Worst blog ever

This is somewhat awkward - I never find the time to post something here. I'm still around, but there aren't many news anyways. Too busy with the job... I hope you all have a nice holiday season soon!

Cheers
Koepi

Longer time without update again

Again two months passed by without real news from me. On the Xvid-side, nothing happened for some time - so there is no need for a new build. The work is taking up plenty of time of course, as usual. So there is no time for playing around with code.

Anyhow, I'm still alive. Should there something happen like a new Xvid release, I'll be right there. Since I don't have a 64 Bit Windows and according build system around, I still can't provide a 64 Bits build. It's nice that you ask for it though!

Oopsi - long time without news

Erm *caugh* Well... Hm. I don't know what to say, but I really more or less forgot about my blog here for a while. Sorry!

I have no real news anyhow right now. The Xvid-release 1.2.1 is out - you probably realized that without me writing about that. If you want to, you can try the build with VAQ-patch applied as it gave a great result in my limited tests.

Job-wise, I am lucky here in the south of germany. The whole area (not just my colleagues) is nice. It's a tourism region, so it has to be. :-)

Ubuntu 8.04 on the EeePC

After a kernel-update for Ubuntu 7.10 yesterday all my EeePC-specific modifications didn't work anymore. Things like overclocking to 900 MHz on-demand were lost, wifi as well as the control of the sound volume via function keys. After fiddling around with the init-scripts, ACPI-events and so on I decided it's not worth the effort. So this morning I finally started a fresh installation of Ubuntu 8.04, that version with long-term-support.

Since 8.04 came out, a lot of people came up with very useful tools and scripts to make it easier to customize the Ubuntu-installation for the EeePC. First, I had to create a bootable USB-Stick with the installation-CD-image. I found the project UNetbootin on Sourceforge. The developers created a tool which takes an image of an installation-CD for e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva or FreeBSD and creates a readily bootable USB-Stick from that. It is available as sourcecode, but packages/binaries for Linux and Windows are downlodable on the project-site as well.

The installation from that USB-Stick went straight-forward. I connected my EeePC via cable to the net so the installer could download language-packs and other things. After the first reboot I got offered more than 180 updated packages, resulting in another 200 MB which got downloaded and installed. You might want to delete the contents of the cache-folder in /var/apt to save some space on the tiny solid-state-disk.

The network connection is also useful for the RiceeeyTweak.sh-script. It downloads all the necessary sources, scripts and packages for overclocking the processor on demand, for the wireless-driver and it also adopts the font sizes, makes changes for reducing write-operations to the SSD and more.

The customization for the EeePC for Ubuntu 8.04 is as simple as this: Start the terminal. Type

mkdir temp
cd temp
wget http://eee.ricey.co.uk/files/eee/RiceeeyTweak.sh
chmod +x ./RiceeeyTweak.sh
./RiceeeyTweak.sh

Watch the script running, asking you for the superuser-password every now and then. It only takes a few minutes and you're done.

I did another check with that Pinnacle 72e USB-DVB-dongle. It didn't work out of the box. I had to fetch the updated v4l-sources and compile and install the new driver from linuxtv-org. I used the SVN-snapshot. Simply unpack the tarball and compile and install the drivers. Keep the file v4l/Module.symvers, you'll need it to build a working webcam-driver again later. The firmware which is already installed by the default Ubuntu-kernel doesn't work with the dongle though. I used the firmware from this old package to replace the non-working installed firmware by typing in sudo cp firmware/dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw /lib/firmware/linux-2.6.24-19-generic.

Then I had to install subversion: sudo apt-get install subversion . The webcam-driver-sources can then be fetched via svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk. Copy the file Modules.symvers to the trunk-directory. A simple make and make install then lead to the installation of a working driver for the webcam.

Always so busy

Sorry for not posting for nearly a month. Good news: I got the job. Bad news: I still have plenty things to do for my current job. That's also the reason why I didn't find the time to add something to my blog.

But now things are getting better. It's nice weather and I'm sitting on my balcony, enjoying it. The little EeePC is so handy ;-)