I switched from comcast to verizon DSL recently ($15/month with one-year contract). I was expecting to deal with PPPoE on my OpenBSD based router. I did a whole lot of research and found out that kernel PPPoE support is not very stable in 3.7 (the version my box was running). So I even installed OpenBSD 4.0 on an old box and tried to make a distribution on the Soekris box.

 However, after struggling for a whole afternoon, I figured out that DSL is not using PPPoE! I didn’t have to do any change to my box. What I have is a Westell 6100 box, it’s a DSL modem combined with a router. All you need to do is disable the router (set it to bridge mode) and plugin your own router. Make sure you release the DHCP lease before doing that.

Source: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-August/017404.html

Quote:

The Intel Open Source Technology Center graphics team is pleased to announce
the immediate availability of free software drivers for the Intel® 965
Express Chipset family graphics controller. These drivers include support
for 2D and 3D graphics features for the newest generation Intel graphics
architecture. The project Web site is http://IntelLinuxGraphics.org.

AMD, what are you goona do? LOL

I took the job of developing project ideas for cs411, which is basically a Linux kernal hacking class. Currently what I have come up with is a tar file system. The implementation would take a tar file and make a file system out of it. I am currently thinking about have three steps toward the final program.

In step 1, we would get familiar with VHS interfaces and data structures. It’s probably a good idea to implement a very simple filesystem, say, containing only one file and its name and content are hard coded.

In step 2, we would try to hack a little on tar file format (which should be pretty straight-forward) and make a read-only tar filesystem.

In the final step, we would try to make it writeable as well. This might be too complicated since tar is intended to be linearly accessed rather than randomly accessed.

Since I want to share /home between OS X and Linux, I chose to use HFS+ as the filesystem. Kernel 2.6 supports HFS, although journaling is not supported yet. I’ve been using it for quite a while and it looks generally OK. Apple has the system utilities and they can be used on Linux with patches from gentoo. Here is a nice howto from gentoo (I almost miss gentoo now :))

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_hfsplus

If you are like me who cannot live without anti-aliasing and is an emacs user, this is what you want. Here is the screenshot.

I tried to make a a debian package and here it is. It’s based on the CVS code of April 24th, 2006. The reported version is 22.0.50. I never made a debian package before. But it works on my machine. Let me know if you have problems with it.

I built the package on a Ubuntu breezy/dapper machine, gcc 4.0.

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs cd emacs cvs up -Pd -r XFT_JHD_BRANCH ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-gtk --with-xft --with-jpeg --with-png --with-tiff make bootstrap && make && sudo make install

我的平台是Ubuntu Linux dapper, Gnome 2.14。其他基于Debian的平台应该类似。

• 字体 我用方正GBK字体包带的方正细黑字体，个人感觉比SimSun好，笔画清楚。把字体拷到~/.fonts目录下，运行fc-cache。如果必要重启X11。
• 输入法 SCIM和FCITX都是很好的选择。如果用SCIM，需要装scim, scim-chinese和scim-gtk2-immodule包，设置如下环境变量：

  export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM export GTK_IM_MODULE="scim"

  目前（2006年4月）scim似乎和acroread有冲突。如果是这样的情况，可以用fcitx，设置如下变量，并手动启动fcitx:

  export XIM=fcitx export XIM_PROGRAM=fcitx export GTK_IM_MODULE=fcitx export XMODIFIERS="@im=fcitx" export LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.GBK" /usr/bin/fcitx

  我一般把这些设置放在~/.xsession，手工启动gnome-session，在gdm里面选择System Default Session。

• Samba 我的文件服务器是一台Debian，运行Samba（版本：3.0.14a-3sarge1）。smb.conf中编码设置：

  dos charset = UTF-8    unix charset = UTF-8

  Windows和Mac OS X客户端对中文文件名显示都没有问题。Linux端mount选项：

  iocharset=utf8,codepage=utf8

截屏

Finally I found a xft branch of emacs. I just can’t bear with X core fonts without antialias any more. Just check out the branch from cvs and build. It runs without a problem on Debian and Ubuntu:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
cvs up -Pd -r XFT_JHD_BRANCH

SSH is not designed for running in a chrooted environment. There is a patch to OpenSSH, which can be found here . It can chroot based on the user’s home directory (looking for a “.” and chroot to the directory prior to the “.”). This is a very nice trick. However I decided to do my own hack, because I do not want to mess with my already running sshd. In case I screw up, I will be locked out of the headless server. The main difference between my approach and chrootssh is that I have the whole sshd running in a chrooted environment. Instead, chrootssh is on a per user base.
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I looked into MPD and decided that it is not exactly what I am looking for. I am expecting something better integrated with mt-daapd. It’s now tempting to write one myself. The basic idea is having a daemon running background. The daemon can make use of gstreamer to play the music. The web server is used to communicate with the client. The client requests a song list (as well as a list of playlists, I guess) and present them in a browser. When a song is clicked on, it sends a command to the server and the http server controls the daemon. I dug into mt-daapd source code a little bit and found out that it is actually running one webserver for both administration task and daapd. The server determines which handler to use based on the URL. One can easily add another handler for controlling the playing daemon. Now I just need to arm myself with some knowledge in gstreamer and daap. I found a good spec about daap on the web. Not sure how much changes since iTunes 4.01, but it’d be a good start.

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I am now running mt-daapd on a headless Debian box as a iTunes server. I just thought it’d be great to have a web interface that controls the box to play those mp3 files on the local machine and output the audio to the nearby TV. I am not sure if there is something similar already there. But if not, it’d be fun to fix something like this up. What is needed is to analyze the database of mt-daapd to get the list of audio files and a backend for playing the audio files. The backend probbaly can make use of gstreamer. I should check it out.

Update:

I dug a bit on freshmeat and came up with something (look what open source has brought us!). One that looks exactly like what I am hunting for is called MPD . Time to check it out. There is also this article I should go through. This is all getting interesting.