mikas blog

FreeSBI (version 1.0) is FreeBSD as a live system on CD (like Knoppix). On 2nd March I copied the FreeSBIE-ISO to the TUG-ftp-server and today I plugged in the CD to the CD-ROM of one of the many computers at work ;-)

A windows-like desktop (XFCE) welcomes the user running xinit. The italian menu is a little bit strange ;-) (FreeSBIE is developed by an italian BSD-usergroup called GUFI), but the software works as it should and FreeSBIE is definitely nice for people who want try running a BSD-system.

http://koti.mbnet.fi/~ghouli/fitness.jpg

http://koti.mbnet.fi/~ghouli/windowsownzj00.jpg

I am at home again since one hour past midnight. Chemnitzer LinuxTag was really great and together with Thorsten and Jimmy it was fun :-). I’ll write a (german) report in the next few days. Mails, newsgroups, university, work and projects are calling for me ;-)

Update: The (german) CLT2004-Report is online:
http://www.michael-prokop.at/sonstiges/clt-2004-report.txt

2nd Update: Webgallery is online:
http://dufo.tugraz.at/clt2004/

CLT 2004 is going to start tomorrow. Today I will go to a “Ausstands-Feier” (some special kind of party ;)) and tommorow we (Jimmy, Thorsten and me) will drive to Chemnitz by car early in the morning. So I should prepare my baggage now :)

Today I tried to check out rrdtool. It’s quite powerful but it’s documentation sucks IMO and using it is quite painful, at least for beginners. I wrote a small shellscript which automatizes some stuff and writes a html-file.

Konq Rellinks is a very nice addon for konqueror, you can use document relations with this plugin in konqueror as in opera and mozilla. Due to that Kevin Krammer is one of the developer of the program he was the one who pointed my to it :-) Have a look at it: screenshot

Today I am really tired. Yesterday I went to bed at around 2 o’clock because of Security Treff Graz. First of all I felt asleep in a very boring softskills-lecture at university, profile-migration on the windows-box (from local to serverside) at work was really ###censored###. The only ray of hope was the lecturer of “control systems I” Nicolaos Dourdoumas who has made a really exciting lecture. Now I will try to go continue on my lectures for GLT04, I hope I don’t sleep in front of my laptop ;o). BTW: On Saturday I am going to drive to Chemnitzer LinuxTag 2004.

Today I installed the dvorak keyboard layout on my happy hacking keyboard, and I am feeling like a small boy who has never seen a keyboard in his life before :-) but I am getting faster and faster. Of course I am using a special Xmodmap. Check out the abcd-dvorak-tutorial (thanks for the URL Thomas Quaritsch!).

As I’ve said some days ago I want to set up ipv6 at home. Now I am running an ipv6-tunnel on my workstation via freenet6.net. I had to change tspc host_type to “router” in /etc/freenet6-client/tspc.conf and due to a bug in the freenet-client I had to restart the tunnel with if_tunnel=sit0 and again with sit1. But now it works like a charme (thanks ak!):

grml:~# ifconfig -a | grep -v "^\ "  | grep Link
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr «censored»
ip6tnl0   Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00  
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
ppp0      Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol  
sit0      Link encap:IPv6-in-IPv4  
sit1      Link encap:IPv6-in-IPv4  
grml:~# ping6 -c3 tintifax.v6.synflood.at
PING tintifax.v6.synflood.at(3ffe:bc0:a25:1:260:94ff:fe8a:44c6) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 3ffe:bc0:a25:1:260:94ff:fe8a:44c6: icmp_seq=1 ttl=62 time=848 ms
64 bytes from 3ffe:bc0:a25:1:260:94ff:fe8a:44c6: icmp_seq=2 ttl=62 time=1299 ms
64 bytes from 3ffe:bc0:a25:1:260:94ff:fe8a:44c6: icmp_seq=3 ttl=62 time=1279 ms

--- tintifax.v6.synflood.at ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 1999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 848.513/1142.582/1299.815/208.104 ms, pipe 2
grml:~# ping6 -c3 www.kame.net
PING www.kame.net(orange.kame.net) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=334 ms
64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=332 ms
64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=332 ms

--- www.kame.net ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 332.256/333.177/334.292/1.074 ms
grml:~#

In centericq 4.9.10 german umlauts don’t work for many people, also my box had problems. Now I could figure out (with a hint of Marc Thoben – thx!) the problem. Have a look at my mail to the centericq-mailinglist. Short version: don’t use POSIX for LC/locale-settings but use something like that:

[mika@grml: ~]% locale
LANG=de_AT@euro
LC_CTYPE=de_AT
LC_NUMERIC="de_AT@euro"
LC_TIME="de_AT@euro"
LC_COLLATE="de_AT@euro"
LC_MONETARY="de_AT@euro"
LC_MESSAGES=en_US
LC_PAPER="de_AT@euro"
LC_NAME="de_AT@euro"
LC_ADDRESS="de_AT@euro"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_AT@euro"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_AT@euro"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_AT@euro"
LC_ALL=
[mika@grml: ~]%

As you might have mentioned I really like the firewire-stuff on linux, today I captured 5GiB of movies – sucessful and on my workstation :). But due to some problems with the dv1394-module (which couldn’t be loaded via insmod after compiling) I wanted to upgrade from kernel 2.6.2 to 2.6.3. I already tried 2.6.3-rc2 but also on 2.6.3 the problem with the e1000-module still exists – my box freezes when there’s traffic on eth0 :-(. But I should move this rant to category linux because all needed stuff works on my 2.6.2, even 3D-support for my ATI Radeon 9600 (benchmark started while watching tv with my WinTV Express):

[mika@grml: ~]% glxgears 
7426 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1485.200 FPS
8916 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1783.200 FPS
[mika@grml: ~]%

No, at home I don’t use KDE 3.2 as a desktop environment due to pekwm is really great ;-), but I configured kicker (the KDE-taskbar) and I really like it because it has some really nice features as kweather (weather reports), klipper (clipboard-manager), kdict (a dictionary, I am using it with dict.tugraz.at), the color picker and the sound-mixer. I found a bug in kweather and reported it. Have a look at my workplace.

http://kai.iks-jena.de/miniwahr/darmstadt-griesheim.html – ECHELON-Station Griesheim bei Darmstadt

As I already wrote firewire works really great with linux. Today I created 124MiB of divx-movies with kino and mencoder:

[mika@tweety: ~/Video]% mencoder -ovc divx4 -o stuff.avi -oac lavc export014.dv

Works like a charme – just the filesize-limit of my system as user mika sucked:

[mika@tweety: ~/Video]% limit | grep filesize
filesize        244MB
[mika@tweety: ~/Video]%

Some days ago I installed KDE 3.2 on the computer of my girlfriend. Today I installed KDE 3.2 on my box at work and I really enjoy it. It’s fast enough for my system, it’s definitive an eye candy, the kicker-applets (klipper, dictionary, knewsticker, kmix, kscd, kweather and so on) are useful, the KDE Wallet Manager seems to be great, Konqueror has much improved Tab-Handling and kontact (the groupware client) seems to be a really good replacement for some “not-so-well-to-use” software (Outlook, Evolution,…). I really enjoy working with KDE 3.2 at office.

Today my brother gave me the digital videocamera from my father and because we would like to create some movies about our cat Rubeo I tried to use the camera with linux. Some weeks ago I bought a firewire-cable and so I connected the camera with my laptop, loaded the kernelmodules dv1394, ohci1394, raw1394, ieee1394 and started a program called kino. And hey – I just works as it should! Not a single problem and even a first try with mencoder works:

[mika@tweety: ~/tmp]% mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -o output.avi -nosound ~/mikasvideo.dv
[mika@tweety: ~/tmp]% ls -lah output.avi
-rw-r--r--    1 mika     mika         3,6M 2004-02-25 23:42 output.avi
[mika@tweety: ~/tmp]%

I am absolutely fascinated by it’s simplicity and now I want to improve my knowledge about the possibilties with mencoder :-)

Ok, now I used some options from the X-config from my debian-installation and X is working on freebsd. But: it just works if I call “startx” as root, neither gdm nor startx running as user work as they should, and calling “X” as user mika results in a freeze. Grml!

Ok, because I should learn for university I installed FreeBSD on my laptop ;o). Installing FreeBSD 5.2.1-RC was no problem, but booting it via Grub was tricky ;-). But finally I got it working:

root@tweety:/home/mika# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 20.0 GB, 20003880960 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38760 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1       13212     6658816+  a5  FreeBSD
/dev/hda2           13213       23460     5164897+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3           23461       37852     7253347+  83  Linux
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda4           37852       38760      457852+  82  Linux swap
root@tweety:/home/mika# cat /boot/grub/menu.lst | sed -ne "/FreeBSD/,/^$/p"
title FreeBSD 5.2.1-RC
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------

root@tweety:/home/mika#

Local network (but currently without the VPN/PPTP-stuff) seems to work fine. When configuring and then starting X FreeBSD freezed – huh?! Ok, now I am booting Linux and taking the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 as a template. Let’s have a look ;-).

Because I try to find out the best features from all the existing distributions for my own one (called grml), today I tried to run phlak (0.2.1) [a derivative of Morphix] and fire (0.4a) [Forensic and Incident Response Environment]. While phlak tried to access the CD-ROM for more than 5 minutes without doing anything (hanging at PCMCIA-initialization), fire had problems with it’s own init-system. So I rebooted my box, maybe I’ll have more success with both distributions when using a non-laptop-system ;o).

http://lists.netsys.com/pipermail/full-disclosure/2004-February/017613.html
http://www.macmerc.com/news/archives/1270
http://heise.de/newsticker/meldung/44853 (german)