June 6th, 2008 cmsj
This post is about getting audio to work properly on your shiny new Thinkpad X300 in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).
The basic jist of things is that in Ubuntu, audio drivers are part of the linux-ubuntu-modules package, which has a version number that matches your current kernel. We need to replace these drivers (ALSA 1.0.16) with a newer version (1.0.17rc1) and rebuild.
The really excellent news is that you almost certainly don’t need to follow this guide, you can instead use a Launchpad PPA to just install a pre-compiled package with the necessary modifications.
For more details click here and follow the instructions.
Read on if you want more details
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Ubuntu | No Comments »
May 22nd, 2008 cmsj
After learning to use Meld and much chatting with chantra, I’m pleased to announce that we have landed his dnd-tabs branch into Terminator trunk.
What does all of that mean? Well, it means that we are a major step closer to being able to release 0.9 (which I have arbitrarily decided should be released only when we have tab support). That’s not to say that the release will be today or even in the next week - the branch landing may bring us all the infrastructure we need, but it needs some UI and behaviour love to make sure people don’t get lost in a maze of nested tabs (although this seems like such a powerful feature for some users that it may well be available as an option). This is the sort of thing I want to avoid out of the box:
One other nice thing we get from chantra’s branch is drag&drop re-ordering of terminals. You can kind of see it at work in the screenshot below - we highlight the area of the window where the terminal being dragged will end up (note that you can’t see the mouse pointer - it should be over the grey square with a drag icon of a terminal):
Thanks very much to chantra for his hard work on this, and indeed all of the team who have been rocking trunk for weeks now. We’ll get this polished and fixed ASAP and into a tarball/PPA and hopefully into things like Fedora and OpenSUSE :)
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | No Comments »
May 20th, 2008 cmsj
Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.
It’s utterly outrageous that we have a law which supposedly prevents individuals from expressing their opinion.
3. A system of intense religious veneration of a particular
person, idea, or object, especially one considered
spurious or irrational by traditional religious bodies;
as, the Moonie cult.
[PJC]
even if you don’t like that, there’s:
2. A system of religious belief and worship.
[1913 Webster]
so that covers every religion as a cult. As for dangerous - they have a well documented history of legal threats, intimidating behaviour, etc.
Update: It seems that sanity is not lost and the guy isn’t going to be prosecuted because, as should have been fairly obvious, his sign wasn’t inciting anything \o/
Posted in Rant | 1 Comment »
April 20th, 2008 cmsj
… neither of them good.
First off, in a stunning piece of fail, Lenovo have used a drive from one of the few manufacturers that enforces region coding on DVDs in hardware - Matshita, aka Matsushita, aka Panasonic. This is very frustrating and made worse by the drive shipping in a state with no region code set, so no DVDs at all will play. I now either have the choice of changing it no more than 5 times, or risking the drive with some custom firmware which claims to remove the region code.
Secondly, and more worryingly, there is a new BIOS release for the X300, but one report from a Linux user thus far suggests that the machine has started hard locking. I can’t confirm because this machine is far too important to me (ie I use it for work), so I am holding back on the update until I know what’s going on.
Update It occurred to me that it might be useful to document how I changed the region code - install regionset and run it. It will show you your current region code (0xFF for me, ie region 0) and how many changes you have left, then ask if you want to change it.
Second update Lenovo actually withdrew the BIOS update, so clearly something was wrong with it. This page lists the models for which they have pushed out a fixed version. The X300 is currently still listed as “Coming Soon” :(
Third update Lenovo published a new BIOS (1.04a), which I installed and it worked fine and seems to have reduced power usage for me (although not for some others), but that update has now been pulled too and the above page is back to “Coming Soon”. Seriously Lenovo, sort it out.
Posted in Techie | 1 Comment »
April 8th, 2008 cmsj
You have new hardware (most likely server).
You pop in a debian/ubuntu installer CD, tell it what kind of keyboard you have and expect it to scan the CDROM for packages, but….uh-oh, it can’t find the CD!
What do you do?! Well, realistically there’s not a lot you can do to make it work, but you can do a lot to help get it fixed.
You need to pull off /var/log/syslog, the output of lspci, lspci -v and lspci -vvnn.
You may very well find yourself having a problem with that though, because you’re still pretty early in a typical linux boot process, so you probably don’t have any disks mounted and you may find yourself missing any modules to make that happen.
You should have usb-storage.ko though. That and isofs.ko.
Can you see where this is going? :)
find the .udeb’s on your install CD with a working computer, ar -x the core fs modules one and pull out ext3 (and jbd and mbcache), or vfat and its dependencies. put them in a directory, then do mkisofs -o /dev/usbstick1 /path/to/modules.
You now have a partition on your USB stick that is an ISO9660 filesystem (ie a CD). Obviously make sure you don’t do this on a USB stick you care about the contents of.
Chuck the USB stick into the broken server, modprobe usb-storage, mount the newly appeared partition and copy the modules over to the right place in /lib/modules/. Unmount the USB stick, modprobe the drivers and now you can put in an ext3/vfat formatted USB stick and you have somewhere to write the debugging information to!
Easy! :) Now file a bug with the debugging information you collected.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Ubuntu | No Comments »
March 17th, 2008 cmsj
The Thinkpad X300 is a pretty tasty beast. Much nicer screen than the X40, and the SSD is a huge win for lots of IO workloads.
I’ve still got a fair few Linux support oddities to work through, but thus far people are being very helpful.
When the support is there, this will be a laptop to be highly recommended.
Posted in FOSS, Techie | No Comments »
February 27th, 2008 cmsj
luisbg has a blog posting of the very interesting looking flickbook, specifically a video which shows Terminator being used to launch the demo.
Woo!
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | No Comments »
February 20th, 2008 cmsj
0.8 had a few annoying little bugs we decided to squash quickly, so without further ado, 0.8.1 is now out and on the homepage.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | 2 Comments »
February 15th, 2008 cmsj
This is a bugfix and feature and infrastructure release.
It should be a lot better than 0.7 in less focussed ways - e.g. icons, menu integration, better gconf support.
As usual hit up the Terminator home page for more.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | 4 Comments »
February 12th, 2008 cmsj
Terminator will soon appear in GNOME’s Preferred Applications preferences if you have it installed and as such I figure we need to support -x in the same way gnome-terminal does.
What that basically means is that *anything* which occurs after -x on the command line is the command to execute and its arguments, so:
terminator -x screen -U
should cause terminator to execute screen -U. By default, most options parsers will see this as the -U being passed to terminator and screen being the argument to -x.
After looking around the docs and asking on #python, optparse seemed to be a better option than getopts, so I switched it over and implemented a callback to extend the default argument processing for -x. It wasn’t quite working, so after another quick foray into #python I ended up reading this page which provided everything I needed. More than I needed, in fact, since their while loop has conditionals which affect whether or not the next arguments are added. I just want to gobble them all up and stop them from being parsed :)
Posted in FOSS, Techie | No Comments »
