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Just upgraded to a new 80 gigabyte hard drive.

Just upgraded to a new 80 gigabyte hard drive to replace my old and worn drive which was quite small and not very fast. Here is my partition layout.

2-:$> df -Hla
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 33G 2.4G 30G 8% /
proc 0 0 0 - /proc
sysfs 0 0 0 - /sys
tmpfs 98M 13k 98M 1% /dev/shm
devpts 0 0 0 - /dev/pts
/dev/hda2 33G 166M 33G 1% /home
/dev/hda4 15G 4.0G 11G 27% /usr
usbfs 0 0 0 - /proc/bus/usb
/dev/hdc 0.0k 0.0k 0.0k - /media/cdrecorder
/dev/sda 0.0k 0.0k 0.0k - /media/128M

This is much better, now I have installed SUSE Linux 10.0 and have got Gnome and Kde and Icewm, Windowmaker, fvwm, mwm and twm installed and just about everything else you could ever want. Very cool indeed. I installed FreeBSD, but that is quite frustrating I would rather run Linux. Kde is not so bad after all, I have 192MB of RAM and 1GB of /swap space, I am not complaining at all. It runs very smoothly and fast even without recompiling the kernel. I have the vanilla 2.6.16.16 sources from kernel.org, and I will install that very soon, I will setup a preemptive kernel built for my processor and enable DMA for faster DVD playback.

You should always replace your hard drive before it crashes of course. I have helped someone replace their hard drive once, but they were running Windows `98. (shudder) And he is browsing the web with Internet Explorer 6.0. There is a new thing that the Woolworths supermarkets are doing where they have AU$20.00 cards you buy and then you go to a website and you can enter the code from the prepaid card and buy music to download. Problem is that the website only works with Internet Explorer version 6.0 and you need to have ActiveX enabled to use it. Totally bogus. Surely you can setup a webserver that can authenticate the codes entered and then allow the downloads without needing ActiveX? They do say to use Ietab extension for FireFox but obviously if you are on BSD or OSX or Linux you cannot use that as the Ietab extension uses the IE rendering engine through Firefox. And I actually tried the website with IE6.0 and ActiveX enabled and it still would not work.

And yet the cool features in Hotmail are cool though, like the calendar and the built in spellchecker. You right click on the word and you get spellchecker corrections. I tried that in Mozilla 1.6 running on a Linspire 5.0 live CD and it worked perfectly. The one Microsoft creation I actually like to use. And it underlines spelling mistakes.

I went on a long walk along the railway line as I like to do frequently and I was on a high part of the railway track, where a waterway went underneath and I climbed down to the bottom to have a look through the huge 10ft tall metal pipe that went under the railway tracks and there was a large weatherproof microphone dangling down from the top which had a cable going from it to a solar panel. Which is strange, as I was examining it the owner of the property came close and yelled at me to leave, whence I then frantically scrabbled 15ft up the steep slope and down the other side and scrambled across the rocky slope and made it 15kms back home. I have just enabled mp3 playback in SUSE Linux 10.0. I copied a fresh vanilla copy of the Xmms library and overwrote the existing file with the vanilla unmodified copy of the Xmms library. So that the directory appears like so.

<>[ Jobs 0. PWD: /usr/lib. bash 3.00.16. ]
2-:$> lu | grep xmms
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2006-06-26 19:21 libxmms.so.1 ->
libxmms.so.1.3.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 46K 2006-06-26 19:21 libxmms.so.1.3.1
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 176 2006-06-26 03:32 xmms

The existing file was larger than the one I replaced it with, But now I can play MP3’s and have no more problems with getting that to work, although the SUSE 10.0 AmaroK program can play MP3’s but using that is far from ideal. I ran /sbin/ldconfig after copying the file and all was well. So that is how you get MP3 playback working. Just replace the libxmms.so.1.3.1 with a unmodified version from a Mandrake Linux or other package and then run /sbin/ldconfig and then you will be able to play MP3’s. I had a Gentoo Linux DVD so I used that to get the files from and patch my system to get it working. Just make sure you install a file from the same version, e.g version 1.2.10. But this really does work very well, then just restart XMMS and you will be set.

[ Jobs 0. PWD: ~/.xmms/Plugins/Input. bash 3.00.16. ]
13-:$> lu
total 160K
drwxr-xr-x 2 gandalf users 112 2006-06-26 21:08 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 gandalf users 72 2006-06-26 21:08 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gandalf users 990 2006-06-25 05:05 libmpg123.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gandalf users 154K 2006-06-26 19:21 libmpg123.so

Here is my xmms plugins folder, I have copied the MP3 plugin to this folder and it works very well once you have replaced the xmms library in the /usr/lib/xmms folder. Now I have also deleted the /media folder and I am using /etc/fstab to control hotplugging of USB devices. Here it is below:

1-:$> cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda1 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda2 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/hda4 /usr reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd iso9660
noauto,ro,procuid,nosuid,noexec 0 0
none /subdomain subdomainfs noauto 0 0
/dev/sda /mnt/sda auto noauto,user,rw,noexec 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 auto noauto,user,rw,noexec 0 0
/dev/sdb /mnt/sdb auto noauto,user,rw,noexec 0 0
/dev/sdc /mnt/sdc auto noauto,user,rw,noexec 0 0

As you can see I have filled out lines to control adding USB thumb drives and they allow me to mount and unmount them as a normal user and have normal write access to them. Below is the content of the 90-storage-nosync.fdi file you are supposed to add to the system to remove the need to mount USB devices with sync which results in abominably slow access times. But my way using /etc/fstab is way better. You are supposed to use the following file by using lshal and using the resulting output to get the uuid of your device and putting that into the file, but I could not make any sense of that.

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