Buzz

Google saved my ass once again..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JVqj7TIi-k

Atom - software

A brief followup on the software installed on my Atom PC.
I already mentioned Munin, a great monitoring software, very easy to setup. Even though there is quite a few plugins available in the Debian Lenny package, I have added and/or modified some (openssh, apache_accesses - with added SSL support, enabled graphing for apt).
Ever since I started sshd on port 22, I noticed some password guessing attacks, mostly for root, but also for oracle, guest, test, support, squid, svn. I tried to limit the number of connections via iptables as described here and here. Currently I am testing denyhosts.
I have also installed Apache2 with SSL, subversion, WebSVN (I originally wanted to use Insurrection but failed to configure it).

Atom

I got myself a new PC. It's based on Intel Atom D510 (1.66 GHz, 1M Cache, 2 cores), 1GB RAM, VGA is integrated but I use it as a headless machine. The processor has only passive cooler, so it's completely silent. The board is placed in a Travla C137 case, which has external PSU. I had a spare WD 160G 2.5" USB HDD laying around, so I used it.
I installed Debian Lenny (amd64) on the HDD. It was a bit of PITA, because I used my USB key as an installation medium. After a bit of googling I learned I need to use the 4th primary partition in order to boot from a USB device. There's also a small catch, the configuration of GRUB need to be changed after installation, because the HDD is sdb during install, but sda after the OS is installed (and USB key removed).
Here's the list of web pages that helped me during the install:

• Debian etch on ThinkPad X31 via USB stick (for dummies like me)


• Boot grml from usb-stick/firewire-device


• Grub Error 24: Attempt to access block outside partition


• Editing /boot/grub/menu.lst to change the GRUB boot menu


• chroot then "update-grub" gives errors

The PC is now up and running, I just configured munin on it, here are some resources:

• How-To: Monitoring a Server with Munin


• Munin Statistics


• Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Lenny

Converting AVCHD Videos

I have a Panasonic DMC-TZ7 camera, capable of 720p video. For some time I was struggling with the MTS format that is used. Mplayer seemed to play it faster than the original. However, when uploading to youtube.com, the video plays fine. It also plays fine in xbmc.
I searched around a bit and found this syntax:

fmpeg -i $1 -vcodec libxvid -b 18000k -acodec libmp3lame -ac 2 -ab 192k -s 1280x720 $1.avi

The video played fine in mplayer, but after upload to youtube, the sound was off. Same with added

-async 48000

parameters to ffmpeg.
Then I have read this blog post explaining how to convert the MTS format to mpeg4.
First I tried the

-acodec copy -vcodec copy

thing, but the wideo can't be rewound in mplayer. Finally the syntax

ffmpeg -i $1 -sameq -f mp4 $1.mp4

worked best for me.

Finch

I switched from centerim to finch recently. The UI is very intuitive so the switch was very smooth. Since there were a few features missing, I implemented two plugins.

The first one is xssidle, to report idle time from xscreensaver (actually I did a similar feature for centerim previously).

The second one is called betterhistory (could not came up with better name). It's an improvement of existing gnthistory plugin, it can display configurable number of previous conversations, it can also limit the history to messages from current day.

The plugins are located at github.

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade

I have upgraded all 3 my PCs from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04. The upgrade process went fine on all of them. I had problem with my htpc, though.. After the upgrade it could not connect to my wireless network. I have found out that both NetworkManager and wicd were installed after the upgrade and probably they had a problem with each other. I am using wicd on 2 my PCs but had this problem only on one of them.
There are people claiming they can boot in something like 10 seconds, but that's not my case, even though my laptops are not so old (Dell D630, Dell XPS M1530).
Ubuntu 10.04 features the new splash thing called Plymouth, which should "run very early in the boot process". This is not what I observe, in fact most of the boot time the screen is blank, the splash screen displays late and only for a very short time.

Keys mapping

Not all the keys on my TV card remote work with XBMC. I needed to map some of them to achieve certain behavior, e.g. I needed to use the backspace key which was not mapped to the remote.

The solution is very simple. First run the "xev" program. This program prints out the content of X events, such as key presses. Then press a key on the remote and make sure you see this in the "xev"-s output, such as:

KeyPress event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x400001,
    root 0x157, subw 0x0, time 69418336, (567,307), root:(620,340),
    state 0x0, keycode 182 (keysym 0x1008ff56, XF86Close), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

This is the output for the "Back" key on my remote. There's another event for KeyRelease, which does not interest us at this point. The important information is the "keycode", which is 182 in my case.

Next we need to map the keycode 182 to the particular keyboard key, in my case it is the Backspace key. Since I am using gdm, I put the mapping to the /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default file. The mapping is:

xmodmap -e "keycode 182 = BackSpace"

And that's it.

Update 20120124: Now that Ubuntu switched to lightdm, the key mapping can be made permanent by adding the xmodmap commands to separate shell script and add this shell script to /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf under "greeter-setup-script".