Ingredients:

1. 2x Green LED’s
2. 2x Red LED’s
3. 1x Switch
4. 1x 9V battery

Yep. It’s my first project, not aiming high at all

1. It’s fun.
2. You get to control your own computer.
3. I get richer by the experience of using Linux.
4. A lot of the Linux-tinkering has made me a more advanced Windows-user as well. (I do benefit from this where I work)

But, there ARE several issues with Linux. Poor commercial support (for instance, Nvidia still need to fix PureVideo support for Linux. Many hardware vendors do not want to write drivers for Linux, etc.). Sound has been an issue for a while, and is not problem free yet, although - ALSA is much better than it used to be, and the amount of applications that use OSS seems to be decreasing. But, with all these issues — why won’t I simply go back to Windows?

I feel like we should focus on why the Linux herd stays in Linux. For me - this is:

1. Support for lots of stuff out of the box (at least true for Debian).
   1. Want to burn an ISO-file? Right click -> Write to Disc (In Windows, you need 3rd party software for this)
   2. You have a bluetooth dongle? It’s plug and play basically. If you want OBEX support in Gnome, you only need to install gnome-vfs-obexftp, and you can browse your mobile devices at once.
   3. Great packaging system. APT; Tons of Software to pick from, I just tell my distro to install it - and it will. I usually don’t need to interact with the installation - it “just works”. This is _HARD_ to beat. Having all kinds of software EASILY accessable, is a huge plus.
      1. Updating the system includes everything installed through the package manager. For most users, their needs are covered by this.
2. It does not cost money. If you do not have a Windows-license, and want to use Windows you have two options:
   1. Purchasing Windows. This costs 250 USD (1300 NOK) in Norway. That is actually a signifigant amount of cash for something you don’t really need.
   2. Being a pirate.
      1. Finding a working, OK, copy of Windows - without being stabbed by the Windows Genuine crap, is quite hard.

As far as I can tell - The world don’t really need Windows. The only reason why it still has such a huge strangle-grip on it’s users is mostly because there are a lot of applications and/or games which are made to only run on Windows. The only Windows-app I run, is World of Warcraft - which happens to work fine in Wine.

Initializing the VPN connection.
Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client
Reason: Failed to establish a VPN connection.
There are no new notification messages at this time.

Looks like a very reasonable error message, does it not? … No - there’s absolutely no information here which helps us debug the problem. HOWEVER! I’ve recognized that the following has helped to avoid the problem:

• Bring down network interfaces which you don’t intend to use. This error has been observed when a wired interface has been up, but without a connection - with wireless on. ifdown eth0 solves the problem in some cases.
• vpnc does not have this error. You should use vpnc because it does not require proprietary modules to work, and it is probably included in your distributions packet management system. In debian - installing vpnc is as simple as running “apt-get install vpnc”. If you have pcf-files for the cisco vpn client which you want to reuse, you can use pcf2vpnc to convert it. Download pcf2vpnc here: http://svn.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/vpnc/trunk/pcf2vpnc

Go to the ivtvfe page!

My Setup

• AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+
• 2GB RAM
• nVidia GeForce 7900 GT (driver 100.14.03)
• Debian testing (Lenny)
• Wine 0.9.44

The games I have tried to make work are the following

• Half-Life 2
• Counter-Strike: Source
• World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (2.2.3)
• Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (1.21)

Steam, Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source

The prerequisites before installing Half-Life 2, is to install Steam. And to install Steam, one needs the gecko-plugin (for web-browsing), and some fonts. In addition to the msttcorefonts-package, you should get tahoma.ttf and put it in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts. This makes additional text readable both in and outside the game later on. You download the steam-installer msi-package from steampowered.com. You start the installer by running: wine msiexec /i <themsifile>. When Steam is installed, and you have the needed fonts, you should be able to log on to Steam and install Half-Life as you usually do. I don’t think it’s necessary to define anything more, as it works as you would expect it to work in Windows. This is what does NOT work:

• There’s an expected performance decrease.
• When you play, you might experience that the sound starts to stagger for some seconds, and the game exits. When this happens, you will have trouble to restart the game. Logging off and on X solves the problem.
• The game sometimes fails to start, “because an application is locking the registry”, restarting X solves the problem.
• Steam is not a stable application in Wine. Browsing the shops and such is not recommended as Steam may hang unexpectedly at any time.
• The community-stuff recently added to Steam does not work well, you’re not able to search for and add friends.

For the casual player, this works, but it’s not awesome. There’s still things you wish were fixed, but some people are willing to live with these flaws. Let’s hope that Valve will create a Linux-port of these games soon!

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (2.2.3)

The prerequisites before installing this game is pretty much not more than having the gecko-plugin installed, and the only real effect it has is that you can read the patch notes when the patching is done. As far as I can tell - the game works quite well. What does not work well is the following:

• When you try to exit the game, it hangs, and you have to kill the processes yourself (with the -9 flag)
  • As a result of this, you have to accept the patch notes every time you start the game. This can be worked around by editing the ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/config.wtf, and add the lines
    • SET readTOS “1″
    • SET readEULA “1″
• There’s a noticable performance decrease compared to running the game natively. This is expected. You can cope with a lot of it by doing some reading on this site: http://wowwiki.com/Linux/Wine
• There’s an error message in the blizzard launcher, making it seem like there’s an error.
• Occasionally in-game, you may experience a hang-situation which makes audio stagger and the PC seems unresponsive for up to 5 seconds. This can be provoced by accessing things outside of the game (other applications and the desktop).

World of Warcraft is totally playable in Wine, and if you’re a casual player - the only reason to not stop running the Windows-version should be the performance decrease, and that your hardware can’t handle it well.

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne

This game works quite well. It installs flawlessly, and it plays quite well. What does not work well is the following:

• Probably a performance decrease, but I can’t notice, the game isn’t brand new, and my hardware handles it quite well.
• Poking around at desktop-items makes everything slow and unresponsive. Multitasking while playing this game is not a good idea - pay attention to the game and you’ll be fine.
• The installer blocks the audio device, so launching the game from the installer makes the game run without sound - exiting the installer and launching the game manually (from the desktop shortcut if you have one) is one way to work around this.

Conclusion

Linux is becoming more gamer-friendly as the market share goes up. More companies are looking at making Linux-ports of their games, and Wine is becoming a more mature product as development goes by. Even though Wine is a product which makes some Windows-titles playable in Linux, we seriously want real Linux-ports of these games most. If EA would port The Sims-series to Linux, it would probably make noticable changes to the market share - including my girlfriend

Here’s some useless screenshots

Before you begin

You need the following before you begin.

• A computer or virtual machine to install on
• A Debian CD. This guide will use the ‘netinst’ image. If you are unsure on which architecture you want to download for, it is probably ‘i386′.

If you chose to use the netinst CD, you need an internet connection. If you don’t use the net-inst CD, you should still be able to install Debian by following this guide - but some steps will probably look different.

The beginning

The first step is to load the CD in the CD-tray, and restart the computer. Make sure that it boots from the CD - you might have to enter the BIOS to change this (this guide does not cover this part at this point, if anyone feel it’s necessary, please request it in the comments). You should be presented with the following image:

Hit “Enter”. At this point you should see some text scroll over your screen, while the Debian Installer is loading. You should be met by a dialog which asks you to ‘Choose language’.

In my experience, English is the most complete translation to date. I’m Norwegian, so I’ve tried to pick Norwegian - but I had to accept that a bunch of my packages were in Danish and Swedish. To me that was more of an annoyance, so I’ve picked English ever since. You should pick what you prefer, but I’m giving you a “heads up”, that all packages might not exist in a language which applies to you. After you’ve picked your prefered language, you’re met with a dialog which asks you where you’re located - and most likely with a suggestion of countries based on your previous choice.

At this point, it’s recommended that you pick the country where you are located. Since I’m Norwegian, and I pick Norway, I will have the correct timezone and network mirrors suggested automatically by Debian Installer - and this will probably save me some trouble later. If you’re not from any of the locations initially suggested, pick “Other”, and browse to the correct location. I pick Other, followed by Norway. Again, another dialog. This time we’re asked what keyboard layout to use.

At this point you should just pick what applies to your keyboard. I pick Norwegian. At this point the Debian Installer starts loading a bunch of components, and trying to configure the network. We assume that the automatic configuration went well, or that you know what network settings you need to make the computer have Internet access.

You are now met with a dialog which asks you to define a hostname for the system. As the dialog says, it is a single word that identifies your system to the network. I’m gonna be very boring, and name mine “debianbox”. In the next dialog box, you are asked to specify a domain name. If you are setting up a private network, you can make something up, but if you own a domain, and intend to use it for your server, it is pretty safe to fill it in now. I’m gonna input “example.org”. You are now met with questions on how you will partition your disks.

If you have an existing Windows-installation on the disk, and want to keep it, you have to pick Manual and do some changes manually. I’m sorry to say that this guide does not cover what to do in this situation yet. If you want to keep your existing OS, you should stop following this guide now. If you have nothing to lose on the disk, and want Linux on this computer - stay with us and pick “Guided - use entire disk”. You are now met with another question - which disk to partition.

As you can see, I only have one disk present - so I don’t have much of a choice. Pick the disk drive you want to install Linux on. Another dialog appears - this time you should decide what “Partitioning scheme” you want.

For most small servers, and workstations, “All files in one partition” is totally OK. Explaining the advantages of choosing a different scheme is not covered by this guide. I pick “All files in one partition”. You are now presented with an overview of your currently configured partitions and mount points. Since we don’t cover why you would want to change any of this, you can safely pick “Finish partitioning and write changes to disk”. You are again presented with another confirmation box which wants you to confirm to write the changes to disk. Pick “Yes”.

You are now asked to pick a root-password. The root-password, is basically the password you use when you want to make administrative changes on your computer. This might be installing new software, or making changes to system services. You should set something safe as a root-password. Input the password, and press enter. You have to do it again, to verify that you typed correct.

You should now create your first non-administrative user. This is the user account which you will log on with remotely. What you fill in is optional, but your full name would make sense. I fill in “Trygve Vea”. Next it asks for a username. I’m gonna take the advice given by the dialog, and use my first name. Again, asked for a password - this time for the new user. You should pick a password which is different from the root-user. The reason is, that if you should have an accident, and someone breach into your system with your non-administrative user - they WILL try to use the same password to authenticate as root. If they succeed, your entire system is compromised. - Setting different passwords will not “stop the bad guys” - but it can limit the damage they can do.

Debian Installer is installing the base system. This takes a little while, depending on the speed of your computer and CD-drive. When the process is over, you are asked if you want to use a network mirror.

If you have a decent Internet connection, you should pick “Yes”. If you’re using the ‘netinst’ CD, you should definitly pick “Yes”. I pick “Yes”. The installer guides you to find a good mirror - I’m gonna pick Norway, but you should try to pick the country you live in, or a country near you. If there’s a mirror in the country you picked, you get a box which asks you which mirror you want to use. I’m gonna pick “ftp.no.debian.org” for me, since that’s my only choice. I am now asked to fill out proxy-information. If you don’t know if you’re behind a proxy or not - then you’re probably not - press enter to continue without filling the info.

The package manager is now gathering information from the mirror you choose. When this is over, you are asked to participate in the package user survey. This is totally optional, and can be changed later. I’m gonna pick “Yes”, but what you choose is irrelevant. You now need to tell the installer what kind of software you want.

If you’re installing this on your workstation, you probably want a “Desktop Environment”. “Standard System” should be checked regardless if it’s a server or a workstation. If it’s a laptop, it’s an advantage to check the “Laptop”-setting, for additional software related to laptops. I’m gonna install a “Standard system” for now.

The installation proceeds. After a short while, you are asked if you would like to install the GRUB boot loader on the master boot record. You usually want that. Pick yes. Again, some short installation procedure will run, and you will be notified that the installation is complete! Press continue, take out the CD, and your system will reboot. If you did not install a Desktop Environment, and get something similar to the image below, you should be OK. If you did install a Desktop Environment, and get a more graphical logon-screen - you should also be OK.

There’s only one thing left - and that’s a slight change of the apt-sources. (Before you continue, if you installed with a Desktop Environment, you want to press CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to the terminal which looks similar to the ones in the pictures). Log on as root (username root), and the password you specified earlier in this guide for your administrative user. Type the following:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

You should now see something which looks similar to this:

This file contains the sources your system will use when looking for software to install and/or update. Since the software on the CD eventually will become outdated (if not already), and you hopefully have an acceptable internet connection - we want to remove the CD from the list. Just erase the lines which contain “cdrom”. When you’ve done this, press CTRL+X, followed by Y, followed by enter. You should now see something similar to this:

Now you should type the following:

apt-get update

When this is done running, your apt-sources is updated, and future package installations will not ask for your to insert your CD. Good luck with your Debian GNU/Linux system. If you need further assistance on how to do certain things, you can always request a guide on the guide-page.

I said poor solution, and I’m gonna stand by the fact that it was poor. It was easy though, and it worked. But because of a recent servercrash, I need to set things up again. This make me want more. I want … RSS… and I want it to be CONTROLLED through the webinterface. This can be done with Azureus! Here’s a quick how-to:

What you need: A server running Linux - my howto covers Debian, but it will probably work in Ubuntu as well - and probably other distros using apt-get.

Install the package “azureus” and “screen” (you need to be root):

# apt-get install azureus screen

Now, if the package installation went well - you want to download the rssfeed, and the azhtmlwebui plugins.

1. rssfeed
2. azhtmlwebui

These plugins are fairly simple to install. Start azureus once (as the user you intend to run azureus as - YOU DON’T WANT TO RUN AZUREUS AS ROOT!) by running

# azureus --ui=console

Type “quit” shortly after it starts, just to let it build up the files it needs in your homedirectory. It’s a simple structure, and you want to put the plugins there. Unpack the zip files with the plugins you downloaded, and put them in /home/youruser/.azureus/plugins/rssfeed/ and /home/youruser/.azureus/plugins/azhtmlwebui.

Now we’re ready to start azureus for the first time with the plugins. Again, run the following as the user - again: don’t be root. I can’t stress this enough.

# azureus --ui=console

Note, at this point you already have a working webinterface. You can access it on its default port 6886. Just use http://ipaddress:6886 in your browser, and you’re in. But you would probably want to add a couple of security features, such as authentication and change the default port. This can be done with the following commands (in the console interface):

set Plugin.azhtmlwebui.User username
set "Plugin.azhtmlwebui.Password Enable" 1
set Plugin.azhtmlwebui.Password yourpassword password
set Plugin.azhtmlwebui.Port 13001

These four commands turned on the authentication mechanism, with the user “username”, and the password “yourpassword”. It also changed the port to 13001. This means that http://serverip:13001 would ask you for a username and password before the interface opens. So now, the service is secured with basic authentication. If you want to be able to upload something through the webinterface, you would also have to run the following:

set General_sDefaultSave_Directory /save/directory
set "Use default data dir" 1

This enabled uploading through the webinterface, and added /save/directory as the default location of new downloads. Now we should have a completely working webinterface. The next thing we need to do is to set up the rssfeed plugin. If you don’t want this, you should just quit azureus (type quit), and do:

# screen -d -m azureus --ui=console

Azureus is now up and running in a screen - if you want to “attach” to the application, you should run

# screen -x

You can detach by typing CTRL+a followed by a press of ‘d’. This is very neat for other purposes too, for example running an IRC-client in a screen - you can just ssh to the box from anywhere and have access to the same IRC-session

Now, back to setting up rssfeed. There’s a catch. This plugin requires to be configured with a GUI. Yes. I’m not kidding. This means that you need to install the client on a workstation with a GUI - I must confess I haven’t tested this on a Windows workstation, but I’ll guess it works just as well. Install the plugin with the internal plugin installer in the application, or use the same procedure as mentioned earlier in this guide. At this point I’m gonna presume that you have the GUI up, with the plugin installed. Let’s continue:

In the Plugins-menu, click “RSSFeed Scanner”. Click the “Options”-tab. Here you can add the various RSS Feed URLs. This should be torrent download URLs. This means that the <guid>-tag should contain the .torrent-file to download. Most torrent sites provide these rss-feeds. Add a RSS-feed by pressing the green + next to the box containing the RSS Feed URLs. Give it a name, type in an URL, a directory is optional. Check for “Enabled”, and click “Save”. At this point, the RSS Feed is added. Now you want to add some filters - “What do I want to get from this feed?”.

Now, click the green + next to the “Filters”-box. Give it a name - a directory is optional here as well. In the filter-field, you can type the name of what you want to download, but instead of spaces I would recommend you to use dots (.). Check “Filter is a Regular Expression”. This means that the dots counts as wildcards - which would mean that the filter “pure.pwnage” would validate both “Pure Pwnage 1×11.torrent” and “pure.pwnage.1×10.lol.torrent”. This is useful if you want to make sure that you get what you’re looking for. I want to set “Set State to” to “Queued”, but that’s your decision. Tell it which feeds it’s gonna use, and change the Type to the appropriate one. RSSFeed has a neat function when it comes to TV Shows. You can tell it to start from season X, and end in season Y. It will make sure that it does not download any duplicates. It’s pretty neat! Check for Enabled, and click “Save”. At this point you should give the filter a test - type in a text in the “Test match” and click “Test” to see if it’s a valid title of something you want to match. If it’s green, and it’s in the feed - it’s going to be downloaded the next time the feed is checked.

OK! If you’ve done everything correct so far, you have a file in your home directory under .azureus/plugins/rssfeed/ named rssfeed.options. Copy this file over to the same directory on the server. Start azureus the way previously mentioned in this guide and everything should work. You now have RSS-support in your headless bittorrent client The catch is the configuration of the RSSFeed plugin - I hope this will improve in later versions of rssfeed or Azureus.

Symptoms: Starting X.ORG does not work. You get the following error in the end of your xorg.0.log:

Fatal server error:
could not open default font 'fixed'

Cause: You have no fonts.alias files with the ‘fixed’ alias defined

I just did a dist-upgrade. What happened, was that the fonts.alias from xfonts-base was missing after the upgrade.

Resolution:

Simply removing and installing the package is not always sufficient. What I suggest you try is the following:

# dpkg --purge x-window-systems-core xorg xfonts-base
# apt-get install xfonts-base

If you’re still experiencing problems - you should check the following:

# find /usr/share/fonts/ -iname 'fonts.alias' -exec grep -H "^fixed " {} \;

If the command does not return any lines of output, the cause is still valid. However, if the output is for instance;

/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/fonts.alias:fixed -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1

You should check that /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/ is included as a font-path in your xorg.conf.

I hope that helps - please feel free to leave a comment

Performing

# rmmod saa7134
# modprobe saa7134 card=65 tuner=54
# modprobe saa7134-alsa

seems to do the trick for my card. Other stuff that might be interesting for you;

LSPCI;

01:05.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7133/SAA7135 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev d1)

KERN.LOG;

Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7130/34: v4l2 driver version 0.2.14 loaded
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: found at 0000:01:05.0, rev: 209, irq: 21, latency: 32, mmio: 0xfdfff000
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: subsystem: 1043:4845, board: V-Stream Studio TV Terminator [card=65,insmod option]
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: board init: gpio is 0
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: input: saa7134 IR (V-Stream Studio TV as /class/input/input6
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: tuner 2-004b: chip found @ 0x96 (saa7133[0])
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: tuner 2-004b: setting tuner address to 61
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: tuner 2-004b: type set to tda8290+75a
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: tuner 2-004b: setting tuner address to 61
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: tuner 2-004b: type set to tda8290+75a
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 00: 43 10 45 48 54 20 1c 00 43 43 a9 1c 55 d2 b2 92
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 10: 00 ff e2 0f ff 20 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 20: 01 40 01 02 03 01 01 03 08 ff 00 88 ff ff ff ff
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 30: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 40: ff 22 00 c2 96 ff 02 30 15 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 50: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 60: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
Jul 28 14:34:02 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 70: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
Jul 28 14:34:05 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: registered device video0 [v4l2]
Jul 28 14:34:05 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: registered device vbi0
Jul 28 14:34:05 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]: registered device radio0
Jul 28 14:34:09 kvisle kernel: saa7134 ALSA driver for DMA sound loaded
Jul 28 14:34:09 kvisle kernel: saa7133[0]/alsa: saa7133[0] at 0xfdfff000 irq 21 registered as card -1

And as a little treat in the end; If you want to play the sound over the PCI bus, instead of using a loopback cable, you can do it with sox (requires you to be tuned in to something with a suitable application);

# sox -t alsa hw:1 -t alsa -w default