Linux – Page 2 – Kasperian Moving Parts

KDE 4.2 (trunk) Now Rocking On My Thinkpad T61!!!

Friday October 3, 2008

My work laptop and main computing device is a Thinkpad T61 with an nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1) card. It’s been a frustrating last year in trying to run a KDE4 desktop as my main work and development environment because of the problems with the proprietary nVidia drivers that show up in KDE4. However, this little post is definitely more of a Huzzah!!! than a disgruntled grousing session. Lord knows we’ve had plenty of those. =:) Thanks to the folks at nVidia who are diligently working on improving the problems in their drivers!! Anyway, I’ve followed everything I could find on Lemma’s techbase pages and in the nVidia forums, but nothing has worked. Until now! I’m running the Read more…

Desktop, KDE, Linux

Multi-Monitor Setup On A Single Physical Head (Now Better!)

That’s a big title, eh? I blogged previously about setting up a multi-head X environment for development and testing, even though I’m working on a laptop with only one card. My previous attempt used Xdmx and multiple Xephyr displays, and there were some problems with it. Thankfully, Lubos commented about his nifty little fakexinerama library that achieves the same result only MUCH easier (easierly?) and without any of the problems that I’d seen using Xdmx/Xephyr(1..n). Here, then, is a description of what I’ve done and the results…. This is a screenshot from within the Xephyr session, showing the 1600×1200 Xephyr display. The cool thing is that using ksnapshot from within the Xephyr session will actually capture the entire display, not Read more…

Desktop, Linux

A Poor Man’s Multi-Monitor Setup On A Single Physical Head

Thursday September 25, 2008

Finally!! I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this for a while now. Namely, I need to be able to test multiple display stuff out in Linux and being that I use my laptop pretty much exclusively for development, and I don’t have mulitple physical monitors handy at home (and certainly not whilst travelling), I’ve been thus far unable to test anything multi-head-ish. But, thanks to Xdmx and Xephyr, this is now possible. Xephyr :3.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 600×400 & Xephyr :4.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 600×400 & Xdmx :5 -display localhost:3 -display localhost:4 +xinerama export DISPLAY=:5 openbox& xterm& So, the first 2 lines start up X-within-X displays on localhost:3 and localhost:4. The third line starts up Read more…

Linux

Modeline Generation and Xinerama Info

Tuesday September 16, 2008

So, I’m trying to think positively about the 3-hour battle I just had with X. I learned 2 new things today, which I didn’t really want to learn but yay nonetheless. First, Xinerama. I’m going to be doing multiple monitor stuff for work, which should be really interesting if I can keep my self-imposed stress level down. I have never had more than a single monitor to use on any given desktop or laptop until I started working at VMware, and as such I am currently less than clueful with how all of this stuff works in X. (As an aside, if anyone can refer me to some really good documentation or multi-head/multi-screen/multi-monitor/multi-display Linux/X resources, I’d greatly appreciate it!) So Read more…

Linux, Open Source

OpenSUSE 10.3 > Kubuntu Hardy -> Fedora 9 -> Mandriva 2008.1 -> OpenSUSE 11

Monday September 15, 2008

I got bored with my Ubuntu Hardy install last week and decided to have a look at what some of the other guys are up to these days. Mind you, there wasn’t anything horribly wrong with my Ubuntu host. I still ♥ apt; IMHO, there’s still nothing faster (although the new package management in OpenSUSE 11 comes darned close!). But anyway, it was an interesting trek across the newest distros and while I was looking to end up with something other than SUSE (again, nothing wrong with it at all–I just like change), I am totally impressed with OpenSUSE 11 and am going to feel satisfied sticking with it for a decently long while, knowing that I’ve shopped around as Read more…

Linux

Zypper versus Smart

Wednesday February 13, 2008

sudo zypper update: 2 Problems:Problem: No valid solution found with just resolvables of best architecture.Problem: Cannot install java-1_5_0-sun-plugin, because it is conflicting with java-1_6_0-sun-plugin Problem: No valid solution found with just resolvables of best architecture. With this run only resolvables with the best architecture have been regarded.Regarding all possible resolvables takes time, but can come to a valid result. Solution 1: Make a solver run with ALL possibilities. Regarding all resolvables with a compatible architecture.number, (r)etry or (c)ancel> 1Applying solution 1 Problem: Cannot install java-1_5_0-sun-plugin, because it is conflicting with java-1_6_0-sun-plugin A conflict over java-1.5.0-plugin == 1.5.0_update14 (java-1.5.0-plugin) requires the removal of java-1_5_0-sun-plugin-1.5.0_update14-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] which is scheduled for installation=== java-1_5_0-sun-plugin-1.5.0_update14-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] === java-1_5_0-sun-plugin-1.5.0_update14-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] is needed by atom:java-1_5_0-sun-plugin-1.5.0_update14-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] (java-1_5_0-sun-plugin >= 1.5.0_update14-0.1) findutils-4.2.31-24.i586 is Read more…

Linux

Mencoder, DVD Rip, Volume Increase, Your PSP, and You!

Monday December 10, 2007

Holy crap. The time between iterations of testing video encoding is prohibitive to quick progress as well as a (several) good night’s sleep. After much pain and gnashing of teeth, I present you with the result of the last 3 hours of my life. time nice mencoder dvd://1 -sws 9 \ -aid 128 -af volume=15:0 \ -vf pullup,softskip,dsize=480:272,scale=0:0,harddup,unsharp=l3x3:0.7 \ -ofps 24000/1001 \ -oac faac -faacopts br=128:mpeg=4:object=2:raw -channels 2 -srate 48000 \ -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=500:global_header:partitions=all:trellis=1:level_idc=30 \ -of lavf -lavfopts format=psp -info name=”Tomb Raider” -o “$HOME/Movies/TombRaider.mp4” Sincere thanks to forgeflow’s answer to this ubuntu forum post and to his excellent videogeek site. Other observations: There is far more complexity to audio/video encoding than I’d ever want to understand fully. Anyone who Read more…

Linux

Embedded Album Covers, Your PSP, Amarok, and You

Sunday December 9, 2007

So… first off, I Googled for Amarok, hoping to find some new sweet pixels and instead I find this. Um… so not the Amarok that I know and love. Anyway, a couple of years ago, I won a PSP from the LinuxWorld convention. Being that I’m a geek, it was love at first boot jingle. Being that I am married, have 3 kids, work full-time++, and try to hack every once in a while, the brave little PSP spent a lot of alone time. Oh sure, I own several PSP games (go SOCOM2!!), but that’s about it. Until now. Since I’m lucky enough to be able to work from home for a bit, I’m not driving back and forth to Read more…

Linux

Truecrypt versus LUKS Speed Test

Friday October 26, 2007

I did a small performance test yesterday and was very surprised by the results. I wanted to see which encrypted filesystem was faster betweeen Truecrypt and LUKS. I created 2 20-gig files, one with Truecrypt and the other with LUKS encryption. Then I mounted the encrypted files and copied a 180 meg file 10 times, synced, and then reported the time taken. Here’s the results: Truecrypt test: time (for f in $(seq 1 10); do; cp bigfile truecrypt-mnt/bigfile-$f; done;) 0.22s user 26.30s system 15% cpu 2:47.06 total LUKS test: time (for f in $(seq 1 10); do; cp bigfile luks-mnt/bigfile-$f; done;) 0.20s user 8.40s system 15% cpu 55.169 total Wow. Now, granted, this is a simple enough test, but does Read more…

KPilot, Life in General, Linux

Thinkpad T61 and a Blond ‘fro

Thursday October 25, 2007

Technology had several glorious victories at my desk today. First, I was fortunate enough to get a very nice dual-head GeForce Nvidia card installed on my 4-way AMD 64-bit cpu server at work. It goes very nicely with the two beautiful 1600×1280 monitors that are now hooked up via twinview. This is by far the coolest working environment I’ve ever had (okay, ever seen). Secondly, I got my new work laptop today, and it is hella sweet. It’s a Thinkpad T61, and I think I’m in love. About my only complaint is that the thing must weigh 50 pounds, but what can you expect with these specs, I guess. Sweet, sweet, sweet laptop. Oh, also, it’s by far the smoothest Read more…