RPM:

redhat-release-0.94-2

Desktop "wars"

As an update, I finally decided to upgrade my desktop at work from RH9/xd2 to RH9.0.93/whatever-they-call-it-today.

RHLP / Fedora Project 9.0.93 Update

First thing to note: RHLP has changed its name to Fedora Project and has a nice looking web-site. Moreover, they've merged RHLP with the excellent Fedora Linux who always provided up-to-date cutting edge RPMs for RHL. This is an amazing move - most companies do not go "hey that guy is doing our job better than us, let's merge!" they usually have a NIH (not invented here) mentallity, which I'm very pleased to see that Red Hat does not have.

For those interested (and very few are, I suspect) I updated sylvester (my laptop) from Fedora 9.0.93 to err confusingly the same thing: RHLP 9.0.93 via the following channel on RHN: "Red Hat Linux (Severn) 9.0.93 - Beta Updates".

Those Red Hat people (yes, standing on the shoulders of giants, I know) are making good. This is clearly a good step up from RHL 9 and GNOME 2.4 feels "warm and cozy". And while I can't say exactly what's so much better than the previous 9.0.93 (except epiphany 1.0.0 is a lot better) I can say that, subjectively, it is better. So there.

Epiphany v. Galeon

Aha. I have found out the history between Galeon and Epiphany. (I mentioned before that I did not know what was up).

The Galeon team have put a polite, unbiased story up explaining all. Kudos to them for this explanation. Kudos to both teams for their efforts in trying to build a better browser for GNOME.

64-bit

So AMD are almost ready to ship desktop 64bit procs and in a few months Intel will too.

Now assuming a decent compiler (and no legacy apps to run at vaying speeds) what advantage will this bring the consumer in the short term?

I'm not confident that there will be any. I seem to remember that when XEmacs was first ported to 64 bit and Hrjove Niksic benchmarked the two together the 64-bit version was fractionally slower except when performing some extreme, atypical applications involing a lot of integer criunching.

So perhaps 64-bits on your desktop will mean better eye-candy. Perhaps things people previously installed SQL servers for will be performable through your spreadsheet or MS-Access (and similar). Perhaps ripping and converting multimedia will faster (if we're allowed to... :-).

Maybe it's not the apps that will really benefit but the OS and that will make us all happy. But did we see such a speedup when Solaris went 64 bit? Nope. Irix? Nope. On the otherhand, maybe moving to 64 bits gave us the advantages of XFS (now available on 32-bit Linux), UFS Logging (also available on 32-bit Solaris 7+ for SPARC and x86) so that's a big fat "nope", too.

As you can tell, I'm more than a bit confused. Can someone tell me why we need 64-bit desktops when all the evidence and experience we've had have shown otherwise?

Red Hat Linux (Project?) 9.0.93

So Red Hat have launched a new public beta (9.0.93) of their standard Linux distro.

Now, I am a Red Hat apologist/defender/user/admin/whatever. Take that as a pre-warning against a positive comment...

I upgraded to 9.0.93 on my laptop to see what it was like as a desktop distro. Compared with RHL 9, we have stuff like Evolution 1.4 (phew) and a newer Mozilla. Plus I installed Epiphany to check that out. All in all, it's a welcome imporvement over 9.

Compared with RHL9 with Ximian Desktop 2 (xd2): well for me at least, it's just as good. (In fact for me it's better than xd2, simply because I prefer the default panel set up by RH than xd2 (but you can, and I do, change them).

I don't know the history between the galeon/GNOME/epiphany developers, but Epiphany does not seem to be as well-featured as galeon 1.3.x (the standard browser in xd2).

Whatever, all 3 combos are good, but xd2 and RHL 9.0.93 are a welcome improvement over RHL 9's desktop, and for me the RHL version just has that edge.

Both teams deserve congratulations.

Ximian Evolution 1.4, 2.0 and XD2

In this article we're shown some screenshots of a (possible) future interface for Evolution 2.0.

Now despite my previous rant about Ximian Connector, I am a fan of Ximian Evolution. 1.2 was damned good and pretty stable, and 1.4 and all of Ximian Desktop 2 (xd2) is amazing.

I love the fact that, at last, all the apps I have are using the same toolkit (and the same version) with the obvious exception of ooo.

KDE users may sneer as they've always had this sort of thing, but I just prefer using GNOME. KDE for me, feels too much like a certain prevalent desktop operating environment.

Back to those screenshots: they look great, and give a more logical and usable sidebar than the Outlook-esque navbar (which I rarely use, but keep for eye-candy). Go for it Evolution hackers, many happy users await these kewl improvements to an already great product!

Ximian Connector 1.4

As many of you will know, one of Ximian's money-making schemes is to sell a commercial plug-in for Ximian Evolution that allows it to talk to Microsoft Exchange Server 2000.

Now for some reason, my employer who "should know better" has installed said groupware server.

So, excitedly we paid for 3 Ximian Connector licences to cover the number of Evolution users (and left the KDE users to their own soon-to-be-released devices).

Now, Ximian Connector does not talk using MAPI to the MS server. Presumably because this is a proprietary protocol at the whim of MS to change at any point.

It uses OWA: "Outlook Web Access" to retrieve XML files over HTTP and then renders them. Very clever, shrewd, cheap and quick-to-implement (given Ximian's knowledge of XML) solution.

The biggest problem with this is - it takes a f*ck of a long time to download, parse and render that much XML. If you get more than about 5-700 messages, say "bye-bye" to Evolution. Hello? I do not want my MUA to crash!!! It's my lifeblood!

Also it gets confused about the number of messages in a folder, oscillating between two numbers or just lying and showing a larger number than you have. Some of these invisible messages do in fact exist and are visible in Outlook. This has improved in 1.4 over 1.2 but is still an issue

Then there is the Deleted Items folder. It is never emptied, and is normally too big to visit unless you want Evolution to crash (for the reason given above).

All in all Ximian Connector 1.4 is a pile of rubbish. It's unstable, and does not do what it is meant to.

Sun is dying

I come from a Sun background. I started seriously using Unix (as opposed to just "using a computer" - which was on a Gould running BSD 4.2) on SunOS 4.1.x (and SGI's Irix).

(On the flip-side I'm an open-source bigot and Linux-lover.)

I became a Unix sysadmin for a Sun house and have moved around a bit. I love purple hardware and the way that Solaris just runs and runs and runs... and running the entire GNU toolchain and Apache etc. on it.

But WTF have Sun done? They've certainly dropped the ball in the low end. x86-based machines are now vastly faster running Linux. Also the big hardware vendors are (finally) fully supporting Linux on their platforms. The final nail in the coffin is the emergence of Enterprise editions of Linux (eg Red Hat Enterprise Linux) that offer the stability and reliability (plus ISV support) that kept Solaris as a prefered platform for RDBMS.

So Sun's answer to the fact that their own hardware is redundant? Sell x86 hardware. Purple x86 hardware.

Unfortunately, Sun's x86 hardware is still overpriced (when are Sun going to realise that we want the simplicity of Hardware RAID?) and underspecced.

So after years of loving Sun, I've now found myself loving HP/Compaq (with RHEL ES 2.1).

Add in Red Hat Enterprise Network, and Sun are dead in the water (Solaris 8 has an 80MB+ patch set that take hours to install and patchpro is difficult to configure and use).

No, I'm off. My employer agrees and I'm glad. Thanks Sun for being there until something better came along, but no thanks for not keeping up.