Fedora Core 5

Here’s a list of things that I’d like to make work on my Katana+Odachi box:

• Sound recording. Audio output is perfect, but the input is deaf.
• Suspend to hard disk. (A.k.a. “hibernation”.) To my surprise, the “Suspend” button I click when I hit “Shut down” from the main menu in Gnome actually suspends to the hard disk. When I turn the computer back on, it detects the saved memory, but always fails to resume.
• xawtv. It segfaults on startup. I like that little tool, especially to preview the point-of-view of my Web cam.
• No more freezing. I’m not sure if it’s because of my motherboard, the four hard drives, or anything else. I believe it’s caused by the prolongated use of the Web cam.
• Forced disk check. This is an annoying feature that I want to disable. The computer freezes when you were in the middle of something, you want the computer to be back on its feet right away. But no, Init kicks in and it seems you have mounted 23 times a partition with dozens of gigs, so it will force a disk check. It takes forever, and you’re annoyed… That features needs to be turned off!
• “Enabling swap disk space.” If my system crashes and I need to restart the computer, the start-up process hangs there. But if I restart the computer once again, it goes just fine.

A stupid thing I found is that v4lctl, part of the xawtv package, requires X libraries to be compiled, and usually requires an active X display to run.

But just specifying the DISPLAY variable to null will make v4lctl work without an X Window server.

DISPLAY= v4lctl

I had little problem merging Katana (Linux box) and Odachi (Windows box) together. I now have a fully function Linux-Windows hybrid computer. I normally boot from Linux. And if I want to boot with Windows, either physically or from a virtual machine, I can.

Making Windows XP capable of booting from the physical BIOS and VMWare was slightly tricky. I remember trying to do so before and failed. I kept getting a blue screen when starting up Windows from within VMWare, with the error 0x7B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. The solution was simply to boot physically in Windows, create a copy of the current hardware profile, and change the driver of the 3rd-party IDE controller to the generic one. I renamed the profile copy to “Physical” and the one I modified to “Virtual”. Now, it works like a charm!

For the sound in Linux, I had a little bit difficulty making ALSA work for non-ALSA software, including VMWare. (My friend NoMez has the same problem.) But I’ve found something that fixes that. All I needed to do what to create the file ~/.asoundrc with the following:

pcm.!dsp {
  type plug
  slave.pcm "dmixer"
}

Although, that seems to have made another problem. With that, I seem to be unable to record any audio, so Skype and my home-made VCR script don’t work as expected. (I can hear friends in Skype, but people can’t hear me. And video recorded by my script has no audio.)

“To each solution, there’s a problem,” I always say.

However, I did manage to still use my SB Live! sound card instead of the crappy on-board sound. The motherboard I have now is the worst I’ve ever used with its weak audio output and non-working Ethernet port. I now have the following in my five PCI slots:

• Sound Blaster Live! sound card
• D-Link wireless card
• Realtek chipset Ethernet card
• 3-port FireWire card
• ATI TV Wonder (BT878 chipset) TV tuner and capture card

I also have a good nVidia video card in the AGP slot, and I found a great RPM repository at www.livna.org with wonderful kernel modules and X drivers for the card. The 3D acceleration is always fun to have, even if I’m not a hardcore gamer.

Compiling my favourite SNES emulator, ZSNES, was also a problem. But that’s because there was actually a bug in the source code. A fixed version is linked in a ZSNES forum page. (Direct download.)

I decided to rename my computer to K.O.(Katana+Odachi), since it’s like the initials of a good friend of mine…

The following pages were recently useful for me:

• Alsa HOWTO: I discovered aumix was no longer available. I now use amixer instead.
• xawtv 3.88 RPM: I need v4lctl part of xawtv. It was not installed and I couldn’t find any xawtv RPM files in any repositories I use, including some third-parties. I couldn’t compile it on my box, so I searched and found this RPM which seems to be working fine in Fedora Core 5!

If you export your mail in Outlook, contained in a PST file, to an IMAP server, you’ll notice that most of the e-mails will have a winmail.dat file, of the ms-tnef MIME type, attached to each of them. That file contains the attachements of the e-mails, such as pictures or documents. To access them, I’ve found a page telling you how to make it work in Mozilla Thunderbird, and which program does the whole work.

• TNEF
• Accessing winmail.dat attachments from Mozilla on Linux

(I just did yum -y install tnef, and I got it.)