Ax0n’s Den

So I emailed our local fox station, after find out that we only have a low power repeater here in Yakima, and that LP repeaters are not governed by the same set of regulations regarding implementation by Feb ‘09 that the full power stations are. Here is his response for those in Yakima whom are interested:

From: Lonnie Eaton
To: Morgan Collins
Subject: RE: Digital Conversion
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:57:04 -0700

Hello; our company is going ahead with our digital conversion, even though we are not held to the Feb ’09 deadline; our engineering department says we will be digital and HD before the end of this year; I’m trying to hold them to their word!! The sooner the better, so we can at least see the college bowl games, NFL post-season and the start of NASCAR in all their digital/HD glory!

Thanks for watching;

Lonnie Eaton

Station Manager

509-574-4141

So, after reading a post about NTSC tuner support in 2.6.26 I decided to upgrade my HTPC to Ubuntu 8.10 which is the development release of Ubuntu. So, after a seamingly smooth upgrade, I found out that Ubuntu 8.10 comes with 2.6.27 not 2.6.26… even better.

Nvidia drivers have previously required kernel headers, but not source. The new DKMS build system tells me that they now require source. I should have known better and not listened to it, but I spent I dunno how long trying to get a compiled kernel source tree to match my running system. After complaints about not being able to run under Xen, and misaligned struct_module and various other issues, I realised that I needed to apt-get install kernel-headers-2.6.27-2-generic, not kernel-headers-2.6.27-2. This is very important. Without the -generic bit, you don’t get a configured header tree, just a stock one. After realising this, I have had no problems with the development release. Everything works at lease as good as it did before, or better. The new X+nvidia drivers are WAY FASTER than on 8.04. My ATSC tuner is at least recognised now, but still isn’t really working.

So I have always been fascinated by satellites. So when I wokeup this morning, and was glancing at Slashdot while eating breakfast I was really excited to see an article about Every Satellite Tracked In Realtime Via Google Earth.

It took me a bit to figure out how to turn off all the Debris and Spacejunk, and track down my favorite multimedia satellites. All I can say is… bad… fucking… ass…

So my laptop has finally kicked the bucket. Wont power up, wont anything. Because I haven’t been updating my blog, you wouldn’t know that is lacks any internal fans. You also wouldn’t know that the battery wont charge and the power brick has an after market capacitor in it, because it blew up a while back. Oh and did I mention that it like to turn off randomly by itself?

In anycase, I have decided that it’s time for a new one. My choice? The Dell Studio 17″.

• Intel Core 2 Duo T8100, 2.1GHz, 800Mhz, 3M L2 Cache
• 3GB DDR2 RAM
• 17.0″ WLED 1920×1200 Display
• ATI MOBILITY RADEON HD 3650
• 250G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
• 8X Slot Load Burner
• Dell Wireless 1397 802.11g Half Mini Card
• Integrated High Definition Audio 2.0
• Integrated 2.0M Pixel Webcam
• 56 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
• Dell Wireless 370 Bluetooth Module (2.0)
• Dell Wireless 5720 EV-DO Revision A

They are telling me that it’s going to be 3 weeks before it gets here. A co-worker of mine just ordered a laptop from Dell a month back, and they told him like 3 weeks too but it only took a week to show up on his doorstep, so I am hoping the same happens for me.

I am concerned about driver support in Linux. From what I can tell, the video card looks to be supported by the proprietary ATI(AMD) drivers. The last time I used an ATI card in linux was back before ATI was releasing drivers and the FOSS drivers were not mature.

There isn’t much information on the chipset for the wireless card or sound card. I am guessing the soundcard is supported by the Intel HD Audio driver for Linux. The wireless card will be some sort of Broadcom black box. Hopefully the b43 driver will work.

The internal bluetooth and EV-DO radio are less pressing. I have a USB dongle I can use until I get the internal one working. From what I have read about the EV-DO Radios, they are basically a chuck of programmable ROM and a radio. You have to flash the ROM in Windows for your carrier, and then you connect to it like a dumb modem. Since I don’t even have a plan right now, I’m not concerned about it.