Gareth Halfacree

I appear to have broken my netbook.

Well, ‘broken’ might be a bit steep – it no longer responds to a lid close event with the nice, neat standby mode it once treated me to.  Instead, it triggers the standby script and gets itself into a half-on, half-off state.

In this state, the power light is flashing to indicate that it’s in standby.  Unfortunately, it isn’t – everything’s still working fine.  The only indication that it even tried to standby is that my SD card unmount/remount script is triggered and the default keyring is locked.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since my PC blew up – and took Windows with it – I’ve been gradually making the switch to using Linux as my everyday desktop operating system.  Although I’ve been using it on my laptops and netbooks for years, I’ve usually kept Windows on the desktop for one simple reason: TVersity.

TVersity is an excellent UPnP media server which works perfectly with my media playback devices – the PS3, the Xbox 360, and the Roku SoundBridge in the bedroom.  Sadly, it’s Windows only – and most of the Linux equivalents have left me cold.

I stumbled across a small daemon called miniDLNA, written by a Netgear engineer for the company’s ReadyNAS range of network attached storage devices, which works like a charm as a TVersity replacement, with one exception – the damn thing refuses to be seen by the Xbox 360.  Thankfully, I’ve figured out why.

In the configuration file – /etc/minidlna.conf – the software makes reference to a “presentation URL,” which by default is commented out.  This results in an invalid default of http://192.168.0.1:80/, which everything except the Xbox 360 happily ignores.  The 360, however, decides to go visit this URL – and falls over.

To fix the issue, simply change the line to the IP address of your server and the port you’ve got miniDLNA working on – 8200 by default.  The entire line should end up reading:

# default presentation url is http address on port 80
presentation_url=http://192.168.0.20:8200/

Once that’s done, restart miniDLNA and everything should spring into life.

It seems that Microsoft is scoring a bit win in the netbook sector, with claims doing the rounds that Windows XP has gone from a mere 10% of the market in February last year to 96% now.

As someone who uses – and likes – Ubuntu on most of his hardware, this is a surprise.  Sadly, it’s not that surprising – most people will always vote for the status quo.

I did write an article for Bit-Tech on the matter, but a real journalist did the same.  Accordingly, here’s the article that never made it:

Read the rest of this entry »

My laptop is now officially Powered by Ubuntu, thanks to System 76 and the Linux Emporium.

To snag yourself some free Ubuntu stickers, simply pop a self addressed envelope across to:

The Linux Emporium
Bridge House
17a Maybrook Road
Sutton Coldfield
Birmingham
B76 1AL UK

They’ll drop a pack of four by return of post.  I think you’ll agree that it looks much nicer than the old “Designed for Windows Vista” sticker it replaces.

Being a huge fan of Ubuntu, I’ve been using the OS on most of my hardware for quite some time – including my first release spec Eee PC 701. Originally running Ubuntu 7.04 and then upgraded to 7.10, it’s always been a bit ‘finicky’ – mainly as a result of the non-standard hacks I’ve had to implement to get things like the shortcut keys working.

I decided the time had come to move to something a bit newer, however, and have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04.  Using the ISO from the Ubuntu Eee website, it was a fairly painless install.  I was disappointed to see that the installer didn’t set up fstab in the manner I prefer – with a limited number of writes on the internal SSD available, I like to put /tmp, /var, and others on a tmpfs mount – but that was easily sorted.

What wasn’t quite so easy was the wireless.  Unfortunately, Asus have opted to use one of Atheros’s less supported wireless chipsets in the Eee – with no official Linux driver available.  The madwifi-ng driver included as part of the Ubuntu-Eee package sort of worked, but tended to drop out rather frequently – oddly, when the signal was at its strongest rather than its weakest.

Read the rest of this entry »