Archive for September, 2006

Dual-Head ATI X800 and FreeBSD

Saturday, September 30th, 2006

I figured I would post this here for the archives…

I spent most of last night and a better part of this morning trying to get my personal desktop configured with a dual-head X display. I thought I would just use the configuration for the ATI FireGL V3100 that I had used yesterday at work with some minor changes for device BusID’s and what not. However, that didn’t work.

I tried a number of configs on my personal box and most of them would lock up the machine. Not just X Windows, but the machine itself requiring a “poke in the eye” to reboot it. I finally went through the config line by line and found the culprit. The AGPFastWrite directive that worked like a champ on the FireGL card hosed up the x800 box. Once I commented that line out in the config my X Windows session fired off and worked as expected.

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Dual-Head ATI FireGL V3100 and FreeBSD

Friday, September 29th, 2006

I finally had a chance to install FreeBSD on my work desktop today. I have been working on my FreeBSD laptop for the past 2 weeks or so and with the help of Win4BSD I can do everything I need.

Today after work I spent a little time trying to get a dual-head setup for my X desktop. I mean, it’s cute and all when one monitor clones the other one but it doesn’t really make good use of two 17″ flat panels and a dual-head video card. I went through a number of configs, changing this, adding or removing that, and nothing seemed to be working. I had some pretty strange setups from time to time where my desktop would be spread across both monitors, I could swing my mouse from one to the other, but I had two taskbars in Fluxbox and when I pulled up the right-click menu, it would display on both screens. At one point I also had the same setup I just mentioned but when I would move my mouse to the left monitor the mouse cursor disappeared and I had a big light blue square with which to use as a pointer… and it wouldn’t do anything. It wouldn’t pull up the right-click menu, move through the workspaces by clicking the numbers and arrows on the taskbar, nothing.

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The Cingular 8125 with all the features you’d ever want??

Friday, September 29th, 2006

Well, it should have all the features you’d want! Here’s a list of the features found on this sophomore venture from Cingular, which is actually a rebranded HTC Wizard Pocket PC - Cingular 8125 Pocket PC

Now, when the time came for me to upgrade, I bought the 8125. It has all the great features that you would want, and upon first use, it was quite an amazing machine. The only downside is the processor, which seemed a little sluggish when trying to navigate certain features. The Comm Manager was a nice feature, which included WiFi, Beam, Bluetooth, Data Connect, and Email Push. All these features could be turned on/off via touchscreen, or set up to be used with shortcuts. The WiFi was a really nice feature, although in Texarkana, we have very few hotspots that would really accommodate such a feature. These places include: Baker Bros., Valor Parking Lot, and a few hotels that I picked up while passing by them. Now, I’m sure if you were in Dallas, this feature would be off the chizzain. Anyway, onto some other features.

The camera, a 1.3mp, was quite good, although the flash feature always whited out picture subjects. The slide-out keyboard was very nice, and closed securely when not needed. The call quality was a little less than desirable, and always seemed like it should be a little louder. Now, I used to use a Palm Treo 650, into which, I downloaded a program called VolumCare. This program would amplify the earpiece, speakerphone, and general function alerts. This program would have made the 8125 much nicer, when traveling through areas with low signal strength. Of course, the phone has all the sync’ing software to be able to hack/navigate your way into it’s deepest darkest regions, or to upload pictures, Mp3 ringers, videos, etc.

Now, the bad part, cause we all know everything isn’t perfect! After a couple weeks, my phone started acting up a little. Mainly, the touchscreen began glitch, for lack of a better word. I believe it’s mainly due to some of the features being to close to the corners of the screen. So if you have bigger thumbs, you push more on the touchscreen than you need to. Now, it didn’t do that all of the time, but seemed to when trying to run too many programs at once. I think this is the reason it began doing strange things, i.e. closing the Text Message feature and it would go to Calendar, when it should have gone to home screen.

In conclusion, I may have just gotten a bad phone or may have had software problems due to the infancy of Cingular’s software for smartphones. I took mine back, and acquired the new Cingular 3125, the first smart flip phone. It has all the same features, sans WiFi. Just go check out the 8125, because we all know software can be fixed. The actual phone and hardware itself was very well built and could last long enough, until Cingular drops the Palm 700 for GSM. Right Jeff??

jason

Resizing Windows Partitions

Friday, September 29th, 2006

I have been working on getting my home desktop ready to dual boot Windows XP and FreeBSD 6.1. I have been working on pushing all the data on the Windows partition to the front of the drive (not optimized, I know) so that I could resize the partition. I ran into a couple of snags that I easily worked around with a few helpful resources and tools.

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Old AA Blog to the Rescue

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

Long live the original average admins blog! I recompiled my kernel this evening for my laptop and in the process wiped out my NDIS driver for my built-in wireless card. Guess what?! I blogged about how I got that working back in the day, my 5th entry in “My FreeBSD Diary” to be exact.

There is some good stuff over there at the old AA blog! Check it out! Here is a link directly to the search page… Don’t laugh too hard. I made that blog from scratch! I think I did quite well considering I am one guy with a limited amount of time for maintenance (which is why I switched to WordPress).

Until next time…

Using Fluxbox-Devel 1.0RC2

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

FluxboxI have been a fan of Fluxbox, an open-source window manager for X-Windows (.X.org & XFree86), since I started using FreeBSD about this time last year. When I first started using Linux I would switch between Gnome and KDE like it was nobody’s business, and really, it’s not! Sure, Gnome and KDE have tons more eye candy, more, better, and more better integrated applications, and it seems, better support and cult-like followers than other lesser known window managers (hence they are lesser known window managers). However, in my gray and balding old age (dern near 30 now…), I prefer a little something simpler for my desktop experience.

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Dumpster Diving for the Wrong Reasons

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

One day last week I had the opportunity to do some dumpster diving. Every techy, hacker, social engineer, or security analyst dreams of the day he gets paid to do some dumpster diving. However, this diving experience was less than desirable and it was for all the wrong reasons…

I have been working on a DVR project (An Affordable Surveillance System - March 24th, 2006). Basically, creating an FTP server using a Dell PowerEdge 850 and FreeBSD for some D-Link IP cameras, DCS-3220’s to be exact, to FTP an image over to the server every 2 seconds. Everything was going well. I had unboxed and provisioned 4 new cameras and was beginning to unbox the PoE injectors for the cameras. When I was done with all four camera boxes and the remaining unused PoE boxes I felt a trip to the company dumpster was in order. So, I head off to the dumpster with 8 boxes piled from my hands, hovering around waist level, to my chin, used to hold the top of the tower down.

Our company dumpster is surrounded by an 8-foot privacy fence that sits on top of the curb for the drive. That would make it at least 8-foot, 4 or 5 inches tall. Me being the ex-basketball player that I am decided that I would toss the boxes over the fence instead of wrestling with the two latches that hold the fence gate together since you can never seem to get both latches undone at the same time.

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What do You Want on a Live CD?

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

I am going to try and make a Live CD before too long using the FreeSBIE toolkit. This CD will be based on FreeBSD but will contain a number of third-party applications. My question to you is, what kind of applications, or even better, what specific applications would you want on a Live CD/DVD? Which window managers would you want to be available on a Live disc? File Managers? Security/forensic tools? Productivity software? CD/DVD utilities? Games/Entertainment software?

Until next time…

Win4BSD Beta Announced

Monday, September 18th, 2006

I have been looking for some virtualization software for running guest operating systems on a FreeBSD host for a while. In the FreeBSD ports tree there are two versions of VMware workstation available but they are version 2 and 3. I want to run Workstation 5.5… Not happening. Thus far, the only alternative I have found is Qemu. I had great success getting Qemu to install and run but I recently found that it wouldn’t run a necessary Windows application I need for work. It would die for some reason and I couldn’t figure it out (I may still report it to the qemu-devel mailing list). I then went on an extended hunt for virtualization software for FreeBSD and pretty much came up empty handed.

Last week I started to see if anyone had successfully ported Win4Lin to FreeBSD but found nothing. I was getting a little frustrated because I want to be cool like Chris, who is running Debian GNU/Linux on his work box, and run FreeBSD on my work machine. I had basically decided to go ahead with the FreeBSD install on my work machine and setup a little Windows XP desktop to RDP (Remote Desktop) in to for Windows functionality. Then it happened… I saw the following e-mail come across the advocacy@ FreeBSD mailing list:

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Creating a Bootable Windows Install Disk with Service Pack Applied

Monday, September 18th, 2006

Tonight I am working on some virtualization stuff for FreeBSD. The software I am trying (more on this later) requires a Windows XP SP1 or SP2 CD to install Windows XP. My retail version of Windows XP has no service packs applied so I needed to create an install CD with SP2 already applied.

This tutorial worked like a champ. It walks you through the process step-by-step and even provides instructions for creating a bootable install disk for Windows 2000 SP1/SP2/SP3/SP4, Windows XP SP1a/SP2, and Windows 2003 Server SP1.

At the bottom of the above tutorial it even has links to detailed instructions for burning the bootable CD in a number of CD burning applications. I didn’t think there was that much to making a bootable CD in Nero 6, but their instructions showed me there is more than meets the eye for making a bootable Windows install CD.

Anyway, this is now posted here for a reference if anyone needs this information in the future (like me). Until next time…