Posted by ap0calypse on 28. September 2009 – 13:05
hi,
just wanted to give you a small update about how things are going with the current kernel (2.6.31.1 so far) on the 901 model from Asus.
Graphics:
The intel chipset ( Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller ) works very well and even KMS works like expected. There were some minor issues that required to build a initial ramdisk in the past, but now that’s not necessary anymore. I don’t know if that’s because of a bugfix or just some lucky configuration of my kernel. 
Wireless:
WiFi works with the rt2860 module from /staging.
Bluetooth:
I managed to use my cell phone as a modem device. It wasn’t very difficult. I’ll write a small article soon how to get this done. wvdial and rfcomm do the dirty work anyway …
I also bought a very nice little IBM thinkpad some days ago which I am currently tweaking to fit my needs. Screenshots will follow. Here is one from my eeePC:
Posted by ap0calypse on 18. September 2009 – 08:58
Filed under general, linux
Ok guys, I figured out how to fix the issue I wrote earlier about. Sometimes KMS didn’t work on boot-up and I didn’t know why. After some research I found the reason. The intel-agp module has to be loaded before the intel driver gets loaded. Sometimes (I don’t even know why) the driver got loaded earlier than the intel-agp and KMS failed. My simple fix is to create an initial ramdisk which loads intel-agp. So far it works quite well … The error didn’t appear again.
Here are the steps for 2.6.31:
# create initrd
mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.31 -m intel-agp
OK: /lib/modules/2.6.31/kernel/drivers/char/agp/agpgart.ko added.
OK: /lib/modules/2.6.31/kernel/drivers/char/agp/intel-agp.ko added.
3224 blocks
# this now created a file named initrd.gz under /boot
Next, you have to include this line to you lilo.conf, under your “root = blabla” line:
initrd = /boot/initrd.gz
and run lilo to update. You have to comment out the “vga = xxx” line too by the way.
I hope this helps some of you. Enjoy!
Posted by ap0calypse on 10. September 2009 – 14:17
Filed under general, linux
today I tried out KMS for the intel-chipset on my eee 901. It results in reduced flickering when starting X and a much higher resolution when booting up. So far, I’m glad it works now. The only thing that sucks is, that there is something wrong with KMS when I reboot via 3-finger-salute. It works perfectly when I type in “reboot”, but it does not come up in KMS again if I reboot via [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Del] … strange.
Config for kernel 2.6.31:
Device Drivers --->
Graphics Support --->
Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support) --->
<*> Intel 830M, 845G, 852GM, 855GM, 856G
[*] Enable modesetting on intel by default
Today I found a very nice ncurses-based calendar tool named calcurse. At first it is a bit hard to get used to it, but once you figured out how it works, you’ll love it.
Friends of console applications will love it anyway . I have always been searching for a reasonable console tool for this task. Now I found one 
Here is the link to the website:
calcurse
I’m using it as my primary calendar application to get an overview of my daily tasks and events.
Here a screenshot of me entering my university lessons 
:
entering stuff in calcurse
Filed under general, linux
Hi guys (and girls? … don’t know),
I recently found out how to make your MySQL-Service listen to the entire world instead of working explicitly with the socket-connection.
At first I took a look into the configuration-file, which is /etc/my.cnf in my case and found out, that it should already work. But it didn’t. After some searching I found out that the start script /etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld contained the following line:
After commenting out that line and restarting the daemon everything worked as expected and the daemon listens at port 3306. I hope that the next guy trying to configure MySQL doesn’t have to search for a solution anymore now.
hi guys,
some days ago I decided to write a little simulation in Perl. Well, … here is the result (huntersim-0.1). The package contains a README where everything should be explained.
Have FUN!
UPDATE:
Because people want to see pics:
Filed under general, linux
Yiiiiiha … I love good news.
As published on the official Slackware website Slackware 13.0 will come with an officially supported 64bit version. From the announcement:
[tap tap tap]… Is this thing on?
Ready or not, Slackware has now gone 64-bit with an official x86_64 port being maintained in-sync with the regular x86 -current branch. DVDs will be available for purchase from the Slackware store when Slackware 13.0 is released. Many thanks go out to the Slackware team for their help with this branch and a special thank you to Eric Hameleers who did the real heavy lifting re-compiling everything for this architecture, testing, re-testing, and staying in-sync with -current.
We’ve been developing and testing Slackware64 for quite a while. Most of the team is already using Slackware64 on their personal machines, and things are working well enough that it is time to let the community check our work.
We’d like to thank the unofficial 64 bit projects for taking up the slack for us for so long so that we could take our time getting everything just right. Without those alternatives, we would have been pressured to get things out before they were really ready.
As always — have fun!
Pat and the Slackware crew
I’m looking forward to install it on my machine! 
UPDATE:
##############
I now rewrote the script a little bit to use a private MAC-area because of problems when generating some MAC-addresses. Please use this version if you want to use it …
##############
hi guys,
yesterday I told you how to change your MAC address. Because I’m unbelievably lazy I decided to write a little helper-script to do this automatically. This script generates a random MAC address and brings the interface up with it.
here it is: change-mac
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
# name: change-mac
# author: ap0calypse (ap0calypse@agitatio.org)
# purpose: helper script for bringing an interface down
# and up again with a random MAC-address
# date: 2009-04-15
# replace this with your wlan-interface
my $interface = "wlan0";
my @val_mac = (0 .. 9, "A" .. "F");
my $rand_mac = "AC:DE:48:";
for (1 .. 6) {
$rand_mac .= $val_mac[rand(@val_mac)];
if ( ($_ % 2 == 0) && $_ != 6) {
$rand_mac .= ":";
}
}
system("ifconfig $interface down");
system("ifconfig $interface hw ether $rand_mac");
system("ifconfig $interface up");
Filed under general, linux
I know that this is nothing secret or special for most of you, but I think there are people out there who don’t know how to do this. Long story cut short:
ifconfig $INTERFACE down
ifconfig $INTERFACE hw ether $NEWMAC
ifconfig $INTERFACE up
Adjust the values for interface and new-mac to fit your needs.
You may ask yourself, why you should ever need this. Well, if you are really asking yourself this question, you maybe really don’t need it ….
Personally I need it because there is an open WiFi-network in my hometown which gives everyone the opportunity to use it for 30 minutes every day. They assure this by saving the MAC …
Alright? Alright!
Filed under general, linux
Well, I can proudly tell you guys that I don’t need any external module from a third party anymore. 2.6.29 has rt2860 in staging, which is, as far as I can see that, nearly identical to the official module from Ralink.
From the Kernel-git:
Staging: add rt2860 wireless driver
This is the Ralink RT2860 driver from the company that does horrible
things like reading a config file from /etc. However, the driver that
is currently under development from the wireless development community
is not working at all yet, so distros and users are using this version
instead (quite common hardware on a lot of netbook machines).
So here is this driver, for now, until the wireless developers get a
“clean” version into the main tree, or until this version is cleaned up
sufficiently to move out of the staging tree.
Ported to the Linux build system and cleaned up a bit already by me.
Cc: Linux wireless
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman
The bad news are that the eeepc-laptop module still doesn’t work properly. If I compile the module and the kernel tries to load it, my system hangs for about 30 seconds which is NOT bearable. So I still have to exclude this module as long as it doesn’t work.
I also activated fastboot (well, at least I think I did) by adding it to my lilo.conf (append=” fastboot”) and my small little eee now boots up from lilo to login in 10-13 seconds.
Everything seems fine so far. I’m also working on a small programming project I’m going to release soon . Stay tuned!
