Linux

Bizarre Tecra M7 Sound anomaly

H. Steele Price, IV — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:58:00 GMT

When I upgraded to Vista, I had inadvertently left my audio muted.

This has been a known problem posted elsewhere the weird thing is…

Nothing was working to correct it; no Linux systems would produce sound either.

I am fairly convinced that there is something in the way the BIOS handles sound or the way the XP driver shuts off the hardware amp that is required to fix this.

The final solution was more complex than I have seen posted elsewhere so to help other frustrated M7 owners caught in this dilemma here is how I fixed it.

First the ONLY way that worked was to reinstall XP L, this was not so bad, a fresh XP Install, then add the required Toshiba Drivers: Sound, Modem (this works on the same bus.), Common Modules and BIOS Driver. Fortunately I have an extra Hard Drive or this would have been horrid.

You can now try to get sound, but I was unable to with the 3.1 BIOS.

First I had to downgrade the BIOS (which required using the CD method) and reboot.

Still, no sound, muting and unmuting have no effect.

Next I went into the Sound Control Panel and went to the Speech Tab, there is a "Test Hardware" button on that tab that will run the sound card through its paces and when it got to the Playback device, the sound magically came back on (feeding back like crazy due to mic boost, but definitely outputting sound).

Next I upgraded the BIOS back to 3.1 so suspend works in Vista and rebooted XP. I verified that sound still worked and shut down.

Next I popped in a Kubuntu Live CD and verified that sound worked there.

Finally, I replaced my Vista Hard Drive and when I booted, Sound worked, Finally…

There should be some utility somewhere that will exercise (turning on and off…) the sound card and the hardware amps, but I sure couldn't find it.

Bottom line, if you are moving from XP to Vista or Linux, make sure your sound is working (and turned ON) there first.

Keyword to help people looking for an answer…
Kubuntu, Intel High Definition Audio, snd-hda-intel, ALC262

WinFS is starting to sound like the Red Headed Stepchild of Microsoft

H. Steele Price, IV — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:36:00 GMT

“Although Microsoft hopes to ship a test version of WinFS in late 2006, it could be several more years before the revamped storage mechanism finds its way into Windows Server.

'WinFS in not in the Longhorn client,' he said in an interview. 'It is also not in Longhorn Server.'

It is not even clear if Microsoft will include it with the Longhorn update that is scheduled to follow a couple of years later.”

from and article on C|Net's News.Com

It's really most unfortunate that we won't be getting a new Windows file system anytime soon, but there are a few alternatives worth looking into.

As sizes of modest fileservers gets larger and larger, what can we turn to when NTFS is completely unacceptable in performance and capability. One of them is to use embedded Linux, iSCSI and one of the excellent journalling filesystems that art in the GPL like AFS, XFS, ZFS or Reiser.

If you don't know already:

“Architecturally, the iSCSI driver combines with the client TCP/IP stack, network drivers, and NICs to provide the same functions as a SCSI adapter driver with an HBA.

“The daemon and the kernel driver are available under the terms of the GNU General Public License.”

Why am I even talking about this stuff?

I have a passion for creating personal library systems and that means I need a cheap yet easy to use way to access really large storage. This storage needs to conform to interop standards so I can access it from any OS and not have a huge hassle with security logins, but not just allow anyone with access to the box to get in.

iSCSI is just one way of doing this, Its really amazing that the Linux community is pulling WAYahead in this area. I can make a 4 Drive, 1 Terrabyte fileserver (750mb Raid 5 useable) for under $1000. You can't buy 4 - 250G scsi drives for that right now. For that matter, you can't buy Windows Server 2003 for that with a driveless box to run it either.

I am not sure what to do about this little system publicly but I have some ideas on how to at least help people create some plug and play mass storage for all that stuff we are collecting at home now.

What iSCSI can do that plain old NAS and SAN (without iSCSI) cannot is that it lets you just plug in a storage box to the network and treat it like a local device, I mean Windows can see it as a local drive D: but the performance and reliability is off the charts compared to plugging in a big USB drive. If you want to store all you home movies, digital pictures, etc. in a single safe place that is possible with this scenario. Need more capacity? Just plug in another box.

The main advantage over NAS and SAN is that it can be brought into the local system and not make you go through the hassles of setting up security with Samba for use in Windows.

If using Linux scares you because of the rediculous threats from SCO, then you can do the same thing with NetBSD and it's not contested in any way.

Wasabi Systems is one company providing a way to do exactly what I am talking about here, their hardware is a little restrictive, and so is their policy for becoming an OEM, but it at least a start into the arena. Hopefully there will be some Open Source projects into this area that make sense of reliable storage for everyone to use, not just the geek elite or people who can pay $10K for a file server.

The Amazing Linksys WRT54G

H. Steele Price, IV — Mon, 16 Aug 2004 10:47:00 GMT

News of this is a bit late, but I have looked for something like this for years.

After many struggles getting my main firewall box to cooperate with Vonage, I fanally resorted to getting one of these little jewels from Linksys. OK, I have further alterior motives behind it...

I want to cut the cord with Qwest for good, that includes my T1. I live in an area where there is no decent broadband and have to resort to my own T1. Slightly expensive, but the worst part is the local loop charges that I am being raped with by Qwest. If not for the loop charges it would essentially be the same fees that I was paying for business cable.

I have wanted to set up a point to point wireless with my ISP for a while and have discussed many alternatives, though nothing came close to the cost of this thing. I have looked at similarly capable systems all over $1000. The advent of these Linksys boxes at $70 with the new firmware from Sveasoft makes this a no brainer. Why spend a thousand dollars and huge amounts of time trying to roll your own when it can be had for under $99. This is a truly disruptive technology that will in fact change the landscape of the internet by opening mesh networks all over the country. It is not hard to modify any of the software Sveasoft as it's all Open Source. 99.9% of the people using this stuff won't need to modify it anyway, the setup is simple.

I would surely hate to be a landline telephone company this decade, if they don't adapt to new technologies and get their prices in order, they are history. There is no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't be able to get Cable or DSL from a major provider living just 10 miles outside of the 6th largest city in the country. Its inexcusable for them to be that pathetic in their service offerings. I look forward to getting this connection all worked out and maybe provde WISP services to the local area. It's an idea I have been banging around for years, but there was no clear answer to the consumer premise equipment. Everything so far had been $500 and up for CPE, death to a WISP's ROI. That has finally ALL changed and it is quite reasonable to add an antenna that provides never before seen speeds on local wireless broadband to just about any sub rural area.

Mono Goes Final on v1.0

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 13:33:00 GMT

Project Mono today officially released Version 1.0 final.

Congrats to Miguel and company for a remarkable achievement. I for one will be using Mono in at least one project in the near future. I will be amazed if they can keep up with the releases of VS.NET.

discovered on Scott Cadillac's Blog

OS Bloat

H. Steele Price, IV — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 11:35:00 GMT

As Longhorn approaches, consider this article detailing the new requirements for Fedora Core 2

All OSes are completely bloated. I find the single largest barrier to speed is that people try to make a single machine do WAY too much. Sure it's convenient to have 1000 apps all running off your shiny new 3GHz box but is it really what you want to do?

When I talk to some people and tell them I have 9 PCs at HOME, they think I am running some massive super-computer for unknown reasons... (In fact I have done it just for fun, but not regularly)

Actually I just delineate a very clear separation in what each machine does and isolate a lot of the processing to similar tasks. I have accumulated a lot of hardware over the years and try to stretch the useful life as long as possible. One really easy way to do this is to cut down on the number of tasks each machine performs, XP is perfectly capable of running very fast on a P3-600 with 256M Ram (double the recommended minimum requirements) if you strip out all the extraneous BS that is typically run in the background. With Remote Desktop and GB Ethernet, you can partition your home network to more isolated tasks with dedicated hardware for a lot less than buying the newest hotrod.

I typically have one overloaded machine in the mix, but at the same time I have started to move toward a more utilitarian approach to my home network. I have moved toward machine isolation to tasks, not to users since I am pretty much the only heavy user. This really isn't as hard as it sounds and you can run a pretty effective mail server on a P2-400. My Firewall is a P2-400 that loads everything from CD into ram, it doesn't even have a hard drive, it's completely secure and much more capable than the router/firewalls from the likes of Linksys.

I squeeze out a lot more speed for certain tasks this way than trying to use one or 2 machines to handle everything. Do you ever upgrade your machines? Sure you do, don't throw that old hardware out or sell it for next to nothing, put it to good use as an isolated system to run one of the more frequent tasks that you use all the time. Free up your main machine for more mission critical tasks and leave your email (or image editing, etc.) on a separate machine that you can switch over to in a flash with Remote Desktop. I think you will find that your combined speed is far superior to running on a single machine and a whole lot cheaper than keeping up with the fastest processor on the planet at its premium price tag.

If you are still running a 100mbps network, its time to rethink that approach, the 1GHz cards and switches are now in the home network pricing range and you will see an incredible boost in linked speed when moving files around.

One other advantage to using this approach is that you can access a task based machine from any workstation, I can get to the exact same box running my base app from any machine on the network (and with a single License btw...), I can see it on my TV or I can browse it on the porch via WiFi on my TabletPC. This solution is not yet perfect, but its getting better all the time. I also have far fewer problems from conflicting applications clobbering each other.

Will Gnome ever get their act together?

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 12 May 2004 11:16:00 GMT

Nicholas Petreley writes about Gnome 2.6:

“Of all the criticisms one might lodge against GNOME, it's the hypocrisy of its design philosophy that looms largest. GNOME grew out of the desire to free people from Microsoft's ability to dictate what users can or can't do. Yet GNOME is built on the premise that its developers are so much wiser than users when it comes to navigating folders and setting colors that GNOME users shouldn't have a choice in the matter. With an attitude like that, heaven help us if GNOME turns out to be the only defense Linux has on the desktop against a Microsoft hegemony.“

I have avoided Gnome with a passion since I discovered KDE some 3 years ago. Ximian Gnome caused incredible grief to me when I was first trying to learn Linux.

Yes, KDE is slower(not really since 3.1), Yes it's bloated(you can choose not to install everything), but it also is alot more stable IMO than Gnome ever was.

It' not just a windows styling clone, it's not a mac clone (though it can be made to be both), it stands on it's own as a well adjusted piece of GUI technology.

To be honest, I don't really like it either, but I dislike every GUI I've ever used for the same basic reason, they all assume they know what is best for the user to do and lock you into a certain paradigm that is the same thing Xerox came up with 25 years ago.

This comment by icepick reinforces this lunacy in design flawed by fear of competition. To further quote the linked article:

“If we're going to be competitive, we need to follow the
open source defacto standard route, that we're all working
on, rather than being bogged down with the standards process.“

“We need to slow the upgrade to Longhorn, and since that
is relatively costly to businesses, if we can make cross
platform applications work well, there is an opportunity
for Linux migration.”

They see the opportunity, but are completely unable to capitalize on it from lack of vision. I can only hope that somewhere on the way to Longhorn, a truly flexible GUI will emerge with open standards for accessing the GUI, not design standards that restrict the way in which we can present information in innovative and exciting ways. Longhorn and XAML are poised to dominate right and will make every current GUI look like ancient technology. We can only hope this doesn't come at a price of so many restrictions on other levels of Longhorn that it is so unattractive no one will upgrade to it.

It's too bad no one seems to be able to get it together enough to write a bullet-proof GUI that is flexible in design and free from crashing once you depart from the assumed presentation methodology.

If the design widgets were truly object oriented they would be universally replaceable given a set of open standards for hooking into the underlying presentation system, all the current GUIs break miserably when you try to replace elements within them. I'm not talking about skinning. I want to replace objects completely, not just their paint.

When someone comes up with a completely unique, fast, robust, cross-platform presentation system that supports a rich set of open standards they will have no fear from competition, it will be adopted with open arms.

Maybe CodeGen is the answer for this, if we could CodeGen a skeleton in any given language to the underlying presentation engine, then we would have a way to enforce the object's interface in a way that doesn't take forever to write in code.

Here is another possible solution with potential.

XAML, SVG, XUL and UIX

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 05 May 2004 12:55:00 GMT

As CodeGen and Generics become more of a standard way to develop, these terms are going to proliferate into the way we do all our layout work both on the Desktop and on the Web.

XAML is what is coming from Microsoft with Avalon in Longhorn. I hope to learn more about this at TechED.

SVG is probably the most well known W3C Recommendation from Adobe and KDE already had internal hooks to it.

XUL is what Mozilla is proposing as a standard

UIX is Oracle's proposal for Java.

They are all basically a new combination of XML, CSS and DHTML.

DonXML has written SVG2XAML

Why should you learn SVG and not worry too much about XAML yet? For one, you can use SVG now. Secondly you can convert everything you do in SVG to XAML and there is quite a lot of overlap in the two specifications. Thirdly, SVG is cross-platform, XAML is not and probably only will be through Mono. Sure, XAML is a lot more than just a graphics format, but I am talking mainly about the image that lies underneath. I'll be implementing most of my images as SVG for the foreseeable future.

Of course there is always Flash, but a lot of people (myself included) really despise the programming model inside flash.

XUL is interesting but fairly limited because it ignores audio and video as elements. UIX is a pretty narrow specification, but if you use Java and Oracle it may be of some interest.

I have always disliked Raster art and wondered why we haven't jumped to mostly vector art (at least for program design) for a very long time. It just seems silly to implement a bunch of gifs for things like buttons when we can make extremely attractive elements from vector art that appear identical, take far less space and can be manipulated easily in code.

I'm going to use a button as an example here because most people are familiar with it, don't mistake this for a limited use of SVG.

Lets say I want to incorporate a 3 state button on a form that I plan to use in both Web Forms and Windows Forms.

I have to make 3 different gifs/jpgs/pngs to accomplish this feature, if I wanted transparency, I am down to gif or png, if I want real color support I am down to png. So, I decide that PNG is my solution but now to implement this on the web, I need to monkey around with a bunch of workarounds for IE support. OK, This is painful, lets just go back to gifs...

You get the point, raster art is painful no matter how you look at it. If I want to support skins, 3 new images are needed for each skin. Anytime I want to change anything I have to edit 3 unique files and keep them all in sync.

Ever since I heard a session by Kurt Cagle on SVG back in October of 2001 I thought SVG (or something like it) was the future. It's had 3 years to really mature and is quite robust now.

If I choose to use SVG instead, I can make a single file, change the state effects my manipulating a few elements inside the SVG in code with “transform= attribute” and be done, resizable, rich graphics. If I decide to change the interface, most of the time I still don't have to edit the original image because I can manipulate it in code.

I am picking SVG for several reasons, one being there are a bunch of tools (Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, etc.) that will create SVG and then I can just convert those to XAML or whatever the clear leader is later also Ink can easily be saved to SVG.

This way I can completely get away from raster art for all my graphics (except things like pictures) and have a clearly forward thinking cross-platform upgrade path for the future.

Our User Interfaces need a huge makeover. SVG has finally matured to the point we can start using it in production and it gives us a root standard for Windows, Linux and the Web.

Mono is officially a Beta

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 05 May 2004 11:30:00 GMT

Novell has officially released Beta 1 of Project Mono.

The idea is this:

“Allows developers to write rich client, web services and server-side applications and deploy them on Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, Windows NT/XP and various other Unix systems on a variety of architectures. ”

But of course Java already does that... only Java is pretty darn difficult to use, serverely limited by it's sandbox approach and the IDE tools like SunOne Studio and Eclipse are nowhere near the quality, speed and ease of Visual Studio .NET

In fact, Mono has been my sole motivation to move from VB.Net and a primary development language to C#, it's not a requirement as they will have a VB compiler, but most people are going to be more comfortable looking at C# code on Linux than VB.Net

I look forward to testing out this beta with some of my ASP.NET apps to see how the compatibility has risen and the speed improves. Hosting a site with Apache, Mono and MySQL (basically free) is a really powerful combination for small companies that can't afford Microsoft's Back Office (approx $3000).

Pundits will say that the TCO of MS Back Office is lower because of all the tweaking and learning one has to do with a Linux solution, but this difference is not as dramatic anymore as many developers have learned.

At least it's keeping Microsoft on their toes and forcing them to add value while offering a low-cost solution for smaller businesses. I really don't see PHP as a contender here because it's not a compiled language that can realistically write desktop applications.

Knoppix 3.4 is here

H. Steele Price, IV — Tue, 04 May 2004 10:27:00 GMT

Knoppix 3.4 finally hit the streets... Knopper.net and Knoppix.net are both being completely swamped today so I'm not linking them now (I'll edit this line in a few days for the permalink)

Why is this important? First of all it's one of the only implementations of linux that is designed to boot from a CD and can read and write to an NTFS partition natively.

So what, Big Deal... yeah well it is when you want to explore linux for what it is and not go through the pain of either dual booting/virtual pcing or dedicating a machine to it.

It is also a really easy way to make a “recovery disk” that makes more sense than recovery console.

I also have a need for quickly making a Project Mono installation really fast to test my apps against running under Mono.

Now for my big challenge. I opened my big mouth a while ago and divulged that I had Knoppix running (successfully I might add) on my Toshiba M205. I commited to making a distribution that does this for people who want it. What I decided to do is make the boot images available and give instructions on how to do this installation.

The goal here is this: Copy the Knoppix Image to your NTFS hard drive somewhere, create a bootable SD or CF card that can mount this image stored in the NTFS partition, choose a location for permanent configuration storage, i.e. home directory, etc.

Why is this interesting?

For me it interesting because there are several things I like to do in linux that are academia related and unavailable on windows in a reasonably runnable manner (Octave, KGeo, LaTex, etc. -- they all need cygwin to run right as opposed to running crippled/strangely). I wanted a way that I could run linux without disturbing my XP Tablet edition setup while I am away from my house (which has plenty of dedicated linux boxes).

I also want to be able to make some customized setups that can boot and go directly to a particular configuration, i.e. Quantian, knoppix-std, knoppmyth and store them on the same machine, the method I am taking about makes this possible with the CF/SD card and image on the HD solution for about $20 and no painful installations.

You could actually do this at home too if you want to experiment with linux just as easily so it definately has merit. Doing the CF/SD image should be relatively easy, making some changes to the kernel might be necessary, but I am hoping that the centrino and ntfs support makes that unnecessary since that was the only reason I needed to make a new kernel before.

More backpeddling in the war on individual rights

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 12:28:00 GMT

Open Standards are one thing, Open Source is another.

The thing that really irks me are when NEITHER exist in an incredibly popular format such as DVD movies.

This MIT Interview with Jack Valenti is precious, it shows the closed-mindedness and the depths that Hollywood will go to just to maintain an archaic distribution channel. It also demonstrates their complete cluelessness of where technology is today.

(found on slashdot)

Even Microsoft and Sun offer Open Standards so we can hook most things into their API. I don't need to license anything to hook into Office, but if I use Office, I have to buy it, that's perfectly fair. If I want to use a DVD I bought, I should surely be allowed to do so any way I like.