Robyns' Journal

Picked up a copy yesterday and …

Things went better than I'd feared for and worse than hoped.

What I'm running:

• intel DX58SO motherboard
  • RAM 6 GiB ( 2 x 3)
  • PCI-E XFX 9500GT 1 GiB
    • VGA Dell M991 1600×1200 19” CRT
    • DVI ACER P205H 1600×900 20” LCD
  • SATA
    • 0 - WD Black 640 GiB ( Win 7 & Ubuntu 10.04)
    • 5 - LG GH22NS30 DVD-DL
  • Audio
    • Optical ( rear) - RCA HTiaB DVD 5.1 DD System
    • Line-out ( rear green) - ACER P205H
  • FW - FD 500 GiB FAT32
  • USB 1 internal - Rosewill control panel, card readers + USB
    • USB - Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000 Headphones
    • Card slots - SD/MMC, SM, MS/MS DUO/MS PRO DUO, CF 1/CF 2/MD
  • USB - Seagate FreeAgent ( brown one) 500 GiB NTFS
  • USB - WD 500 GiB ( AMS Case)
  • USB - APC Back-UPS XS 1300
  • USB - Logitech G11 Gaming Keyboard
    • USB - CyberBlue BT dongle
  • USB - Logitech 4 button Marble Mouse
  • USB - Logitech Webcam ( find out which it's a something 200 or 250 though)
  • USB - Palm cradle, T|X
  • USB - i-rocks 4p hub
    • Hitachi 40 GiB 2.5” Snow Leopard
    • Fujitsu 80 GiB 2.5” Time Machine

So I read the install instructions and made some best guesses: ( F8 boot params busratio=20)

• Custom Config changes
  • PCEFI - boot loader
  • disabled RTC
  • AHCI Driver
  • VoodooHDA Driver
  • intel gigabit Driver

Installed and rebooted: ( F8 boot param: busratio=20)

• Dell @ 1024×768 ( primary) #
• Acer @ 1600×900 ( secondary on the right)
• Logitech G11 unidentified keyboard, works fine after doing the push key to the R/L of the R/L shift key thingie.
• Logitech WebCam video and audio working.
• Cyber Blue BT working - connects to my Motorola S805 Headphones both headset mode and headphone mode
• all the HDD found
• MS LX-3000 works, the volume controls even change the system volume setting.
• NO optical sound #
• No network #
• Boot params - having to F8 and type busratio=20 every boot #

# Problems:

• Dell - easy just changed the res to 1600×1200 @ 75Hz in Preferences
• Audio - sighs
  • Optical - haven't found out how to enable the mobo port yet. It doesn't show up in the Sound Preferences.
  • Line-out - I have to run all the volume controls, monitor; system; and app at almost max to max or you can't hear it.
• Network had to install Intel82566MM.kext which you can easily find using http://insanelymac.com and several other places. I had to do the manual install cause OSX86Tools wouldn't.
  • open term
  • sudo cp -R path/to/download/Intel82566.kext /System/Library/Extensions
  • sudo chmod -R 755 /System/LibraryIntel82566MM.kext
  • sudo chown -R root:wheel Intel82566MM.kext ( I didn't have to, it was already correct)
• Boot param
  • open term and added busratio=20 to com.apple.Boot.plist
    • sudo vim /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist
    • now I found an empty key entry so I just inserted 'busratio=20' in it, if you don't have one then insert this some place after the <key>Kernel</key> <string>… </string> pair
    • <key>Kernel Flags</key>
    • <string>busratio=20</string>
  • there are lots of things you can go here BUT I only know about this ONE and you can really mess up the system playing here!
  • Marble Mouse only Buttons 1 & 2 work, the little silver ones 4 & 5 don't do anything, oh well it is Apple and they think one button is enough.

SO the things that aren't working or are partially working:

• No nice 5.1 optical sound, btw it does list SPDIF out for CD and Rear Black
• The volume through the ACER is very soft, it's low in Win 7 and Ubuntu also ( both of which support Optical out) but alot louder.
• Haven't tested Ethernet speed, but it's doing over 10Mbps, I don't have 1000BT so…
• Haven't found, well haven't looked either, setting for the UPS, so I don't even know if Snow knows it's there.

Oh almost forgot I used OSX86Tools to enable Quartz GL it didn't bitch about it so I will assume it worked.

Apple apps I've tried

• Safari :)
• iTunes :)
• TimeMachine to an 80 GiB USB drive I had around, don't ask why I didn't start with it, otay it was full so I needed to save somethings alright.
• Mail
• all the standard things you need just to use OS X

Non Apple apps

• OSX86Tools of course
• Skype
• Chrome
• X Chat Aqua

That's it for now.

time passed …

Something I noticed:

• Win7 only uses local time for the system clock ( on the motherboard)
• Linux gives you the option local time or UTC for the system clock.
• Snow Leopard seems to only use UTC for the system clock.

What does this mean? Windows and Snow don't get the same time from the system clock. Snow will without telling you reset the system clock to UTC and display a time adjusted by your TZ. Windows will just get the system clock and show it to you assuming it's already been adjusted, it can use NTP to set the clock but it only does that every few days. So boot Windows you see 4:30 PM shutdown and boot up Snow you see 4:30PM. Boot back into Windows and in my case, you'll see 11:30 PM or 12:30 AM the nest day depending on Daylight Saving. There are a couple pages on work-a-rounds for this problem. BTW it's neither systems fault, or both systems for not giving you the option of how to set the mother board clock, local or UTC. See I always knew Linux based distros were better.

For years I've been using Hellanzb 0.13 and been quite happy. There where a few issues, none of which caused data loss. But it is getting a bit long in the tooth and no active development has been done for some time.

It was while looking to replace HellaWorld that I ran across Lottanzb which lead me to SABnzbd+, I remember looking at it once before but because of needing Python 2.6 it wouldn't run on RHEL/CentOS both of which use version 2.4. I am happy to report that version 0.5.3 no longer has that dependency. I have it running in deamon mode without problems under CentOS 5.4 on an intel® Adam® 330 1.60GHz with 2 GiB of ram.

So far the only hiccup has been handling RSS feeds and the SABConnect++ plugin.

• SABConnect++ isn't really a problem it's one of those “damned if you do damned if you don't” things, on any given page from Binsearch.info it generates a nzb for each checked item. Now Binsearch.info some times ends up with multiple boxes for a single article set. So if you end up with the .rar, .nfo, and master .par2 files in one group and the par2 vols in another ….
• RSS feeds so far I've had to force everyone, again I'm using Binsearch.info, you get random-number.nzb as the nzb file. Makes it kind of hard to track things. Whos fault is it … in my mind a little of both, but mostly SABnzbd+, it does get a name based on the RSS search name. Why not use that or better still look in the nzb and get the name there.

All in all I'm very happy with it so far - less than a week, “This month: 112.06 GiB | This week: 20.15 GiB” with 76 nzbs, having only installed it last week, I'd say that's not bad at all

My mum forwarded this to me, shes very smart but doesn't do well with computers. Oh a friend of hers sent it to her.

Subject: Finally – an error message I can deal with

Lets see the last two days I've been playing around with booting Live Images from USB sticks. -sighs- it's been good and bad.

What I really wanted to do was create a bootable USB image with persistence. I have a 16 GiB USB stick with ubuntu 9.10 installed on it for the IBM R50e laptop, 10.04 doesn't like it. So I thought it would be useful to have a portable USB stick that wasn't chained to the lappie.

The good news is I found http://www.pendrivelinux.com and they had some good advise and a couple of nice utilities Universal USB Installer – Easy as 1 2 3 and MultiBoot USB Boot Multiple ISO Files from USB

Using the Universal USB Installer I created a ubuntu 9.10, remember the lappie isn't on the 10.04 friends list, LiveUSB 4 GiB stick, allocating 3 GiB for persistence. Will it booted just fine, it's when I did a system update, nothing new added, just updating the base system some 250+ packages that things WTH, it rebooted four or five times, windows went to blank, after sitting around for several hours ( I was doing other things ) I gave up and pulled the plug. Oh least you think something with the WiFi went wrong I had it in the computer room plugged into the wired net.

While we're talking about ubuntu, it was during an Upgrade Manager upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 that the system ate itself, the upgrade was going fine, I went to sleep, big mistake. When I got up and checked it out there was a fatal error about grub ( I HATE grub) and lots of download errors, will sometime after I went to sleep the WiFi got turned off. It was while trying to recover that I found out ubuntu 10.04 doesn't like an IBM R50e for some reason neway.

Back to the main topic… the two utilities from www.pendrivelinux.com seem to work nicely. There are a couple of things to note:

• MultiBoot USB
  1. some of the programmes / distros have been update and you'll have to edit the menu.lst file to fix up the names.
  2. everything in the file will be displayed as there even if you don't have the matching .iso or whatever, so you might want to edit out what you're not including
  3. there aren't any 64 bit versions listed and I don't personally know how to mod the script to handle them. Would be nice though.
• Universal USB Installer.
  1. again doesn't seem to understand installing 64bit desktop stuff, there is ubuntu server 64bit.
  2. make sure the .iso name is right.

And with both of them, if it isn't a newly format stick, enable! formatting of the drive.

This should also work with flash cards SD, SDHC, CF, …. as the ones I've used are attached through USB neway.