[...]

A warning: I don’t know what I am doing and this may brick your laptop. So proceed at your own risk.

I noticed that my Dell E4300 was behaving a bit strangely when it came to managing the speed of the CPU. Sometimes it would limit it to 800Hz for an extended period of time and obviously that made it kind of a pain to use. So I thought that maybe the issue had been fixed in a BIOS update (there have been 11 BIOS updates since the one I have on the laptop now) and here’s how I installed it using Fedora 17.

First we need the Dell firmware tools

[maxx@siamese ~]$ sudo yum install firmware-addon-dell

Then we need to figure out what BIOS version we are running

[maxx@siamese ~]$ sudo inventory_firmware

Wait while we inventory system:
 System inventory:
 System BIOS for Latitude E4300 = A13

Then go to Dell’s “Drivers & Downloads” page and look for updates for E4300 BIOS. I found A24 and downloaded the E4300A24.exe file.

Now to run that .exe file and extract the BIOS update we need to install wine:

[maxx@siamese ~]$ sudo yum install wine
[maxx@siamese ~]$ wine E4300A24.EXE  -writehdrfile

This should give you with a file called E4300A24.hdr.

Update the BIOS:

[maxx@siamese ~]$ sudo dellBiosUpdate -u -f E4300A24.hdr

And finally reboot. Upon booting the machine you should see a message about updating the BIOS.

When you are back at a shell check that the BIOS version is right:

[maxx@siamese ~]$ sudo inventory_firmware

Wait while we inventory system:
 System inventory:
 System BIOS for Latitude E4300 = A24

And that’s it.

Recently I changed from using Secrets on my Android phone to using KeePassDroid for storing my passwords. The point of this change was that KeePass is also available for Linux (called KeePassX) and I can now sync my passwords between my desktop and my phone using Dropbox.

However I had to migrate my passwords from Secrets to KeePassX. Luckily Secrets can export to CSV and KeePassX can import XML. So Python to the rescue.

Here is the small Python program I made in case anyone on the Internet should be interested (does anyone know of a nice code syntax highlighter plugin for wordpress?):

import csv
from xml.dom.minidom import Document

doc = Document()
db = doc.createElement("database")
doc.appendChild(db)

group = doc.createElement("group")
db.appendChild(group)

gtitle = doc.createElement("title")
gtitle.appendChild(doc.createTextNode("Imported from Secrets"))
group.appendChild(gtitle)


row_reader = csv.reader(open("secrets.csv", "rb"))
row_reader.next() # skip the header
for row in row_reader:
 e = doc.createElement("entry")
 group.appendChild(e)

 # "Description","Id","PIN","Email","Notes"
 # to
 # <title></title>
 # <username></username>
 # <password></password>
 # <comment></comment>

 etitle = doc.createElement("title")
 e.appendChild(etitle)
 etitle.appendChild(doc.createTextNode(row[0]))

 euser = doc.createElement("username")
 e.appendChild(euser)
 euser.appendChild(doc.createTextNode(row[1]))

 epass = doc.createElement("password")
 e.appendChild(epass)
 epass.appendChild(doc.createTextNode(row[2]))

 ecomment = doc.createElement("comment")
 e.appendChild(ecomment)
 ecomment.appendChild(doc.createTextNode(row[4]))
 

xml_out = open("converted.xml", "w")
s = doc.toxml()
xml_out.write(s)
xml_out.close()

Using the Fedora alternatives system to make Sun’s (Oracle’s) Java the system default after installation.

sudo alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_20/bin/java 2
sudo alternatives --config java

I recently upgraded Fedora Branched (aka. soon-to-be Fedora 13), and I did a clean install to redo some partitioning. After that I naturally had to roll in my homedir from the backup.

All went smooth, however selinux started giving me this warning on login:

SELinux is preventing /usr/libexec/gdm-session-worker "write" access on .xsession-errors.

Looking into it I found out that my homedir had the wrong selinux type – most likely because I restored the entire homedir as a subdirectory under a temporary user directory and then moved it to /home.

Anyway the solution was to run

chcon -t user_home_dir_t /home/maxx

and the warning went away.

Fedora 12 is now released. Get it now. While it is downloading read the short release notes – or if your download is slow go read the full announcement.

It seems I am destined to have trouble syncing my Palm Pilot. On the plus side I figured out a great deal more about udev than I ever thought I needed to know.

The problem was that with Fedora 12 I was no longer able to sync with my Palm Pilot using J-Pilot (and I wasn’t able to get any connection at all using pilot-xfer -l -p usb:). The bug report is #529259.

Since I was able to run the command as root I figured it had to be a permission issue. So I set about figuring out how udev works – and I found a really great document about writing udev rules. In particular the parts about udevinfo and udevtest where helpful.

Of course since I now knew a bit about udev I was ready to try writing a rule myself. What I came up with was a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/99-palmpilot.rules with the following content:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{product}=="Palm Handheld",MODE="0666"

And with that I am now able to sync my Palm Pilot again.

Mozilla Labs’ Raindrop seems to be getting a lot of attention these days, so here is a small recipe to get it up and running on Fedora 12. After following these steps make sure the read the official Install page to find out more about configuring Raindrop.

Unfortunately couchdb currently crashes in Fedora 12 Beta – see bug #530904. When that bug is resolved I am almost certain the following steps will work

1. sudo yum install mercurial python-twisted python-twitter couchdb

2. Install python-paisley. As this isn’t currently packaged by Fedora you can download a package I made: python-paisley-0.1-1.fc12.noarch.rpm

3. sudo service couchdb start

4. Add accounts to your $HOME/.raindrop file as specified in Raindrop/Install

5. hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/raindrop

6. cd raindrop/server/python

7. ./run-raindrop.py sync-messages --max-age=5days

8. Open http://localhost:5984/raindrop/inflow/index.html

Have fun.

The daughter is turning six on Thursday so I think it is about time she got her own computer. These days it makes a lot of sense to buy a netbook for the kids since they are relatively cheap, lightweight, and small.

So she will be getting a Compaq Mini 700. A pretty standard 10″ netbook with 80GB harddrive and 1GB RAM.

I have it all up and running Fedora 11 now – I just need to transfer her settings and bookmarks from the wife’s computer. I decided to start her out using Gnome with a one-panel layout on the left hand side of the screen. She is used to it being a the bottom, but on a screen this small you can afford to waste pixels vertically. When Fedora 12 goes gold I will probably play around with Moblin since it is better suited for netbooks.

I faced two problems in getting things to work. First of all the wired network adapter didn’t work. The solution is to specify acpi_os_name=Linux on the kernel line in /etc/grub.conf. Next up was getting the wireless to work. It is a Broadcom chipset, and requires some proprietary bits to work. So enable the rpmfusion repository and install the broadcom-wl and kernel-devel packages. On the next reboot a new kernel module will be compiled and the wireless should work.

Now I just need to develop a small, easy to use media browser so she can watch all her movies that are stored on the media server.

TV/Sound sign by John Kannenberg. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

The title of the post says it all, I guess. An upgrade of the kernel and pulseaudio packages means that I have working sound over HDMI.

Yay!

Now I “just” need to write a file browse plugin for Moovida, and I should be ready to use the new media center.

I have had the Dell Studio Hybrid up and running for some time now, but I haven’t put it into actual use because I am having trouble with the sound. Everything works just fine over S/PDIF, but that requires me to have my surround system turned on. And getting sound over HDMI to work has so far been a dead-end. Combine that with the fact that my TV refuses to use the sound from the mini-jack output (since it can probably sense that sound should be coming over HDMI) and it all adds up to me not having a new media center yet… Bummer. I even tried using the DVI output with a converter instead of HDMI directly, but that didn’t help. So it seems that for the foreseeable future I will have to use the surround system.

I have also gotten the new remote up and running, but hardware-wise I am not entirely please. The buttons that are mainly used with a media center are up/down/left/right, and on the iMON Pad remote they are – well a pad. And that just makes for a rather weird feel and responsiveness. It does have the ability to function as a mouse, though, but I don’t see myself using that.

Since everything is running in parallel with the existing setup I have had to throw in a switch to get network connectivity, and there is also an S/PDIF converter and the Dell’s power brick in there alongside the Wii – it is getting a bit cramped.

One thing I have found out is that when you have an existing solution that works (even if it does make a lot of noise) it is a slow process to replace it with something new. The main thing that is missing right now is getting all my music, movies, and pictures exposed remotely – and the symlink hell I have going on with the current media center (which will become tv recorder and file server) isn’t helping.

And I have to make a decision about whether to use Freevo (as I currently do) or use Moovida (and develop some code for a few missing features myself).