Rabidgremlin's
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So one of my colleagues (thanks Matthew) just sent me this link which is so geeky I just had to blog about it.

Apparently on Friday, February 13th 2009, 23:31:30 GMT the Epoch time count will read “1234567890” for the first (and last time).

For those of you who don’t know what Epoch time is (shame on you) it is basically a count of the number of seconds since 00:00:00 GMT on January 1, 1970. Computer systems use this mechanism for storing time because they handle nice big integer numbers very efficiently.

Of course when 2038 rolls around we are all going to be in trouble because the count of milliseconds will be too big to store in the space that most computer systems allocate for storing this time count!

By then of course we should all be using at least 64bit systems so it shouldn’t be a problem and we won’t Y2K48 problem (he says smirking).

If you are planning a “1234567890” party (you are planning a party right?) then this “countdown” would be ideal to project up onto a wall or show on a big screen :)

As I mentioned in my last post I updated my media PC to Ubuntu 8.04 without any issues. Turns out that was not the case…

Over the weekend I discovered that my sound playback has started to stutter especially with apps like VLC playing back video. After doing some digging it appears to be an issue with PulseAudio which is the new sound engine for Ubuntu.

Apparently it has some buffering issues particularly on older/slow machines.

Luckily it is easy to fix. The following command:

`As I mentioned in my last post I updated my media PC to Ubuntu 8.04 without any issues. Turns out that was not the case…

Over the weekend I discovered that my sound playback has started to stutter especially with apps like VLC playing back video. After doing some digging it appears to be an issue with PulseAudio which is the new sound engine for Ubuntu.

Apparently it has some buffering issues particularly on older/slow machines.

Luckily it is easy to fix. The following command:

`

Will ‘kill’ the PulseAudio engine, Ubuntu will then fall back to the older engines and everything will be right.

For the moment I have just configured this command to run when my Gnome session starts up. Which turns off PulseAudio when I boot up.

I read that a patch will be out soon. If it works I’ll turn PulseAudio back on.

Just prior to my Christmas break last year I “dropped” my laptop as it was hibernating, it was only an inch or so as I put it down but the knock was hard enough to corrupt my Windows registry! After trying to recover the damaged file I got XP to reboot but it was all a bit messed up.

Not having my XP install disk (it is a work laptop) and desperate to have my laptop up and running over the holiday I decided to install Ubuntu 7.10. The install was painless and as a bit of an experiment in using Linux as a desktop OS I have kept Ubuntu on my laptop since then.

So when my automatic update offered me to upgrade me to 8.04 I thought, “Why not?”. Having never done a complete OS upgrade via an automatic update process and knowing that I had tinkered with my 7.10 install quite a bit, I expected that it wouldn’t be a smooth process but kicked it off anyway.

So after about 6 hours of downloading and answering a couple of questions I was pleasantly surprised, when after a reboot, I was running my bright and shiny 8.04 install.

Then I was informed that propriety video card drivers were available and did I want to install them ?

Now my laptop is an old Del Inspiron 8600 which has an ATI video card in it. ATI unfortunately hasn’t quite joined the open source party so although they support Linux it is with a closed source driver. When initially setting up 7.10 I did try this driver but did not have much luck especially with issues when hibernating my latop.

Hoping that things had gotten better I decided to give them another go.

First off I enabled the drivers but had a persistent red dot on the hardware drivers screen that indicate that the driver “was not in use”.

Additionally I wasn’t able to turn on the desktop effects and I was beginning to miss my spinning desktop cube.

After digging around on the web it turns out that running:

fglrxinfo

should list out information that indicates that OpenGL support is been handled by ATI. In my case, no matter what I did Mesa stubbornly remained listed as the provider!

I then found this link: http://ubuntu-utah.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=569654&highlight=600m+gutsy which had an excellent guide (although targeting 7.10). Following this guide I came to the conclusion that my fglrx kernel module wasn’t been loaded because running:

lsmod | grep fglrx

Didn’t produce any output. Using some Google-fu I then found this link: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6017 which had an suggestion of commenting out a line in /etc/modprobe.d/lrm-video.

Following this advice and a reboot later, everything was just peachy. I was able to enable the Visual Effects and get my spinning desktop cube, all using a nice speedy ATI driver.

So was the hibernate problem had been fixed? Closing my laptop lid I waited with baited breath… and no its still broken. In fact it appears hibernate flat lined my CPU, all my laptop fans came on and the laptop got very very hot ! Not so good.

For the moment I have simply changed my power settings to shutdown instead of hibernate when the lid is closed. Its a pain but at least I get my 3D acceleration.

Hopefully this problem will get fixed but if you follow the various forums the root cause is some incompatibility with a library that the ATI drivers use and of course because they are closed source we have to wait for ATI to fix them.

Since this has been an issue for a while I’m not holding my breath but 8.03 has LTS (long term support) for 3 years so we may get lucky.

After the success of my laptop upgrade I also did my home theater PC which I’ve also been running Ubuntu on (after surprise, surprise another Windows issue caused me to migrate). This one was completely painless.

At this rate I’m not going to have any Windows machines left in my household !

Ok so I now had the install all going but during startup the TV was filled up with squiggly text.

The cause of this I discovered is that the splash screen that was shown during startup was running at a resolution that my TV did not enjoy.

Turns out the fix is quite easy in /boot/grub is a file called menu.lst after making a backup of the file I simply added vga=771 to the list of boot parameters and saved the file.

In doing this I discovered that Ubuntu creates a special user that you login as. To change any of the system files you need to be root. So you have to use the sudo command to run a command as root. For instance:

sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

So now I have a nice fresh install. The next step is to be able to play back my music and videos….

Ok so I have this EPIA Nehemiah M10000 based PC that I put together as a media center for my lounge.

I generally use it as an MP3 jukebox, playing back movie clips and surfing the web.

I initially ran Windows 2000 on this box but I have had some disk corruption issues in the last few months and have lost all my media at least twice!

Seagate drive tools indicate they drive is ok, but windows keeps messing up.

Two days ago it happened again, so I decided “screw it”; I’ll install the Ubuntu desktop and see how it goes.

Ubuntu has a “live CD” that you can download. It comes as a .iso file that you can use a program such as Nero to burn a bootable CD.

The “live CD” is cool since you can boot from CD, and try out Ubuntu without any installing anything. This is a great way to test if it is going to work with your hardware.

So I booted my media box with the CD. The Ubuntu start-up menu came up and I selected the default option…

Bamm, the TV went all screwy (my media PC is plugged into my TV, I have no monitor attached to it). Mmm, not so good. I hit the reset switch and tried again. This time I noticed that there was an F4 menu option that let me select which VGA mode I wanted to boot up in. I set this to 640×480 and started the boot process again.

Hey presto after half a minute or so I had a nice (and very Mac like) desktop in front of me. Double clicked an example media file that was supplied and got a nice a video clip with sound, just like that.

The only problem was it was all in black and white ! Not deterred I decided to install Ubuntu anyway. So from the System|Administration menu I selected install Ubuntu.

After asking a bunch of questions: where to install to (I asked it to wipe my existing partitions) and what user name and password I wanted to use and my regional settings the install started.

Ten or so minutes later the install finished and I was prompted to remove the “live CD” and reboot. Up came my nice Ubuntu desktop but still in black and white :(

Luckily my media box is wired to my home network and the internet so I opened up Firefox (it comes installed) and started digging around on the web as to why everything was in black and white.

After about 20 minutes I had narrowed it down to the fact that something was incorrectly setup in my xorg.conf file. A little more digging around I made a guess (after seeing a sample configuration on the web) that the desktop was outputting in NTSC not PAL.

Adding

Option "TVType" "PAL"

To the Device section of my xorg.conf and rebooting everything came right!

So about 40 minutes for the total install. Not too bad since I have never used the OS before!