mikas blog

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)

www.flickr.com – share pictures in real time – pointer by Enki Boehm on internetz(at)vibe.at.

Since today the new and updated website for Grazer LinuxTage 2004 is online. Oliver Jusinger did a great job with webprogramming.

More than 20 lectures and about 8 workshops are registered nowadays, call for papers is till 10th of march. There’s still a lot to do but organisational stuff is working quite well. I assume and hope the event will be as great as last year (or even better ;-)), hope to see you there!

Opera 7.50 Preview 2 is available for different platforms (as usual). Get it from snapshot.opera.com. For me there aren’t any obvious changes besides better panels-handling. But fullscreen-mode still does not save the toolbar settings – grml. I use the fullscreen-mode (F11) because there does not exist any advertisements in this mode and place is used much more efficient. But because I still need some toolbars (page, address, status) I mapped them:

[mika@grml: ~/.opera/keyboard]% cat standard_keyboard\ \(1\).ini
[...]
[Browser Window]
F7 ctrl=View page bar,0 | View page bar, 1
F8 ctrl=View address bar,0 | View address bar, 7
F9 ctrl=View status bar,0 | View status bar, 4

For more details check out the changelog.

Ok, maybe you noticed (anyone reading this blog out there? ;-)) that I changed the layout of the blog a little bit. Well, I removed the TrackBack and PingBack stuff a few days ago, today I (again) changed some CSS-stuff – hope it looks ok for you :-). Ok, now I have to study… for university of course ;-)…

[mika@bufo: ~/Source]% uptime
12:02AM  up 12 days,  9:51, 1 user, load averages: 0.14, 0.08, 0.03
[mika@bufo: ~/Source]%

Still running and I tried to compile some small c-programs for the university-lecture “datastructures and algorithms” on the BSD-box – worked of course ;-).

What was curious and new for me is the fact that I had to change the “Release Name” from 5.2.1-RC to 5.2.1-RC2 via sysinstall to be able to install wget via “sysinstall configPackages” and URL ftp://ftp.tugraz.at/mirror/FreeBSD-i386/5.2.1-RC2/ – doh! Ok, no wget works like a charme ;-)

http://selinux.lemuria.org/install-2.6.html – SELinux on Debian/Sid with Kernel 2.6

https://solarflux.org/pf/pf+IPv6.php – Firewalling IPv6 with OpenBSD’s pf (packet filter)

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795 – We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source

Today I set up Fedora-Linux on my box at work on the new harddisc. Setting up was quite easy, but I have to become used to the rpm-stuff ;). Looks like it would work fine, but some things didn’t work as they should (Printer-Setup via SMB-Share, there was no ntfs-module available for mounting NTFS-partitions – argl!). Ok, I will check it out in the next few days and will see whether it persists against a waiting debian/knoppix ;).

Sorry, but spamarrest really sucks. I hate this procedure of whitelisting to be able to send people mails because they use this kind of crap.

http://www.dfn-cert.de/events/ws/2004/ – Vortragsfolien

http://farrokhi.net/blog/archives/000235.html

http://www.fingerworks.com/MacNTouch_product.html (thx for the pointer karl!)

http://www.foebud.org/texte/aktion/rfid/positionspapier.pdf – Informationspaper des FoeBuD (Verein zur Förderung des öffentlichen bewegten und unbewegten Datenverkehrs e.V) zum Thema RFID