This article contains some notes about the latest 7-12 ATI linux drivers. Biggest change in versions after 8.40 (aside of the new versioning scheme), is the support for Composite and AIGLX extensions, and the supposedly improved 3D performance. Unfortunately for some, support is currently limited to newer Radeon cards only.
Installation on my X700 was not entirely straight-forward, though.

Installation took place on my laptop which has a X700 on-board, but the driver only worked properly after some tweaking of xorg.conf...

Since I'm using Gentoo, installation of the latest driver was fairly   ...

The trouble with PSTN lines is that the CID has to be transmitted in-band, and there are more than one standard in doing this. On top of that, there are small differences between the various Telcos on the planet. And finally, to make things worse, documentation about it, is sparse and scattered at best.

The settings displayed usually go in /etc/asterisk/zapata.conf (either directly, or by inclusion).

How CID is handled is defined by the following variables:

cidsignalling: tells how the CID signalling occurs, can be bellcore (mostly US hardware), v23, or dtmf. cidstart: specifies how  ...

Got a curious error during the merge of the latest VirtualBox ebuild for Gentoo:
it fails with a die:

Quote

kmk failed

It took a bit, but looking around the output gave some indication of a problem with one or more dependencies. Looking around the Gentoo Forum, I came across this thread, which had the proper solution.

The error, more in full, is attached.
A bit more to the top of the error (sorry, but couldn't capture the right line as the new merge was already busy), it complains about Xmd.h, and GLXext.h. In that way, the solution provided by the forum thread I mentioned earlier, makes   ...

Because of my move, I had need of a media PC system, which allowed me to watch TV, record from TV, watch DVDs, listen to music and more. Buying a pc with Windows Media Center was not an option: linux has very wonderful applications and utilities to build such a sytem.
This guide is not a real how-to, but rather the steps I took to get things running, along with descriptions and solutions to caveats and problems I encountered. Since my Media PC is still in progress of being build and configured, this guide is also a work in progress. Comments on any of the steps are, of course, very welcome.

T  ...

Realtek has a new gigabit chipset which is appearing on various motherboards, including the Asus M2A-VM board. At the time of writing (with kernel 2.6.22 being the default), this driver is not yet included in the default kernel tree.

Thanks to Realtek's wonderful support for linux, they have the driver source for various Unix/Linux flavours available for download on their website.

Download the driver from the official download site.

First, have your dependencies in order by having the following:

A sane build environment (contains gcc, make, etc.)The kernel tree and/or headers of your curre  ...

In light of my media guide (which is still under heavy development), I did a bit of experimenting with MythTV.
The result of my experiment is pretty nifty: I now have the ability to watch TV on my laptop (without a TV tuner), as long as I have a connection to my media PC (where the tuner is). Want to know more? Read on then...

As you know (or perhaps not yet), MythTV consists of two parts: a backend server (which does all the work: managing records, accessing hardware and so on), and a frontend client (basically controls the backend server, look up recordings, watch actual TV, etc.).
These t  ...

Gentoo users that do regular updates, probably already ran into this issue before: Gentoo has pushed libexpat-2 to stable, effectively breaking all applications that depend upon it because of a missing library. While this is quite normal behaviour (the two versions of libexpat are not entirely compatible), it is mostly a very annoying thing, as it is not easy to find out which packages depend on it. Lucky, the Gentoo Forums provided me with a good solution.

Normally, in such a scenario, one would use revdep-rebuild to solve these issues, but, as seen on the forums, it more than occassionally   ...

Had a bit of a problem with re-emerging app-arch/rpm-4.4.6-r3 after an update of libexpat: the emerge failed with a whole bunch of compiler messages.
After a quick search on Gentoo Forums, I found a post about someone who has had the same problem, and was able to solve it.

About halfway the merge, the compile failed. At the beginning of a long list, I found these error messages:

Quote

i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -I. -I.. -I/usr/include/beecrypt -I../lua/include -I../lua/local -I../misc -march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -fPIC -DPIC -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_REENTRANT -  ...

Information about nvidia in Gentoo can be found here.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml

It goes more in detail about which driver versions are suitable for which nvidia cards; quite handy, since they kicked out nvidia-legacy-drivers.

If you don't want to read the article, here's the short story about the driver version:

Geforce FX, 6, 7 and 8: use the newest driver (100.xx and up)Geforce 3 and 4: max 96.xxTNT, TNT2, Geforce and Geforce 2: max 71.xxIn order to properly install the correct version, it is recommended to mask the packages like so:

Add the following to /etc/portage  ...

This little article contains some useful tips and tricks about using tar.

When your starting point for the tar is situated at /, you may already have noticed the warning output from it:

Quote

tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

In case of an automated backup, where the tar is executed using cron, this warning quickly becomes annoying: most systems mail the output of a cron job to a specified email address (and in any normal scenario, this is configured properly to know whether a backup succeeds or fails). If each time you get a mail with only this warning (the rest of the backup wa  ...

In absence of a decent article, here's a good resource page for performance tuning of DSPAM:

http://dspamwiki.expass.de/Performance_Tuning

An LVM structure is build as follows:At the bottom is the PV (Physical Volume), which is basically just a partition (logical or not). LVM markers need to be placed on it for LVM to see it as a usable PV.Before actual volumes can be created, a VG (Volume Group) has to be created. A group is the second lowest structure. Only one VGs can be created on per PV, but a single VG can span multiple PVs, which makes VG a very neat thing.The final step (before the filesystem) is the LV (Logical Volume). This is the thing that will actual hold the filesystem and data. So when mkfs-ing, it will be done on   ...

Has no journalling, so preferrably only used for CF and USB sticks, or for very small file systems where journalling makes things worse than better.No indexing, so don't use for many files.Preferred choice for external storage, because virtually all systems can read ext2/ext3 (including Windows with proper software).Has journalling. Is perfect for all-round (server) systems, in particular root file systems and such. If there are many small files, and many files in one directory, this one is not the preferred choice because there's no specific indexing method (or none that I know of).Has full  ...

Found this article to be so true...

http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/18417.

In light of my media guide (which is still under heavy development), I did a bit of experimenting with MythTV.
The result of my experiment is pretty nifty: I now have the ability to watch TV on my laptop (without a TV tuner), as long as I have a connection to my media PC (where the tuner is). Want to know more? Read on then...

As you know (or perhaps not yet), MythTV consists of two parts: a backend server (which does all the work: managing records, accessing hardware and so on), and a frontend client (basically controls the backend server, look up recordings, watch actual TV, etc.).
These tw  ...

In this article, you'll find some pointers on listening/watching to live streams with certain software applications.

MPlayer is a very good application when it comes to live streams. It supports a whole deal of protocols, including those of windows (mms://).
The only "drawback" is that MPlayer by default sets its cache to 8MB. For video over LAN, this is not really an issue, but when listening to a low bitrate audio stream on the internet, it takes a long time to fill up that cache.

The easiest way to listen to a live stream:

mplayer -cache size-in-KB "stream-url (e.g. http://&  ...

There are two things you need:

A bootable linux LiveCD, preferrably Knoppix, but any other distro with all basic linux tools will do.Some knowledge on how to use commandline based programs (and perhaps some knowledge with linux in general).First, make sure to boot with your LiveCD. You won't need to boot entirely into the graphical interface.
For Knoppix, the boot: commandline would be something like:

boot: knoppix 2 lang=your-keyboard-layout vga=normal

You can leave out the vga=normal to use framebuffer instead of plain text mode. Replace your-keyboard-layout (keyboard layout) with you  ...

In short: the kernel frequency is the number of interrupts (IRQs) handled by the kernel per second. Like most applications of frequency, it's also expressed at Hz (hertz).

A more sound explanation of interrupts can be found here, but it basically boils down to this: an interrupt is generated each time an event on a piece of hardware (in the most elementary way; this includes your keyboard for instance), and requires the necessary CPU time to handle that event. This is called interrupt handling.

Now, because the kernel directly interacts with all the hardware around, it's vital to have it han  ...

If you happen to have keyboard trouble when you SSH with PuTTY to a Debian system, you might want to read on.
With trouble, I mean one or more of the following symptoms:

Numeric keypad not working, even with numlock enabled/disabledHome/End keys not working as they shouldFunction keys not working as they shouldOther weirdness concerning keyboard...We've figured out a possible solution to the problem. It has been tested (and used) extensively by my and a collegue, and have found it working perfectly on Debian Woody and Debian Sarge.
It may be possible that these settings also work on other dis  ...