Flexing

My broadband connection through Eclipse (link on the right), allows me to 'flex' the speed up temporarily. Although I know that my line is pretty poor I thought I'd perform a little experiment and given that an hour of flexing to 2Mbit is only 5p at the moment it will hardly break the bank!

I chose Speedtest.net to perform the tests and from there I used the Maidenhead and Dublin servers to test against.

The results were (download/upload):

• Standard speed to Maidenhead = 544kbps/528kbps
• Standard speed to Dublin = 619kbps/528kbps
• Flexed speed to Maidenhead = 692kbps/527kbps
• Flexed speed to Dublin = 652kbps/530kbps

My conclusion from this little test is that my line could handle a little more speed but it is hardly worth the effort (or money) realistically.

If I lived in an area with better lines, nearer to an exchange, this model would be great because you could just flex up when you need to download a big file. I wouldn't be surprised if some people could double their connection speed for that 5p! For me, unless BT get their arses into gear and sort out their infrastructure, I don't think that there is much point in me flexing again.

ADSL Speeds

Today I thought that I would spend some time seeing what sort of speed I actually get on my ADSL line - those of you that know me will be aware of my living out in the sticks and so being limited to an appauling speed :-(

Anyway, as long as I am getting my full 512kbps I'm happy. So off I go to www.speedtest.com and run a few tests. A representative result of my tests to different servers in the UK and overseas gave the following result:

I then decided to run some more tests...

www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk - 629kbps/531kbps

www.kbps.co.uk - 530kbps/-kbps

From my limited experiment, I can see that the results vary quite a bit but I can pretty safely say that I am getting around 600kbps download and 530kbps upload which IMHO is pretty good for a line tat supposedly is only good for 512kbps ADSL. I particularly like the upload speed that Eclipse Internet gives me :-D

Phillips Pronto Remotes (on Linux!)

Some of you may know about my little project at home which will ultimately mean that that I have a Linn Knekt multiroom sound system, Comfort Alarm system (with home automation stuff) and multiple Pronto remotes.

I recently purchased 5 Prontos from eBay (one for each family member) and now need to program them but have found ProntoEdit to be a PITA to work with... plus it doesn't work on Linux :-(

I have found a project called Tonto (see http://giantlaser.com/tonto/ ) which is written in Java. I haven't fully tested this yet but it does look promising and is supposedly more intuitive. I will update soon on this!

What I will say is how to run the bloody thing in Ubuntu because that was a bugger to set up!


First you need the latest JRE...
apt-get install sun-java6-jre

You then need to extract tonto to /usr/share and edit the tonto.sh file to point to the jre...
JHOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre"

Then make the tonto.sh file executable...
chmod +x tonto.sh

Then simply run tonto.sh and the job should be a good 'un ;-)

More on LinuxMCE

Since my recent foray into attempting to set up LinuxMCE I have purchased a second-hand Hauppage HVR-1100 tuner. This has much better support in Linux! It should be noted that IMHO the picture quality on the GDI BlackGold cards is far better and less affected by poor signal quality.

The only difficulty I had was that I had to recompile the Video4Linux DVB drivers - I believe that this is an Ubuntu problem but it isn't exactly hard to do ;-)

Anyway, I re-installed LinuxMCE and it works quite well... I'm undecided whether to switch back to vanilla Linux with MythTV or not though - I'm not using LinuxMCE to its full potential and I haven't got time to investigate more at the moment.

LinuxMCE

I recently spotted a news item on AutomatedHome about the new release of LinuxMCE (http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/Software/LinuxMCE-0704-Released.html). Basically, the project aims to be a Linux replacement for Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition... with extra bells and whistles.

I have been using Windows MCE for almost 2 years and I have found it great as a PVR using my two GDI Black Gold digital tuner cards. I have found that it is a bit limited though... particularly if you want to intergrate it with other systems.

One of the biggest of these drawbacks is extending it to other rooms - this requires a Microsoft Media Extender and even then you can't watch live TV in the secondary room. With LinuxMCE, thin client devices boot from the 'core' machine and media can follow you around the home... this can be seen to good affect in the video on the LinuxMCE site.

Anyway... I checked compatibility for my existing hardware and all seemed well... I downloaded the quickstart ISO (a DVD featuring Kubuntu and LinuxMCE - which is itself a collection of several other projects) which took an age due to its size!

I proceeded to install the distro on my PC and all went well until the initial hardware setup wizard began. No output on the screen! I tried every combination of the number keys to get a resolution that my DVI-connected TFT would accept to no avail. I then tried the second DVI port on my graphics card and it worked straight away! That was a serious schoolboy error!!!

I then followed the rest of the setup wizard (which includes a number of video with a lovely woman telling you what to do) but at no point were my TV cards detected :-(

By reading the dmesg output it seems that my card type isn't automatically detected. This has been my major stumbling block as there seems to be nothing on the net about my particular card in Linux. By editting the modprobe.conf I have successfully got Linux to recognise one of my cards but that is as far as I can get.

I cannot seem to make the card play any further... either through the LinuxMCE wizard or MythTV. I'm not going to give up now that I have got this far and I'm hoping to have an influx of people telling what to do. An update will be forthcoming when I crack it ;-)

Neglecting my blog

I've let things slip a little and haven't updated my blog for a while... partly because I have been busy with bits and pieces and partly because I haven't done anything of any particular interest :-(

Anyway, I will try to remedy that soon.

In the meantime, a quick note... I found a dual-head PCI-X graphics card (in fact it is a quad-head card!) although Beryl isn't playing yet. I have also spent a bit of time playing with Joomla for the work's website - some nice pics there too now :-)

VMWare Server (Part 1)

Also tonight I have installed VMWare Server on my Debian Etch laptop. After my last attempt, when Etch was still Testing and the kernel headers were conspicuous by their absence, I was surprised with the ease with which it installed.

This has given me a cunning plan for my new workstation at work... I have just purchased a HP ML350 G3 to use as a workstation and I think I will now install Debian Etch onto that too so that I get the groovy eye candy and the power of Linux. My Windows admin tasks could then be performed in a VM running Windows Server. My idea of running Server is so that I can install Citrix and connect in to that remotely to access things - rather than using the generic server farm that I would have to share with all the other lusers ;-)

Now I just need to find a PCI-X dual-head graphics card with 3D capability to run my twin NEC MultiSync LCDs :-D

Part 2 will tell of my success ;-)

Citrix Fun

If anybody doesn't already know... I love Citrix!

Anyway... since getting my X60 laptop, I haven't been able to run the ICA Client :-( It turns out that this is a known bug to do with UTF-8 locales - something that Etch uses by default.

After trying the recommended work arounds to no avail, I discovered that the only bit that wasn't working was the selection of the applications from the browse list (ignoring the warning messages when running wfmgr from the command line).

If I type the application name in manually, I can connect to my applications.... YAY!!!

I know that this configuration isn't ideal but I can put up with it for now because it works. I was a little dissapointed not to have any replies to my post on the Citrix forums though :-( Usually you get a response within the hour (and a good response at that!)

Upgraded works laptop - Lenovo Thinkpad X60 running Debian Etch

I have just upgraded my works laptop to a very lovely Lenovo X60 after reading about how easy it is to install Linux on Thinkpads at ThinkWiki (an excellent site).

The laptop is unbelievably thin and lightweight whilst still having an excellent spec (Core Duo 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM and 40GB HDD). I will probably upgrade the RAM soon and the hard disk may need an upgrade but it will do for now ;-)

The installation of Debian went well too so I thought that I would detail some of the specifics here...

1. A stock install of Debian Etch was performed from CD without problems (I did not choose to use a mirror during install)
2. Removed some bits of rubbish from the install
3. Updated the distribution after specifying a mirror in /etc/apt/sources.list
4. Added a few of my favourite packages (such as gaim and synaptic)
5. Followed the instructions on ThinkWiki to enable some of the Thinkpad-specific bits and bobs (such as tpb for the special buttons and acpi for hibernation and the like)
6. Installed packages to enable wireless (it uses an Intel 3945 chipset so the following packages were needed - firmware-ipw3945, ipw3945d and ipw3945-modules-2.6.18-4-686)
7. Followed the instructions at http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Install/Debian to install Beryl... I then needed to change the 'Rendering Path' in 'Advanced Beryl Options' to something other than 'Automatic' because the contents of Nautilus windows did not display but now all the wonderful wobbling and cube effects work OK
   
8. Checked that my USB-Serial adapter worked... it did without having to do any configuring!

PyKota Update

Today I have been mostly migrating to PyKota from Print Manager Plus... as I have mentioned earlier.

An updated guide on how I have been doing this can be found at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=78029#78029 - still a bit of a work in progress though at the moment.

There is one little niggle with doing this mid way through the year... a lack of abiility to export the existing print quotas into PyKota from PMP. What this means is that anybody who doesn't have approx. £2 of credit left (the default balance given at the start of the year) has to be manually created in advance with their initial balance set. You can probably imagine that this is taking some time (approx. 1000 to do!!!!!).

Qemu - My fault for being bleeding edge!

Those that know me will be aware that I am a fan of Debian - I love the package management and you don't get the dross or quirks that come with Ubuntu et al. Anyway, since the announcement that Debian Etch (or v4) was to be released back in December I figured why not upgrade?

Unfortunately, Debian being as stable as it is means that they won't release a version until ALL the major supported platforms (something like 9 out of 15) are completely bug free. As you can guess this is pretty tricky to do... hence the slow pace of new Debian releases.

Because I couldn't curb my enthusiasm, I've been using the release candidate (aka Testing) and I'm very pleased. Anyway... I digress.

As a result of my using this 'bleeding edge' OS, I'm currently running kernel version 2.6.17 which is perfectly stable IMHO. However, to test out my Pykota instructions (see earlier post), I wanted to install VMWare Server (another one of my favourite profucts) but to do this you need the kernel header files and for some reason these haven't been made available in the Debian repositories!!!

What does all this have to do with Qemu? Qemu is an open source virtualisation product which is very easy to install on Debian since it IS in the repositories.

After downloading the Debian Testing install disks (again - I keep leaving them places!) I've started up the app and kicked it off installing. All seems to be going well so far (touch wood) and I will write an update when I've had chance to test it further. It has certainly got around my problem for now though so I should be able to test my Pykota instructions ;-)

PyKota - Another update!

Following on from yesterday's update, I managed to find some more time between a Nedap meeting, meeting with the architect and cabler for the new extension and ringing DELL to arrange for a new motherboard to be sent out to take another look at PyKota.

I tweaked some accounting settings and re-added the test users. The printing AND accounting now works a treat! YAY!!!!

As a result, I decided to publish my installation notes on EduGeek so that others can learn from my experience. I will be refining these to create a 'proper' installation guide as soon as I get chance.

In the meantime, anybody who is interested can check out the guide at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7100

Update on Pykota

OK... so I've been playing with this Pykota lark in every free minute that I've had at work (and many at home too!). I'm sure that it could be a lot easier than this but I'm still learning... I'm by no means a Linux guru.

When I've got the whole thing working, a howto guide will be produced... this is something seriously lacking with Pykota IMHO. There are lots of installation guides but they all seem to make a lot of assumptions and miss significant (if menial) parts out.

Anyway... back to the progress so far. I have configured CUPS with Samba - this was relatively easy. As I mention above, Pykota was the tricky part but it all seems to be working now, bar one 'tiny' detail... it isn't counting the pages :-( This has a knock-on effect in that it prevents the user from printing :-s

Anyway... back to trawling the net for ideas and re-reading the config files.

A Quick Guide to Thin Client Computing

Many people on EduGeek have recently been looking into thin clients as a way of reducing TCO in their schools. Many of these people have turned to me as I am somewhat of an authority on this. As a result, I promised to write a little guide explaining some of the basics. The guide can be found at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7035 - enjoy!

As a background, my network setup uses 6 terminal servers running Windows Server 2003 and Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 to server approx 200 thin clients... most of the clients in the school are thin clients.

Eagles of Death Metal @ The Manchester Academy

So... the long awaited Eagles of Death Metal gig was last Saturday at the Manchester Academy. I haven't been to the Academy before (only Academy 2) and I was impressed by the venue. Beer was cheapish (only £2.45 for a pint of Grolsch which is VERY cheap for a gig!) and the room was just the right size.

The support act was Mother Vulpine... a pretty heavy indie rock band comprising of a singer/guitarist, bassist who bounced around like Zebedee, a drummer and a female guitarist. I was quite impressed... their music was OK and the female guitarist wasn't too unppleasent on the eyes ;-)

Then the gig started proper and when EODM came one we bounced our way to about 5 rows from the front! It was great and everyone was having a good time! The only problem is that it was a little warm and cramped so I had to bounce back a couple of rows to try to cool down. My old age (of 25) meant I later had to go back further still as the sweat was still pouring off me!

EODM were fantastic and played a great set. It really was one of the best gigs I've been to in a while. Definately worth watching again!

Kaiser Chiefs @ The Manchester Apollo

On Thursday Pete, Kath, Caroline and myself went to see the Kaiser Chiefs at the Apollo in Manchester.

The first support act were called Ripchord and can only be described as The Beatles on speed with a touch of Geaorge Formby chucked in for good measure. I was not overly impressed.

The second support band were called Th 1990s (I think) and they were much better.

Next was the Kaiser Chiefs who were very good - although not quite as good as the last time I saw them. The set was a mixture of existing material as well as material from their new album which I believe is out tomorrow.

The gig itself was quite short, finishing at approx. 10.45 but it then took us half an hour to get out of the car park!

On the whole then, a very enjoyable evening.

Motorola KRZR

Well my Motorola RZR finally gave up the ghost the other night. The battery had been going for a bit and I think that I have had it nearly 2 years. Anyway, on Friday night it finally packed in and will now no longer turn on!

Anyway, Sunday I got around to ringing Vodafone and arranging a phone upgrade. After a good chat about the cheaply available handsets and my requirements, I decided to shell out £25 for a MOTO KRZR.

The phone arrived yesterday, whilst I was out but from using it to make a couple of calls and send some text messages it seems OK.

The thing that did worry me slightly was the slowness of my old RZR but this has been much improved and the clarity of the keypad is far better too. The silver mirror finish puts my black RZR to shame and it certainly looks dated. This finish looks equally good on the included bluetooth headset too.

Talking of bluetooth, the bluetooth connection worked flawlessly when transferring names from my PDA. I'm also glad to see that Motorola have finally decided to implement a 'proper' phone book that allowss you to save multiple numbers with each name.

Jodrell Bank and the Dog Inn

Well yesterday I had a lovely day out with Caroline, taking advantage of my holiday.

It was decided that we should go to Jodrell Bank because we often see the large Lovell Radio Telescope from the motorway.

For the princely sum of £1.50 each we were admitted entry to the small visitors' centre and, after declining tickets for the shows in the '3D Theatre', we had a quick look 'round and watched some videos about the Lovell Telescope - although the screaming kids making a lot of noise made it somewhat difficult to concentrate.

We then had a walk around the base of the Lovell Telescope, which was unfortunately parked and so wasn't much to look at, before have a look at the 'Granada Arboritum' - a rather pleasant landscaped area full of trees.

After having a good look around we ventured off in search of a pub with a humorous name... we had a couple that we had found by trawling the web earlier in the day but the directions (courtesy of the RAC) sucked. We did happen upon 'The Dog Inn' and it was decided that the name was suitably humorous (plus it was in Lower Peover - which is a funny name in itself).

The pub was quite quiet, only a few customers other than us and the service could have been a little quicker but the food was excellent and the atmosphere was lovely too.

Wolfmother @ The Manchester Apollo

Well, last night we braved the elements and went to the Manchester Apollo to watch Wolfmother.

By the time we reached Domo's in Farnworth, the snow was falling quite heavily but we got some lovely chinese food and then off we went... by the time we reached Manchester the snow had vanished... although this didn't prevent some stupid woman nearly driving into the side of me!

The support act for the evening were called Wolf & Cub. Their set started well... 2 drummers and a prog-rock style! This soon deteriorated into some trashy indie rubbish.

Anyway, the support act was soon finished and Wolfmother came on. Wolfmother were far better and it was most enjoyable. Very loud and some strange 'chicken-dancing' by the lead singer!

CUPS and Pykota

I decided a couple of days ago, after reading more about the capabilities of Pykota, that it may be the way forward for print accounting and management. For those not in the know, Pykota is an addon to CUPS (the printing subsystem for Linux) which does lots of clever accounting and reporting stuff on a print server.

Some of the particularly interesting features of Pykota and CUPS are:
* Users are not charged if the job does not print
* Jobs can be 're-processed' to add headers and the like that could include the username!
* Ability to save PDFs of all the jobs printed for keeping an eye on the little darlings
* Windows clients only need a single printer driver - CUPS then converts to the relevant format for the printer

We currently use Print Manager Plus and I don't have an issue with it. I recently upgraded to an MSDE backend and since then it has been VERY stable (not that it was unstable before) and it takes care of charging the little darlings like it should.

The reason that I decided to take the plunge with Pykota though, is mostly cost. The annual software maintenance is approx. £200 and if this cost can be saved it could be better spent elsewhere. There is a nominal fee of €25 for Pykota (I paid £25) which is a kind of donation to get access to the downloads of current and future releases - even just for an initial play it's probably worth it and it supports open software too.

Anyway... software downloaded and armed with a spare server from the cupboard (loaded with hard disks in case I want to start saving PDFs) I began the install.

I'll post more soon... possibly a mini-howto. It's just a bit of a steep learning curve at the moment since I've never run a Linux print server before.

StumbleUpon

I heard about a great Firefox addon in Linux Format recently called StumbleUpon - you can check it out at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/138/

Basically, it gives you a button in the toolbar which you press and you will be sent off to a random web page based upon your pre-defined preferences. This thing is great for finding new sites and general time wasting when there is nothing on TV.

EduGeek @ BETT

It's taken me a while to get these pics up but here we go...
Monday - The Week Begins

We arrived relatively early on the Monday to begin the preparation of the stand and were presented with an empty shell.

Nothing could really be done until we had some hardware stand so we decided to go off for a wander amongst the ensuing chaos of stands being built to find our very kind sponsors to collect bits and pieces.

Anyway, we had pretty much no luck fining anyone... in fact we discovered some people wouldn't be turning up until Tuesday afternoon! However, we eventually managed to grab somebody from Promethean so we could set up the interactive whiteboard and projector that they loaned us.

Of course, all the time that this was going on, Tony was being mithered by work about SIMS stuff which made my eyes glaze over every time he tried to explain it to me.

By this time we had begun to start getting hungry so we popped off for lunch... to a traditional english pub - except that the entire menu was made up of curries! Quite odd. Upon our return we didn't have to wait long for a delivery from LapSafe - a nice kiosk to display our fancy web site on :-)

Tuesday - Not long to go

So Tuesday came and we eventually got some hardware. Firstly a box on loan from Stone Computers to run demonstrations on and connect to the Promethean board.

Then came the SmoothWall box - kindly donated to TickMike after we'd been let loose on it!

Then, in the afternoon, came the monster DELL server (which we would later name BEAST). This quad-dual-core Opteron with 16GB RAM and SAS drives was quite something. The only problem was that it had no OS and no setup disks.

When we did eventually get the server going, it was quite something to look at as it sat there without breaking a sweat with 6 virtual machines running!

So anyway.... there wasn't much time for picture taking during the show's opening hours. Steve Thomas from Novus did get rather tired of the standing at one point though.

And Tony made time to print some additional promotional material.

Finally a quick thank you to Art Lader - our Moodle Evangelist that was flown in from the States by Sun to help out on our stand. Well done for pulling that one off Tony ;-)

I'd also like to thank Jo (aka LinuxGirlie) of Koroshi fame.

Another thanks to our sponsors who had people helping out on the stand. Of course there was Steve Thomas (Novus), two experts from RM and two experts from Solutions Inc. (Apple experts). We also had a helping hand from Mandy Brereton and Sacha at EuroLaser (who also donated 2 laser printers as prizes and are generally very nice to everyone).

If there's anyone or anything I've missed out (I know that there is a lot!) I'm sorry.