I put two Seagate 750GB ST3750330AS SATA drives in it in a RAID 1 configuration. He recommended the drives and a D-Link DGS-2205 Gigabit switch. Like I said, he does the necessary research. So far, I’m mostly loving it all. You should be able to get the NAS for a little under $200, the drives for about $120 each, and the switch for around $30. Having a GB switch is nice, since it greatly speeds up file copies, assuming your computers have Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

In addition to acting like a file server on my home network, the D-Link NAS has an iTunes server, USB print server, FTP server and a few other goodies running on its Linux operating system. Even better, since it’s running Linux, the community was able to build add-on utilities.

Though the rating on Amazon is only 3.5 stars, this is one of those times you have to read the reviews. A lot of the negative comments refer to issues that have been fixed in newer firmware versions. Though, I have to admit that the user and group permissions design is mediocre and the administration UI for permissions even worse.

There is an especially annoying permission issue if you are using Windows. When you connect to the NAS, you can’t edit the username in the login dialog. So, you have to create a user with the same name on the NAS. This is especially bad if you have multiple Windows boxes on which you use different usernames. At least, this is what happened on my neighbor’s Windows boxes. When I connected to a file share on the NAS from my Fedora Linux desktop, I could change the username. Same for my Macbook Pro.

One of the biggest negatives for me is that the iTunes server won’t serve up Ogg Vorbis encoded music files, and I’ve encoded most of my collection that way. Grrr. I’ll have to look at other community built software for streaming audio or hack the GPL’d source from D-Link, since the iTunes server is also GPL’d. It’s based on mt-daapd by Ron Pedde. I’m kind of puzzled, since the ogg.c file in the src I downloaded makes it look like it should work. It’s successor, Firefly, definitely supports transcoding ogg files.

Setting up the Windows XP VM using KVM and a management tool called virt-manager was amazingly easy. I also benefited from a KVM and Fedora 7 tutorial at Phoronix, which is also home to great info for Linux users like me who have laptops with ATI video cards, but it would have been easy enough to figure out just by running virt-manager.

First, you may need to install a couple of packages:

$ sudo yum -y install kvm qemu virt-manager

If you had to install kvm, you should reboot to load the kvm modules. Once you restart, launch Virtual Machine Manager from the System Tools section of the Applications menu.

One problem I ran into with virt-manager was that it wouldn’t let me browse to the reinstallation CD. I ended up having to copy it to the hard drive into an iso disk image file, but that was easy enough.

$ cat /dev/cdrom > /tmp/winxphome.iso

Also, because the 2004-era Intel CPU in my laptop doesn’t have the Intel VT enhancements that support hardware acceleration of VMs, I had to configure my VM for full virtualization. It’s definitely slower than running native, but it’s still quite usable. I wouldn’t try running Halo in the VM, though.

I was worried when a popup window appeared about thirty minutes into the Windows XP install asking me to insert a CD that contained Service Pack 2. That was baffling, because the XP reinstallation CD claimed to include Service Pack 2. After canceling out of that dialog and stopping and restarting the VM a couple of times, the install continued. After a couple of hours of the installer grinding away with 98% CPU usage, I had a functioning Windows XP VM.

The biggest problem I’ve run into is with the mouse cursor. Frequently, it behaves like it has hit the bottom or the top of the screen, even when it is far from the edge. Perhaps Windows is getting confused about the size of its display window, which appears to be 800×600. The easiest way to work around it is to move the mouse all the way to the edge of the window in the opposite direction. This seems to temporarily help Windows calibrate the screen size. I ran into a similar problem years ago with VMWare, but was able to get past it by installing VMWare Tools. I’m not sure/doubtful there is an equivalent for KVM for Windows guest operating systems.

I haven’t set up a new Windows install for a couple of years, so I forgot how painfully slow it is to install all the anti-virus and anti-malware software, disable the naive user settings that Explorer and other Microsoft apps set up by default, enable the power user settings, and install all the apps and utilities like Firefox that make Windows usable. Setting up a new Linux install is so much easier for me and takes a small fraction of the time. When comparing the time to set up Windows versus Linux (especially for a software developer), you have to keep in mind that Windows comes with only a very basic set of useful tools and applications when compared to a good Linux distribution. The Yum (RedHat/Fedora) and apt (Debian/Ubuntu) packaging tools also make it far easier to install additional applications on a Linux system than on a Windows system. Keeping software up to date on Windows is generally a nightmare compared to Linux.

In this case, the rpm for Fedora Core 6 has a hard coded dependency on Firefox 1.5.0.8. So, the first step was to download the source RPM, patch the spec file, and build a new binary. After downloading and installing the source rpm, edit the file /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/Democracy.spec to change the lines

BuildRequires:  firefox-devel = %{mozversion}
Requires:       firefox = %{mozversion}

to

BuildRequires:  firefox-devel >= %{mozversion}
Requires:       firefox >= %{mozversion}

This is better than just changing the version number from 1.5.0.8 to 1.5.0.10, since you can then reinstall the Democracy Player rpm even if you later update Firefox.

Before going further, you need to install Pyrex and qt-devel. You should be able to use yum to install these from the standard Fedora repositories. If you don’t install qt-devel, you will get the message:

Package qt-mt was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `qt-mt.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'qt-mt', required by 'avahi-qt3', not found

Then, you need to build a binary rpm. The following command should do the trick:

# rpmbuild -bb /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/Democracy.spec

Near the end of the output you should find a line like the following which will tell you where to find your brand spanking new home made binary rpm:

Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/Democracy-0.9.5-1.i386.rpm

Then, install the rpm as usual:

# rpm -Uvh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/Democracy-0.9.5-1.i386.rpm

It’s worth all the effort, though. Democracy Player is an awesome app.

# rpm -e acroread

Fortunately, there are plenty of other options for viewing PDFs with Linux.

The one major exception would be networking. I just installed a 400 GB drive in the desktop, and then decided that I should upgrade to FC5 at the same time. I started to regret that decision when my network connection would stay up for only about a minute after booting. If I disconnected and reconnected the Ethernet cable, it would work again for a minute or so.

Fortunately, my wife and I had dinner tonight with a friend of ours who was in from Sydney for work meetings at Cisco. Knowing that he was far more knowledgeable about networks and Linux than I, I pumped him for info. After I mentioned that the Tulip driver was being used, he suggested that I add that to my search keywords. He also suggested that it sounded like the desktop was having trouble getting an IP address from the DHCP server. He was right on both accounts. Genius!

After a bit of searching, I turned up a series of forum posts that saved the day – this one in particular (Wrong driver loaded for Davicom ethernet card). It turns out that the Tulip driver probably should have never been used with the Davicom ethernet card, though it had worked with older Linux kernels. Apparently a change sometime around the 2.6.15 kernel sealed the incompatibility. You can fix the problem by following the directions in the page linked to above to force the kernel to use the dmfe driver instead of the tulip driver.

Unfortunately, until the problem is fixed upstream in the kernel, you have to reapply these changes every time you upgrade to a new kernel.

I was surprised how difficult it was to setup CVS. I think I’m already beginning to learn why people dislike CVS so much. With this rite of passage complete, next up on my source code control system investigation is Subversion with Subclipse.

Just over a year ago, I got my Sony Clie to sync to Evolution on Red Hat 9. Though I had already purchased the Treo by then, I didn’t try to sync it until tonight. It turns out the Lazy Web works both ways. Someone posted a comment to my post about my Clie asking me for advice on syncing a Treo 600 to Evolution. That comment caused me to stop being so lazy and to see if I could get it to work. Happily, it works and it was easy to set up. Well, assuming that you consider creating files as symbolic links as the root user as easy. The real easy part was that someone else had already provided all the instructions.

The first stop on my path to Treo syncing enlightenment was at Carsten Clasohm’s blog. Then, it was on to the awesome FedoraNews website for the gnome-pilot tutorial and its simple step-by-step instructions. Be sure to change the type from serial to USB and feel free to change the speed to 115200. I don’t have the spare time or the interest to confirm whether it really makes it sync faster than at 57600, but at least it doesn’t make it not work. And, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t make it noticeably slower. And, one of my high school teachers once told me that anytime you can set the speed to 115200, you should.

I can now confirm that syncing a Treo 600 with Evolution 2.0.2 (using gnome-pilot) on Fedora Core 3 with kernel 2.6.10-1.741 works. I even did it twice to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. I synced my address book, To Do list, and calendar.

So, if you happen to be interested in the technical viability of any of the other items on my ToDo list, please ask away.

Dvd::rip is a front end to a big pile of libraries that do the good deeds. One of the key libraries is transcode, but there’s a lot of other great software underneath the covers that a lot of talented open source developers have contributed to the cause. While dvd::rip presents enough options to make your head spin, you can back up one of your DVDs to a pretty good quality AVI or MPG file with just a couple of mouse clicks. Okay, maybe ten or twenty clicks, but I’m going to tell you which ones.

If you prefer to install from rpms, the rpm you want for dvd:rip is perl-Video-DVDRip. I installed perl-Video-DVDRip-0.50.18-0.lvn.2.2 on my FC 2 system and it works just fine. I tried to use a newer version 0.52.2, but ran into a problem with a dependency I couldn’t resolve.

Fortunately, I quickly found on the web a well-written, albeit somewhat outdated, tutorial for using dvd:rip and transcode written by Moritz Bunkus. This tutorial provided a lot of background info that helped me to quickly understand why the various options had the effects that they did.

I ended up going with XviD4 compression to an AVI file. Depending on the complexity of the video and quality of the audio, I chose targeted sizes of anywhere from 700 MB to 1.4 GB. I may try compressing some other files with an MPEG 2 codec. I also used a “smart deinterlacing” filter. That cut the encoding speed in half, but it seemed to significantly improve the quality of the final video.

Here’s the speed path through dvd::rip for a basic ripping and encoding with no subtitles:

1. Create a new project and give it a clear name
2. Move to the RIP Title tab and click Read DVD table of contents
3. Select the largest entry (other entries are individual scenes, previews, trailers, interviews, etc.) and click RIP selected title(s)/chapters(s)
4. Make prank phone calls for 45 minutes
5. When ripping is finished, move to the Clip & Zoom tab. Yes, it’s normal for the images to be upside down and backwards.
6. Unless the third image is cropped poorly, leave this tab as is. The default preset will have converted a normal 720×480 DVD video to 640 x 336
7. Skip to the transcode tab
8. Change video codec to xvid (xvid setting currently defaults to XviD4) and make sure 2-pass encoding is selected (slow, but worth it)
9. Change deinterlace mode to smart deinterlacing
10. Determine the final size and quality in one of the following ways:
• If you want to copy the video to a CD, set Target Media to the number of CDs you want to use. Look at your CD-R blanks to determine how much each can hold.
• Specify an exact Target Size. If you are encoding only a part of the video, check the Use Range box. I often do this when testing different algorithms on small bits of the video.
• Enter an exact bitrate. Click manual to overide the bitrate generated by the previous two options.
11. In the Target Track section, click MP3 and change the sample rate to 192 kbps. Change quality to 2.
12. Click Transcode. If you had chosen to multiple Target Media (i.e., multiple CDs), click Transcode & Split.
13. Go to sleep. Actually, this step took about 4 hours on average on my machine

Obviously, there are a lot of other options, but the above steps are a pretty good compromise for video quality, audio quality, file size, and encoding time. You might want to try out other deinterlacing options (choose none if you’re sure you don’t need it) or antialiasing options if there are a lot of sharp, high contrast transitions in the video. If you want to keep the Dolby digital and surround sound and are willing to use more space for audio, stick with AC3 over MP3.

If you want to do a quick test encoding, set the range to a few hundred or so frames somwhere in the movie where something interesting is happening. You will have to disable Use PSU core. Click the Yes radio button next to Preview window. Click Transcode. You will send a window pop up and the encoded video will start to play as it is encoded. Depending on the options you chose, the video could be close to real time. If you want to hear the audio too, click View AVI after the range of frames you specified have been encoded.

If you want to backup your newly encoded video to a CD, move on to the Burn tab. You can use a lot of other tools to accomplish this, but dvd::rip makes it pretty convenient.

I think I started backing up my DVDs not a moment too soon. The first one I backed up had a weird glitch 2/3 of the way through. The problem seemed to be in the vob files on the DVD, since it reappeared no matter how I tried to encode the video. The glitch is just barely apparent when playing the DVD with a regular DVD player. I ended up having to split the encoded video into two files. The next two DVDs I tried were fine.

The first thing to try is running glxgears from a shell prompt. Every five seconds it will print out the number of frames per second that are being drawn to the screen. Press the Escape key when you’ve seen enough.

$ glxgears
9751 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1950.200 FPS
10738 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2147.600 FPS
10744 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2148.800 FPS
10740 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2148.000 FPS

I get about 2,000 frames per second on a 1.8 GHz P4 with an NVIDIA GeForce Ti200 video card. If you get a number in the hundreds, then you’re probably just using the generic frame buffer video driver. Forget about doing anything that requires 3D graphics until you install the proper driver.

The easiest way I have found to install the driver is to use the one on NVIDIA’s website. Select the appropriate items (for me, this was Graphics Driver -> GeForce and TNT2 -> Linux IA32), and then click Go! Download the driver file (it ends in .run).

Before going any further, make sure you have downloaded the source code for the kernel you are running. FC2 will do this by default, but FC3 doesn’t. You can use the command uname -r from a shell prompt to find out what kernel version you are running.

One catch about installing the driver is that you can’t be running the X Window system during the install. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to edit /etc/inittab so that X is not automatically started. If anything goes wrong during the install, it’s easier to fix the problem if X isn’t trying to automatically start. In the inittab file, change the line that looks like:

id:5:initdefault:

to

id:3:initdefault:

Then reboot. When you get to a command line login prompt, login as a regular user. Then su to root and cd to the location of the .run file that you downloaded and run it. Assuming you saved the file to a downloads directory in your home directory, this would look something like:

$ su
Password:
# cd downloads
# sh  NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6629-pkg1.run

Go through the install and answer yes when asked if the installer should build a new kernel module. If you haven’t already installed the source RPM for your kernel, this will not succeed.

After the install completes, you need to edit some X11 config files. If you are running FC2 successfully, you have presumably switched over to using xorg instead of xfree86. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to comment out the line that says dri in the “Module” section. Also, in the “Device” section”, change the driver from “nv” to “nvidia”.

After saving your changes to xorg.conf, press ctrl+d to logout as root and return to the session as a regular user. Start X by typing startx at a shell prompt. As X is loading, you should very briefly see an NVIDIA logo on a white background.

After rebooting a couple times and convincing yourself that all is well in video driver land, you might want to change /etc/inittab back to always starting X. But, then again, maybe not. Whenever you start using a new kernel, you will have to update the NVIDIA driver. The good news is that you don’t have to download a new file from the NVIDIA website. Instead, you just need to drop out of X, uninstall the driver, and then reinstall it. When you go through this process, it will trigger the building of an interface for the new kernel.

# nvidia-installer --unistall
# nvidia-installer --update --accept-license

Once you get the driver installed, run glxgears again to make sure it really is working. Then, play Onslaught in UT 2004. Repeatedly.

Anyway, here’s a quick run down of the problems I ran into with FC 2, and how I fixed them.

Error activating XKB configuration

This was a well documented issue that came up because of the switch from xfree86 to xorg for the X11 implementation. The fix is to edit the /etc/X11/Xf86Config file. Change the line :

Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"

to

Option "XkbRules" "xorg"

Yum Failed Due to Wrong Repositories

Some of the URLs in my yum.conf file were hard-code for FC1. During the upgrade, the file /etc/yum.rpmnew was created. After backing up my FC1 yum.conf and renaming yum.rpmnew to yum.conf, I was back in business.

Failed NVIDIA Dependencies

I was using the NVIDIA loadable kernel modules from Livna.org with FC1. I couldn’t get that trick to work with FC2. It turns out that the kernel provided with FC2 uses 4k stacks instead of 8k stacks. The NVIDIA drivers needed 8k stacks. Rather than recompile the kernel with 8k stacks or use one someone else compiled, I waited around long enough for NVIDIA to fix it. Version 6111 of the NVIDIA drivers worked for me. After downloading the installer from the NVIDIA website, I did the following as root.

# sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6111-pkg1.run

Then I made the following change in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Changed Driver "nv" to Driver "nvidia"

Then, I confirmed that Load “glx” was in the Module section and that Load “dri” and Load “GLcore” were not present. I saw a message “Could not find kernel module interface’ and then a warning about “rivafb” kernel module. The install finished, I rebooted, and I had my fast NVIDIA drivers back again. Unreal Tournament 2004 worked great.

Rhythmbox Problems

# yum install gstreamer-plugins-mp3
# yum install libmad
# yum install libid3tag

XMMS Problems

# yum install xmms-mp3

I also needed to use OSS instead of ALSA. I used Options->Preferences->Audio I/O Plugins to change the Output Plugin to OSS Driver 1.2.1.0.

Evolution Error – Cannot Activate Component OAFIID

The full error message was something like:

Cannot activate component OAFIID
GNOME_Evolution_Mail_ShellComponent
The error from the activation system is
Unknown CORBA exception id: 'IDL:omg.org/CORBA/INV_OBJRE:1.0'

The fix was to delete /tmp/orbit-username (replacing username with my login name) and then reboot.

Make Firefox default browser

Used gconf-editor – desktop->gnome->applications->browser and changed exec from “mozilla” to a symbolic link to the install of Firefox that I installed from a tarball. Since FC3 comes with Firefox, this should be an issue going forward.