Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

It is nice to see that this well tested filesystem technology has been made available under the GPLv2 and may have another life with Linux.

Press Release HP Contributes Source Code to Open Source Community to Advance Adoption of Linux and the AdvFS site on SourceForge.

Last night I gave my much delayed talk about MySQL at the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group.

BTW, next time you are in downtown Nashua, stop by Martha’s Exchange and have a Cherry beer with the Jambalaya — spicy but delicious!

Last month I ordered an hp 2133 mini-note with pre-installed Linux, specifically Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and it was back ordered until last week.

Here are the obligatory unboxing photos.

Man it is tiny, but after a few hours of getting use to it, it isn’t *too* small for typing. I’m getting to like the button under the space bar that disables the touchpad for when you are doing extended typing.

See the rest of the photos here:
HP 2133 mininote unboxing

I’ll be blogging more about this nice hardware as I explore it — hw specs, restore CDs, installing Ubuntu/Hardy and Fedora 9, and any little hints along the way.

Full Disclosure: While I do work for HP, it is not in any PC/notebook related area, although I do use Linux (RHEL4, OEL) on ProLiant servers on a daily basis. Also this a personal purchase for home use. I didn’t even get an employee discount!

First purchase a USB cable that works with the Samsung Flipshot U900 — I ordered one from 3GCables.com for $8.95 (and $6.95 s/h)

The default setting for the phone was to ask how it should present itself when connected via USB. The options are “Ask on Plug”, “Copy To/From Card”, “Sync Music” or “Modem”
Since I’m always going to use it like a usb-storage device, I changed it to always use “Copy To/From Card”.

• 5. Settings & Tools
• 8. USB Auto Detection
• Change to “Copy From/To Card’.

Now you can copy files to /media/disk. My top level directory looks like this:


$ ls /media/disk/
my_files my_flix my_music my_pix my_sounds


I recently received an updated laptop at work — a nice hp nc6400 notebook. Unlike the previous nc6000, this new on does not include a serial port which is problematic for the Garmin to serial cable I have. I ordered from CompUSA a USB to Serial Adapter by CablesToGo (model 26886) and it works great out of the box on Ubuntu/Feisty.

All I needed to change is the serial port to use, so:

gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyS0 -o kml,points=0,line_color=ff0000ff -F waypoints.kml
gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyS0 -o gpx -F waypoints.gpx

becomes:

gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o kml,points=0,line_color=ff0000ff -F waypoints.kml
gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o gpx -F waypoints.gpx

FWIW, it uses the pl2303 kernel module.

A while back some radio station website or somewhere had a video in WMV of KT Tunstall performing Black Horse and the Cherry Tree and I wanted the music for a plane ride today.

Usually I’d use vsound, I’ve been able do save the audio track of a video in realplayer, but for some reason it wasn’t working for gxine.

Anthony Barker’s blog had the concise steps needed to use mplayer to grab the sound.


mplayer -dumpfile outfile.dat -dumpstream some-video.wmv

rm outfile.dat


The instructions How to Build F-Spot from HEAD are mostly correct for Ubuntu/Edgy and Ubuntu/Feisty, but leave out a number of packages that need to be installed before autogen.sh is run.

Be sure to also install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install mono-devel \
libglib2.0-dev libmono-dev libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil \
libexif-dev libgnomeui-dev liblcms1-dev libgphoto2-2-dev \
libusb-dev

And instead of make install, use make -k install since it will attempt to run scrollkeeper which attempts to update /var/lib/scrollkeeper/scrollkeeper_docs.

The offending line is: scrollkeeper-update -p /var/lib/scrollkeeper -o /home/marc/unstable/f-spot/share/omf/f-spot


$ sudo sshfs marc@192.168.1.200:/home/marc -o allow_other /media/homeserver/home/marc
Password:
$ df -h /media/homeserver/home/marc/
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
sshfs#marc@192.168.1.200:/home/marc
7.5T 0 7.5T 0% /media/homeserver/home/marc
$


I recently recorded an event using my little Creative MuVo TX FM mp3 player. It created a 22M WAV file of reasonable quality, but lame and audacity had problems converting it to an MP3 file.

The work around is to open the original wav file with audacity and then File->Export as WAV. The resulting wav file is about four times as large, but is in a usable format. From there use your favorite tools to create an OGG or MP3 file.

It appears the problem has to do with the way the MuVo encodes the wav:



VOC001-original.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, IMA ADPCM, mono 8000 Hz
VOC001-clean.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 8000 Hz



My wife had an unused Logitech Stereo USB Headset 250 kicking around the house that I took into the office today. Joy of joys! Ubuntu/Dapper recognized it and both the headset *and* microphone work out of the box.

Just like Microsoft Windows ;-)