general update on the state of affairs…

By finndo On May 14, 2010 · 3 Comments

ok so to start, Appcelerator Titanium is still not working on either x64 or 32-bit Kubuntu 10.04.  I even found a video on YouTube on setting it up [...]

ok so to start, Appcelerator Titanium is still not working on either x64 or 32-bit Kubuntu 10.04.  I even found a video on YouTube on setting it up for Ubuntu 9.10 that had about 4 or 6 steps and took almost zero time, in fact he did it in an edited 10 minute video and did not install and dependencies or compilers… (gcc, gcc++, python, or ruby) on a clean OS install.  I am still not able to get it running.  I have a new weird error I have not been able to find helpful info on at this point.  will update this post early next week, I have a busy weekend ahead of me)

Final Fantasy XIII – still playing, found some things I am happy about, still not attached to my characters, although I care enough about my accessories that I want to complain that you don’t get them back when your party gets changed (which happens a lot).  I spent all my gil upgrading 1 weapon for each and 3 accessories, and I don’t always get a chance to un-equip the accessories before there is a party swap.  Also found a new thing that pisses me off!! THEY MADE UP WORDS TO THE CHOCOBO SONG!!! I can’t believe they stooped so low! (yes I know there was a pun in that statement)

Good news though, no 999hp limit (I know not the first FF to do so), damage is not capped at 9999 nor 99,999 (I believe, as the only not secret achievement in the game is do more than 100k damage in a single attack).  I am now in chapter 8 and have noticed a significant ramping up of CP rewards, and CP cost for new abilities.  I spent 4 hours at the level 7 sweet spot, Hope’s house, just run around inside and the soldiers respawn when you get halfway to the opposite side.  I made 125k gil from celling incentive chips (2.5k each) and got 60 phoenix downs and 25k CP.  not too bad a stash, but it was not enough… I could not buy any of the better upgrade components yet, so could only upgrade 1 item and 1 weapon (got Lightning’s starter sword to level 12, or maybe it was 11) and when I got to chapter 8 I was not able to max out anyone’s new CP skills. better yet! after I finished a relatively short and easy section wit h Sazh and Vanille (whom I always call vanilla) I had 33k CP available to upgrade the other team!!  which means that easy part at Nautillus which took about 45 minutes +/- gave me almost as much CP as 4 hours in Hope’s house… if I had known that, I would have stuck around Nautillus a bit more.

Right, on to my PC state of affairs… again, I have been using KUbuntu 10.04 for a week or two now, and have an installation post to make still, have it written on little scraps of paper that I need to type up, all seems good, Fedora 13 should be out tuesday, I have prepared my system for a clean install of that on a separate HDD.  Should get that done Wed, so there should be a post about that coming Saturday (maybe friday, I am going to try and post everything in the order it has been happening, so nothing gets left behind.  Also look out for a post on Sprint’s HTV Evo 4G sooner or later (might wait till I pick mine up on June 4th!!! although I will be out of town that weekend to watch a dance recital, 4 yr old and a 9yr old).  hopefully I will be posting my 32-bit Appcelerator install guide tonight if I can figure out this new error.  I want to get started on a couple system apps/widgets for my Evo before I get it.

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FreeBSD 8.0 and KDE, the next step

By finndo On March 30, 2010 · 1 Comment

Ok, so my FreeBSD box boots, I have the beastie to welcome me to my system, KDE launches when I type startx, my mouse and KB both work from the console and in [...]

Ok, so my FreeBSD box boots, I have the beastie to welcome me to my system, KDE launches when I type startx, my mouse and KB both work from the console and in KDE, and my system is nearly completely up to date.  All looking good so far, now I need to get some things working in KDE, I am not sure if I want to install the ATI drivers… it always leads me back to the dreaded “blank black screen”  so I may hold out on doing that, as the last time I installed them I had to do a reinstall of the system to get booted again.  Although I may not have to worry about that since I have KDE setup to load only when I tell it to.

 

The first thing I noticed is there is no GUI package management system, I do not mind running it from the console, in fact I may just prefer it; however I do not like not having the option to do so.  so here is a list of things I need to do to get everything where I want it… (not in any particular order)

 

  1. install VirtualBox (done but not running/needs configuration)
  2. install VMWare Workstation (I have a license for either 6.0 or 6.5 on ebay for linux x64 a while back for $5, I was the only one who bid.  I have the iso somewhere on one of my drives)
  3. mount all my ntfs drives and setup nfs support (all done before I started writing this except for 2 folders I want mounted in specific places)
  4. test my remote and local network ssh login (should be setup already, except forwarding the port on the router)
  5. get Google Chrome working
  6. test audio and video playback (can I watch hulu?)
  7. get my VM‘s to launch and successfully run programs (should be easy after installing the correct apps and configuring them, worried about the ATI drivers)
  8. install firefox (my backup browser for when web pages don’t work in chrome)
  9. test remote access to FreeBSD for my mounted ntfs drives (I have a friend in Korea that is willing to help)
  10. begin converting  my ntfs drives to a better FS
  11. convert my drives from MBR to GPT to utilize GUID‘s
  12. find a port/package manager GUI interface for KDE
  13. eliminate all traces of Gnome from my computer (several packages I have installed have dependencies that have Gnome in the name, need to find out if they are necessary and nuke em if not!!)
  14. build my first kernel
  15. get wine installed and working (in case I have something that will refuses to run in a VM)
  16. either install some older DOS games (<—two different links there) or find something newer out there install and get them working (VM or wine, just for fun and to say “oh yeah I love that game, I still it installed on my system…”)
  17. get Xorg port forwarding to work with cygwin.
  18. setup a respectable backup system (currently my backup drive turned into emergency storage when I had a few HDD’s all fail within weeks of each other last year, now I have new drives and enough storage space, I even copied the data off the external backup, but have not yet done a backup of FreeBSD.  Might make this item number one!!)
  19. get java working (part of getting hulu to run)
  20. get flash working (part of getting hulu to run)

 

Sorry about not getting this up sooner, I thought I posted it before I went out of town last week, but I found it today sitting here the drafts section still needing some work…

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FreeBSD 8.0 and KDE 4.4

By finndo On March 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Continuing on from my last post, it was really quite simple to get KDE to run after I closed that post.  in fact I only had to type in 2 lines and the second one ran KDE.

 

exec /usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde4 > ~/.xinitrc startx

 

BAM! that was [...]

Continuing on from my last post, it was really quite simple to get KDE to run after I closed that post.  in fact I only had to type in 2 lines and the second one ran KDE.

 

  1. exec /usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde4 > ~/.xinitrc
  2. startx

 

BAM! that was it, finally!! after 2.5 years of trying I could not believe it was so simple… and then I noticed… I had no KB or Mouse… I did not know it was possible to be so happy and so sad at the same time…

 

You can search the inet any way you want and you’ll find out that running “X -configure” will generate your xorg.conf.new file that you then have to move to “/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf “   one more item to note, when you test this, make sure you type “X -retro” or “Xorg -retro” else you will just get a blank screen.

*****WARNING*****ok, now that I got your attention, you must run the following command before attempting to use your xorg.conf in the previously mentioned location or you will lock your system up and have to hit the power button. “sudo chmod root:wheel /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf“  if you do not have sudo installed, you have 3 choices.

 

  1. login as root (something I never do except to add my user id to the sudoers file)
  2. type “su -” and switch to root
  3. login as root and type “pkg_add -r sudo” then either add yourself to the wheel group or add yourself to the sudoers file

 

there are several ways to add yourself to the wheel group, the only one that sticks out in my mind right now that I can vouch for is “pw moduser [username] -G wheel [username]” this one sets your group to wheel AND your default group [username], if you skip the second [username] you will no longer have access to any of your own files or you can type “pw groupmod wheel -m [username]” should do the same, to add yourself to the sudoers file you need to type “visudo” then you will be in vi, here is what to do if you don’t know vi.

 

  1. press ”/” (initiates a search)
  2. type “root” (tells vi what to search for)
  3. press enter (begins the search process)
  4. press “n” (takes you to the next instance of “root”)
  5. press “o” (creates a new blank line under the current one and starts editing)
  6. type [username] [tab] “ALL=(ALL) ALL“  (make sure you use caps on the “ALL”, this allows [username] to use sudo)
  7. press ESC (stops edit mode)
  8. press “:” (informs vi you wish to enter a command)
  9. type “wq!” (tells vi to “write” the current file to disk and “quit” vi “NOW”
  10. press enter (executes the command you have entered

 

Now you will no longer have to log in as root on your machine, or su to root again.  Back to my problems…  So, I ran the dreaded -configure command (dreaded because after running it on any system in the last 2-3 years the only result I have ever gotten is the blank black screen syndrome) and of course, I got exactly what I was expecting… a blank black screen when I tested X with that config file.  This is the reason I did not switch to FreeBSD instead of windows back when FreeBSD 6.1 was released, I could never get beyond this point.  Well, about a days worth of inet searching and I have come across some useful information that “worked” for several users.  Nothing worked for me (feel free to search the issue and you’ll get a lovely list of others having this issue, some getting off easy, some giving up, some finding alternate ways to do it.)  about 15 minutes ago (not that you will know when that was based off my posting time, but it makes sense to say it that way…) I found a lovely forum post on FreeBSD.org, now when you look at that post you may not be surprised by what you see there, it is fairly common troubleshooting and common knowledge about the workings of FreeBSD and X.org; HOWEVER!!! and here is the kicker, it has in it a code snippet of the ever elusive “ServerFlags” section of  xorg.conf, something that apparently is not auto generated and really is not documented well (additionally other posts I saw told you to stick it in the “ServerLayout” section, which only causes X to crash without loading.)  I added the following to my xorg.conf file:

 

  1. Section “ServerFlags”
  2.                 Option “AllowEmptyInput” “off”
  3. EndSection
  4. Section “InputDevice”
  5.                 Identifier   “Keyboard0″
  6.                 Driver         ”kbd”
  7.                 Option “XkbOptions” “terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp”
  8. EndSection

 

Now, if you ran “X -configure” lines 4, 5, 6, and 8 should already be in there.  Lines 1 – 3 allow my mouse to work in X, and line 7 allows me to hit ctrl+alt+bksp to exit X and both worked!!  So I quickly exited X and tried “startx” and sure enough, KDE loaded, I could see it, and my mouse worked!!  hot dog!!

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Working on getting FreeBSD running…

By finndo On March 11, 2010 · 2 Comments

Right so first off I have to say that it is all my fault I am not currently up and running 100% in FreeBSD 8.0, I agree before anyone else can say it… I’m an idiot.  I went out and bought (went out=I hit up [...]

Right so first off I have to say that it is all my fault I am not currently up and running 100% in FreeBSD 8.0, I agree before anyone else can say it… I’m an idiot.  I went out and bought (went out=I hit up newegg.com)  a wireless card so I can stop bridging my network connection off my laptop, and I just had to buy an 802.11n dual antena (very cool looking too…) wireless PCI card, one that has a BRAND NEWish CHIPSET that is not currently supported in Linux, or BSD.  So, I will gladly bend over and take what’s coming to me for that one… But, it was the same price as the 802.11g card and supports MIMO!! so I think I deserve some brownie points for that…

Well, here is a copy of what I have posted on the DesktopBSD forum (more on that later)

Ok, well I had a nice long post typed out here (twice now, but I copied most of it before I hit the stupid key this time) with lots of details and useless additives; however I hit the stupid “back” button that IBM thought would be a good idea to put on the key board of this laptop right next to the up arrow… and so it is gone.

this will have to be a quick version, minus some heavily laden with porn russian websites (oh! there was also one trying to sell an iphone x-ray vision app too!!!) I can find zero info on this chipset, I have a Encore Electronics ENLWI-NX2 802.11n PCI card, works in Win7 AFTER running their config/setup progy.  Shows up in pciconf with class, card, chip, rev, and hdr hex codes, and a vendor and class listing, but nothing else.  It shows up in windows as an RTL8190P, I was unsuccessful in finding it in FreeBSD 8.0 x64; but I may have forgotten to capitalize the “R” in Realtek when I grepped the “pciconf -lv” results.

manufacturer product page: http://www.encore-usa.com/product_item.php?region=us&bid=2&pgid=81_2&pid=412

I followed the ndisgen instructions posted in this forum by sqlbsd, and all went well until I tried to load the RTL8190P_sys file, then the system hangs for 3-6 seconds and finally the PC just shut off.  So a bit more PC info… I tried running FreeBSD 8.0 x64 first, but did not even find the card listed in pciconf (or dmesg) when I grepped for Realtek (maybe I forgot to capitalize the “R”? but either way I didn’t see it, and although I got KDE setup and it booted to the login screen, I could not log in, the KB and mouse only worked on the console screens, so I came back to DesktopBSD).  So, I have a clean DesktopBSD 1.7 x64 install on my machine, only 1 network card and it is this wireless card.

I am going to try the 32bit drivers, the win 2k drivers, and then the vista drivers that shipped with the card.  I also have the setup file from the manufacturer’s website DL’d and will check that for a different version.  if anyone has any ideas I’d be happy to give them a go.  I may try an Ubuntu Live CD to check if it will recognize the card, also puppy linux tends to find wifi cards out of the box, so I may give that a shot and see if I can figure out which drivers they use.

I knew I should have just bought the 802.11g card… but I had to go with the 802.11n just cuz it was the same price… and had MIMO support…

****edit 10 minutes later****
I did notice that the Encore ENLWI-G is listed on the FreeBSD 7.2 Hardware list, so there is hope…

****update 8:12pm EST****
So, the newly downloaded drivers from the website were slightly more generic (RTL819xP drivers) but they are 7 months newer, so I tried them.  The Win64 failed to convert invalid syntax line 2355 or so, the the winxp2k drivers loaded fine, but failed to create the .ko file.  The vista x64 drivers converted with no errors and loaded without crashing the PC; however the system still does not recognize the wireless card. so I guess I move on to something else?

Right, well then… now you know… and we all know what happens after that… (right, if anyone can’t find those russian sites (I searched for “RTL8190 FreeBSD”) I’ll be happy to email you the links… j/k :oops:  ) so on to a little more explaining…

As stated in the post I failed to find the wireless card even listed in the installed hardware listing, I am 90% sure at this point I did not capitalize the “R” as that just makes no sense.  After which I just dumped the FreeBSD install and went to Desktop BSD, as I have installed DBSD 1.6 previously on this hardware and it had KDE working in under 50 mins with no manual configuring and I was unable to type on the login screen currently in FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE.  So I booted up of my newly minted Desktop BSD disc and away it went.  I learned that if you create more than one UFS partition during install that when you reboot you get a “Invalid Partition Table” message instead of your OS. easy fix, don’t make multiple partitions.  The OS is up and running at this very second, but without inet access.

So I am off to try an Ubuntu live CD, Fedora Live CD, and a Puppy and or Slax USB bootable File System.  In an attempt to find out if any non-windows OS can auto configure or even load the Windows drivers to get that wifi working (I believe I have a post around here somewhere about my HP laptop running Puppy and it finding th ewifi adapter and being able to locate networks, but not able to connect, and Ubuntu 8.x on that same laptop working perfectly with wifi, so we shall see what happens…)

*****quick update, before I even post it… HA! *****

after reading the reviews on the NewEgg site (specifically one from feb 28th), I decided to DL the RTL8192E drivers from the Realtek website, will give them a shot before the other OS’s.

*****update March 12th*****

So, I went ahead and added the lines to /boot/loader.conf to automate the loading of the driver during startup, but I have also been getting the same results with all driver versions. (XP drivers fail to convert, and Vista and 7 drivers convert fine, but the system still refuses to acknowledge the existence of the hardware device after using kldload or even restarting.)  I currently have a KUbuntu live CD loaded and an lspci from a terminal screen shows the network controller, states it is a realtek and gives a device of 8190.  however, the control panel does not acknowledge a wireless adapter as being present nor does ifconfig show the wireless adapter as being present.

I tried installing ndiswrapper from the cd and attempted to load the windows drivers from there.  First I tried running ndiswrapper and it told me it was not installed and to run ndiswrapper-common, when I installed it and tried to run it it told me to install a bunch of other things.  All were available except ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 which replied back that it was missing, obsolete, or no longer available, then that it had been replaced by ndiswrapper-common.  so I could not run ndiswrapper because I did not have ndiswrapper-utils and could not install it because it was replaced by what I already had? got me, without doing an actual install, the good news is that it completely recognized it, I’ll have to check with an installation if it is already in the newest linux kernel, I have just moved on to Fedora since I do not intend on doind an Ubuntu install if I do not have to.

I booted up the Fedora 12 disc I have and it failed to bring up the KDE GUI.  The Vterms were available, and an lspci -v showed the full information on the wireless card, so I am going to try a reboot and see what happens.

Everything came up fine with a reboot, not sure what happend the first time.  it is not working; however an lspci -v shows no kernel driver in use.  I will need to do some research to find out how to add the driver while running off the Live CD, probably get to that later.  been working all day in front of a computer, need to relax my eyes some now.

*************Update 3-17-2010**************

just found this website and I think this is a linux driver for the rtl8190p 802.11n chipset

http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/staging/rtl8192e/r8190_rtl8256.c

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