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  • Dark Liquid 11:23 am on December 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , suse   

    Arrrrrgh!!! 

    I’ve not been a great fan of SUSE but for some reason I installed it on my media box – all the other boxes in the house have Ubuntu on them. I wish hadn’t decided to try out something different, it’s been a nightmare.

    SUSE, quite frankly, is shit. I’ve had no end of problems. When I first installed it it managed to fuck up it’s own update repository info so I couldn’t update anything. after fixing that it was a massive bunch of jumping through hoops to get media working properly, fucking around with enabling and disabling various repos and then having to reinstall packages multiple times so it would actually use the correct (read: packman) ones. Then that broke sound-juicer which I discovered (after looking through the source of sound-juicer and the /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10 directory) as due to giosink missing. You’d think sound-juicer’s fucking error message would say that, but no, all it says is the plugin or file access is not installed – check the documentation. What plugin? How am I meant to know what that is? There is a metric fuck-ton of gstreamer plugins that deal with file access as far as I can tell, which one do you want that isn’t there? And what documentation? The sound-juicer docs? The gstreamer docs? And where would I find either of these?

    FUCK YOU sound-juicer! You vague, mocking bastard!

    So, I googled to find where to get the giosink plugin. It’s in the ‘base’ set of plugins, or should be but apparently not in the packman version. Fuck. So I downloaded the original SUSE version, extracted the giosink .so file out of it using a horrible bunch of rpm2cpio and cpio commands and copied that into my systems gstreamer plugin dir.

    Thank you so much SUSE, sound-juicer and packman for wasting my time.

     

  • Dark Liquid 9:11 pm on December 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: fixes, hdmi, , installation, , opensuse, pulseaudio, troubleshooting, upgrades   

    Ohhhhh Yeeeaaaahhh! 

    This is why I love Linux. When you have a problem, research and perseverance will get you through. You aren’t stuck because everything is some stupid proprietary driver or because the various subsystems of your OS don’t provide any logging or configuration.

    Today, Lostprocess and I upgraded my mediabox to OpenSUSE 11.1. Installing the fglrx drivers was a bit of an arse but eventually we got it working. Then, we decided to try to setup the HDMI.

    Now, I’ve always had a problem with this. I have an Asus P2A something or other which has a M2R68L motherboard. It’s always had some issue or other with it and has never worked properly.

    Getting the video to work was easy enough, but the sound was fucked. Nothing would come through.

    Eventually we solved it.

    First of all we set some module options, like so:

    But restarting the module with the new settings didn’t help. Eventually it came to light that the problem was to do with pulseaudio.

    Pulseaudio was auto-detecting only some of the cards and refusing to send data to the HDMI output. We disabled the hardware auto-detection and forced it to setup the HDMI output as it’s sole audio sink. That sorted it and we were hearing audio via the HDMI! Woohoo!

    Basically we commented out the load-module module-hal-detect and module-detect lines and then added a new line something like: load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1,3

    That sorted it out. There is probably a better way to set the default audio sink of pulseaudio, but I don’t know what it is so disabling every sink except the one I want works out too. Lostprocess actually found the pulseaudio lines required to hack this up, so kudos to him.

    VLC seems to have issues with pulse audio or something. Playback with VLC was really juddery consistently but Totem (and anything using gstreamer as well) seems to playback everything fine. Even 720p stuff plays quite nicely (my TV is a 1080i but 720p plays better on it really) which is something that’s always been crappy before.

    Overall I’m rather pleased, both with OpenSUSE 11.1 (which is miles better than 10.3 which I had upgraded from – no more waiting for ever for bloody zypper to update the repo caches!) and with the nice, shiny HDMI output. Ohhhhh yeeeeaaaahh!

     

  • Dark Liquid 9:03 am on December 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: friends,   

    Of Epic Win and Epic Fail 

    Well, this weekend was Epic. Bytey and Andrea came down and we hung out, did some geocaching and nearly made Bytey asphyxiate due to laughing on several occasions. It’s so awesome to be able to hang out like that, something we must do more often. Unfortunately, there was a tiny taint of fail. Dru had to work all weekend and Lost was broken on Sunday. We were also going sit down and so some reverse engineering but it was just too much hassle setting up wireless packet sniffing so couldn’t be bothered in the end. We found a cache in Poole Park but failed finding one at Blake Hill Viewpoint but to be honest that was all part of the fun.

    Overall, much awesomeness and randomness ensued. We watched films, played Guitar Hero World Tour (and Bytey was bitten by the drumming bug) and hacked at some android code.

    Mmmmmm, geeeksto….

     

  • Dark Liquid 7:46 am on December 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , hacking, server, ssh   

    Kick-arse SSH authorised_keys tricks 

    SSH is awesome. Not only is it a package of a secure remote shell, secure remote copying and secure FTP-ing, there are a whole bunch of extra features hidden away that allow you to do lots of cool things, like key-based authentication.

    Now, key-based authentication has some pretty cool extra features as well. By using some of the options it provides, you can make your own authentication scheme and restricted shell on top of a single user. What that means is that several people can log into the same user, but depending on their keys, you can give them different permissions to do different things or no any number of cool things based entirely on the unique identity given to them by the key they are logging in with.

    It’s this way that gitosis, a git repository management system works, and probably how gitorius and github work too.

    Here is a simple example (DISCLAIMER – no idea if this exact code actually works, writing stuff made up from memory here, but you should get the idea):

    And you can provide different commands for different keys. What you can do is write a more complicated script to run as the command and give it arguments to identify the key that is running it for example. That script can then look at the original command request and do all sorts of things, like check a database to see if this particular key is authorised to run that command with those arguments or any number of things.

    At the office, we’ve written a simple git repository authentication system where we can all login as the same user, but a script will authenticate us against a configuration file to work out whether we have read and/or write permissions against whatever repo we are trying to access. It’s awesome and there is so much more you can do with it.

     

  • Dark Liquid 6:41 am on December 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    Another Year, Another NaNoWriMo, Another Failure 

    Once again I have failed NaNo, following what seems now to be a tradition over 3 years old. This year Dru and I decided to try and work on a single story together, each of us putting in 50000 words. Dru won because she is awesome. I failed with only 25500 words.

    Post-mortem – What went wrong

    Well, I think the main problem was, ironically, one that Dru was worried would effect her and I was quick to dismiss – that of us writing parts that involved other’s characters.

    The plan from the beginning was that we would each take a handful of characters and we would run through their individual plot lines until they met up, where one of us would take over (depending on whose character met whoms, etc, etc. I ended up with two characters, while Dru ended up with 4, pluss all of her secondary characters. My characters on the other hand were mostly solitarry or aloof and didn’t really have much in the way of a supporting cast which I think only contributed to my downfall.

    Without enough characters, I began to run out of stuff to write. While Dru could happily plough on through, I needed to keep these two characters going with little support from the rest of the story and not only that, I needed to keep the events of two characters aligned with the events of four other ones, something that made the task of writing for them even more difficult.

    Another issue is that I find Dru’s writing style quite hard to read, especially when it’s during the heat of NaNoWrimo and horribly unformatted and unedited. Trying decode the wordstorm so I can work out what’s going on and align events in my own plotlines was taxing and demoralising.

    Mostly though, I have only myself to blame. I refuse to ‘cheat’. I refuse to use dirty tricks to bump up my word count. I want to write a novel in a month, not just 50000 words of babbling garbage and mindless repetition. It didn’t have to be a good novel, but it still had to be a novel, otherwise I’d have a character start stuttering at the beginning and never stop until they’d repeated the same word 20000 times or something.

    I also didn’t want to give up doing the things I usually do, like watching various TV shows, playing the odd game on the PS3 or doing roleplay. All of those ate time I could have used writing and maybe if I’d had to inclination to forsake these for a month in favour of writing, I’d have done better.

    The Good Bits

    It wasn’t a complete failure I suppose. This year I’ve got further than ever before. My last record was 14000 so reaching the halfway mark this year was a definate improvement. At this rate maybe I’ll win NaNoWriMo come 2012…

    We also have an unfinished (I was meant to write the ending but never did) novel of 75000 words so far and hopefully during editing we can turn our awful spewing of crap into something beautiful, or if not that, at least something we can read without wincing with embarrassment.

    I don’t know if I’ll do NaNoWriMo next year, but then again I never do until the few weeks before. Guess I’ll see next year.

     

    • Dru 9:08 am on December 2, 2008 Permalink

      *hugs* Oh honey. I kept giving you the option to take some of my charas, but you declined. and you have to be obsessed if you want to win!
      And I didn’t cheat, all the much. I only had the charas play ‘eye spy’ for 500 words because I was stuck, everything else was pure story.
      But it doesn’t matter, this was a learning experience and as long as you try and remember what happened this year and don’t apply it next it’ll be fine and you’ll win because you are wonderful and awesome :)

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