Archive for June, 2009

So last week in an attempt to update… something (*shrug*, don’t remember what), I upgraded to intrepid, which bumped me up to kde4. It was a lot smoother this time around, but there were a few bugs left… mainly the fglrx driver didn’t like me. so I decided to go full bore and try jaunty again. it’d been 2 months since initial release, so it should be a bit more stable.

Well, things sorta exploded. fglrx still wouldn’t work. I ended up burning a copy and doing a clean install (my home dir is on another partition now so no data loss!) I got jaunty up and running fine with the radeon driver rather than the fglrx driver, and started getting everything into place. And by ‘use the radeon driver’ I mean remove all fglrx packages so it defaults to radeon (or whatever else).

Knetworkmanager still sucks, but the plasmoid worked properly this time and is quite nice.

When I got to work I burned half an hour trying to get dual monitors working (again, trying to get fglrx working) and found xrandr works great now. I used the following command to set up my dual monitors:

sudo xrandr –output LVDS –preferred –mode 1600×1200 –auto –left-of DVI-0 –output DVI-0 –auto –mode 1680×1050

and the following is the ONLY xorg config I have:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Configured Monitor”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Monitor “Configured Monitor”
Device “Configured Video Device”
SubSection “Display”
Virtual 3280 1200
EndSubSection
EndSection

Note the only thing I added with the Display subsection. Anyone who’s been using Linux on GUIs for the past 10 years can tell you how amazing that configuration is, and how far Xorg, xrandr and linux as a whole have come.

Amarok gave me some problems, but I was just missing some codecs. I forced KDE to 96 DPI and the screen looks great. The one thing I’m missing now is a functional Quickaccess plasmoid (on that does vertical mode properly) and I’m good. maybe I’ll write about the plasmoids (widgets) I’m using later.

There are the occasional video glitches here and there- mainly flickers or lines that flash for a 10th of a second and then are gone for an hour or 3. The other thing is when I pop open krunner and begin to type, there’s a little noise in the box. over my text as it tries to resize the window.

Other that that minor annoyance I think I’ve been converted to kde 4. That’s an amazing turnaround.

I watch Lost. From what I can tell, one of the appeals of the first season was the disconnect between characters. Their lack of communication drove the plot and drove the viewers crazy in the process.

I’ve come to a point in my book where I know what the catalyst is, and I know what the result is, I just don’t know how it gets from point A to point B. What’s the missing part?

Who knows what.

The Setup:
Ziggy is working as a stable boy for an Inn in a small, walled town (Devitt). The Innkeeper (Clayton) and his wife (Katherine) act as surrogate human parents for Ziggy as he acclimates to living with humans.
A powerful wizard (Leopoldo) rides into town and Ziggy, having never seen a wizard, follows him around, earning a stern reprimand from Clayton who fear overzealous retribution from the wizard. Ziggy opens one of the Wizard’s saddle pouches and finds a powerful amulet that he accidentally activates, raising an army of undead from the cemetery south of town. The way the amulet works, if the user is not powerful enough, the zombies attack the user, otherwise they become willing servants. Since Ziggy isn’t a wizard, the zombies stumble forth through the town, making a beeline for him. Since it’s mid-afternoon, the townsfolk react as you’d expect, immediately rushing to attack the zombies (who would have otherwise left them alone).

The Result:
Ziggy flees the town to the north (towards the capital city of Willis, which can handle this threat), knowing that the zombies will follow him. Ziggy feels deep shame, essentially running away. He never travels to Devitt again, and avoids all contact with the town.

The difficult part is figuring out what happens between those two bits of story.

In Between:

• The Wizard sees Ziggy, realizes he was the one who activated the amulet. Demeans him, gives exposition on how the amulet works and that the zombies are after Ziggy. Says He is responsible for the carnage that ensues, and he’ll deal with him later.
• After Ziggy flees, the wizard is killed by angry mob who thinks he was controlling the zombies, not trying to stop them.
• Clayton may or may not be killed in battle

Questions:

• Does Clayton know Ziggy betrayed his request?
• Does Ziggy think Clayton knew Ziggy betrayed his request?
• Does Katherine know Ziggy betrayed his request?
• Does Katherine blame Ziggy for Clayton’s death?
• Does Katherine (or Clayton) know Ziggy survived the battle? Do they know he ran to Willis? Do they care?

How do I tie this up in a way that leaves Ziggy in Willis?

I pride myself on being a geek, but every once in a while I do something that can’t be described any way other than “Nerdish”. Today I think I crossed that line again.

1) A while back I hooked up my old PC speakers (kinda nice) to my server in the basement, then streamed music through it. Well, this was fine and dandy for me, but jackie wanted “her” music.

2) I set up a web interface with several radio stations that jackie could select from with HTML “radio” buttons. This worked great, but it still required a laptop to hit the web interface to change channels.

3) A few years ago I bought a nice soundcard to attempt to record my guitar playing on my workstation- that never panned out, but the card came with an USB IR receiver and a dinky little remote for watching DVDs… well, I got the remote working in linux (on my server) with lircd. I then have irexec listening to the lircd socket for buttonpushes, and executing commands based on my config in /etc/lircrc which liiks like this:


begin
remote = Creative_RM-1500
button = Vol_Down
prog = irexec
config = amixer -c 0 -- sset Master playback -1dB+
mode = order
end
begin
remote = Creative_RM-1500
button = Vol_Up
prog = irexec
config = amixer -c 0 -- sset Master playback 2dB+
mode = order
end
begin
remote = Creative_RM-1500
button = Mute
prog = irexec
config = amixer -c 0 -- sset Master toggle
mode = order
end

The end result? it raises and lowers the volume and can mute the audio on the server… what’s next?

4) get Next and Previous to change stations.

Oh, and it’s all running as an unprivileged user rather than root, which makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

btw, here’s my /etc/lircd.conf:

begin remote

  name  Creative_RM-1500
  bits           16     
  flags SPACE_ENC|CONST_LENGTH
  eps            30           
  aeps          100           
  header       9078  4671     
  one             0     0     
  zero            0     0     
  pre_data_bits   16          
  pre_data       0x8322
  gap          106974
  toggle_bit_mask 0x0
  min_repeat      4


      begin codes
          Power                    0x000000000000619E
          1                        0x0000000000008B74
          2                        0x0000000000008F70
          3                        0x000000000000906F
          4                        0x0000000000008A75
          5                        0x000000000000847B
          6                        0x0000000000007887
          7                        0x0000000000008976
          8                        0x000000000000837C
          9                        0x0000000000007788
          0                        0x000000000000807F
          CMSS                     0x000000000000718E
          EAX                      0x0000000000008C73
          Mute                     0x0000000000006E91
          Vol_Down                 0x000000000000639C
          Vol_Up                   0x000000000000629D
          Up                       0x0000000000007B84
          Left                     0x0000000000008778
          Ok                       0x000000000000817E
          Right                    0x000000000000758A
          Down                     0x0000000000008D72
          Return                   0x0000000000008E71
          Start                    0x0000000000008877
          Cancel                   0x0000000000007C83
          Rec                      0x000000000000738C
          Options                  0x000000000000827D
          Display                  0x0000000000007689
          Previous                 0x0000000000007F80
          Play                     0x0000000000007986
          Next                     0x0000000000007A85
          Slow                     0x0000000000007D82
          Stop                     0x000000000000857A
          Step                     0x0000000000007E81
      end codes

end remote