daantje.nl

I’ve revised my post on how to convert an Axis webcam stream to Flash (.swf/.flv). Check my post: http://www.daantje.nl/2007/05/07/convert-axis-webcam-stream-to-flash-swfflv/

After installing Mac-OS X Tiger, Ubuntu-eee and Xandros on my Asus EEE-pc 900, I now swiched to Debian Lenny. Installing was easy. Running a normal Gnome now. For the wireless I used these links:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Debian_5.0_(Lenny)_on_a_ThinkPad_X200#Atheros_Chipset
http://wiki.debian.org/NetworkManager
http://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse
Everything else worked out of the box ;) Nice and easy installer too! I think this one is a keeper. And I love Debian!

I’ve attempted this a lot of times. Now it works (sort of, but it still needs some tweaking). What you’ll need is a Debian server running a slapd daemon. You can get this with apt-get, of course… It could be handy to have the utils too and I use the GPL-ed handy web based ldap management tool phpldapadmin. I like it, it’s small and easy to work with… So the apt-get command should be like;

apt-get install slapd ldap-utils phpldapadmin

Now after you’ve configured your slapd and phpldapadmin you should be able to login into your ldap server. I used phpldapadmin for that. Remember that you’ll have to use the DN you’ve configured earlier. It look something like ‘cn=admin,dc=subdomain,dc=domain,dc=com’. Yes it’s the complete string, not only ‘admin’!

Now go to addressbookserver.com and download the latest version of ABxLDAP (AddressBook X LDAP), I’ve used for this how to ‘ABxLDAP_v1.1.16_31_May_2008.dmg’.

After you’ve installed it, check the mounted disk image. You should have a file called ‘abxldap.schema‘, it can be found in the folder ‘LDAP Schema Extension’. This file should be uploaded and placed into ‘/etc/ldap/schema’ on your Debian server. Edit your /etc/ldap/slapd.conf and add the schema with this include line;

include         /etc/ldap/schema/abxldap.schema

Now restart the ldap server…

/etc/init.d/slapd restart

Now comes the magic… You’ll have to populate the ldap directory, so ABxLDAP can sync with it… What I did was this:
I’ve made a text file called ‘populate.ldif‘. This file contains the following text:

dn: ou=addressbook,dc=subdomain,dc=domain,dc=com
objectClass: organizationalUnit
ou: addressbook

NOTE: ‘dc=subdomain,dc=domain,dc=com’ should be what ever you’ve configured slapd with in the first step!

Now use phpldapadmin to import the ‘populate.ldif‘ into your ldap directory. When you don’t have any errors, you should be able to sync with ABxLDAP for the first time.

Go to your System Preferences on your Mac and pick the ABxLDAP panel. Fill all the fields. What I use is this:

That’s it, all should be working fine. Every time you edit something in your Address Book on your Mac, it should sync the whole ldap. Also when you delete or edit a record directly on your ldap, it will sync. The only thing I’ve to figure out is, how to sync periodically, so the Mac always have the latest version. Now it only syncs when something is changed in your Address Book, or when you hit the sync button in your ABxLDAP in System Preferences.

Almost forgot to mention. In case of troubleshooting set in slapd.conf loglevel to 448 instead of 0 to get debug log messages in /var/log/syslog.

So more is coming later… Now it’s time for a beer!

I want to have internet all the time. And I have… I have a HTC Touch Cruise running Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro with a HSDPA connection. Now this is a way to connect the EEE to the HTC via bluetooth and use the windows mobile device as a gateway to the internet. By the way, I’m running Ubuntu-eee… If you are running Xandros, the default distro, try to Google on “Xandros bnep0 windows mobile”

First get the right software. Open a terminal and install the Bluez gnome utilities.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bluez-gnome


Now open the file ‘/etc/default/bluetooth’ and be sure that the following is set;

BLUETOOTH_ENABLED=1
PAND_ENABLED=1


Now I did a reboot, you could restart some services, but I was lazy. Now, after you insert your Bluetooth dongle (or when you have it build in), you should have a bluetooth icon in the upper right corner. With that tool you should be able to pair with your Windows Mobile device. If you don’t know how, try it the other way around, use your mobile to pair with your eee. After the exchange op pins the two devices should be paired.

Open up the terminal again and do the following command to scan for your mobile…

sudo hcitool scan

You should get something like this;

Scanning ...
00:17:83:xx:xx:xx HTC_P3650

This is the mac address of your mobile device and you’ll need it later on to connect.

Okay, we have a working bluetooth dongle and we can see the mobile… Now some config we need to have to get the link working. Append the following to ‘/etc/network/interfaces‘;

iface bnep0 inet manual
down dhclient -r -pf /var/run/dhclient.$IFACE.pid $IFACE
down pand -K
up pand -Q -n
up dhclient -pf /var/run/dhclient.$IFACE.pid $IFACE


We are done configuring the eee. The following steps should be made every time you want to get the eee online:

Open on your Windows Mobile device the application ‘Internet Sharing’, you can find it in your Programs folder. Start a Bluetooth PAN connection and wait for it to start.

Open up a terminal on you eee and do:

sudo pand -c 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx -n

Ofcource, you’ll have to replace the 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx with the mac address of your device.

You should get this as result:

pand[8033]: Bluetooth PAN daemon version 3.26
pand[8033]: Connecting to 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx
pand[8033]: bnep0 connected


Now bring the network interface up and get an IP from the windows mobile device:

sudo ifup bnep0


Now wait for the following result, it should look something like this:

pand[8060]: Bluetooth PAN daemon version 3.26
pand[8060]: Inquiring
pand[8060]: Searching for NAP on 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx
pand[8060]: Connecting to 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx
pand[8060]: Connect to 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx failed. Connection refused(111)
pand[8060]: Searching for NAP on 00:16:CB:xx:xx:xx
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.6
Copyright 2004-2007 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/bnep0/00:10:60:a2:8c:dd
Sending on   LPF/bnep0/00:10:60:a2:8c:dd
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.85 on bnep0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK of 192.168.0.85 from 192.168.0.1
bound to 192.168.0.85 -- renewal in 111983 seconds.

YES! We have an IP! You can double check with the ‘ifconfig’ command, or just try to open up Firefox and start browsing ;) Now close your eee, walk to the pub, get a nice cold one. Open your eee and start browsing the net ;) w00t!

To get the interface down again, use:

sudo ifconfig bnep0 down


Most of the info I’ve used, can be found in this forum post. Ive written a little shell shell script to bring the connection up, because it’s hard to remember all of this after some beers ;)


#!/bin/sh
sudo pand -c 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx -n
sleep 5
sudo ifup bnep0
echo "Drink beer!"

Don’t forget to make the file executable with ‘chmod +x myscript.sh’, or something like that…

It has been a while after my last post, been very busy with a few big projects. But I found the time to buy a Asus EEEpc. It’s a real small laptop running Xandros Linux. I’ve reinstalled the little machine with Ubuntu. There is a dedicated Ubuntu distro for the eee. You can find it on http://www.ubuntu-eee.com. The first attemt to install it, I used a USB stick, but it crashed after a vew seconds… The USB stick was corrupt. After a view tries I thrown the stick in the trash an got a SD card. Now the installer did his work without any errors! Now I’ve got a real distro! Apt-getted quanta, apache, php, mysql and now I can develop anywhere!

Finally, I’ve got it working… There is so many documentation on the net on how to config your avahi-daemon under Debian, so it’s working under MacOSX Leopard. But what ever I did, the server showed up in my Finder, but when I tried to connect by clicking the server icon, it didn’t work… Googled around, but never a solution. I could not connect to my Netatalk daemon. After I added a configuration so I could click the server to connect to my sFTP server in Cyberduck, (same box as the Netatalk and Avahi daemon) and it worked?!

Now I know why… What I had in my Avahi configuration for my Netatalk daemon, was in my afpd.service file a host-name definition. But in my sftp.service file no <host-name> line.
So what I did, was simply remove the line, restarted Avahi and there it was!

So my working config file: /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
<service>
<type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type>
<port>548</port>
</service>
</service-group>

More usefull documentation:
Netatalk 2.03 with encryption support for Debian 4.0
http://www.disgruntled-dutch.com/2007/general/howtodownload-netatalk-encryption-support-debian-4/

How to use OS X Leopard screen sharing with a Linux machine
http://www.sanityinc.com/articles/mac-screen-sharing-with-linux

Okay, after some googeling I’ve found two options for a free GPS and navigation solution. The first one is a multi-OS GPS software ‘Roadnav’ http://roadnav.sourceforge.net/ This GPL-ed software is build for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Also source packages are available. Maps are available and downloadable for free!
The second is for smart phones, ‘Nav4all’ http://www.nav4all.com/ I’ve tested it on my Nokia 9300i and it works like a charm. Only thing is that you’ll need a working internet connection. Trough GPRS or WiFi. I have a flat-fee GPRS account, so I have no worries. It is real fast. More info coming later. Will test the two packages now! ;)

I had this problem after a new installation of Debian Etch on one of my machines at home. Fetchmail, Exim, Freshclam and all other mail related software could not connect to the ClamAV socket. The file /var/run/clamav/clamd.ctl was missing. Touching the file and changing rights and ownership didn’t do the trick. The trick is this under Etch;

Unofficial packages for sarge and etch are available through the Debian volatile project (AMD64 arch is also supported). They are usually more recent than official ones and they are maintained by Stephen Gran too, so they follow the same layout as the official ones.

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add a line like this to it:
deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile etch/volatile main contrib non-free

Than do an apt-get update;apt-get upgrade to upgrade the ClamAV and all related software ;-) The only thing you need to do is add the user clamav to the Debian-exim group, restart exim and clamd and open a bottle of that nice cold beer! All is okay now!

I’ve installed Debian unstable on an iMac (PowerPC). I will upload my configuration files of XFree and my kernel here. I’ve used the ‘jigdo-lite’ application to master a Debian-non-us (woody) installer iso for the ppc. It worked very easy! Than I altered the /etc/apt/sources.list to the unstable sources, did an apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade and after a hour I had Debian Sid running on it! I had some difficulties configuring my Firewire LaCie DVD wirter, but it’s working now. You must apt-get install hotplug and compile the sbp2 and enable ieee1394 in the kernel to make it work. Did not get it to work with dvdrecord. I use ‘dvd+rw-tools’ instead. I use the 2.4.25 kernel on it now.

I’ve got it working… finaly… What I did was editing ‘/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc’ and put in this:

/sw/bin/startkde &
/sw/bin/kwin &
xlogo -geometry 50x50-1+1

Started Xdarwin in ‘full screen‘ mode and whoopy, it’s starting a KDE desktop… I hope my quanta is now more stable than under OroborOSX and rootless Xdarwin. My quanta crashes after scrolling pages. Don’t know what the problem is. Trying everything…

Update: This works like a charm! Got native KDE 3.5 running right now!