bordagen

OK, so maybe that was a bad choice of words, since it was actually an update of the software on my Asus EEE 701 4G that go me in to this mess to start with.

Last night, I decided to update some of the software on the Eee netbook, which in Synaptic Package Manager, means everything that is installed since it has never been done.

It downloaded all of the packages that it needed for Xandros, Firefox updates, Flash, Open Office as well as some of the other software that has been installed from purchase that I’ve never used, but anyway, They all downloaded fine, but the peppy little device ran out of disk space about half way through installing. I had anticipated this and checked how much space was left on the drive and there was a good 1.1GB left clear, apparently I was wrong.

I am now left with a rather funky looking door stop that, when powered up, produces a message telling me that it can’t find the Power tool for the system tray then it stay on a nice, calming icey blue screen.

Rather than look upon this as a bad thing, I have seen it more as an opportunity to install a new OS on the machine.

This is no easy task – just wading through the choices of alternative OS’s for the machine is work in itself. I looked at Xandros again (it had served me well in the past), a native Ubuntu installation, gOS and various others, but in the end I decided to give Easy-Peasy a go.

From what I can tell, it is built on a cut-down version of Ubuntu and, unlike other alternative OS’s for the Eee, this actually told me that it will run on the 701! amjor plus point.

The time is 17:53 on 6th October. I’ll continue on when it’s finished…

After downloading the ISO from the Easy Peasy website I have to install it to my USB pen drive. Time check: 17:57.

18:03 – It has finshed making the image bootable on my usb pen now, lets hope it works in the Eee.

18:04 – OK, it didn’t work. But I managed to fix this. In the BIOS of the Eee 701 you need to disable the SSD drive and make the primary your USB pen. Then set it to boot as the first device.

18:08 – I’m seeing the Ubuntu loading screen. A familiar sight.

18:11 – I just encountered a login screen, wasn’t sure what to put in there, so I just pressed ‘Enter’ – seemed to work. If this screen is a preview of things to come, it’s very shiny.

18:14 – Very shiny indeed.

18:15 – It’s loaded in the very familiar LiveCD edition of Ubuntu, meaning I just double click on ‘Install’ and away we go!

18:17 – Uh-oh, it’s asking me about partitioning… I probably should create a separate partition for my OS and my /home directory, but I don’t see myself switching OS (or trying to upgrade) again anytime soon, so I’ll leave it using the whole disk – it’s only 4GB anyway!

18:24 – And Go! I’ll leave it be, formatting partitions and installing. In the mean time I’ll go and was the pots up and think about what to put with the chicken for tea.

OK, so I watched a couple of episodes of Stargate (sadly not Universe though, not allowed to until we’ve – and by the I mean Liz – finished watching SG1) and then went back to the installation, but after a quick reboot it all worked perfectly. Even the WIFI which I was most shocked about. You could say that it was in fact, Easy Peasy.

I haven’t had a proper play with the new installation yet, just a couple of moments to setup the WIFI and seeing what was actually installed. There seems to be a few things on there that I won’t really need, such as the OpenOffice suite which I’ll remove, as well as Transmission (BitTorrent client) – because piracy is bad.

In the office, we use a program called Daylite to manage our projects, contacts and jobs.

Yesterday, all heck broke lose and Daylite Server stopped working, claiming that the database could not be started and to try reinstalling or rebooting. So naturally being the expert with computers that I am, I turned it off and turned it back on again – still the same error (and yes, I also checked that it was plugged in).

After a little bit of solution hunting in the forums, trawling through posts of “Yes I have this problem !!!!111lol” and “Pls fix. kthnxbai” I managed to find a possible solution, rebuilt the system permissions. So I went ahead and did that and the error went away. Only it was replaced with a more worrying one – Database cannot be found! So a bit more hunting and I found another possible solution. This time to rebuild the permissions on the OpenBase database.

Tried that and then I get the original error back (for anyone searching, it was: com.marketcircle.MCPostgresDomain, Error 300). Now that I have come full circle, I try a different solution to the problem. This time from the official Market Circle Knowledge Base (which didn’t show up on my original search):

Go to /Library/Application Support/Daylite Server/Logs/Daylite Configd.log and check to see if see the following text pattern:

FATAL: pre-existing shared memory block (key 0, ID 65544) is still in use

If you see that text, then you can try to reboot the server to see if the shared memory block is released. If it is not, do the following in Terminal:

sudo ipcrm -m 65544

The ID number (65544 in this case) is important. It will be different for everyone.

Orignal post on the knowledge base can be found here

This seemed to work right away and now I can continue working through the To-Do list of jobs I have been given. Yay?

I was iddly catching up on reading mates blogs one lunchtime at work and I stumbled across Paul’s site, and I was struck down with astonishment – he’d updated!

The most recent post on his site tells us that he is planning to get rid of his Sky subscription and invest in a media centre (which is strange as I am trying to get Sky at the moment – but thats the subject for another day). Now having recently built one of these, here is my view on the topic.

The media centre is a great idea, but it is not without it’s downsides – mainly if something goes wrong on a program on it, you either need to sit on the floor, straining your neck whilst working on it, or increase the font size so that you can see it from the comfy sofa. Luckily though, nothing much has gone wrong with ours (a few hiccups now and then mind) *touch wood*.

Lets start with the specs of mine:

Hardware
Synergy HTPC Media Centre Case
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H 780G Socket AM2+ onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4450e 2.3GHz Socket AM2 Energy Efficient 1MB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor
2GB PC2-6400 RAM
250GB HDD
LG GGC-H20L Blu-Ray/HD DVD-ROM, DVDRW SATA Black
Cooler Master Vortex 752 Intel SKT 775, AMD K8, AM2 Processor Cooler
Extra Value All in 1 Internal Card Reader Plus One USB2.0 Port (Black)
Cyberlink Media Center Remote Control – With Mini USB IR Receiver
D-Link 520+ Wireless Card (old one I had lying around)

Software
Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
Corel WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-Ray (very important to get the version correct)

The hardest part to get setup was the blu-ray playback as it was frought with ‘issues’. Firstly I had the wrong version of the software as you might be able to tell from my note above. Secondly I discovered that Blu-Ray can use one of two audio systems, Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio. I then found out that my AV receiver (the hub of my entertainment centre) did not support ANYTHING to do with DTS so I had to invest in one that did.

When building it, I had to remove some of the fans inside the slightly larger-than-I’d-like case to keep the volume down as well as change the fan speed in the BIOS to ‘auto’.

The setup allows me to watch anything I could on my computer (avi, mpeg etc) as well as now enjoy high definition content from Blu-Ray AND the now extinct HD-DVD.

The reason that I am using Windows is simply that there is no Blu-Ray/HD-DVD support in Linux yet.

It’s a really good setup and although it needs a bit more RAM (mine is only using 1GB from my PC because I screwed up and bought the wrong RAM – in my defense it was in the wrong category on the site anyway) I’m very pleased with it. One thing I would like to do later on is use NAS for storage of video/music and maybe increase the speed of the wireless network – but at a later date, I’m not made of money!

I finally managed to get a stable VNC connection to the office machines! Well, just the server at the moment, but that’s because it was the only machine on at the time…

I’ve been trying to get this sorted out since I was living at Liz’s parents house but there was a conflict with IP’s (the BT Home Hub and the work router had the same IP). There was a problem when we moved here too as the modem/router supplied to us by Be Internet was playing up not letting me change the IP address of it.

So yesterday I took a backup of the user settings, manually changed any reference to the existing IP to the new one and then ‘restored’ the settings from that edited file. Strangely it worked without a hitch!

The next step was getting a VPN connection working. This I already had set up – but it kept crashing out and being generally lagged on the old link, but with this new one (a different subnet) it not surprisingly worked.

From that internal connection I could SSH to the server, but not bring up a VNC window. I had to connect to the server from Liz’s Mac to change some settings (namely for the Remote Desktop to allow VNC conenctions with a password). Once this was sorted, I nabbed xtightvncviewer from the Ubuntu repositories via:

sudo apt-get install xtightvncviewer

And told it to connect. This worked very nicely, although it is quite slow but that is to do with the fact that I’m going over the Internet to make the connection rather than being in the same room as it.

On Monday night I went back to Ubuntu – forsaking Windows completely and starting anew with my favourite flavour of Linux (based on my experience of Suse, Red Hat and Fedora).

Complete with a format and full system update and installation of video drivers, I had a full working Gutsy Gibbon system running in an hour and a half. Not bad going when you compare it to Windows installations which have taken me slightly longer in the past. And only 2 system restarts.

Luckily, this time I didn’t have the fun of trying to get my network drivers sorted (which last time took me nearing 3 days!) – it just went straight through, enhancing my love for Netgear products!

Next it is time to install World of Warcraft…

I had been reading about this application called PlayOnLinux which is a friendly frontend for WINE. At least, that’s what it says…

For a start, it’s all in French – which I’m not really good with. I can guess a few words and phrases (‘Hello’, ‘What time is it’, ‘How do i get to the bank?’) but that’s basically as far as it goes. It doesn’t really help when I can’t install from the DVD as Ubuntu doesn’t see any of the .exe files or folders – only the install archives. I then need to operate a mount command to read the CD using ISO9660 and only then, can I see my executable install file.

However, even after this had been sorted, PlayOnLinux still couldn’t install the game because it couldn’t find the bank (as I said, my understanding of French is limited). In the end, I gave up with this frontend and just used the command line to install it, and lo and behold – installed first time. Managed to download and install The Burning Crusade add-on without a hitch too. I just need to patch it and I’ll be good to go.

My next task tonight is to download and configure Compiz-Fusion. By default, Ubuntu 7.10 includes some effects from the package, but doesn’t actually let you customise them, meaning I have a pointless piece of transparency at the top of the title bar which for some reason annoys me.

Well I finally got my monitor back from repair, and it actually turns out to be a new one, judging be the fact that the DVI/power ports are the opposite way around to what they were.

Anyway, with any luck I won’t have the lovely cyan line down the screen and I can enjoy my 20″ LG screen.

On a seperate note, Liz and I just made our first Xbox 360 game purchase – Lost Odyssey. She obviously gets to play it first, no matter. I’m not really paying attention to what she’s doing, so I’ll wait and play through it myself later. It’s 4 discs so it should keep us busy for plenty of time…