Chris’ Blog

When you hard reset a Pocket PC device it runs a Welcome one time tutorial programme, this can be skipped, by hooking it up to a computer and deleting the Welcome shortcut inside \Windows\Startup. Took me a while to find this one out so I thought I would document and share.

In side news Microsoft’s value has plummeted, and is for sale at PCWorld: El. Reg

You can tell Linux to respond to broadcast pings by running this snippet from the console.

$ echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf to set the option permanently.

Turns out I had a computer on for even longer which I had forgotten about! benjamin, one of my Linksys WRT54-g’s. He doesn’t really do much apart from provide WiFi access for my PDA and networking for my room (two 100Mbps feeds are not enough). He will be moving back to Exeter with me later today, so beast will overtake him in terms of my record recorded uptime.

root@benjamin:~# uptime
 00:43:01 up 102 days, 43 min, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Yesterday beast my NSLU2 passed 100 days of uptime a personal record for any of my machines, somewhat geeky

chris@beast:~$ uptime
 20:47:30 up 101 days,  3:00,  1 user,  load average: 0.08, 0.16, 0.11

I find a firewall on my windows installation personally a waste of resources, so I have it removed in my nLite customised installation media. Well I had problems installing the Company of Heros: Opposing Fronts Beta, it kept trying to adjust Windows Firewall and of course failing. So I had to reinstall it, found out how to here.

I have been playing with packaging for Ubuntu and Debian for a while now and I have one fairly useful package called rsnapshot-scripts which contains a bunch of scripts for use with rsnapshot. It allows you to backup other data sources like MySQL, DPKG and Subversion.

This is a really ugly sed one liner that configures grub how I like it.

$ sudo sed --in-place 's/#\(hiddenmenu\)/\1/;s/^\(timeout[ \t]*\)[0-9]*/\12/;s/^\(# lock.*=\)false$/\1true/' /boot/grub/menu.lst
$ _GPASSWD=$(read -s -p "Enter Grub Password (note type carefully): " _GPASSWD; echo $_GPASSWD | mkpasswd --hash=md5 --stdin); echo; sudo sed --in-place "s/# password topsecret/password --md5 $_GPASSWD/" /boot/grub/menu.lst; unset _GPASSWD
$ sudo update-grub

I am beginning to understand the power of gstreamer, the following snippet converts FLAC files to MP3 with a 192 kbps bitrate.

gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="$FILE.flac" ! decodebin ! lame bitrate=192 ! filesink location="$FILE.mp3"

I keep meaning to document this, the installation procedure for my MCEUSB2 remote control with lirc under Ubuntu, so here we go.

1. $ sudo aptitude install lirc lirc-modules-source module-assistant debconf-utils

2. $ wget http://static.cs278.org/conf/debconf/ubuntu-704_lirc-modules-source -O- | sudo debconf-set-selections
   $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc-modules-source

   This was needed before but is now automated:
   Select mceusb2 and then No, and chooseInstall the package maintainer’s version if the option appears.

3. $ sudo sed 's/MODULES=""/MODULES="lirc_mceusb2"/' /etc/lirc/hardware.conf --in-place

4. $ sudo m-a update,prepare
   $ sudo rm /usr/src/lirc*deb
   $ sudo m-a clean lirc
   $ sudo m-a a-i lirc
   $ sudo depmod -a

5. $ wget "https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Install_Lirc_Feisty?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=lircd.conf.mceusb" -O- | sudo tee /etc/lirc/lircd.conf

6. $ sudo modprobe lirc_mceusb2
   $ sudo /etc/init.d/lirc start

Sources:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Install_Lirc_Feisty
• http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_LIRC
• http://wiki.videolan.org/How_to_Use_Lirc

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel/applets/clock_screen0/prefs/format "12-hour"
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/panel/applets/clock_screen0/prefs/show_date true
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/panel/applets/clock_screen0/prefs/show_seconds true