gregoa's blog

I got my fonera on monday, named her kes, had to reset her once 2 hours after connecting her (deleting too many files is no good idea), had no real luck with trying to convert her into a repeater — & today I bricked her (by trying to install a newer busybox package). the wlan led is dead, no wlan signals, no connect on the lan port, ... (resets didn't help, & a flashing lan led when the cat5 cable is connected doesn't help either.)

I guess the only solution involves a serial cable, & that's far beyond my capacities, therefore I hope that my friend & hausmasta chrisu will take this challenge :-)

btw: playing with the fonera firmware (based on openwrt) could be fun.

inspired by albert's experiments I took his script, changed it a bit [0], & calculated the factorial of 30.000 on my two boxen.

results:

• belanna: 46 seconds
• nerys: 56 seconds

update 1: good old guinan needs 5 minutes & 3 seconds; still faster than chrisu's desktop machine :-)
& on our colleen the script takes 1 minute & 22 seconds to complete.

update 2: the new guinan takes 1 minute & 48 seconds. wow.

[0]

#!/bin/sh
[ "$#" != "1" ] && echo "Usage: $0 integer" && exit 1
STARTDATE=$(date)
echo "
define fac (x)
{
        res = 1
        while (x > 1)
        {
                res *=x;
                x -= 1;
        }
        return res;
}
fac ($1)
" | bc
ENDDATE=$(date)
echo "start: $STARTDATE"
echo "end: $ENDDATE"
exit 0

if you have an intel graphic card & you are using the new intel X.org driver [0] instead of the old i810 one you might — like me — get the following errors in your /var/log/Xorg.0.log & only some strange resolutions:

(EE) intel(0): detecting sil164
(EE) intel(0): Unable to read from DVOI2C_E Slave 112.
(EE) intel(0): Unable to read from DVOI2C_E Slave 236.
(EE) intel(0): ivch: Unable to read register 0x00 from DVOI2C_B:04.
(EE) intel(0): Unable to read from DVOI2C_E Slave 112.
(EE) intel(0): tfp410 not detected got VID FFFFFFFF: from DVOI2C_E Slave 112.
(EE) AIGLX: Screen 0 is not DRI capable

the information in #434028 lead me to the following entries in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
        ...
        # gtf 1280 1024 75
        # 1280x1024 @ 75.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 80.17 kHz; pclk: 138.54 MHz
        Modeline "1280x1024_75.00"  138.54  1280 1368 1504 1728  1024 1025 1028
        Option          "PreferredMode" "1280x1024_75.00"
EndSection

& now my monitor is running on 1280x1024 again.

you might want to auto-adjust your monitor afterwards with the test image from nies.ch.

[0]
xserver-xorg-video-intel - X.Org X server -- Intel i8xx, i9xx display driver

having a laptop at hand & wireless around almost all the day; still not reading as much mails/postings/blogs/irc as at home.

I guess I have one of the largest & heaviest laptops & one of the smallest batteries.

forgot the power strip for my laptop at home. now roaming edinburgh on a sunday afternoon.

update: a few minutes later I found a little shop & a suitable cable.

my thinkpad had troubles with kernels in the 2.6.x series where x >= 21. a bugreport later I found myself on the kernel bug tracker.

today Thomas suggested to try an -mm-patch; I grabbed it from kernel.org, & played around. read my results in Bug 8463 on the kernel bug tracker.

if you like mutt, slrn, and irssi, and you happen to read a bunch of rss feeds take a look at newsbeuter, a feed reader for the text console; the documentation can be found either here or at /usr/share/doc/newsbeuter if you grab the package from Debian/unstable.

tonight I moved our svn repository. it's now publically available

• either via your favourite svn client at http://svn.toastfreeware.priv.at/projects/
• or with your browser at http://svn.toastfreeware.priv.at/wsvn/ToastfreewareProjects

contents:

$ svn ls http://svn.toastfreeware.priv.at/projects/
fullquottel/
mailtextbody/
quickappoint/
teleschorsch/
$ 

enjoy.

linux-source-2.6.20 has entered unstable, and I've built new kernels for guinan & belanna. on guinan everything worked out of the box, on belanna I had to use gspca-source instead of spca5xx-source for my webcam & of course run /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup to create a new kernel module for VirtualBox. — great!

for nerys linux-image-2.6.20-1-686 & linux-headers-2.6.20-1-686 would be available but linux-kbuild-2.6.20 is still missing (which is needed to build madwifi-source with module-assistant).

two out of three ain't that bad anyway :-)

after etch was released on the weekend I upgraded the server at the office (yesterday &) today, following the procedure in the release notes. — it worked without a problem, I just had to make 2 small adjustments to the spamassassin & logcheck config respectively.

great!