Blog by Daniel Bovensiepen

GNU Radio 3.3.1-git on Gentoo Linux

2010-07-10T21:51:00Z

The dependencies for GNU Radio 3.3.1 out of the git repo are looking currently like this on Gentoo:

emerge swig fftw cppunit boost alsa-lib sdcc guile wxpython xmlto numpy gsl

The official wiki sadly missed the gsl package. Without this one you won’t fulfill the requirements for nearly all packages of GNU Radio (not even gnuradio-core). After emerge of these packages you can grab the source and compile it:

# git clone git://gnuradio.org/gnuradio
# cd gnuradio
# ./bootstrap
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/
# make
# make check
# sudo make install

Another important point which will be interesting in the future, is the incompatibility of GNU Radio to Python 3. With eselect you should check which version of Python is at the moment your preferred interpreter. At the time of writing on my machine Python 2.6.5 was the current interpreter. This one handles GNU Radio without to much trouble.

Linux on Fujitsu S710

2010-07-10T15:00:00Z

I just got today a spare solid state hard disc for my notebook from work. It is a Fujitsu S710 and I just gave Gentoo a try to see how long it would take me to put all the drivers together to use it in a sufficient way. Well, it was quite easy, here is my Linux Kernel configuration file for the Fujitsu S710. If you are interested in the built in hardware, here are the system information from the running machine:

Hope this helps people who like to use a Linux system also on their Fujitsu S710. For now the Wlan (ath9k), Graphic (agpgart-intel), Ethernet (e1000e), PCMCIA (yenta_cardbus), Trackpad (Synaptics Touchpad), USB and Sound (HDA Intel) works like a charm for me. The rest I didn’t use yet.

Automatic configuration of Hirschmann switches

2010-04-10T21:38:00Z

Hirschmann is a german company which is producing quite sophisticated network components. For the networks in our current projects (area of 40km and more than 600 network components) we were using these switches mainly due to the ring protocol from Hirschmann which provides a decent fail over time (less than 50ms). All in all the components we are using (RS20, RS30, Mach 4004 and Power MICE) are industrial quality network components with great performance.

The issue we run into was the deployment of the configuration. Hirschmann provides special tools which are working on layer 2 to configure all of their network components (HiDiscovery Protocol). In fact this is a handy way to configure large networks but for our needs it wasn’t enough. So we decided to script our configuration. We were using telnet and expect to do this but we run into trouble while trying to change the password. The problem was, that our switch software didn’t support the script mode of changing a password (using a scambled password). Only an interactive mode was available and this one failed permanently when triggered by expect.

The solution was to use the “-s” flag to slow down the speed of expect. An argument I didn’t know before but a colleague told me, that this was used in the past also to slow down the communication over very slow connections like modems.

CardDAV on the iPhone

2010-04-08T21:33:00Z

Since several weeks I have finished my home network. Everything is built around a Mac Mini Server which provides a mail-, web-, vpn- and time machine server. On top of the web server I’m using CalDAV and CardDAV to sync my events and contacts to all Macs. To all Macs? NO. Till yesterday the iPhone was not able to sync to a CardDAV server. Even not the own one from Apple. But today with the iPhone 4.0 Beta update I was able to add a CardDAV account next to the mail and CalDAV one. And it seems to work without any issues so far. Great improvement!

But the bad part here is, that the missing feature (previous 4.0) was not clearly marked anywhere on the Apple site. Apple explained that you can sync events and contacts without any issues. But for contacts it was in the past always necessary to use the iTunes sync function.

a fresh start

2010-04-08T19:07:00Z

Once again I just dropped everthing I had in my digital life and started over again with a new homepage and blog. The last time I was able to handle the blog for around 3 month. I’m going to break this record… maybe.