Huh? What?
An E-playground for members of Bebear.net

Subscribe
Receive the RSS Feed of Samsara updates.

Links
People's pages that live on this server

Chumby, an open hardware flash player

Lots of discussion on Chumby has been happening ( here, here, here and here).

A couple of points on Chumby are:

1. An open source hardware flash player
2. Schematics completely open
3. Runs Linux
4. The hacker that wrote Hacking the Xbox is one of the leads behind this
5. Lots of O'Reilly alpha geeks seem utterly into this
6. Price point at around US$150

1. A reverse-engineered open set of creative tools
2. A more open specification than the one that is available
3. Adobe opening up their toolsets

[/al/linux] permanent link

Getting Linux running on a Mac Pro

I've been wondering how hard it would be to get Linux running on a Mac Pro. Seems quite possible. This has a bit of promise for other things...

Bin-false's version
Ubuntu Forums on Linux for Mac Pro

[/al/linux] permanent link

Core 2 Duo Motherboards and Linux instability fun

I built myself a Core 2 Duo system recently with the hopes of running a much faster Linux setup than my old Athlon setup. However, what I ran fast into were compatibility issues. It seems that the JMicron chipset which is present in the MSI P965 Neo motherboard that I own is the culprit of many problems [1], [2], [3], [4]

A workaround which is to install Gentoo (Ubuntu Dapper folks does NOT work at this time) or some other distro besides Ubuntu and make sure to boot sending the kernel parameters all-generic-ide and irqpoll to make sure that the kernel does not completely bork itself on bootup. After that, you STILL have an issue with the Gigabit NIC that is included onboard. And NO, it is NOT in 2.6.17.x kernels or less. In fact you have to download the stupid thing from Realtek's website (HELLO, have we heard of merging into the kernel??) which can be found here.

Just for note, the 2.6.17-suspend-r4 kernel that I used with Gentoo does seem to cause some issues with the Realtek driver. I had to tweak some settings in the header files for the Realtek driver to get it to compile however I'm noticing that it is now causing OOPSes in 'dmesg' when I try to load the driver. These OOPsies are causing issues since the NIC refuses to come up during these problems.

Fixing it

[/al/linux] permanent link

Migrating a Thunderbird Profile from Windows XP to Linux

I decided to move my emailing activities from XP to Linux for *mumble mumble* reasons. I thought it would be a rather simple operation of dump the data files in the right place and be done with it but there are some small things to keep in mind when doing the move. Here's my diary entry on how I got it to work properly. I'm not going to cover how you view your Windows data. I imagine you have a Windows partition, a backup, or zipped up the relevant data and now can easily access it somehow. If so, you can adapt the directory paths for your situation.

1. Thunderbird on XP stores the relevant data usually around C:\Documents And Settings\[Username]\Application Data\Thunderbird\
   I'll call that $XP_TBIRD_HOME for the rest of this article. So first find that directory.
2. Linux stores the profile data in $HOME/.thunderbird
   For the rest of this article I'll call it $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME. Look for this directory as well or if not go to next step.
3. If it doesn't exist create $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
   mkdir $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
4. Copy the profile directory from $XP_TBIRD_HOME/Profiles/[blah blah].default into $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
   cp -Rp $XP_TBIRD_HOME/Profiles/[something] $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
5. Copy the profiles.ini and registry.dat from $XP_TBIRD_HOME into $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
   cp $XP_TBIRD_HOME/profiles.ini $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
   cp $XP_TBIRD_HOME/profiles.ini $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
6. Fix permissions and owners if you copied straight from a NTFS or FAT32 partition as root using chown and chmod stuff. I'm not sure my chmod-fu is 100% correct but I'd rather keep my mail stuff read only to me not the world.
   chown -R me:me $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
   chmod -R 700 $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
7. Edit $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME/profiles.ini and change the Path variable from Path=Profiles/[blah] to Path=[blah].
8. Fire up Thunderbird on Linux. If it doesn't bug you to create a profile and all that garbage you're done! If not, then maybe you missed something in the steps above. You can always blow away $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME and start from step 1 again until it works correctly.

Just the commands version:
mkdir $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
cp -Rp $XP_TBIRD_HOME/Profiles/[something] $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
cp $XP_TBIRD_HOME/profiles.ini $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
cp $XP_TBIRD_HOME/profiles.ini $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
chown -R me:me $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
chmod -R 700 $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME
vi $LINUX_TBIRD_HOME/profiles.ini
thunderbird &

There's a chance these instructions don't cover all situations But after goofing it up a few times and stumbling on this. I'm pretty sure this way will guarantee you get your Thunderbird settings just right. That should migrate everything over including all your settings including which servers to connect to, spam settings, and even extensions you might have installed.

I've not tried moving all this data to a different machine architecture so I'm not sure if the binary data will hold but I'm going to guess 'yes'. I imagine if you reverse the process a little bit it should be rather trivial to migrate from a Linux Thunderbird to a Windows Thunderbird. I imagine with some permutations it should be simple to adapt this to get your Thunderbird moved to OS X.

Links:
Sharing Thunderbird between Linux and Windows (Might be useful for dual-booters but I wanted a full migration not sharing).

[/al/linux] permanent link

Why Linux doesn't have a stable Kernel API

A binary driver
is sufficient if you want to provide a module for a specific release version of a specific Linux distribution. But multiply that single build by the number of different Linux distributions and the number of different supported releases of the Linux distribution and you quickly have a nightmare of different build options on different releases

Considering some of the shoddy drivers I've experienced over the years this developer strategy to drivers makes more sense although I can say that compiling the Linux kernel these days is long even on faster processors and getting the source is also not a small task. Although that might be mainly due to most of the distribution specific build tools that have surfaced over the years and require learning a new tool to test if it's actually better than just make menuconfig for me. In some cases they are, in quite a few cases it has not.

Read it yourself

[/al/linux] permanent link

Non-MSIE platform users not need apply for hurricane relief

The Inquirer reports that FEMA is only allowing users of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser to apply for hurricane relief funds. "The now very much criticised US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has stopped Mac and Linux victims of hurricane Katrina from applying for relief. The agency, which is already in hot water for its lack-lustre rescue efforts in New Orleans, has created a web-based service that only works for users of Windows and IE6."

File this under the WTF Were They Thinking Dept.

Original Link

[/al/linux] permanent link

So much for PS2 Linux

I've always been interested in Linux for the PS2, especially since some of the hardware on the PS2 had some interesting features from a graphics standpoint. However, I just checked the Playstation 2 Linux Website and found this disappointing news.

US & Canada: The North American territory is now sold out of Linux for PlayStation 2.
...
Linux for PlayStation 2 final release 1.0 was sold as a DVD set only in Japan, for users who had already purchased the hardware with the Beta kit release in 2001. All final release 1.0 discs have been sold, and there are no plans for further sales in Japan

In other words, if you don't have one, don't even bother looking for one. Ah well. Guess I'll just wait for the PS3 and hope they have something for tinkerers.

[/al/linux] permanent link