Tech Tok

HandBrake is Free Software for ripping DVDs on a Mac.

Cool!

Rogers HDTV PVR hits the streets of Toronto: http://www.shoprogers.com/store/cable/digitaltvpurchase/HDTV_ONpricing.asp?

From /.: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt It was a good read. Unfortuntely, I think that may be the last such talk Corey can give. His speech is about to be criminalized: http://news.com.com/Antipiracy+bill+targets+technology/2100-1028_3-5238140.html

From /.: http://www.pdabuyersguide.com/notebooks/sony_vaio_U50.htm Also, AMD to go dual core in latter 1/2 of 2005: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~86455,00.html

AMD just added another 10% to the Athlon 64. A 3800+ now exists: http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=65000304 I don’t like spending a lot of money on upgrades, so I don’t personally recommend the high-end chips. I’m a $200 chip kind of a guy.

I really like the SONY Vaio notebook as well: http://www.sonystyle.ca/commerce/servlet/ProductDetailDisplay? storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&langId=-1&productId=173677

…but I’m waiting for the AMD Athlon Mobile 64 to get incorporated into more laptops: http://www.amdboard.com/athlon_64_notebook.html I wonder why it’s taking them so long to make a notebook with a DVI port like Apple has.

Also, if you want to keep a low-profile with a camera, here’s a great one, the SONY DSCT1: http://www.sonystyle.ca/commerce/servlet/ProductDetailDisplay? storeId=10001&langId=-1&catalogId=10001 &productId=170166&navigationPath=32090n47385

Do look at Canon products too, though: http://www.canon.ca/english/index-products.asp?lng=en&gid=2&sgid=23

FYI, most of my equipment is Nikon. I don’t like the fact that SONY uses “memory sticks”, but that wouldn’t stop me from giving serious consideration to the DSCT1. It’s hard to keep a low profile with a Nikon camera. Fortunately, in Canada you don’t need to.

–Jeff K.

Last night I downloaded the ISO DVD image for Fedora Core 2, which was really nice, since it meant I didn’t have to burn like 5 CDs or something. It was nice to use BitTorrent to download the 4 Gig image all in one night (I have no bandwidth cap from 2am-10am).

I burned the image to DVD on my Mac, and then slapped the DVD into the Media Box (which I named “Media” during all installs) and did an install.

It was the first of three I did tonight.

The first install seemed to go swimmingly, but when it was all done and the machine rebooted, it hung after spitting out the text “GRUB”. Now, “grub” is the default boot loader for Fedora Core 2, so I realized that I had a problem, possibly because i was trying to be fancy and include my already-existing old disk as an optional boot.

Now at this point I should mention that I have two hard disks in Media, each of which is 160 Gig. One is Serial ATA (SATA, new-fangled, fast tech), while the other is old-school parallel ATA (PATA). They are from the same manufacturer, and in fact their model numbers only differ by an “S” at the end for the SATA drive. The model #, for the morbidly curious, is “ST3160023A” (and “ST3160023AS” for the SATA, obviously).

I’ve been having problems with the SATA drive because the 2.4 Linux kernel didn’t support my SATA chipset — “Silicon Image 3112″ — which meant performance on my SATA drive was ultra-crappy. I went and got the second drive because of this, in fact. Now, when Fedora Core 2 was announced, it was not only going to have the new, fast, cool and in other ways spiffy 2.6 kernel, but it was also going to have the SiI3112 SATA driver built-in. W00t! So you can imagine that I was really looking forward to the upgrade.

I was surprised to learn that in fact, Fedora Core 2 was released back on May 18th! Ah well, I guess I waited a few extra weeks.

Well, back to the install. So when I couldn’t boot, I thought that maybe the problem was that the BIOS was set to boot off the PATA drive, and not the SATA drive. Well, changing that BIOS setting could really confuse the boot setup for Fedora, so I thought a re-install was in order. Especially since it was so easy to install!

Now, about some shortcomings in the installer… When the installer starts up, it asks to test the disc media from which you are installing. This is a good idea, and is also used in Apple’s recent installers. So I let it check out my DVD and make sure all is good. After about 10 minutes, it spits out my DVD and says “put in the next CD”. Well, I would think that: (a) it should notice that I am using the DVD, and (b) most people will only have the one disc, and (c) it should only spit out the disc when you click on “Test another disc”!

Shortcoming number two has to do with package selection. Following the advice of someone who wrote up their Fedora install (sorry, no link), I selected my packages manually rather than just saying “Everything”. The defaults for the package groups were not all that great. I would say that about half the groups needed no change, but the other half definitely were missing key components. I had to manually add things like postfix, mailman, squirrelmail, mysql, and ruby.

Well, after the second install I got an error that ended with:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet

Error 15: File not found

Press any key to continue

Now, as it turned out, the key bit there was “root=LABEL=/”, because it was supposed to say something like “root=/some/path LABEL=/”. Well, the long and short of it was that I had to manually edit my grub.conf file to have a fixed “root”, and also have the root defained as “root (hd0,0)” instead of using “hd1″.

Now that I had a successfully booting Fedora Core 2 system, I had to get MythTV installed. The easiest way to do this is to follow the instructions about using atrpms. I did that, but got more errors concerning a conflict between qt and redhat-artwork, of all things. So I have posted about it to the atrpms-users mailing list. I’ll let you know how it works out!