Orb Home Site Map Current Week Daynotes Gang [Enter] (for site search)

Orb Designs Grafitti February 19 through February 25, 2001 Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun Last Week  <--  *  -->   Next Week --> Link to the Current Week <--

Email Brian Bilbrey

Orb Grafitti is sometimes a conversation, sometimes a soapbox. I use Linux most often, and I write about that and related software frequently. I also have a day job working as a dogsbody for a small manufacturing firm here in the SF Bay Area. Also, Tom Syroid and I recently co-authored Caldera OpenLinux Secrets, unfortunately cancelled by the folks at $TINY_MINDS. I'm glad you've come to visit, and always happy to hear from you.

EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so, I'll pay attention to your wishes.

Good Morning. Well, we had a fun day yesterday. Started by sleeping in a bit, went through some work at the tablesaw, some observational work at the SolidWorks station, a lovely lunch involving a pesto w/ smoked salmon pizza, potato-leek soup, and foccacia (?sp). We then left Orinda and toddled off home.

No, not to nap, but to pick the place up a bit. Then we went out for supper at Hunan Gourmet with Pat and Nathan, where we partook of egg rolls and pot stickers for starters, and had as main shared courses: snow peas w/ chicken and water chestnuts, orange peel beef (in a garlic/ginger/honey sauce), green bean something or other with bits of meat in, and mu shu pork. Then we popped back over here for some decaf (eeesh, I know, but I would have been up all night with coffee at 9:30) and chocolate mousse cake. Mmmm.

Today is an unplanned day. We'll go, hop in the car, perhaps do some random shopping, lunch someplace, and who knows what else. I certainly don't. On a sunnier, prettier day, we'd likely make a driving day of it - spend 6 hours sight-seeing in a direction or road we hadn't taken before. But it's a little to gray and drizzly for that.

Beyond that, I know not. Y'all have a lovely day. Maybe back later, maybe not, who knows. I am certainly feeling a bit rested, with three days of sleeping until I awoke under my belt. Hope you're doing OK, too! Take care.

Top  /  Site Map  /  Orb Home  /  Email to Bilbrey

Good morning. Now to start a "four" day work week, with a rainy day and hopefully news back from the extended warranty company that the work on the truck is covered, and they can start! Beyond that, we had a bit of fun yesterday...

Marcia's been wanting new bedding for approximately ... ever, and finally we went out and looked at a bunch of stuff, and picked out a new color scheme for the bedroom that works for both of us. We also gagged at the inflated cost of furniture these days. I mean now really, folks, the list price for a nice queen size sleigh bed is the same as that of a cheap used car? Harrumph!

Also, I made a bit of progress at the Debian installation walkthrough yesterday evening. At the prompting of JHR, I have morphed the design to a multipage, large image format. Each HTML page should print on about 2 pages, there are 10 screenshots per page, and I've got full text on two now, pictures on the third, and I'll just keep after it until it's done, mostly because I really like Debian.

That vies for my time with a web design project for my brother that's been lagging, and now that I have all the images I want, I really should finish it, hopefully by the end of the coming weekend. Now let's hit the mailbag, then I'll have to hit the road. Thanks for dropping in, I'll be back later!

Mandrake 7.2 help please
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 04:04:46 -0800
From: [email protected]

Hi. I'm losing a lot of sleep trying to find the AMD PCNet card driver
you refer to in your article. Please help! I have one of these cards,
and It isn't in the list of supported cards on my copy of Mandrake 7.2.
I've spent about 30 hours trying to install the &^#@$ operating
system (the stupid Adaptec 152x SCSI driver syntax alone took me ages to
figure out, no thanks to Mandrake's hopeless "help"), and I'm pretty
close to giving up. What's the secret?

And, if it's not too much trouble, I have one other extremely annoying
problem I'd appreciate a little help with. Is there an alternative to
XF86Config? I can't get into graphics mode, and XF86config keeps failing
with a Subsection "extmod" error: "Module Section Keyword Expected." I
have no idea why that would be; I haven't edited or moved this file,
altered paths or changed anything I am aware of. I have a supported card
(ATI Mach64). And a bug, it would seem?

I 've tried three graphics cards in total. TNT, All In Wonder Pro, TNT2.
None work, but they ALL should. I also tried two different Ethernet
cards without success.  After I couldn't get the AMD card to work, I
installed a NatSemi Infomover 4100. Apparently, its driver is buggy too.
It will only load half a page, and then the kbps readout "stalls" and it
never finishes.

I've installed several other Linux distros over t the past several years
and NONE were this much hassle.  Is Mandrake 7.2 really buggy or
something? So, clearly, I'm looking for something like XConfigurator. Is
there such a thing? 

Sorry for the rants above. Thanks in advance.

The correct module for the PCNet card (I presume you're talking
about the AMD PCNet32 PCI card, eh?) is pcnet32.o.

I have a silly question for you. If you've had Linux running on this
hardware before, where's your notes on which drivers worked, what
the module option syntax was, etc.?

Penultimately, Xconfigurator is present, just the lower case 'c' should
help. Which version of XFree86 did you select during install?

Additionally, have you had any luck with the Mandrake mailing lists?

Old link
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 09:22:37 -0500
From: "Jon Barrett" [email protected]

You might want to update your "Last Week" link at the Feb. 19-25 page head -
it's still pointing at the week of Feb. 5-11.

Thanks -

Jon

Jon Barrett
[email protected]
Kensington, MD

Done. Posted in a bit. Thanks. You know, I saw that when I was
traversing the structure yesterday before we went out, and then it
was out of my head just as quick. ::sigh::

Not much to report tonight... <grin> Yup, the Agenda VR3d is here. I have some serious play work to do yet, so I'll keep this brief. Plug in the batteries, turn it on, it works. There's an update to both the kernel and the ROM utils that I need to flash into the system yet, but here's a couple of preview snaps, above. The first three are look-n-feel shots, for a sense of scale. Then I added the port expander (and the USP SmartMedia reader) to the laptop, and plugged up the VR3 (yeah, it needs a name, doesn't it. Let's return to that in a minute...). That's a lot of cords attached to a mobile computer, don't you think?

Then we have the front view of the VR3 next to Gryphon, then finally, a closeup of Gryphon's screen - I am logged into a BASH shell on the VR3, via the serial connection. Too much fun.

A name... Looks a bit like a communicator, I love Star Trek, it's small, machine names start with "G" ... duh. Well, how about Galileo. OK. Now the naming's done, it's time to get to it. Take care, see you tomorrow morning!

Top  /  Site Map  /  Orb Home  /  Email to Bilbrey

Howdy. Welcome to Wednesday. If you didn't drop by last night (and I wouldn't blame you for not doing so - a life is a good thing to have!), then you won't have seen the initial snaps of Galileo, the latest addition to the OD computing environment. Galileo is an Agenda Computing VR3, Developer's Edition. Aside from all the palm-ish things that can be done (and several that can't, like sync'ing with a Linux application), it is really truly a full-bore Linux computer - I can login to it via a serial connection and work away. Now if I could only find an editor... hmmm. This bodes to be a fun and useful tool for me, if I manage finally to get all my pertinent data into it.

Hope your day is going well, or will soon! It's still raining here, which is a good thing from a reservoir capacity point of view. But the snowpack in the Sierras is apparently still woefully low, which isn't a good thing from the runoff/power generation/high reservoir perspective. We need a couple of big storms to blow right through here, then hit the mountains and dump!

Extra special good news that I forgot to mention last night... Kaycee's cancer is in remission. Be happy. Some battles are won. Sure brings a smile to my face!

Now let me organize myself to go to work. Have an interesting day, I will...

Top  /  Site Map  /  Orb Home  /  Email to Bilbrey

Good morning. Hope you're doing well... I spent some more time working with Galileo (the Agenda VR3d) yesterday. I uploaded then flashed the latest kernel and romutils images from Agenda (latest test, beyond the recent stable release). Apparently this should fix a lot of the various hinks in the shipping version (which is quite alpha). Power should be more stable, behaviour should be much more consistent, yada-yada-yada...

If I don't hear anything else soon on the writing gig front, I am liable to start investigating writing a tool to sync the Agenda data with the associated KDE utilities (ABbrowser and KOrganizer). To do that, I'll need to understand both data formats, and translate between them seamlessly. Hmmm. Nice spare time project, don't you think? Additionally, isn't there a new tool from Eazel that's supposed to be a Gnome-based Outlook-killer? Maybe I should write to that at the same time... Mmmmm.

Zack Brown, maintainer of Kernel Cousins, was let go by LinuxCare in their restructuring preparing for the merger with TurboLinux. I sure hope he finds a good place to land. Kernel Cousins has now moved from under the LinuxCare umbrella - it can now be found at http://kt.zork.net/index.html In the meantime... say, do you remember what Kernel Cousins is? From the intro:

Kernel Cousins 

Kernel Cousins is an attempt to track the activities of various developer 
mailing lists. By summarizing the discussions that take place, a much 
finer grain of information can be provided than a normal news service. 
Readers can learn not only about new releases, new features, and 
security alerts, but also about the trends of thinking, the various 
alternatives and viewpoints, and the overall structure and nature of 
the bazaar itself. 

As an Open Source project itself, the history that is documented in 
KC will be forever available to folks interested in learning more about 
a given project, or researching the early life of the bazaar. 

KC is in large part a volunteer project, and several Cousins use a 
group-authored approach. Anyone can participate in this. Check 
out the KC Authorship page if you're interested. 

Kernel Cousins tracks the following developer lists: Linux Kernel, Wine, Debian Hurd, Samba, Gimp and Debian. I hit Kernel Traffic each week, keeping up with at least the surface foam on the ocean of Linux kernel development. It makes for an interesting read (for me, at least).

Now to run, Marcia's ready to go, so I should be too. Have a lovely day!

18:06 - Good (early) evening. For those of you into drooling over geek toys, here's a couple of progress shots of Galileo the Agenda VR3d. I found a cool resource online the other day off the homepage of Andrej Cedilnik, a UMBC grad student. It's his Agenda VR3 PDA help page (although that's an understatement, it is many different pages, and links to all sorts of useful information Agenda-related. Very fun stuff to be found there, from the basics of flashing new kernel and romutils images (which I'd previously found on the Agenda site) to connecting via pppd on a workstation and Direct Serial on the Agenda (figger'd that one out for myself), and a cool tip about updating the Agenda splash screen, among much other info that is useful.

To the left above is a snap of Galileo with his new splash, and to the right, I've telnet'd from the Agenda into Gryphon, and from there used lynx to "read" Slashdot. Then I quit from that, and ran who from the commandline - I must be in on pts/3. Now, this is not something I'd willingly choose on a regular basis. However, it was fun to do, at least once to show that I could.

There's plenty more to learn and do... now I want to check if the latest iteration has allowed me to save not just data, but the clock setting, when the power goes away... one moment please. OK, the batteries are out. Now to pop them back in. We're booting... login... Nope. Back to the beginning of the Epoch. (Unix time starts counting back in December of 1969 (don't ask)). Looks like it's back to the message archives for me. Gee whiz, this is fun. Setting the date isn't too hard, at battery changes only. But really, it should work. More when I know more.

Ahhhh hah hah hah hah hah hah... and so on for minutes on end..... Thank you, thank you, thank you to Chris Locke (aka Rage Boy), care of Doc Searls, who must know I needed to laugh just about that hard. OK. On to the next thing, whatever that is... Debian? Agenda? Job hunting? Who knows, I surely don't!!!

Top  /  Site Map  /  Orb Home  /  Email to Bilbrey

Well, it's crunch time - I've got only a short allotment in the morning, and this time I've got 48 overnight messages to cope with. Plus we're leaving a tad early this morning to tank up the Benz, so I think I'll devote my time elsewhere at the moment.

After all, I did get a post up last night, and after that, I didn't get a durn thing done at all, so there really isn't much new to report! We're picking up Marcia's Valentine's sparklies tonight (she had the earrings modified to be screw-backs or something???). What else? Not much right now. I'll catch you later.

Top  /  Site Map  /  Orb Home  /  Email to Bilbrey

Mmmm. Hullo... Yup. A late online start, following a bit of a sleep-in. In a way I feel a period of lassitude overcoming me. There are events over which I have no control, these vex me. Normally I am fairly competent at letting go those things that I can't affect, since they only frustrate. Hmmm, again. This too shall pass.

One of the items out of my control is my throat, which has chosen this day to return to ragged raw raspiness. ::sigh:: It, along with noisy neighbors in one direction or another, woke me in the wee hours (perhaps 2:30 or 3), and kept me up an hour or more. So I didn't drag out of slumber until nearly nine, this rainy morning.

So far I've done round one of email, showered and hared off to SuperCuts. That trip was necessary, since it was early December when last I had my hair sheared. Still on today's agenda (no, the lower case "schedule", not Galileo the Agenda VR3d) is putting a few hours into building a new website for my brother's business, and cooking for our dinner guests this evening. So I guess I'd better get to work. Y'all have a lovely day!

Top  /  Site Map  /  Orb Home  /  Email to Bilbrey

Hey. Nice to see you! We had a good time last night - our neighbor's Prasad and Sangeetha came over for supper. They're vegetarian, so I made a veggie Italian supper for us - the big hit of the evening was my garlic bread. Also pasta with red sauce, zucchini and salad. Desert was a variety of sorbet and ice creams. After, we played Trivial Pursuit. Next time, I think scrabble may be in order, as TP is fairly US-centric (to no one's surprise).

My bug is still with me, but I had some hot medicine drink thingy before dinner, and felt OK through it. But the sore throat is there, and a bit of flu-like achey-ness in the joints and large muscles. Mmmm. Not a great deal of fun, but there you are!

We've done our *big* Costco run today, stocking the freezer with meat of several varieties. Plus I stocked on Cola, and we got our vitamins and bagels. Now I have to get back to working on my brother's website - I'll be finishing that this afternoon. I'll post a link after I get his approval, later next week. Meantime, take care, I might be back this evening.

Top  /  Site Map  /  Orb Home  /  Email to Bilbrey

Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

All Content Copyright © 1999-2001 Brian P. Bilbrey.