salam and greetings..
well, as i said in the previous post i'm a bit bz with alot of stuff; not just work, but also my development projects. since a couple of weeks ago, i felt so alive and i dont want to put it to waste. life is not as easy as it seems, but i tried to put as much effort to put life as 'happening' as possible. well, honestly
vulture, (my laptop) have been very useful since i got it. carrying my stuff ehere and there, testing new things whenever i want and wherever i want.
as i mentioned in my last post about the imac lab i was setting up, well, its finally operational. seriously from my experience,
Mac OS X is a more flexible and easier to maintain compared to its desktop rival,
Windows XP. i guess its about the underlying system which is based on
UNIX that made it possible. the only thing that is stopping people from widespreading the usage is the cost of owning a macintosh machine, whether its a desktop or notebook. its damn costly and not all people have the cash to get it.
anyway, there is a cheat way to get your hands on Mac OS X;
PearPC of course! the latest version is
0.3.0! superkewl. it seems they are working hard to improve it. please check out the respective site for further information.
projects update
lets talk about my projects shall we? as you all know, when i'm using UNIX or LINUX, i prefer to use CLI rather than the eyecandy GUI; its straightforward and easier to work with. due to that matter, i wrote a simple script to make the system greets me everytime i log off from the system.. (well, its easier to write the 'greeting' script, so i'm not going to put it here). check it out:
# Greetings to users after logout
if [ "$USER" = "root" ]; then
trap 'sleep 1 && clear && echo " {Thank you My Master. I will be waiting for you}" && sleep 2 && clear; exit' EXIT
else
trap 'sleep 1 && clear && echo " {Please come again Mr. $USER}" && sleep 2 && clear; exit' EXIT
fi
it uses a command called trap which 'traps' the signals send to the hardware. for my case, the script pause for a second and then it clears the screen when the user that is logged in sends an exit signal. while doing this it displays some 'greeting messages' that will appear on the screen for 2 seconds. then it clear the screen again. if the user logged in is root, then a message specifically for the root user is displayed, otherwise it displays another message.
i think there might be a more easy way todo this, but sorry! i'm not good at it yet. :P maybe next time i'll do a better job. ah! i forgot.. this script should be paste at the end of /etc/profile file.
another project i'm working on is to find the way to make the
Dlink AirPlus DWL-650+ cardbus working under Linux. the chipset used by the card is
Texas Instrument's ACX100 and its not in the default kernel (both 2.4.x or 2.6.x). after searching for quite some time, i finally found the opensource
project site. its created by people writing the TI's ACX1xx driver. i found out that the chipset is used in other cards/brands as well. check out
here to see the list.
following the guide in the
download section, i downloaded the latest snapshot release of the driver;
acx100-0.2.0pre8_plus_fixes_23.tar.bz2. i think by now they might have a newer version ready, so please check it out first before downloading. you sure wanted the latest rite?
before starting the installation process, make sure that the kernel (either 2.4 or 2.6) is enabled with
CONFIG_NET_RADIO and
CONFIG_NET_WIRELESS.
CONFIG_SMP is disabled (sorry! only non-smp machines only!).
the steps to install the driver:
1. unpack the downloaded bzip2 archive file.
# tar xjf acx100-0.2.pre08_plus_fixes_23.tar.bz2
2. the firmware of the card is needed so we go and get it
# cd
# make fetch_firmware
- the firmware is needed in order to drive the cards' onboard embedded wireless baseband CPU.
- this will run the script to download the driver package from the Dlink website, extracted and then copied to the firmware directory located inside the extracted folder.
- another way to do this is by copying it from a windows driver package that comes with the card.
- the firmware files are
WLANGEN.BIN,
RADIO0d.BIN and
RADIO11.BIN.
3. "making" time! we can just run
'make' or
# make config.mk
- this will check some configuration settings
# make driver
- this will compile the driver
# make install
- this will install the driver to
/lib/modules/kernel-version/net
4. lets make the driver autoload properly.
/etc/modprobe.conf file is edited by adding:
options acx_pci firmware_dir=/usr/share/acx use_eth_name=1
- the firmware is moved to
/usr/share/acx following the question been asked while 'making'.
-
'use_eth_name=1' will enable the usage of eth0 rather than wlan0.
5. test the card. plug it in and do the
'modprobe module+options' thing (just like the above statement!)
the rest of the projects will not be explained yet because its not really working! one of it is the
CS110 Intel Webcam support for Linux. i manage to find the module, compile and enable the webcam to be detected by the linux machine. but the weird thing is that its not showing any pictures when using the software to test the webcam! weird. going to find the way to settle this!
links of the day
SlackCare: the Slackware community that focuses on providing information about GNU Linux/Slackware. they provides forum, daily news feed plus plenty of tips, tutorial and FAQ. custom packages are also created.
SlackCare:
http://www.slackcare.com/
Slackware Gallery: wallpapers, screenshots and pictures. pro-slackware of course!
Slackware Gallery:
http://www.slackwaregallery.com/
