Jiří Slabý

2009 is over

2009-12-30T09:38:00.002+01:00

Well, a year full of grief, death, crisis and bad status of politics in Czech Republic is at its end. Finally.

Wish smile to all. Hopefully 2010 will be better. Full of life, energy and satisfaction.

To all farmers

2009-08-08T10:05:00.003+02:00

I strongly ask all farmers to NOT lose their pea in corners. In spite of the dark yellow seeds are pretty visible on black asphalt, one can miss them and fall down (from a (motor)bike). :)

First 5000 km on my ninja

2009-07-11T15:47:00.005+02:00

Heya, my Kawasaki ZX-6R (known as Ninja, yr. 2002) odometer hit first 5000 km with me. I bought it on November, riding since February. No accidents (knock-knock), I met few crazy car drivers though. I hope it will remain that way for a long time. I'm trying hard to ride safely.

It did recall my memories from my first car journeys. I has been driving like an idiot. At least I feel it that way today. I think it's the same with the motorcycle now – that I'll see later.

I love it! Especially cornering is great adventure. I read about that much. Trying to catch up the information, still lea(r)ning. Who would say it'll turn right, when you push right handle forward?

Funeral

2009-05-29T23:04:00.003+02:00

I'm sad, we all are. After we recovered from the shock a bit, another event happened. A funeral. Blah, I hate it.

Why this all happens? Just because... If only there was something to do, no, you can only stand still, stare and hope for a miracle. But it doesn't occur. Again and again.

R.I.P.

2009-05-22T17:23:00.002+02:00

We all loved you.

Sometimes life is a fucking weirdo, we have to put up with that.

I bought Nokia 5800

2009-03-07T14:47:00.008+01:00

I may recommend this phone. Really. I had Nokia N80 for almost 3 years (a month after introduction to the czech market) and upgrade to Nokia 5800 was eligible choice.

It satisfied all my needs and expectations, especially what I hated on N80 the most has improved a heap – sound output. My Sennheiser CX 300 feels the difference, no noise, great music experience.

ath5k as an AP

2008-11-08T15:22:00.004+01:00

I got ath5k AP mode working at least with 5212/5213 cards (known to be defunct with 5413 and 2425 at the time being).

One needs these patches to the kernel:
- Add AP mode to ath5k (included in 2.6.29)
- Enable AP mode in ath5k
- Enable AP mode in mac80211 (included in 2.6.29)

Grab some later version (a git snapshot at best) of hostapd and compile

Run hostapd hostapd.conf

antlr is (not) broken (alias code too large)

2008-04-05T18:02:00.009+02:00

After 2 hours of debugging this issue down, I've found out, that antlr is probably broken on too fast machines. My E6850 core 2 duo (3GHz) with antlr 3.0.1 generates simply too huge code, so that java can't compile it. (I don't hit the problems on same software configurations with different hardware – my notebook with core 2 duo neither another desktop AMD 64 dual core 4200+.)

If I run 2 this suckers:

cat /dev/zero > /dev/null &

and antlr under nice (nice java -cp ... org.antlr.Tool My.g) priority just for sure, it just gives out totally different code, shorter for about 15000 lines (diff). There must be some uglymoronic race.

EDIT: Ok, according to Terrence Parr (the antlr leader), it's not a bug from his point of view, see his comments below.

The trick is -Xconversiontimeout 600 on my machine.

Empty structure size in gcc and g++

2008-04-02T22:29:00.005+02:00

Did you know that empty structure in GNU C has size 0, whereas in c++ it is 1 character?

#include <stdio.h>

struct A {
};

int main(void)
{
        printf("%zu\n", sizeof(struct A));
        return 0;
}

Output of this after gcc a.c -oac && ./ac is 0, g++ a.c -oac && ./ac will output 1...

See gnu cc manual, chapter 5.15.

Něco o zákonodárcích

2008-01-06T16:27:00.000+01:00

Tak jako informatik nemůže ladit programy v rutinním provozu, neměl by ani zákonodárce ladit své zákony až po uvedení v platnost.

-- RNDr. Jan Skula, CSc.

Bakaláři SQL vulnerability

2007-11-24T23:35:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago (precisely Nov 7 2007) I've found out a way how to break into the bakaláři czech high school system database. I used probably the most known method called SQL injection. After something below an hour (got up about 9:30, sent an email to the school at 10:08) I got the magic formula to execute SQL queries.

fuj order by cas desc'; select 1; -- '

Ok, so I informed the school which I had been attending for 6 years in the past about the security hole. But then I realized that it's not school specific, I found many schools which use the same system, so I didn't hesitate to drop a message to bakalari.cz people. Their reaction was fast and they fixed the problem next morning with promise that they will post updates to all high schools. Nice.

Not that much, because this haven't happened so far, you can still find many schools which are still vulnerable against this attack. This pisses me off little bit, I only hope they weren't involved in any grant for this sloppy work.

EDIT (Dec 8) they finally either seem to distribute the upgrade or the school admins update the soft.

fglrx and x1450

2007-10-29T18:59:00.000+01:00

After many fights with this driver, it finally works!

I started use it about 8.38* and it never worked with X 7.2 from Fedora 7. I had to use 7.1 from F6. After upgrading to F8 with changed glibc 7.1 X didn't work anymore. I had to install old X proto devel and recompile whole X from F6 and use it with fglrx up to 8.40. No hw acceleration, no video overlay. I couldn't use it with F6 packages too, fglrx kernel module had broken suspend/resume (did you know, that you can use X driver with no need to use the kernel module).

Now I have 8.42.3 with patches from livna package (to have compilable sources on 2.6.23) and lkml (to enable suspend stuff) running on X 7.3 from F8. Also I can have fglrx kernel module loaded, suspend seems to work, hw accel and video overlay enabled, so I'm happy.

gmail & imap

2007-10-26T23:23:00.000+02:00

I love it!

outb_p, outw_p, outl_p, inb_p, inw_p and inl_p in linux kernel

2007-10-21T13:25:00.000+02:00

Do you want to know where the definitions of this macros for i386 and x86_64 platform are? Yes? Then you would try cscope as usually. But it shows nothing relevant. You might also try to grep whole sources, but with no reliable output. It's not that easy.

Try to generate preprocessor output by -E switch and it will show you, that you should take a look into asm/io.h (i.e. include/asm-arch/io.h) and … what you see? BUILDIO for i386 and __OUT* macros for x86_64. Ugly. Sometimes, preprocessor output might be useful :).

IRQ handling

2007-06-03T21:31:00.000+02:00

There are 2 common principles how to get known about new data in card.
1) asynchronous – whenever the devices get data, it will interrupt line and will get know it in your ISR. Smarter devices support irq mitigation, which more or less means deferred interrupts unless there are more data or timeout elapsed – this is especially common in network devices, where interrupt overhead would be large on high speeds.
2) "synchronously" by timer – you setup a timer and "poll" the device even in the case, there are no data (you simply reschedule the timer). This is mostly useful for devices which generates interrupts at high rates, but do not support irq mitigation. Beside this, you may use this approach in the case you don't want (or must not – e.g. netconsole with data in opposite way) enable interrupts.

But when you enable interrupts, you must handle them, even if you don't want to do anything but returning IRQ_HANDLED in ISR (interrupt servicing routine – the function you register in request_irq).

Note that if you request shared interrupt, you also need to check, if the device really raised the interrupt you are handling.

Comments are mostly a bad idea

2007-06-03T13:04:00.000+02:00

As I was saying ever before, comments are unneeded unless you write something not obvious, for example resetting a device in a place, where nobody would expect it. Then yes, comment is necessary to disallow everybody removing the code that is requisite.

The other case of using comments is documenting API. Everybody wants to know, what the function does without reading whole body and studying the code.

But for God's sake, don't try to comment each line of code explaining what it does if it's obvious or even worse how it does. If it seems to you, that the code is pretty unclear in the meaning what it does, do it better and don't vindicate it by long comments. This is often a very bad idea and makes the code totally unreadable and ugly. Beginners often do this, I saw a code that seemed something like this:


function min(a, b)
{
  /* compute minimum by comparing both values and */
  /* store the one, which is less than the other into */
  /* result variable, which will be finally returned */ 
  if (a < b)
    result = a
  else
    result = b
  
  /* and now, return the computed value */
  return result
}

Please, don't do that ;), at least don't do that where you are working in team, when other people will work on the same code either in parallel with you or after you leave the project.

Final quotation of Martin Fowler about Refactoring:

Comments are often a sign of unclear code... consider refactoring

Asus F2JE and defunct fn+brightness

2007-04-04T13:47:00.000+02:00

While pressing Fn+brightness buttons, this occured in dmesg and nothing changes:

ACPI Error (psargs-0355): [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P2.VGA_.LCDD] Namespace lookup failure,
AE_NOT_FOUND
ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed
[\_SB_.PCI0.SBRG.EC0_._Q0F] (Node ffff81003ff07f70), AE_NOT_FOUND

I slighty changed DSDT, compiled it and used hex in "include custom DSDT" kernel option.

Sensable phantom driver

2007-03-08T07:46:00.000+01:00

Good news to write is, that Sensable shows people sourcecode for their 2.4 Linux PHANToM driver. That means, everybody can sort out, how things work and use the know-how in their 2.6 driver.

This is exactly the thing, I've done. I have a 2.6 driver based on real basis, not rtc hack and ready to submit upstream :), whoooo, except the fact, that I'll probably rewrite it to standard force feedback layer before sumbit #2, as Dmitry Torokhov suggests.

The world becomes nice.

RAID1 is recovering

2007-03-08T07:44:00.000+01:00

This means, everything went fine, RAID is now copying blocks to the spare device and user data stays intact :).

RAID1 assembly

2007-03-01T10:19:00.000+01:00

After a month or so of running degraded RAID1 on the new disk to test it in our lab server (with almost daily backups on the old one) and since S.M.A.R.T. with its tests was silent, I've decided to finish the job of moving homes to the raid on the fly. The first step was done – repartitioning of the old one. Now I'm going to restart and move the old root to the end of the disk to have enough space for the raid partition. Keep one's finger crossed, please, I'll keep you informed.

Solaris, qemu and audio

2007-03-01T09:51:00.000+01:00

After proper load of network driver, there is still one thing to do in Solaris + qemu – audio is defunct. According to Solaris HCL, audio1371 is for es1370 hardware (pci1274,5000). You can obtain a copy of audio drivers from tools.de site. After bunzipping, you can pkgadd -d it. Note, that you need only TOOLSSbpro driver, so that you may tell the installer not to install all the drivers from the package.

The next obvoius thing is to add_drv -i '"pci1274,5000"' audio1371, touch /reconfigure and reboot. Enjoy the audio :).

Solaris, qemu and network

2007-03-01T09:36:00.000+01:00

When I was playing with Solaris 9 under qemu, I needed to install driver for network adapter (the default ne2k_pci). Rtl8139 neither other options doesn't seem to work not even in linux. Lspci says nothing when -net nic,model=<anything but ne2k_pci> is used in linux, the same result for prtconf in Solaris.

To get it right I've tried nei driver without success. Next thing I was told to test by google (and maybe Solaris HCL) was ni driver from this page. And it works, despite it's marked as beta. (You would propbably need to add_drv -i '"pci10ec,8029"' ni to add the driver, touch /reconfigure to tell Solaris to recheck hardware and reboot. Remember to create /etc/hostname.ni0 and /etc/dhcp.ni0 if you want to use dhcp client on this adapter (as you want to on qemu).

Just a note, use ls more than I. I installed gcc and make and after that I figured out, that there is already a binary driver in i386 (alias obj) dir. So you don't need to compile anything, if you don't want to.

Nasty bug

2007-02-02T11:40:00.000+01:00

I've been playing for a six or so hours with one tiny bug. I was working on the high speed network adapter NetBSD driver and underlying PowerPC didn't want to send packet chain longer than one. Tons of messages in dmesg, many tries to debug DMA S/G transfers without anything reliable in return.

Finally I found out, how I'm stupid. I always set the end of the queue as transfer tail – send from end to end instead of send from this point to end. Aaargh.

I'm just curious, if there is any way to solve such issues not in so many hours.

NetBSD network stack

2007-01-29T20:44:00.000+01:00

I'm playing with network stack in NetBSD and as a product I've released nettest – the test LKM to get familiarized with the stack. It's simple, it receives packets from userspace and sends them to the another interface and bpf listeners (tcpdump for instance). Everything is on my homepage.

It also contains examples of list queues use and deferred work. Everything in one short file.

Qemu is nice

2007-01-20T01:13:00.000+01:00

Finally I've time to try it out. It works just fine, especially with kqemu – a kernel module for speedup.

I tried 3 systems till now: Windows XP 32bit, Netbsd 3.1 and Solaris 9. No problem with installing Solaris and Windows. The NetBSD dislikes kqemu module – it spits out a 'Warning: no /dev/console' and hangs when trying to boot installation iso. The (simple) solution is to add -no-kqemu to the qemu command-line (even for standard booting of installed system, otherwise it won't boot with no warning).

Going to test it all harder :). First thing I took a note is the processor load; it's low, at least I expected it to be more hardware exacring.

Quotation

2007-01-07T00:16:00.000+01:00

Rodiče dřou děti sportem a muzikou, matematiku považují za týrání.
-- Jaroslav Král (origin, probably not the author)

(Sth. like parents force children to do sports and music, maths is considered as torture.)

Set it in stone :).

ALSA stoop

2007-01-04T01:13:00.000+01:00

I finally got my 5.1 speakers work in linux properly with this asoundrc file:


pcm.p6 {
        type route
        slave.pcm surround51
        slave.channels 6
        ttable.0.0 1
        ttable.1.1 1
        ttable.0.2 1
        ttable.1.3 1
        ttable.0.4 0.4
        ttable.1.4 0.4
        ttable.0.5 0.2
        ttable.1.5 0.2
}

And then for example aplay -D plug:p6 <soundfile> plays the sound in all speakers. In xine I have settings which produces original AC3 sound into all speakers by default (I've set nothing) if available.

I had no idea about how asoundrc files works, I needed to study it and went through /etc/alsa stuff to understand it. Now, the life with ALSA is easier :). Let me note, that I have an emu10k1 card (creative sb live!) with analog genius speakers.

3:30 doorbell

2006-12-18T19:07:00.000+01:00

It was a pretty good night today. I went sleeping and fell asleep about 2 AM (nothing unusual for me). Suddenly, a doorbell rang. Once again. Huh, wtf? I got up and go near the window to see, what happens and to get known what's the clock. It was 3:30 AM and my neighbour stand in front of the house.

"What do you need", I asked. "Could you please wake up your father. Our furnace is out of order and I want it to work", was the answer. Hm, wake up my father? Ok, let's try. Sure, he didn't want to get up, so I must deal with that. I arrange them a meeting in the afternoon and kick him away.

He was going to work (a bus driver) and wanted my father to repair it afternoon. Do these people think, that everybody is woken at the time, they getting up? Why didn't he wait till afternoon (he came at 1 PM again)?

Broken usb ports on laptop

2006-12-14T21:24:00.000+01:00

My father bought an USB extension cord. Good, but the metal is too close to the plastic part in the connector. Both me and him tried to push it into the USB cage, but with no effect, but side effect – we pushed 2 of 4 metal connectors (inside the cage) in 2 of 4 cages, so that no device worked in them from that moment.

We decided to disassemble the notebook, unscrewed about 20 screws and after an hour we were in (this piece is interestingly assembled). Fortunately it was correctable by pushing the connectors up inside the cages and pressing them from the back (inside part of the chasis) to their default position.

NEVER try to push anything into the USB cage not even with minimal force.

Exams are coming

2006-12-05T23:10:00.000+01:00

Who is looking forward to them?

Me :D!

Playing with AVR

2006-12-05T22:48:00.000+01:00

I've bought Attiny2313 chips (8-bit RISC) and created simple programmer connected to my ntb's parallel port. It's easy to use and easy to program – I use avrdude for programming.

After some playing with blinking LED on the one of the outputs, I've decided to construct something bigger. I had an old LED display from old clock, so I started to write digital clock :). To complete my toughts I also needed 4 NPN transistors, some 10k and 220Ω resistors and crystal with a pair of condensators.

The result is simple, 2 timers, one overflows each 500ms with 9.216 Mhz crystal – for colon blinking and time computing, the latter display numbers on the display (each time, one anode output is on and bound cathodes are 0 or 1 depending on nums arrays in the code.

Let me note, that the display has weird wiring, both right and left couples are bounded each together, so you will need to recompute nums arrays, if you want to use my code :).

Phantom driver

2006-12-05T22:41:00.000+01:00

I've finally done phantom driver, at least the first release. It took me some time to go through the Kabi's code and libraries, but It's done and ready to go.

Today I put a doxygen comments to the library header file to describe interface. The only remaining thing now is to cope with overheating and checking big force, which was done in kernelspace in previous version. It should be augmentation only by few lines of code to avoid problems and the driver will be safer.

NFS issue

2006-10-18T21:33:00.000+02:00

After some delay I'm back again. I've compiled and installed a new (2.6.19-rc2) kernel. After reboot it works correctly. Almost. One exception occured, nfs remote mounted filesystem with home dirs is still mounting read only even if it is tell to mount it read-write.

I tried to find out the reason and with some help from nfs folks I investigated, that homes and user directories are mounted from same disk partition with one substantial difference: there is a read-only protection of exported /usr and true rw access for /home dirs.

The new code sets first mount options even to the second, third etc. mountpoint if they are on the same disk part on the server. The caveat is, that this is visible only in /proc/mounts, not in /etc/mtab (what mount outputs).

This disk partition is ugly for this purpose, because subtree checking has to be enabled due to security (otherwise anybody has access to mentioned /usr part), but it's not so good option for so much changing files, which surely are in home directories.

My family's health

2006-10-11T11:43:00.000+02:00

I've just returned from floorball and my ankle is slightly twisted. The pain has gone, however it will hurt for a month or so. Ouch.

Despite it isn't the worst thing. My nephew caught a cold and has to be at home instead of learning in the school. He is interested in the school-life so much – his first year and he is ill, bad luck.

Nevertheless, there is even worse thing to write. My second nephew is with his mother, my sister, in the hospital. He fell down from his bike, stops breathe and nobody was able to wake him up for a short while. This had happened some times before this accident, but he had woken himself after being in syncope for a while. This simply happens to some children, they are so angry because of the fall, so they don't breathe and faint, then the brain starts to control the heart and lungs properly again. My sister had this syndrome when she was a child. Genes.

His parents decided to do something and he is connected to some devices (such as EKG, EEG et al.) and has to be there till Thursday.

Music player

2006-10-08T00:54:00.000+02:00

Today (according to the last post) I've decided to use something other than bmpx. For some hours I've used xmms, but it sucks. No support of gnome. I remembered, that I'd read about some server/daemon music player on Jan Kasprzak's blog long long time ago. But what was the player's name? I had no clue.

I tried to go through his blog again with nothing in return. Suddenly, the idea came. Use google, dude! Yup, it gave me a good result of that what I wanted (using "site:" notation). Music Player Daemon. I grabbed a last version and made rpm packages with some .spec parts from livna orginal srpms.

Now I use it and I'm totally happy. It sits on tcp port 6600 and the protocol is text-based. Everybody might write his own client – there are many clients to choose from. I personally use mpc in text mode (and for key-bindings) and gmpc in gnome graphics. I'm going to write dbus client, but I have to wait for listen interface, that would be implemented shortly.

Bmpx is a piece of shit?

2006-10-06T14:41:00.000+02:00

I have been using xmms, then bmp, then bmpx. xmms was the best, but is intended for old libraries (I prefer gtk+) and is not-mondern-designed (old libraries, plugins, no dbus et al). bmp was not so bad, but it's discontinued. I decided to try something new some time ago, so I chose bmp-successor: bmpx. It uses gtk2, dbus and hal libs, perfect.

Version 0.2x is poor comparing by functionality, but works. I hoped they will improve this in next releases and will continue in winamp-styled player – very bad hope. What the hell did they do in the 0.3x series? Non-stability, slowness, absolutely no options, stupid library, no shuffle, no repeat, no more dbus control (such in 0.2x versions), no winamp-style, there is just simple window with 6 tabs (library, radios, play queue); blaaah. What is the player like this for? They change all including appearance and functionality in the player per release – they may do that yet another time and they'll loose everybody, who use it for the time being.

Filesystem crash

2006-10-05T23:38:00.000+02:00

On one of my boxes ext3 filesystem went down during updating system by yum. This appeared in log:


EXT3-fs error (device hda2): ext3_free_blocks_sb: \
       bit already cleared for block 747938
Aborting journal on device hda2.
ext3_abort called.
...

with further info including – it was remounted to read-only mode and was slightly inconsistent. I reported this (a little bit freaky) to lkml and rebooted to correct the filesystem.

I tried to boot to single user mode, but fedora was (properly) faster and tried to check the root before I was able to log in. In spite of that it cannot correct it, so it gave me a shell to do-it-on-your-own. Ok, I ran fsck on root partition, it found some bad links, orphaned entries and block mismatches. Fsck was able to correct all those errors, then I checked S.M.A.R.T. output (with nothing suspicious) and rebooted.

Second phase of recovery began now. Rpm database and updated files needed to be corrected. Only 10 packages (including glibc libraries) were updated and the last one (the most affected) was gnome-vfs2. I removed all updated packages (there were both updated version and old versions) and verified if installed packages were allright, some was, some wasn't. Doesn't matter, I updated it again by yum, this time it went through successfully. Next nice experience :) – it works for now (not first, not last crash, since I use a -mm tree).

P.S. Jiri Kosina wrote on lkml list that he expereinced similar problems, so we will see if this is bug or not.

2006-10-02T01:39:00.000+02:00

Linux is like a wigwam. No windows(TM), no gates, apache inside.

I had to repost this ;).

Installing Linux from scratch (cont.)

2006-09-25T23:27:00.000+02:00

Today, I tried it, and it doesn't work. It works everywhere, but the hardware, where it should be connected.

I had several ideas what to do. Either I hunt out some PCI graphic card and keyboard with DIN connector or null-modem cable to connect it to other PC by serial (rs232) port. First I did the latter. I have a friend, who lent me a null-modem cable without data flow control pins connected (just RXD, TXD, ground and other two I can't remember now). Cable was long only 25 cm (approx. 1 ft), so he lent me a cord extension set with male-female connectors. Nice. The first thing I want to know if wiring is OK. One windows station and one linux. I ran hyperterminal on Windows and send data from linux. Nothing came, weird. I investigated, that the cord extension set wires bad pins.

I needed to know if at least the null-modem cable is allright. I made loopback COM1-COM2, ran 2 hyperterminals and after 3 tries I understood, that I hadn't switched off flow control. Doesn't matter. It worked from that timestamp.

The problem was with router. Nothing appeared on the hyperterminal console, just x sign just after I switched the power on. Strange, maybe grub can't initialize itself – I am going to enable serial support in grub tomorrow to see what happens. I'll have to disassemble the router to get the disk out again (I had to do this to provide console= kernel parameters), write configuration file and assemble the router back.

For the time being I still have no PCI graphic card, so the former thought I had in the beginning won't be perhaps realized, although it may be desirable.

Freecom DVB-T under linux

2006-09-25T12:45:00.000+02:00

My friend bought a Freecom DVB-T reciever and apply me to make it working under Linux operating system.

I asked him to put the usb device into the slot to see what Vendor and Product ID it is. I found out by lsusb command it has 14aa:0225 IDs. I started to investigate which driver could take control of that device, unfortunately there was no such driver in vanilla kernel.

Ok, he has kubuntu 6.06 installed, so I compiled a little bit altered vanilla kernel with make-kpkg and he installed it and rebooted. Unfortunately changes from v4l tree, that I used didn't helped, there were some unresolved symbols, so I decided to compile clean vanilla and install modules from v4l snapshot. Yup, this worked (I was able to load those modules). The driver requested firmware and the device switched to warm state with product ID 0226.

The rest was on him, he tried to scan with absolutely nothing in return. He tried hard. No way. He forgot to change the location of search. He changed it and he stopped to communicate with me, because he is watching TV all the day 8-). Nice co-work.

Furthermore, remote controller works better than in Windows and he is very glad.

Installing Linux from scratch

2006-09-25T00:28:00.000+02:00

Heh, I have a hard-disk from my router here with idea to install there some later system (Mandrake 8 was there with absolutely no support nowadays). I put the disk in my local linux (Fedora Core rawhide – devel) installation, wiped and created partitions with fdisk, made filesystems and the work might start.

I was lazy to write boot image from CD/DVD to a disk partition as usual and reboot ;), so I mounted its root partition, made lib and bin dirs, copy bash, all ldd bash libraries plus some other stuff such as ls, mkdir, rpm (with libraries) and so on. I had iso of the distribution on my laptop, I exported it by nfs to here. Here I loop-mounted it to created mnt/fc dir and chrooted into this new root with shell and mounted iso.

I had a small system with almost nothing, I thought, I need to expand it, so I inited rpm database – rpm --initdb and started to install yum with all what it needs as dependecies from mounted iso. About 30 packages were needed to be installed (very long command line). Now I set a new yum repository pointing to a mounted iso up and run yum install whatever-I-needed. The final step was to setup daemons and finally grub. One well-aimed grub-install and the system was ready to boot, I rebooted.

Fine, just some misspells in /etc/fstab, otherwise OK. I tried all servers it would serve (httpd, dhcpd, named, sshd, proftpd) and it worked, also network was okay, so I am looking forward to try it back in the server tomorrow – there is no monitor and keyboard. I hope it'll work (I'm a little bit naive, I know).

Playing with Vista RC1

2006-09-24T23:51:00.000+02:00

Vista RC1 is out for some time and the first computer (with directx 9 graphic card) with Vista preinstalled came to me today. Cool. First impression is the system is cool, at least skin seems to be very impressive. Fine. I started to work with that, mainly system configuration.

I don't know why did they change almost everything including configuration and control panel, strange – I was unable to find network configuration for a long time for example. Nevermind, we have to get used, but why the hell does it ask when changing some system settings if I really know what am I doing (continue-cancel question)? Aaargh. It can be switched off in user profiles, but what is that for (i.e. what kind of security enhancement? every user will click on continue, doesn't he)?

After configuration of network I can finally test Internet Explorer. That nice thing with tabbed browsing hangs in 5-10 minutes intervals. When you click on something in microsoft.com domain (mainly the menu on the left), it does nothing – Loading...; Done, no change, as if you never clicked. I had to copy and paste that address into address bar and click on go-to. IE7 needs much work and is still not eligible to be a superb web-browser like Firefox or Opera are, blaah. Furthermore IE wasn't able to open google.com, I really don't understand why. When I tested it on laptop the domain worked.

If Microsoft is prepared to release final version of this piece of *), I have to utter the system is not ready until SP1 is released. System behaves strange in some situations, we can call it Microsoft Hell for the time being.

*) whatever you want

School begins

2006-09-18T21:24:00.000+02:00

School started to exist for me today. I have 68 credits in enrolled subjects and need to reduce them to about 35.

I'm so tired after the first school day, it was exhausting. I hope it'll be better in next days to choose right subset from courses.

Suffering with WXP

2006-09-16T22:32:00.000+02:00

Okay, the first post and I'm going to object. Windows is the Evil(TM). Period. Grrr.

The story started by notebook coming to me to install HP drivers for a brand new bought printer. Ok, I inserted shipped CD and started with installation process. In the middle it stalled and nothing was going to happen. Reboot. Hard. Again, the very same issue. Hm, windows reinstall came on my mind.

So I inserted WXP home edition CD and started reinstall process. Installation has been done and the new system boots, nice. Let's use iiiiiiii...it hangs about a minute after logon (let me clarify, what do I mean by hangs in this case: mouse is moving, _some_ apps may be executed, no answer to ctrl-alt-del, ctrl-alt-esc keys, no response to clicks of mouse on start menu, i. e. explorer.exe hangs plus some other parts of system).

Fine, I agreed, no SP2+connection to Internet, it's error-prone, nevermind. I'll reinstall it again with no connection to the Net and installing SP2 right after reinstallation. No way, it didn't help!

It may be a hardware error, appeared on my mind. I downloaded and burned memtest86+ and tried it out. No error for a couple of hours, weird. Then, I'd test harddisk. I used for this smartctl from Fedora 5 rescue CD. I ran short S.M.A.R.T. with no negative results. I tried also a long one, no results too (and also no records in log).

It almost excluded HW failure, but I found out, that it recovers in 30 minutes or so and the system is usable again for a while. I let it update by Microsoft updates and it succeeded. The situation after this big update is a little bit better, but it still hangs, however for much more shorter times. Ok, I installed rest of software back, also the HP driver and returned the notebook back. I want to Kill Bill.