My thoughts in e-text

I received my wireless keyboard and mouse! Still waiting for the graphics card. Once that arrives I can start putting things together and start playing games :-). The GPU was shipped but I probably will receive it on Feb 4. Will have to wait and see...

I decided to start working on Freevo 2.0. I compiled and installed evas in a local space with the following commands: ./configure --enable-gl-x11 --prefix=~/workspace/usr/local make make install Now I had to export the lib path using LD_LIBRARY_PATH. I prefer to run everything in a subshell with the proper environment variables set. So I write this small script called setup-subshell (modified it from project pigment's subshell): #!/bin/bash -i # # Set up environment. # PROJECT='newvo' LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/chandanp/workspace/usr/local/lib${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH} export LD_LIBRARY_PATH # Common env vars export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/chandanp/workspace/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH export PYTHONPATH=/home/chandanp/workspace/python/kaa-lib/lib/python2.5/site-packages/:$PYTHONPATH # If we got a command, run it and exit if test ! -z "$1"; then $@ exit $? fi # Set up a prompt helping us remember we're in a subshell tmp=`mktemp -t bashrc.XXXXXX...

I got everything ready. Kubuntu is running well in Q on my macbook pro. However it does not mean anything. The real test is to see if it is really usable. My plan is to start working on Freevo2 on the virtual kubuntu PC. But even before I start working on it the first question is I am not sure if I should be working on writing Freevo 2 from ground up to fit to my needs. Or should I simply use elisa (fluendo) and write a freevo plugin so that I can access all my movies and music that have been prepared for freevo (fxd file et al). I tried elisa. It is really cool I mean the UI and smooth graphics and such. But I was not able to use it to play any content. The problem seems to be with some code in elisa that twisted python does not recognize. Long story short, a ticket was opened in elisa (see https://code.fluendo.com/elisa /trac/ticket/961 ) to resolve the problem. Not sure if is effecting others users. May be it is my Gentoo distro. I will probably give it a try on my kubuntu machine....

Today I received my 1GB memory, the upgrade I require to transform my media center desktop PC into a moderately powerful gaming PC. I am still waiting for the nvidia 8800 GT and the wireless keyboard & mouse to be shipped.

So after a bit of thought I decided not to use Gentoo, because as it is Q is very slow and I did not want to compile all of Gentoo. Instead I decided to go the easy route with kubuntu. All I had to do was to download the image and start a new virtual PC with the install image as the virtual cd. Booting the virtual PC from the CD image launched Kubuntu. So far so good. Installing kubuntu was very easy but slow because of Q. It probably took about an hour until the installation was complete. Now I have linux in Mac. Sweet. Restarting the virtual PC and selecting boot drive to the virtual harddisk boots into the installed kubuntu. It is slow, but still usable. I can live with it. Now to test internet. D'oh. No internet. A ping reveals that even domain is not being resolved. ipconfig reveals that an IP is not assigned to eth0. After tweaking the network settings to make use of dhcp I now have an IP. A ping resolved the domain name, however my browser still says error -- page cannot be...

With my failure to run VirtualBox on Leopard, I decided to go with Q (http://www.kju-app.org/kju/). Here are some notes about my adventures with Q on mac. 1. I downloaded the mac release and the install was a breeze. 2. Created a new Virtual machine. Named it Gentoo, gave it 512MB memory and 10.00GB harddisk and the cd-rom is the gentoo install image. Everything looks good so far. 3. Set to boot from the cd and launched the virtual machine "Gentoo". 4. Wohoo I see linux booting. But it is very slow. 1 CPU on my mac book pro is maxed out but the booting was going very slow. Well I guess that is what you get with an emulator but somehow I remember VirtualBox on linux to be much faster. Anyway continuing further 5. I got my shell prompt. hdparm -tT /dev/hda gives about 80MB/s. Nice! I know I am in a virtual environment. 6. ipconfig gives a virtual ip for eth0. A ping to www.google.com resolves the domain name to an IP but I never get back a response for the ping. Hmm. Am I insid...

...continued from previous post 6. Downloaded the Gentoo image. 7. Selected install from an image in VirtualBox. 8. Click continue. Darn that "App quit unexpectedly" dialog again. 9. Click reload. Again the same error. I had to learn it the hard way. VirtualBox beta release for mac has some known issues with Leopard. I install Leopard over Tiger just a month ago. I did not know I would regret so much. Oh well, I guess I will have to wait until the next release of VirtualBox. I wanted to build VirtualBox from svn, but before I compiled it, I searched on the net to see other's experiences and they were not very positive. I decided to go with other virtual environments until VirtualBox is fixed. Here is a link explaining the problems with Leopard and compiling from svn http://www.macwindows.com/virtualboxbeta.html.

So I have used VirtualBox on my Gentoo machine a few weeks ago. I loved it. Very simple to use. Now I wanted to install Gentoo linux on my macbook pro laptop. I did not want to erase Mac OS, just want Gentoo running along side. I decided to give VirtualBox a try. At the time of writing this blog the VirtualBox download page says that the mac build is in beta for intel macs (http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads), but I decided to try it any way. I am writing this blog as I am trying VirualBox to install Gentoo on my macbook pro. 1. Ok so I downloaded the .dmg and the install was a breeze. 2. I launched the app from the application folder. Oh what is this. I got a message saying that the app exited. A dialog asked me if I wanted to relaunch. Uh? Alright relaunch. Now it works. I got my VirualBox window! 3. Created a new virtual machine for Gentoo. Enter name, allocated 512MB (my macbook pro has 2GB :-) 4. Created a new virtual disk on which to install Gentoo. Allocated 10.00 GB dynam...

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am looking for a wireless keyboard & mouse, a 1GB memory card and a graphics card for $300. After spending several hours frantically searching for various deals I finally came to a conclusion about what I want. However the budget has gone overboard. For the memory, the search was simple. I need a 1GB 800MHz RAM for under $30. I first went to newegg.com as usual and found a deal almost immediately. The link is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820146117. I know the link will not live for ever, so for reference it is a mushkin 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory. It comes with a heat spreader (awesome :-), and a near 5 star rating in newegg.com. The only complain people had was about its large heat spreader which may obstruct another memory when attempting to place beside it in the next DIMM slot. I don't think that will be an issue for me. Let us see. And it has free shipping too! Sweet. The total co...

How hard is it to buy a graphics card for your desktop? Easy right? Hardly! In my previous post I casually mentioned that my Dell E1705's GPU burnt up. I will probably write how that happened in my next post. But for now it suffices to say that I need a GPU fast to continue playing my Need for Speed, Age of Empires and Command and Conquer. I know these are not very demanding games but I still want to buy a powerful graphics card, not for my fried Dell e1705 (the GPU was nvidia Go 7900GS) but for my media center desktop. My desktop has always been used as a media center. It is connected to my music system and LCD TV. It has over 1TB disk space to store my HDTV recordings and ripped movies/music. However since I only planned to use it for playing media, it has a cheap nvidia 6100 GPU (on board). It has 1 GB of RAM which is pretty good for media center needs. But now I need to upgrade it to replace my gaming laptop. My plan is to install a powerful GPU and run games using wine-hq fro...

Isn't it a bit too late to welcome 2008? Well not for me I guess. I just realized I am in a new year. How fast days have moved. I almost remember nothing from the time I last posted till date. I was just too busy with all the things going in my life. Well it is not too late for anything. So we are almost 7% into 2008 and here I am once again blogging. I will try to start blogging a little more often. This is the first time I am blogging from my Google shuttle with it's wifi. Not too bad eh? Usually I spend the 1 hour commute on the shuttle by reading wired or Dr. Dobbs or Electronics for you in the morning shuttle. And spend the evening 1 hour by watching some of the excellent tech talks that happen at Google. Perhaps most of you already know this but a lot of tech talks are recorded. I try to attend any tech talk I can, but mostly I prefer the recoded ones, because I can pause, rewind and resume when I want. Isn't that why TiVo became popular? My plan going forward is to t...