Debian Etch has been released!

Since today I have DVB-T working. I have a Pinnacle PCTV 300i PCI card, which is a Analog PAL + DVB-T tuner card. It is supported onder Linux, however I couldn’t get the DVT part to work.

Geert had a Hauppauge DVB-T USB stick since a few days which I could borrow, to make sure I had good reception with my old trusty analog UHF/VHF antenna. After some fumbling with the kernel modules and firmware his USB stick was up and running with reception, but my PCI card still didn’t want to budge. Armed with the knowledge that reception was good but the thing didn’t work, I asked the question in #linuxtv on freenode (again, I already tried a few times). Luckily, mkrufky/Michael Krufky was there to help me, but unfortunately his first few attempts I had already tried, modules already loaded etc. However, after I pasted something particular out of the dmesg output, bells started ringing…

[21|23:11:10] < sid3windr> tda9887 1-0043: tda988[5/6/7] found @ 0x43 (tuner)
[21|23:11:10] < sid3windr> tuner 1-0060: Chip ID is not zero. It is not a TEA5767
[21|23:11:16] < sid3windr> and then tuner 1-0060: microtune MT2050 found, OK
[21|23:11:28] < sid3windr> (this last one appears twice btw, perhaps that isn’t normal?)
[21|23:12:24] < mkrufky> it’s supposed to be a mt2032
[21|23:12:39] < sid3windr> oh?
(…)
[21|23:16:37] < sid3windr> HAHA
[21|23:16:38] < sid3windr> it works
[21|23:16:53] < sid3windr> mkrufky rocks. 

He already left the channel, but I’ll be sure to let him know. The module misdetected the tuner type, so here’s how to force it: 

It’ll still say the same in dmesg, but! tuning will work. 

root@khalid:~# cat be-Veltem
# VRT Veltem
# T freq bw fec_hi fec_lo mod transmission-mode guard-interval hierarchy
T 482000000 8MHz 1/2 NONE QAM64 8k 1/4 NONE

-> scan be-Veltem (scan from dvb-utils), and you should find 11 channels provided by VRT. If you’re closer to another broadcasting station (check vrt.be for the list), you can adjust the frequency there.

DVB under Linux still seems to be a bit quirky at times (and ick, tuning time is quite slow), but it works in MythTV. I’m watching remote, and the image stuff is rather slow at the moment. Have to figure out why, but my backend server is also resyncing one of its md arrays, so it’s a bit loaded… 

From April’s Linux Format in the "Mailserver" column:

Reader’s letter:

I fail to understand why Linux Format keeps dismissing and talking down Gentoo Linux. I note that the latest issue has yet another dig at it [Gentwho?, Distrowatc, LXF89]. I have been using Gentoo for about two years, and my only regret is that I did not discover Gentoo earlier – there is no way I would go back to any other distros I’ve tried with the problems of finding compatible dependencies. You imply that it takes a long time to install Gentoo. That is true, but if one considers the time spent in uninstalling unwanted programs and finding dependencies for other distros, then that is a small consideration. As for the difficulty of installing… It couldn’t be simpler if one takes the time to read the manual carefully. One does wonder if your magazine’s reluctance to endorse the system is due to the fact that Gentoo users have little use for the software included on the discs you issue with the magazine and are less likely, therefore, to buy it?

 – Graham Young, Nottingham, England 

LXF reacts: 

How would we "endorse" Gentoo? By writing about it? Oh, we already do that… Er, by putting it on our (apparently redundant) coverdisc? No, we do that too. Hmm. I have an idea: we could print a massive poster extolling the virtues of the system. In fact, we just have – you are holding it right now. In the true spirit of the Gentoo build-it-yourself culture, you need to do a bit of work yourself, but it’s easy if you follow these simple instructions: 1) cut out all the individual words from any 20 pages of the magazine. 2) Boil down the spine binding to acquire some glue. 3) Lay the remaining pages flat and glue on the words in the correct order to make an inspiring message. (NB for a stage 3 poster only, you can simply take a big marker pen and draw on the pages yourself.) 

Standard Gentoo-fanboy post, thoroughly torn down by LXF.

Got my Fosdem LPI exam results earlier today… 620 points! (500 required to pass). That’s an average of just a little over 75%. Yay ! 🙂

If you’re running Debian Sarge, have a >2TB ext3 volume and your fsck.ext3 exits with signal 11 leaving the damn thing all dirty and stuff, get 1.39+1.40-WIP from backports.org . This fixed the problem for me on my home box (2.4T) and one of the servers here at work (4.7T). Takes a long while to fsck, but at least it gets through instead of crashing somewhere half way!

– ext2 doesn’t have a journal 

– ext3 is so "default". AND it gets b0rken just as well; on my home fileserver there were errors and fsck.ext3 exited with a SIGSEGV. Yikes. Upgrading to the 1.39-1.40 release from Sarge backports made that go away, luckily, but it’s still icky that it just broke like that and kept on humming along at the same time.

– XFS turned out to be really, really slow with many small files.

– ReiserFS only gave me corruption, headache and a murderer as an author 😉

– ZFS? Quoting Andrew Morton, "I haven’t seen a patch for that yet, but it’s very welcome!" 

What to do, what to do… 

Installed Firefly Media Server on my home fileserver for fun (unfortunately not for profit 😉 ), and installed iTunes on my desktop. Never used it, but hey, it supports DAAP and that’s the big deal, right? 🙂 I have 22K+ songs in my iTunes player now, advertised via mDns multicast "modern" stuff. Yay!

Tried to use it in Amarok on my laptop as well, but no dice. If I add the machine manually, I can browse the files via DAAP, but the actual discovery doesn’t seem to work. I installed the avahi daemon which takes care of mDNS discovery, but it still doesn’t want to find it.. 🙁 Any tips?

If you’re there tomorrow, and you want to see me, gimme a yell 🙂

Hopefully this time the wireless network won’t be a notwork. 😀

Now they really don’t have any reason not to support Linux 😉 *cut bs about FCC regulations and competitive advantages*

Linux Kernel Hackers write device drivers for free ! 

Via Slashdot, excellent reasoning 😉