Today I made the mistake of upgrading my girlfriends LinuxMint on her Dell mini 10. After a new kernel was installed the video went to shit. It uses the Intel GMA500 “Poulsbo” video hardware.
I thought it would improve performance to do the entire upgrade like this one here. However the upgrade just made everything shitty. Soon after the upgrade I attempted to playback a nice big video with mplayer and I got a shitty choppy playback and a shitty black flickering bar towards the lower part of the playback. So, I googled for a few hours only to find a ton of others bitching about this driver and how much Intel sucks for this. After readin about all i could fucking stand about the psb driver, one of my old i810 video tips came to mind. Appending “mem=” to your kernel boot line to specify how much memory the kernel uses, Leaving some for the video system.
In your grub/menu.lst find your kernel line:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro quiet splash
Add “mem=SOMETHING LESS THAN YOUR ACTUAL MEMORY”
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro quiet splash mem=1000mb
Her mini 10 only has a gig of memory so I am using “mem=1000″, thats in Megabytes and there is 1024 of them in a Gig of ram so this should leave me 24MB’s for video.. if it needs it.
Wouldn’t ya know it, It worked. 
Hope this stupid post helps somebody out. Please share your comments.
Posted in geek speak, instal notes | 1 Comment »
Alright, you have a Linux server connected to your television. You don’t want to have to plug a keyboard into it to play movies, right? You most likely have some other computer on the network you would like to launch mplayer from and then have the output to the television. Well thanks to xservers we can take care of this.
Log into your server and create a /usr/local/bin/mplaytv script like this:
#!/bin/bash
DISPLAY=:0.0 mplayer -fs -zoom "$1"
Make sure you make it executable.
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/mplaytv
Now you can play something with the new script and the output will go to the xserver attached to the TV.
Make sure you run the mplaytv script as the user logged into the xsession on the server, or you will get xsession errors.
mplaytv Some_Video.avi
You should see some activity in your shell and mplayer controls are attached to that shell, So keyboard shortcuts also work remotely.
Linux Media, Done.
Simple ain’t it?
Posted in geek speak, instal notes | No Comments »
Some install notes, thats all
If you don’t know what irc is or irssi or blowjob.pl do not waste your time trying to understand this. Move along.. Don’t Waste your time.
apt-get install irssi irssi-scripts
Try to load blowjob in irssi
/load blowjob.pl
poop, im missing something.
11:06 ,--[ScriptAssist]
11:06 | The perl module Crypt::CBC is missing on your system.
11:06 | Please ask your administrator about it.
11:06 | You can also check CPAN via '/scriptassist cpan Crypt::CBC'.
11:06 `--->
Guessing I need libcrypt-cbc-perl and im thinking, libcrypt-blowfish-perl
apt-get install libcrypt-cbc-perl libcrypt-blowfish-perl
Next load blowfish in irssi
/load blowjob.pl
Loaded
Set a test key with someone your irc’ing with, and blow something.
/setkey foobar
/blow yo testing
“Ciphertext does not begin with a valid header for ’salt’
Shit still not working! Seems the script is old. It needed to be updated for the newer Crypt:CBC. I changed a couple lines and came up with this fixed blowjob.pl
Working now!
Posted in geek speak, golf, instal notes | 1 Comment »
Someone asked me this morning about browsing the web and masking the IP of the origin. The most effective way to do this is with tor and privoxy. These are my notes installing this stuff on windows xp.
This is about the most simple thing.
Step 1 download and install Tor
Download from our kick ass friends at EFF the Tor & Privoxy & Vidalia bundle on this page. Run the setup and hit OK a few times.. choose the defaults.
Step 2 Get the Tor Button
Well I’m assuming that if you are reading my blog you already are using firefox. If you are not using firefox, go away.. your to stupid to figure this out. or get firefox then come back and read more.
OK then, get the Tor Button firefox extension from here. Install it and restart firefox. You should notice a new indicator on the status bar. click it to change it to “Tor Enabled”
Step 3 Test
Visit whatismyip.com or similar and confirm the IP result is not your own.
done.
Posted in geek speak, instal notes | 1 Comment »
