December 21st, 2009
Like Christmas Scrooge, the nvidia binary driver VS. conexant cx18 conflict is still with us. (written 21 Dec 09)
If you have a Hauppauge TV card with the Conextant cx18x chip onboard in your system (such as my Hauppauge HVR-1600 ATSC/Mpeg encoder/ TV tuner card) and you are getting stuck at 800×600 resolution and nvidia-settings reports “You appear to not be using the nvidia driver. Just run nvidia-xconfig as root”. But when you run that, you are still stuck at 800×600, continue reading.
Here is the fix thanks to 76GTA on the ubuntuforums available here. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: conexant, cx18, hauppauge, mythbuntu, mythtv
Posted in MythTV and Mythbuntu | Comments Off
November 28th, 2009
My PCs are almost all Ubuntu based, the latest being Ubuntu 9.10 – the Karmic Koala. But my Sansa MP3 player firmware updater only runs in Windoze and I ordinarily don’t have Windoze running. However, I do have XP-SP3 installed as a virtual PC in VirtualBox 3.0.12. The Sansa Firmware Updater runs fine in the Virtualized XP. These are the steps I followed to get the Sansa Fuse player, Windoze XP-SP3 under VirtualBox 3. and the Sandisk Sansa Updater happily (mostly) running together. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Sansa Firmware Updater, Ubuntu, Virtualization | Comments Off
October 30th, 2009
Virtualization according to Larry: Here’s my take on Virtual Machines having experimented with VMWare Server (success), VirtualBox (success and recommended) XEN (never did run successfully) and now KVM which after a few days walking about in the dark was installed successfully. If you want to experiment with virtualization, try VirtualBox first. VB Version 3 installs from the Ubuntu Repository. This is a good introduction to virtualization. Take my advice though. Dedicate an entire HD to your experiments. Unplug the power from your other HD’s so that when the first Live CD/Install Program boots, you won’t be wondering if you are going to wipe out your production installations. After you get VB going, you should try KVM using the program Virtual Machine Manager. Just wipe out your experimental HD and start over) In this walk-through, I install KVM on a Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 desktop system which I used as the host. I then install and configure a guest Ubunty Jaunty 9.04 desktop in that host. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 9.04, jaunty, kvm, Virtualization
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August 6th, 2009
Kismet will run with this cheap USB wifi dongel installed. After you have installed kismet (sudo apt-get install kismet), edit the /etc/kismet/kismet.conf file (sudo gedit /etc/kismet/kismet.conf) and change the “sources” line to read: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Encore, ENUWI-G2, kismet.conf, USB Adapter
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August 2nd, 2009
I have a Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop with a mini-pci card containing a Intel 3945 wireless chip. This works fine most of the time except when I want to connect to a weak RV Park access point. Then I want to use a USB Wireless “dongle” that I can move around until the signal strength is sufficient to allow a reliable connection. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to run the Intel card and a wireless USB dongle at the same time. I ended up blacklisting the Intel 3945 card then rebooting. If you have the same problem, this may be helpful. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 12th, 2009
This excuse to dabble in Python was a response to sleepless nights and pathetic programming on late night radio. So I’m awake at 2:30 AM, there’s nothing on the radio, but my nearby LAN cifs server is filled with interesting podcasts and some media files. However, I don’t want to wake my sleeping partner by turning on a monitor, clicking on the keyboard, and otherwise creating a distraction. The answer: this TalkingMediaPlayer. (TMP) TMP is a python script that combines the media player Totem with an InfraRed Remote Control and a text to Speech Synthesizer. Give the location of your mounted media files to TMP, put in your ear buds, then grab your remote control. Arrow right moves to a new directory then speaks the name of the directory. Arrow down changes to the next file within this directory and so on. The play button starts the media player Totem running on the selected media file with appropriate audible feedback. All quiet and easy to run in the dark. Here’s the source and two demo files in which you can hear Talking Media Player in action:
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: festival, lirc, python, totem
Posted in Ubuntu, python | Comments Off
March 27th, 2009
Bins (http://bins.sautret.org/) is a photo album generator. Given a directory full of images, bins will format the images into an html page offering your choice of resized images and thumbnails. Many arrangements are possible and several templates are included. This walk through used bins version 1.1.29 which I installed from the Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 repository on March 26, 20009 using Ubuntu’s package manager synaptic. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: bins, html, photo, web page
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March 7th, 2009
After struggling for almost two days while attempting to install a new Hauppauge hvr-1600 tuner card in my old Mythbuntu 8.04 installation, I finally threw caution to the wind and used the Gnome System->Admin->Update Manager to move up to 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. Suddenly, to my great delight, the card was recognized within the mythbackend setup program and I was able to configured the mpeg encoder and dvb ATSC tuner. So far everything appears to be working. Here are some hints you may find helpful if you intend to install this card.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Add new tag, lirc, mythbuntu, mythtv
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March 1st, 2009
After about six months of trouble free operation, my Mythbuntu 8.04.1 Front-End & Back-End combination suddenly died. This was not the first time! I guess the only sure thing is that at sometime mythtv will “spit up” on you like a gassy baby. Usually, I have to admit, the crashes are self-inflected as I can’t resist tweaking.
After installing Mythbuntu 8.10 and making some changes, I decided to image the single drive partition that now contains only my mythbuntu installation (recordings are on second hd) with the utility partimage(short for partition image) so that in the future, I can simply re-image (aka restore) my master mythbuntu installation. Since this image contains all the nitty about the remote and other configuration details, re-imaging should restore all that exactly. This article details the method I used to image by Mythtv install step by step. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: mythbuntu, mythtv, partimage, systemrescuecd
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