Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

grub and knetworkmanager problems in Kubuntu Karmic

Shantanu Goel — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:08:00 +0000

I generally move from LTS to LTS releases of Ubuntu but reluctantly had to update my system to Karmic when my old HDD gave in. I also thought of trying out Kubuntu (KDE based) this time as I had heard that its doing a lot of interesting things (Akonadi/Nepomuk etc) and that with 4.3.1 it is stable as well. The installation went fine, all over within less than half an hour and then the problems started. Here are the 2 main issues that I faced along with their solutions, in the hope that if someone else runs into same issues does not have to waste time (and hair) on it

1. Bootloader Issue: I dual boot my system along with Win XP (Needed for some office work) and generally install the bootloader onto a separate boot partition instead of overwriting the MBR. But this time when I did the same, I couldn’t boot (not even the grub menu). When I did this, the very helpful message that I got on restarting after installing kubuntu was “Error loading operating system”. I could still go back to my good windows install by setting the boot flag onto its partition. I mucked around with it a lot, trying to install grub2 again and found that actually it fails when I try to do the above (install on a partition). I also tried copying the boot sector from my /boot partition to C: and use ntldr to boot into linux but that also didn’t work. This lead me to believe that the same thing happened during my main installation and the installer failed to tell me anything about it. I tried then to install it on MBR but that also mucked up things and I couldn’t even get the error message, a cursor just kept blinking. Finally, the solution. I had to install kubuntu again and this time selected to overwrite MBR (this is default, BTW).

2. Wi-Fi Connection Issue: Second immediate issue was with knetworkmanager. It failed to start my wi-fi module (even after installing restricted drivers). I disabled and enabled wi-fi, so that brought some life to it (wi-fi led started glowing) but it still couldn’t scan for any access points. I could do the scan through command line and see my AP but my AP is WPA2 secured and I didn’t want to mess around with wpa-supplicant stuff. Solution: Installed Wicd. And it worked automagically.

Hope this helps someone else who faces the same issue. Looks like my idea of moving to kubuntu wasn’t a good one (especially because I had 2 lockups during the 1 hour I used it for in the wee hours of this morning). I’ll probably give it another week or so before taking the decision whether to move back to ubuntu or not.

One good thing to take away from this though: For the first time I could really appreciate the live CD installer that these linux distros give. As I could search about the various issues I had without having a second computer. But then again, it’s not that good as well because it means that so far I never had any installation issues at all…

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Tags: grub2, karmic koala, knetworkmanager, kubuntu karmic, ubuntu, wicd

Making Frets On Fire Work With Pulse Aludio – pasuspender

Shantanu Goel — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 18:18:45 +0000

I recently got hold of a Guitar Hero controller for my PS3 but the game still had some time to come so I tried it out on my laptop with Frets on Fire (rather FoFix). But when I started it, it was crashing with some weird error about not being able to open mixer devices. Searching on the google, I came to know this is happening because of Pulse Audio as this application needs direct access to the sound devices and finally I came upon pasuspender. This little tool allows you to do that with ease. Just run it in the following way:

pasuspender — ./FretsOnFire

And it will start working just fine. You can use the same trick for any other application that needs direct access to the sound devices. What pasuspender does is that it will suspend pulse audio and allow the application to access them directly and when the application is terminated, normal functioning will resume.

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Tags: FoFix, FretsOnFire, Linux, pasuspender, PS3, Pulse Audio, ubuntu

Killzone 2 Tips Tricks Tactics And Strategies : Engineer

Shantanu Goel — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 16:45:04 +0000

Killzone 2 (KZ2) is one of my most favourite games for the Playstation 3. Killzone 2 is a very different game as compared to the other run-of-the-mill FPS’s out there. Now, I might not be the best player out there but I’ve played my fair share of it. So, I thought of jotting down some quick points for the different classes, how to play them and how to make the most of them according to my opinion. I hope to make this a series where I would discuss the strategies for a class and its primary and secondary abilities and once all classes are covered, I’ll probably touch upon the rest of the aspects of the game. Please read them and supplement them with real practice to see the benefits. And yeah, do not hesitate to point out the flaws if any and I’d also love to hear about the tactics that you follow as well as KZ2 is a game where the element of surprise is very important which calls for unusual strategies many times .
So without wasting any more time, here is a really really basic set that you should follow:

Engineer’s Prime Role: Understand that your role is not that of a front line assault. An engineer is best suited as a defender or a support class.
Engineer’s Weapon – Shotgun: The shotgun is called the one shot killer. It fires a burst of various pellets resulting in a much larger hit area and so you need not be extremely accurate. But it has some salient points to be noted while using it.

Shotgun is useful only in a very short range. Avoid long range combat because 99% you will find yourself dead without even getting a single hit point at the opponent. This means lurk around in corners or alleyways, take the less travelled routes to your destinations, and let your turrets do the most of your job for you
Shotgun is slightly heavy as compared to other weapons and hence you will find yourself moving that right analog stick quite a bit more for aiming.
Shotgun has a high reload time between bullets and especially the full magazine. So if you are in middle of a fight and run out of a mag, it’s best to take out your M4 revolver instead of waiting to reload (or just run away if you are not confident enough of your revolver or haven’t unlocked it yet)

Engineer’s Primary Ability – Turrets:

Find elevated places. It has two advantages. First, it is more difficult for the opposition to take it out because it is above the eye level and second, your turret has more chances of getting headshots leading to faster kills and more points.
Cover up alleyways/alternate routes which the enemy can take to flank your team. This is more important than you think. You are, in effect, forcing the opposition to take a route where most of your team mates can easily take them down.
Don’t place them close to walls as it makes them more susceptible to damage.
Don’t bunch up your turrets, keep them a safe distance apart. This has two advantages. First, it is more difficult for the enemy to take out your turrets (otherwise they can take them out together easily), plus each turret can give cover to the other and also attack the enemy from two sides taking him down quickly.
For rounds like Search & Destroy/ Defend or assassination, don’t place turrets very close to the objective point but at a slight distance, at a place where the turret has clear line of sight to the objective point and/or the path to it. This will make it safe from the enemy while raining hell onto him while he is concentrating somewhere else.

Engineer’s Secondary Ability – Repair:

Repair ability is a very underrated ability. It might not give you a hell lot of points by itself but it is very important for your team.
Repairing ammo crates is a natural thing as your team mates might need it but that is not the most important thing to concentrate upon as people might not need them too often as people die often in KZ2 and moreover they might not want to waste time taking stuff out of the crate and risking their life.
First important use of repair ability is to repair your own turrets. Your turrets go under wear and tear as time progresses or when attacked by someone. It is of utmost importance to keep repairing them because you have to wait for a lot of time before you can set up another turret while repair ability recharges much faster.
Second is to repair the emplaced/mounted machine guns at various places in the maps. Repair them and use them to take down the enemy quickly (especially useful for S&D). But make sure that another guy/turret is protecting you from out of peripheral-view attacks.

So that’s it for now. But keep in mind that just reading these tips won’t help unless you practice. Let me know if you found these tips helpful or if you have any map/situation specific queries and if you would like to add your own strategies. I’ll take up a new class next time.

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Tags: Killzone 2, Killzone 2 Classes, Killzone 2 Engineer, Killzone 2 Engineer Repair, Killzone 2 Engineer Turrets, Killzone 2 Strategies, Killzone 2 Tactics, Killzone 2 Tips, Killzone 2 Tricks, KZ2, KZ2 Strategies Series, Playstation3, PS3

Easiest Way to Shutdown Asus WL-500W

Shantanu Goel — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:19:12 +0000

If you are a proud owner of an Asus WL-500W wireless router (or maybe another one of the same series like wl-500g, wl-500gp, etc), then you know that this router has a very useful USB port with which you might have attached your external hard disk and have already offloaded all your downloding tasks to it, or maybe using it for various other purposes. Whatever maybe the reason, the main point is that because of this hard disk, now we cannot just turn off the power of the router any more. It has to be shut down gracefully like a PC. One way is to ssh/telnet to it and then give the "halt" command but then you have to switch on a PC specially just to turn off your router. Well not any more. I was looking for a better way to do this and just found out the simplest one. And if you are using Oleg's custom firmware then you are in luck too.
With the 1.9.2.7-g version of his firmware, oleg added a new feature with which if you press the EZ Setup button at the back of the router for 3 seconds, it executes a script "/usr/local/sbin/ez-setup", if present. So, all you gotta do is create a new text file named "ez-setup", and paste the following contents in it:

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

#!/bin/sh
halt

Then save it at /usr/local/sbin in your router and make it executable by running "chmod +x ez-setup". And you are done. You can now try out whether your router is shutting down gracefully or not by just pressing the EZ Setup button for 3 seconds.

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Tags: Asus wireless router, Asus WL-500W, external hard disk, EZ Setup, oleg, oleg custom firmware, setup button, shut down script for asus, usb port

VirtualBox High CPU Usage Problem Solved

Shantanu Goel — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:36:00 +0000

A few days ago, I had to install Windows XP as a guest OS on my Ubuntu Hardy machine as I needed to carry out some Visual Studio work. What I noticed was that my CPU usage went through the roof (constantly at 100%) even if the guest was completely idle. Result: My laptop was shutting down within a few minutes because the CPU was heating up and its temperature going beyond 75C. And finally came to know a simple solution from a friend, that immediately worked. The solution was to create a new dummy guest machine in VirtualBox, allocate minimal RAM to it (I gave 4MB) and just run it, don’t even need to add boot disk to it and to my surprise, the CPU usage came down to just 3-4% immediately. I’m not sure why this issue is happening and how the dummy machine solved it but atleast it is working for me now. If you have a similar issue, you can try out the same.

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Tags: High CPU Usage, Virtual Box High CPU Usage, VirtualBox

Compiling Latest FireFly (mt-daapd) for ASUS WL-500W

Shantanu Goel — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:28:32 +0000

FireFly is a nice DAAP based media server that allows you to listen to your music collection anywhere using any DAAP based client like iTunes, with other players (like Winamp, Rhythmbox, VLC, etc) using plugins, or it even has its own dedicated php/flash/java based clients that can be fired up on any platform any computer giving you instant nirvana.

Many people, like me, use it on their Routers or NAS boxes to access their music anywhere without having to keep their home PC running or lugging around external drives. However, development on this gem stopped some time ago. The last stable build released (2.4.2) was good but it doesn't have a lot of features provided by the nightly builds in svn (subversion). And the last nightly build released (svn-1696) had a lot of broken things. It was rebuilding the database everytime, crashed around quite a bit, had a lot of security holes. So, I decided to get the latest version (trunk) of the FireFly code, as it had a lot of fixes for above issues, put in whatever was missing, and try to build it for my use.

After a day's worth of efforts, here it is. This latest build is the most rich in features as compared to the stable one, and is just as stable as the 2.4.2 release if not better, and also fixes all the issues shown by the svn-1696 build. The downloadable source and complete install package are attached with this post. But I'm also listing down the steps that I took to achieve this so that if anyone wants to recompile it with their own options (e.g. I haven’t included ogg/flac support in my build), they are able to do so. You can find the steps below. Please let me know if you have any queries. Also, if you want to submit any patches, I’ll be happy to incorporate them and recompile. I’m also trying to get this source and package into the unslung/optware repositories for wider distribution.

Note: Although I’ve compiled this for Asus WL-500W, it should work for most devices with a mipsel architecture (which includes all the Asus routers in this family). Also, the compilation process should work for most other architectures barring one or two steps. I’d be happy to help if you want to do so and face any issues.

Changes and Build Steps:

ipkg install optware-devel
ipkg install buildroot
Edit /opt/share/aclocal/audiofile.m4 and change AC_DEFUN(AM_PATH_AUDIOFILE, to AC_DEFUN([AM_PATH_AUDIOFILE],
ipkg install gettext (for some missing m4 macros, libr_rpath etc)
Comment out AC_USE_SYSTEM_EXTENSIONS in configure.in (using dnl)
aclocal -I
run “autoheader” to generate config.h.in
touch config.rpath (somehow this file is not provided with gettext for us)
change configure.in line 95, remove the ; at the end
remove -g flag and add -O2 in configure.in for optimization purpose
run “automake --add-missing”
run “autoconf” - to generate configure
ipkg install grep (for egrep)
change /bin/sh to /opt/bin/bash in configure and install-sh
run “./configure --enable-sqlite3 --prefix=/opt CPFLAGS=”-D_LIBC” ” (You can also use --enable-oggvorbis and/or --enableflac)
After this step, I had to make numerous changes to the source code to put in the missing functionality for database handling, removing some compilation errors, etc. You can diff the svn 1715 code with mine to see the changes.
run “make”
run “make install”

And you are done. The modified source and compiled bianries can be downloaded from below.

Download:	shantz-mt-daapd.zip
Version:	svn-1718
Updated:	July 3, 2009
Size:	2.8 MB
Hits:	219

Let me know if you have any queries or face any issues.

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Tags: Asus WL-500g, Asus WL-500W, buildroot, daap, firefly, ipkg, itunes daap media server, media server, mt-daapd, NAS, optware-devel, patches, RhythmBox, router, routers, subversion, winamp

Opera Web Server In A Browser: Bad Idea

Shantanu Goel — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:17:04 +0000

Today, the whole word is going gaga over "Opera Unite", the new technology in Opera 10 which will make your web browser a web server as well (and not just that, it will make a whole lot of “sharing” options available). Well, I’m not so excited about it. Technology wise, it is really cool but what they don’t realize is that this is like giving motorized chain-saw or a swiss army knife in the hands of a two-year old. Seriously, majority of the people around the world who get themselves into all sorts of shit while just plain surfing the net, now got a whole new array of avenues where they can be exploited upon. For people who do need a webserver, there are plenty of straight-forward point and click options available. I hope they atleast have options to completely turn it off and even better, keep it turned off by default.

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Tags: opera, opera unite, web browser, web-server

Microtek UPS Problems (And A Solution)

Shantanu Goel — Sun, 10 May 2009 15:35:02 +0000

I got myself a Microtek 800VA UPS (MDP800+) a couple of weeks ago to save my PS3 from the frequent power outages that we are seeing in Hyderabad but the purpose was rather lost when I found that it worked fine only till the mains power was on. As soon as there was an outage, it couldn’t stop the PS3 from an abrupt shut down. I ran around the pathetic Microtek customer service for days and they finally sent an “engineer” down to my place (after a week) to diagnose the issue and he couldn’t say anything more than that the UPS is meant for a PC and nothing else. All logical discussions to tell him that PS3 is essentially a PC but in a different form were kind of like pouring water on a well-oiled rock and hoping it would stick.

Kind of disappointed, I had a hunch which solved it for me though today . When I tried to read the output voltage from the output ports on the UPS, it showed me 225–230V when main supply was on. As soon as it was switched off, the output dropped to around 160V. On connecting the PS3, it went up a bit (to around 180V). Now, the load should not have been an issue because a PS3 requires 180–350W I think, which can easily be given by even a 500VA UPS. So far, all suggestions given to me were to remove everything else from the UPS except the PS3, but that was actually my setup in the very first place.

The weird idea that I had was that the problem is, in fact, that the PS3 is not enough load for it. Call me crazy but as soon as I connected my TV also to the UPS, it started working just fine and dandy. No trip ups now, and I can even cold-boot my PS3 and TV from the UPS backup alone.

Now, I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to electrical stuff (in fact this was one of my most dreaded subjects during my graduation). So, if anyone can give me a sound reasoning behind what I just saw would be very much appreciated. Or is this a real fault with the unit that I got, or maybe it is a defect in all the Microtek UPS’s? Anyways, I ain’t complaining till it’s working for me and if you are seeing the same issues you could try the same as well.

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Tags: MDP800+, Microtek, Microtek 800VA UPS, Microtek UPS, PS3, UPS, UPS no backup, UPS shuts down

Why You Should Not Upgrade to Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04)

Shantanu Goel — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:46:40 +0000

Update: It has come to my notice that many people do not know about this (and other problems listed in comments of this post). Please digg and reddit this post so that more people can be made aware of it before they upgrade unknowingly.

You should not upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackalope), released a few weeks ago, if:

You have an older ATI graphics card (prior to R500, .e.g xpress 200m)
You like to have 3D support (read compiz/games, etc)

This is because of the following reasons:

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope has the new version of X.org server (1.6)
The open source graphics drivers for ATI do not have 3D support
The only version of the ATI properietary drivers (fglrx\Catalyst) compatible with X.org server 1.6 is 9.4
Support for older cards (mentioned above) was dropped from fglrx 9.4

So, basically right now you are in a soup and it seems to me that this is going to remain this way unless someone figures out how to backport x.org 1.5 onto Jauntu, which is going to be a hell of a task, IMHO

But, if you are a simple person, who looks beyond the gloss of the 3D and marvels at the beauty that the rest of the system holds, then go right ahead and dive in

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Tags: 3D support, ATi, ATi Catalyst, fglrx, graphics card, Jaunty Jackalop, Linux, linux graphics drivers, ubuntu, Ubuntu 9.04, X.org, X.org server 1.6

TIP: Perforce – Sync Files In A Label Without Deleting Previous Files

Shantanu Goel — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:00:50 +0000

If you have used perforce, you'd have definitely come across a situation where you wanted to sync files belonging to two different labels, but as soon as you sync the second label, the files from the first label get deleted. P4 help suggests the following ways to achieve this:

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

p4 sync @label1,label2

or something like

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

p4 sync @label1,@label2

But I've found that depending on the perforce version you are using, the above commands might not work. So, here is a tip that will always work for you irrespective of which version you are using:

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

p4 files @label | cut --delimiter=" " -f1 | p4 -x - sync -n

It is as simple as that. Let me know what are your perforce tips..

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Tags: labels, P4, p4 sync, Perforce, perforce tips, sync files, tip

Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

grub and knetworkmanager problems in Kubuntu Karmic

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Opera Web Server In A Browser: Bad Idea

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Microtek UPS Problems (And A Solution)

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TIP: Perforce – Sync Files In A Label Without Deleting Previous Files

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