Delboy's Web Corner

You have stumbled over Derek Jennings' web pages. This site is just a collection of some of my personal stuff, and a collection of tips I put together about Mandriva-Linux (formerly Mandrake). I did it mostly as an aide memoire for myself, but I hope you will find them useful.

Welcome to my corner of the web

Asus eee running Mandriva 2008.1 PC Screenshots

After another long period without adding content, here are some screen shots of my lovely new Asus eee sub laptop running Mandriva 2008.1

I am really impressed with the eee. At first I was worried the screen may be too small or it might be underpowered. But no. It is quite nimble even running KDE with the Metisse 3D desktop.

Metisse is what makes the eee usable. It allows me to scale windows so they fit on the small screen. Essential with some of the KDE configuration windows which lack scrollbars.
Another essential tool is the Opera browser with its 'fit to width' feature so I never have to horizontal scroll.

Sunday 124th March, 2008

Mandriva 2007 on an AOpen 1556 laptop

A long overdue update on running Mandriva 2007 on an AOpen 1556 laptop.

Monday 1st January, 2007

Dialing GPRS over a Nokia E61 with Puppy Linux

It's a long time since I added any new content here. To break the silence here is a little piece on using a Nokia E61 (or similar) with Puppy Linux 2.16.

Puppy is the only distribution my elderly 233MHz Vaio laptop will perform adequately with.

Tuesday 17th June, 2007

Mandriva 2007 on an AOpen 1556 laptop

A long overdue update on running Mandriva 2007 on an AOpen 1556 laptop.

Monday 1st January, 2007

MythTV 0.19

I have removed the download links to my RPMs for MythTV because finally the RPMS at PLF have been updated to 0.19 and work fine (with the exception of program search which locks up on my Via C3 system)

Monday 5th June, 2006

Vector Linux on an old 233MHz Laptop

My Old Sony Vaio laptop is a heap of junk. I paid £800 for it in 1998 and even when it was new running Windows 98 it seemed painfully slow. For the last few years it has been running Mandriva, but with Mandriva 2006 installed virtually the entire disc space was occupied by the OS, and it was really slow because of all the swapping it was doing.

I set out to find a replacement and evaluated Vector Linux and Puppy Linux. Here is my review of Vector Linux.

Wednesday 9th November, 2005

Mandriva 2006 on an AOpen 1556 laptop

I got a new laptop (at last), my experiences putting Mandriva 2006 RC1 on it are detailed in the "Tips" section

Tuesday 13th September, 2005

MythTV-0.18.2 RPMs available

New RPMs for MythTV version 0.18.2 (from CVS) are available in the download area. These RPMs include a patch to allow Myth to operate over wireless links. Previously I found that when my client was viewing a stream over my 802.11g network it would spontaneously stop and return to the menu after a few minutes.

I concluded that MythTV has a problem with the variable delay in a wireless network, and some Googling found this post on the subject.

With the patch applied my MythTV is now rock solid over my wireless network. I would appreciate any feedback on these RPMs good or bad. They work well on all my computers but it would be nice to know if they cause any issues,

Wednesday 8th August, 2005

MPeye HTS550 MP3player

My daughter has just been lucky enough to get an MPeye HTS550 Mp3player for her birthday. I got it from mp3players.co.uk. The reason I went for that model is because it plays ogg files and does not need any host software and appears as a usb-storage device under linux.

Mandriva 2005LE detects it perfectly. It appears as a removable hard drive under /mnt/removable. Putting files on the mp3player is just a matter of drag and drop with konqueror. Playlists from amarok can be downloaded onto the mp3player and work so long as amarok is configured to use the same file structure as the mp3player, i.e. the music is stored in /mymusic.

The only problem I have had with the MPeye player is files not being deleted correctly unless a 'sync' command is issued. This can be corrected by adding the option 'sync' to the fstab entry, but because fstab is dynamically written by HAL it is not that simple. I have put a write up on how to control HAL in the tips section.

Wednesday 23rd June, 2005

MythTV on Mandriva 2005LE

Linux is just getting too easy.... After upgrading my MythTV client and server to Mandriva2005LE I discovered that while the standard kernel still does not contain the drivers for my Hauppauge Nova-T DVB video cards, the multimedia kernel in 'contrib' does. My cards work perfectly. For refernce the kernel version is 2.6.10-3.mm.24mdk

Not only do I no longer need to patch the kernel, but the standard version of xorg supplied with 2005LE also contains all the patches needed to support MPEG2 decoding on mu Via Epia M10k motherboard. For reference the version is xorg-x11-6.8.2-7.1.102mdk

Thursday 16th May, 2005

Download Page and MythTV

The download page has been restored today. I suspended it because it was killing my Internet connection. The rpm packages are now hosted on a different server with a much faster connection. Currently available are rpm packages for MythTV version 0.17, and xorg-6.8.2 compiled for Mandrake 10.1

MythTV is a really great application. Someday all TV will be like MythTV:-) The RPM packages I have produced are compiled to support digital DVB TV cards, and the hardware MPEG2 decoder on Via Unichrome motherboards. I produced them to use on my Via M10000 discless, fanless motherboard I use as a frontend for MythTV. One day I really must write up how that works. It is pretty awesome....

Thursday 31st March, 2005

Installing Nvidia drivers on Mandrake 10.1

Like many people I had trouble compiling Nvidia drivers for Mandrake 10.1 Community Edition. It took quite a lot of research to find out the cause of the problem. I have written it up as a guide for others. Look in the 'Tips' section.

Tuesday 28th September, 2004

Flphoto Package

I have started adding download files today. First up is a Mandrake RPM for Flphoto-1.2

Flphoto is a front end GUI for Gphoto to allow you to download pictures from Digital Cameras and create photo albums. It also has a nice upload to web site facility. I started using Flphoto after buying my daughter a nice little Mustek gSmartmini2 camera. Very tiny, but of course made for Windows only. Flphoto solves the problem of capturing still images from it. The next task will be to capture video from it using gqcam. Mandrake 10.0 cannot do it out of the box because it needs the spca50x driver. I'll post when that is working too.

Flphoto-1.1 is in Mandrake 10.0, but it has a few annoying bugs that 1.2 clears up..

Friday 11th June, 2004

New Web Site

Following a second case of my PHP-Nuke web site being defaced by Brazilian script kiddies using the latest in a long line of 'SQL injection' exploits, I have decided to abandon PHP-Nuke in favour of a static web site based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

The use of CSS should allow static web pages to be quickly composed (using Quanta), and the look and feel of the web pages may be easily managed by a single stylesheet file.

Content from the old site will be added over the next few days.

I am indebted to the excellent tutorials on CSS at HTML Dog, A List Apart and Position is Everything . A stunning demonstration of how CSS may be used to render the same HTML content in dramatically different ways may be viewed at Zen Garden.

Friday 9th April, 2004