Julien Valroff's weblog and personal homepage
Posts tagged Geek
Sound output broken on my Dell Inspiron
Mar 3rd
I have recently noticed that the sound output of my (nearly) 3 months-old Dell Inspiron 1300 is broken. I am pretty sure it is something like a bad contact.
As I use this laptop mainly as a media box, I cannot leave it in this state.
I thus wrote to Dell Support team on Thursday evening, less than 5 days before the end of the 90 days warranty. They called me back yesterday morning to confirm they have received my request, and I received an e-mail yesterday afternoon asking me to do some further tests.
I think I will have to sent the laptop back and wait for ages until it comes back. As it obviously runs Debian, I will also have to set up the original system back on it, which will oblige me to re-install the whole system after repair.
Cheap is not always good.
New tiny project: webradios
Feb 25th
I have recently configured a laptop to act as a media box.
We use pytone to stream all our music files (ogg/mp3), but couldn’t find any small command-line application able to play radio streams, with an easy-to-use and intuitive interface. The challenge is that the laptop doesn’t run any X server.
I have thus begun writing a script (called webradios, at least temporarily), which uses (X)dialog. It simply displays a list of pre-defined audio streams, and acts purely as a front-end for mplayer. At the moment, nothing very exciting but it already does its job!
Time when I switched to GNU/Linux
Jan 19th
I cannot remember when I exactly decided to switched to GNU/Linux.
I know I had made my first steps in the Free World with Mandrake (now Mandriva) in 2000/2001, then have used Red Hat (before the split Red Hat/Fedora), and moved to Debian something around beginning of the year 2002.
I then used IPCop to build a firewall, and decided to set up a home server for mail and web hosting later the same year. The “internet wayback machine” goes back to June 2003 for the first site I had published to document my experiences with GNU/Linux (note the irony: I used a @hotmail.com e-mail address at that time).
Given the archives of my mailbox, I think I have really and definitively switched my desktop machine to Debian GNU/Linux in the middle of the year 2003, when my gf accepted to give up her favourite cards games.
So funny to try and remember such things 
Upgraded to kernel 2.6.19.2
Jan 13th
Following to the release of Grsecurity 2.1.10 I have upgraded my servers to kernel 2.6.19.2, which made me aware that the ov511-source package failed to build with this kernel (see bug report), as well as ltmodem-source, for which I uploaded an updated package.
Bluetooth™ on Debian
Jan 10th
I have purchased a cheap Sitecom Bluetooth™ USB-adapter (€15 in my nearest but not preferred merchant). It works perfectly on Linux. I will surely write an article on the steps needed to make it communicate with a bluetooth™-enabled mobile phone under the GNOME environment. I am just waiting to solve a small issue with gnome-bluetooth which does not detect the phone automatically.
By the way, gnome-bluetooth Debian packages and related librairies have been made available from my repository for a few weeks now.
How to simply share files?! #3
Dec 23rd
It seems that Josselin Mouette managed to fix bugzilla #327249!
I am now able to have a shared public folder, using Posix ACLs. However, there is a major limitation which I haven’t paid attention to before: neither cp nor mv do respect default ACL set on the parent directory.
I have opened a bug in the BTS against coreutils, as I am pretty sure this is not the correct behaviour.
hestia is now part of the kirya.net internal network
Dec 13th
I received yesterday my new Dell Inspiron 1300 which is already running Debian Etch (I could not accept Windows EULA). I have chosen hestia for its name.
Setting it up was really problem-free, although I havent tried to install GNOME and the like. I haven’t tested anything except the wireless NIC with WPA2 (works like a charm thanks to bcm43xx-fwcutter and wpasupplicant, just needed to add [code]wpa-ap-scan 2[/code] to my /etc/network/interfaces file to deal with my hidden SSID.
I will thus be able to use this new laptop as an internal server, ie. not accessible from the outside world, It will host an LDAP directory for my contacts, and other things to be thought of (not yet decided). I wanted a wifi-enabed laptop to be able to set it up anywhere in my flat, the battery will be enough in case of power outage.
However, I was quite surprised by the old-looking box of the laptop. It looks a bit like my 6 or 7 years old Compaq Armada e500! The 14.1″ screen is also very small compared to the surface of the case. I wouldn’t recommend this laptop for every-day use, except if you can’t afford to pay an extra 50€ or 100€ for an Acer or Toshiba.
Note that I won’t write any article on setting up GNU/Linux on this laptop, as complete reports can be easily found.
New laptop
Dec 6th
I have finally chosen to purchase a Dell laptop.
A cheap Inspiron 1300 which should do the job I would like it to do.
Transport costs were free and the RAM was doubled to 512Mo for €1. Total cost: €499. Not that bad, isn’t it?
According to the various Linux installation reports I could read, Linux should be supported at almost 100%. The only thing that could trigger me is the internal dial-up modem, a Conexant HSF the Linux drivers of which are not free (both free as in free beer and free speach).
This will be my first experience with a Dell computer.
Recent Comments