Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

I gave a talk on the Linux file system back in November last year to the local Sheffield LUG and kept meaning to put it online so that people who missed it or were interested could access it. So after quite a delay here it is I think it is all factually correct but as with everything in life there are no guarantees.

It was of course written using open source tools and presented on my Acer Ferrari 4005 laptop. It seemed to go down well and sparked off quite a bit of discussion. The guy who requested the talk wasn't actually at the meeting though - so may be you can take a look at it now. I have placed the PDF here for all those who would like to take a look.

Well after reading Diego's post about VMWare server I thought I would have to check that one out myself. I tried out Mike's original ebuilds in bug 56881, but haven't had chance to try out the updated ebuilds in the new bug he opened. I would like to thank Mike for all his work, the ebuilds worked fine on my dual core amd64 SMP system and I have been happily making a few test VMs with it.

This should be great for being able to play with bleeding edge environments in their own sandboxes and easily letting other people try out Gentoo without install whether they are using Linux or Windows. I just need some more disk space now!

Well I have booked my flights and hotel room, joined the American Physical Society and registered for their March meeting in Baltimore. I am feeling broke but really looking forward to seeing some of the American East coast (only ever been to California in the US). I am also looking forward to the jobs fair held in parallel to the conference. I will be polishing my CV and registering for the it pretty soon.

Managed to arrange for my wife to join me after the conference so that we can look around the area and make a bit of a holiday out of it. This is going to be a tough year writing up my thesis, searching for jobs, finishing up my current research and getting it published. I am really looking forward to looking around Washington DC too as it looks like a really amazing place. Drop me a line if you are in the area and fancy meeting up for a beer one night or have any recommendations of sights we should taken in.

Well I have been mostly successful I think with my MythTV project. Dabs still have me waiting around on the 300 GB hard drive and new case, so it is stuck on a temporary 40 GB hard drive and an old case. It is very quiet though. I finally got the two tuners working on my Hauppage PVR-500 MCE. I took out the tuner=57,57 and let it automatically detect the correct tuners! They now both work, and composite in works too. I tried to use svideo in though and that does not seem to work, although it could be a cable issue. I bought a SCART to svideo and two phono adaptor. I get nothing but a black screen from my Sky Digibox.

I can't get anything out of the radio tuner either. I discovered why xawtv and tvtime made terrible test programs - they don't understand the MPEG2 output I get from the hardware encoders. MPlayer made a much better test program. So so far I have managed to get both tuners working, using the mce_usb2 driver form the latest lirc ebuilds I managed to get the remote control and infrared receiver working, although still no luck on the built in IR blaster. There are two IR blaster ports and one supplied IR blaster - anyone got any tips on that one at all?

The DVD player is working great although I switched to xine for the DVD menu support. I tried using svideo output but all I could get was black and white no matter what I tried. So I switched back to composite output which works well. So it seems that svideo sucks over here and doesn't work, but composite works just fine. I still haven't quite figured out MythTV either - I need to tell it about the five analogue channels and my Sky Box which is on a sixth channel - I have the channels but need to program them into MythTV. Right now I am using ivtvctl and ivtv-tune until I figure MythTV out.

So it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to set up, but it is working pretty well right now. Need to figure out how to record programs too, but the core functionality is working well. I am really busy with lots of other stuff so this little project has ended up on a bit of a back burner. I do still find Linux very empowering though, and certainly have no intention of moving back to Windows any time soon for a number of reasons despite the extra effort required to get some things done.

Well I had an old motherboard with an Athlon64 3200+ in it (previous burnt out PSU that wasn't quite as bad as it looked). So I bought 1 GB of RAM, a new PSU, a Hauppage PVR-500, used my old nVidia GeForce FX5900XT and a DVD drive for it. I installed Gentoo amd64 on it of course and then began my first attempt at MythTV.

I have TV out working and I can play DVDs, although I am using xine instead of mplayer for the DVD menu support. The TV tuners are recognised but all I get is static. I was working with this wiki article. I also have messages like this in dmesg, ivtv1: i2c attach to card #1 ok [client=(tuner unset), addr=61] which I think is my tuner failing to get set up properly.

It looks like the infrared receiver/IR blaster doesn't work either, it is USB based and came with the package. I get ID 0609:031d SMK Manufacturing, Inc. when I plug it in but no lirc devices This means that the remote is also unusable. So far I have had limited success, but I am hopeful I will be able to improve and document the set up in future. I am currently using,

media-tv/ivtv-0.4.2
media-tv/xmltv-0.5.39 - current stable is unable to parse UK TV listings
media-tv/mythtv-0.18.1-r2
app-misc/lirc-0.8.0_pre3

Got back from the a full day of Linux discussion which started at around 10am this morning, and carried on until about 7:30pm. Saw an really interesting talk given by Alan Cox on software engineering and how the theory compares to how it is done in both open source projects and the proprietary commercial sector. It was a very interesting talk that really got you thinking.

This was followed by a talk from Megan Larko about their use of Linux at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Land Information Systems group where they really have pushed Linux to some extreme limits. Utilising multiterabyte RAID arrays and very demanding simulations on large datasets and hitting the 2GB per PID limit on 32 bit systems.

It was really interesting to hear someone talking about real issues pushing Linux to the extremes and how they were able to overcome these problems. As well as a very honest description of a few of the failures made along the way. I only just upgraded my main development system to 2GB of RAM, and so it is hard to believe that there are real reasons to use all of this space for one process! The talks were followed by more informal followup talk given by Megan at the LUG meeting, and then informal chats and a nice meal at a local restaurant.

I am now working on my 64 bit Gentoo MythTV box, not wanting to move away from the Linux theme. LUG meetings can be a great chance to meet some very interesting people and always give different insights to reading about this stuff in books and on the web.