To use my "old" IDE devices, I bought adapters. The options on the net about these weren't very good: too slow, do not work. I cannot confirm this.
My adapters:
LogiLink Adapter AD0008: S-ATA to IDE + IDE to S-ATA http://logilink.com/showproduct/AD0008.htm Adapter needs power supply via a USB power cable (within the scope of supply).
LogiLink Adapter AU0005A: USB 2.0 to 2,5 + 3,5 Zoll IDE HDD http://logilink.com/showproduct/AU0005A.htm Great stuff, works with HDD, CD drives, ... If motherboard supports boot from USB, OS from an external HDD or CD drive can be executed. Jumper has to be set master.
Do you think nowadays a swap partition is not needed anymore because of the GB-sized RAMs ?
Well, if you want to use the Hibernate feature you need a swap partition. There is the possibility to use a file on a disk to store the RAM for Hibernate but the quickest way is to use a swap partition.
First pair your phone. There are many HOWTOS or just look at the source at the bottom. At this step you should get the bluetooth address for your phone, if not use
$ hcitool scan
Another way is to put the pin code into file pincodes in the directory /var/lib/bluetooth/<address of your bt adapter> The first entry of a line is the address of your bluetooth device, the second the pin code, eg: 00:1E:3B:10:7A:88 1234
Bind the phone. First you need to find out which channel the DUN (Dial Up Networking) uses. Usually it's channel 1. But ...
$ sdptool search dun
or to get all services ...
$ sdptool browse [bluetooth address]
Add the following to /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf
rfcomm0 { # Automatically bind the device at startup bind yes;
# Bluetooth address of the device device 00:1E:3B:10:7A:88;
# RFCOMM channel for the connection channel 1;
# Description of the connection comment "Mobile Modem"; }
Replace the bluetooth ID after device with the mobile phone's bluetooth ID and check if the channel is the right one. If bind is set to yes, the mobile phone is bind when rfcomm starts. Of course, if there is another rfcomm0 section, use rfcomm1 and so on ...
Bind the phone (if bind is set to yes and the bluetooth service is active, the command will be run at startup) $ rfcomm bind rfcomm0
You can check it with $ rfcomm
Output is something like rfcomm0: 00:1E:3B:10:7A:88 channel 1 clean
Set up a modem connection
Now your are ready to start an internet connection via /dev/rfcomm0 The connection settings you should get from your mobile service.
Usually you need an init string something like at+cgdcont=1,"IP","internet"
Most mobile services accept for the username and password dummy values.
http://linux.frankenberger.at/Huawei_E220_Daten.html is a good place to look for connection settings.
Ref
I tried it with a Nokia 2630 and worked great.
Good source with details HOWTO : http://davesource.com/Solutions/20070520.T-Mobile-Nokia-E65-Ubuntu-Linux.html
If you are really paranoid, you also have to encrypt your swap. On an unclear system shutdown (blackout, ...) the password for the encrypt partition can be still on the swap partition.
Gentoo has a good documentation (cipher, more details, ...):
A Gericom ??? You ask me, if I'm sick ? Well, someone bought it and just for standing around it's too bad.
I installed Fedora 10 on an external hard drive and with my PC and another notebook (it's a maxdata) it works without any problems. Well, how to boot Fedora change from PC to PC. Some can read the MBR on the external hard drive and load GRUB, other need GRUB on the internal hard drive to boot from the external drive.
Back to Gericom: The BIOS have an option to boot from removable devices, but when I plug in my 1TB external drive, the BIOS hangs up. With smaller USB drives it works. BIOS update doesn't help.
So I searched for a boot manager, which is able to boot from usb. I found PLoP Boot Manager at http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html, which does the job.
The next problem: Booting Fedora worked, X started, but suddenly no keyboard or mouse worked anymore. But the system was running. I know that because when I pressed the power off button, the shutdown dialog appeared. What the hell is going on ?
The make a long story short: After some tests, I figured out that the service irqbalance was the trouble maker. When the service is disabled, the system runs.
Start up with runlevel 2 (here is irqbalance disabled), run chkconfig --levels 345 irqbalance off to disable the service at the runlevels 3, 4 and 5.
I just installed Fedora 10 and wo. Everything worked at startup: X.org, sound, network. I didn't have to configure something.
Then I plugged in my Huawei E220 UMTS moden and opened the NetworkManager to enter my username and password.
I tried to connect. NetworkManager asked me for the PIN code. I entered the right one and clicked OK. Nothing happend except the logging in the syslog "Searching for network ...". After some minutes the NetworkManager give up.
Rebooted, enter PIN code in the config dialog. Same problem. Rebooted, maybe currently no network, so I tried it with Ubuntu, no problems.
Why does the thing not work with Fedora ? With Ubuntu there is no problem.
After some time I disabled the PIN code and it worked.
NetworkManager is also unable to handle a SIM card with a PIN code correctly.
My tip: Disabling the f*cking PIN code helps to aviod some troubles ...
mencoder encodes videos, I use it to encode my DVB recordings. When you run mencoder without any tunning, you will waste useful space. Here is my experience with mencoder:
Removes all black borders Really !! You can use the filter cropdetect to find the values for the crop filter or use the filter rectangle:
Height and Width must be a multiple of 16. The video codec encodes the video with 16x16 blocks and if the size isn't a multiple of 16, you will waste space. The filter cropdetect returns values that are a multiple of 16, but also crops the video sometimes to much.
Scale can help to solve this problem. And sometimes it's better to have a smaller height and width. First just crop only the black borders, then scale the video height and width to a multiple of 16.
For example:
$ mplayer -vf crop=716:428::,scale=640:-10
The new width is 640 and height 352. The parameter -10 tells the scale filter to calculate the height using the width and to round the height to the closest multiple of 16.
Use filter hqdn3d=2:1:2 Use filter harddup See man page why
Two Pass Mode The first pass analyzing the whole video and writes a statistics file. The second pass reads the statistics file and bases ratecontrol decisions on it. The output file from the first pass can be deleted or send directly to /dev/null
File Size Should the movie fit on a CD, then you have of calculate the bitrate of your movie:
Use the video codec xvid and it will do it for you, you just need to set the video file size in KB (See example). How to calculate it ? When you use the Two Pass Mode, write down the audio size after the first pass has finished.
Is the value for the bitrate option negativ, it sets the video size in kilobytes [700 (CD) - 110 (audio size) - 8 (AVI overhead) = 580 * 1024 = 595968kb]. The threads option is only useful if you have more than one CPU else remove it.
If you record a DVB streams you will notice sooner or later, that they aren't small. For two hours 5 GB space, isn't that small and won't fit on a CD.
To encode a video, first you have to demux with ProjectX (http://sourceforge.net/projects/project-x) and remux with mplex (package mjpegtools) the stream to fix possible transmission errors. If you don't to that, you will maybe get a video where the audio and video is out of synchronization. It is also possible to export the subtitles from the Teletext.
$ java -jar ProjectX.jar myVideo.mpg
After running the program, you will find for every video and audio track an own file. To see all available options from ProjectX, run it without any parameters.
Then remux the video and audio together with mplex:
