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Recovering != Reinstalling

A client of mine his Linux box crashed. I followed the manual that came with the server and the OS that was given with the server (Suse Linux). As I followed the guide the suggested to use ReiserFS (I’m more in favor of ext3) and also to use LVM what I really like 🙂

So the box crashed and I had to reinstall, after discussing with the client we had chosen Ubuntu as distro. I had used an Edgy cd to do a live boot and to make sure their data was still okay. (You have to boot live, then apt install lvm2, modprobe dm-mod,vgscan,vgchange and mount your stuff). This worked perfect in Edgy. So I thought let’s reinstall using Edgy, hmm very strange seems you can’t do that. Parted doesn’t see your LVM. After downloading Ubuntu 7.10 and reinstalling LVM in live mode, still no go. Finally after doing the vgscan and vgchange Parted could finally see the LVM partitions and I could start the reinstall. (Maybe I forgot one off the 2 last steps in Edgy, so it could be possible, but if I remember correctly I did try this but wasn’t successfull.)

Does anybody know of distro’s who come with LVM support out of the box? As I installed Suse like this, Suse should have this. Can’t remember if my Fedora had this option.

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Hauppauge 500

My mythtv box died, or better said, it can’t detect my hauppage card anymore :(. I moved it to a new PCI slot but lspci didn’t show anything. My best bet it’s dead.

I’ve been looking around for a hauppage 500 card (the one with the dual tunner). But it seems nobody sells them anymore? Does somebody know a dealer who still sells them, or does hauppauge have a new version out with dual tuner?
I saw they now have some digital cards as well. Maybe interesting to use this in combination with TV vlaanderen ?? Anybody got experience with this ?

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KDE 4 dolphin

As most of you know, KDE 4 got released. Jos Henri pointed to a website helping out installing it on ubuntu. I gave it a go, the screenshots of it looked pretty cool.

The file-explorer reminded me of the finder in Mac and it works the same way. I started it up and it works in my gnome environment, probably I’ll start using this instead of krusader and nautilus. Or at least try it for a while to get a better opinion about it. I really didn’t get why nobody wrote the columns view in nautilus. Maybe in the next version?

I’m also planning on installing the full KDE4 environment on my laptop to see it working with full bling bling 🙂

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Hotmail another bogus MS product

Lately a lot of my friends (who are not It people) send emails to our group of friends. Because they all use msn and hotmail, they sent it to my hotmail account. Because I have hotmail,gmail,jabber,… accounts I use Pidgin (formerly gaim) to do my chatting. This off course works perfectly. But I can’t see how many messages are in my email inbox (hmm, note feature to check if available). So today I quickly wanted to forward my hotmail mails to my own domain. Well really, you should try doing that … Really try it, I mean it!

In your webmail (hotmail live, piece of crap) you have options -> more options. There is an option forward to other email. If you read the comment, forward your email to other hotmail,msn or custom domains. So I inserted my own email address. Receiving the error that it wasn’t valid. So after reading the help, it stated that custom domains are not microsoft domains managed by microsoft (prolly something like you can do with google domain apps).

Hmm, no go. Then I started downloading some opensource tools (thunderbird extension,gotmail script,…) all couldn’t get the mail. Then I even tried getting it using gmail, still no go.

So in the end I have to say, what a piece of crap product is this. Compare this to google, google offers you pop3 imap to gmail, forwarding of emails even sms notification I believe (I only use this for my calendar and its free!!!! 😛 ) The webmail client of gmail is much better than the dog slow windows application. So tell me, if someone is asking you to make a new email address for him. Please consider before you lock yourself in like I did many many years ago. If only I had known 🙁

Any suggestions as how I can fix this ??? (And no I don’t want to delete my hotmail address, a lot of my friends have pictures from their events on it and prolly I can’t log in anymore) I’m even considering setting up a vmware with outlook express with a rule to forward to my imap box :s but thats really a big stupid work around imho. So … ??

Update
Thnx sch3lp (again) 🙂
But I found a feature in pidgin that displays how many messages are in my inbox. It works for Gmail and hotmail, you just got to love those developers 🙂

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Asterisk problems

A couple of months ago I upgraded my trixbox to 2.2. I now had the problem that when I called out or someone called in, as soon as the other party answered the call was disconnected. While tracing asterisk with the -gccc option I didn’t find any trace of errors. Today I finally got 10 minutes to spare and got reminded that this feature wasn’t working.

After tracing with -gcc and also the asterisk system log file I got this error message :


Unable to find a codec translation path from g729 to ulaw

After googling it , I was reminded that g729 was actually not installed by default and that you needed to purchase it. So in my config I removed that codecs from my allowed entries. After testing it a couple of times it now seems to work again. So back to happy asterisking 🙂

Reason why I got reminded was that a friend asked what this new Oracle product was, he said it was something like Asterisk. So after checking it out, it seems to be more like a full Communication Server (like the Windows product). But then again, there is probably also an Asterisk version where you can have video conferencing,… (the integration with SugarCRM is already available …)

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Wii multitouch

When I was checking my rss feeds, I came across the following post. This is really amazing. I’ve seen some cool things that people did with the Nintendo wii, but this beats everything. Everyone who is a bit of a technology freak should really see this.

Now I’m really sure I’m gonna buy a Nintendo wii. Maybe schools should investigate this as well as it probably is much cheaper than those smart boards.

Update
Thnx sch3lp
seems my link is timing he supplied me with the youtube vide over here

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32bits with 8 gig RAM

I was installing a new server with 8 gig RAM. (I’ll be using it as a vm box) After installation I did free and noticed that only 3.3 gig of physical RAM was found, hmm very strange. After talking to Bert he gave me a nice command I never heared off (dmidecode) . This gives you all kinds of hardware information. I was always using cat /proc/meminfo and free for my memory.

dmidecode displayed 2 x 2 gig. Hmm even odd, checked the invoice but it said 2 x 4 gig. They told me that it could be because I installed a 32 bit Linux. But I remembered reading in the Kernel book that Linux 32 bit could handle more. They had built something called HIGHMEM. But it seems that either the PAE or the HIGHMEM feature aren’t enabled by default. So after a reinstalling my box with a 64 bit Linux everything works fine.

Learned something again : if your box has more than 4 gig of memory, just choose 64 bit otherwise it’ll probably be wasted.

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Silverlight session

A while ago, I went to a Silverlight session. For those who don’t know, Silverlight is a new product from Microsoft. You can compare it with Flash, difference is that the new version let’s you write your code in dotnet 🙂

As they explained it, they told us the Silverlight runtime actually downloads the managed dll (assembly) and runs it. My first impression that I also tried to explain was that in a corporate environment, many firewalls will block exe,dll,… files. So how where they gonna solve this. I got the feeling nobody actually found this important. Am i the only one who finds it strange that my browser will try to download an run dll files ??? If I were Microsoft I would at least rename the extension to sli or something. Maybe you can do this yourself, haven’t looked into detail in the software.

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Fedora 8

I just upgraded my Fedora 7 to Fedora 8. I didn’t notice to much difference. Okay the login screen looks much better 🙂

However I did install Compiz-fusion. This is really amazing, MS and Apple still have a lot of catching up todo if you look at this. I followed the tutorial on the Howto site but I still have to run Compizmanager as a separate process. I really like the new features (flatten your desktop, group applications on a virtual plane,…)

My girlfriend is doing here internship at some schools. She demoed Ubuntu and Beryl. The day after she had to bring Ubuntu cd’s for all the kids in here class. My little saleswoman is doing great, don’t you agree?

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Xml Xsl FOP

One of the ‘new’ features that was requested in our app was the forwarding of screens to email addresses. We discussed this and adding a simple pdf version of the screen as attachment to the mail was ok.
As at the moment our application isn’t xml based (just Html with custom Javascript,Dojo and DWR) I suggested to first ‘xmlize’ our messages and then convert this xml to a pdf. At previous customers I used Velocity for performing the Xml serialization. But before I suggested this solution I read up on Groovy as I had read somewhere that it has first class support for Xml. And indeed after checking it out. You have a simple MarkupBuilder object that handles a lot for you.


import groovy.xml.MarkupBuilder

def writer = new StringWriter()
def xml = new MarkupBuilder(writer)

xml.Blog(id:"${blog.id}",type:"${blog.type}"){
Content("${blog.content}"){}
}

output = writer.toString()

This small piece of code will generate the following Xml:



Just some content

As I installed the Groovy plugin in Eclipse I get errors when my Xml is false. Not bad at all.
The really nice thing about this is that you just initialize your Groovy engine in Java. You add your Java object (in my example blog) and you can use it as if it was a Groovy object. Then I return the output to my Java code.

Sweet!

As this generates Xml I used a simple Xsl stylesheet to generate an intermediate Xml. So all objects get transformed into this intermediate Xml. This xml gets transformed in to FOP xml and with the nice Apache FOP library I generate a simple pdf.

Another added value is that for changing my pdf or Xml I don’t have to restart my application, so no downtime!!