This Article is also available in Deutsch.

The actual install overall went really smooth. Installer got streamlined a bit more and now carries over the initial language selection to defaults for time zone and keyboard settings. Most complicated about it was my chaotic partition layout on my dev machine. Installation went all fine, all devices recognized. At first I had problems with my Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet because copying over the old config created double entries for all devices, making X choke and kill my USB mouse. Just commenting out the entries in my X config solved that problem. I just had to redo the basic configuration from Gimp by invoking the Gimp Preferences Dialog under Edit -> Preferences, select input devices in the tree, then “Configure Extended Input Devices”. There I just set the mode of all auto-discovered wacom devices to “Screen”. (not “Window” or “Disabled”).

Things turned out to be a bit more work than initially planned when I discovered that the MythTV frontend from karmic wouldn’t connect to my mediahub computer, a Eee Box B202 with dual DVB-T tuner ( TerraTec Cinergy DT USB XS Diversity , newer hardware-rev). After the initial troubles I had first getting the DVB-T to work perfectly, I was really not eager to change anything about that system.. In fact it was still running an updated EasyPeasy 1.0.

But my fears were totally unfounded. The DVB-T stick was now auto-discovered and there just needed one module option to be added in a newly created /etc/modprobe.d/options :

options dvb_usb_dib0700 dvb_usb_dib0700_ir_proto=0

This sets the remote control protocol to NEC, which is something my remote control needs. Everything else basically worked out of the box. I just had to configure MythTV and tell it the two DVB front end devices and EIT create video sources and connect those two. After copying over the randomly generated mySQL password to the laptop, I was back at my old setup.

What changed is that both computers now boot a lot faster and look a lot prettier, even using only graphics that come with Karmic Koala

Congratulations to the ubuntu team for producing such a fine new ubuntu version, better than ever.

Links:

• My current x.org config file with commented out wacom devices

update: added more details for the wacom configuration process.

This Article is also available in Deutsch.

This Article is also available in Deutsch.

My plans are now entering the final stages after a long and diffcult journey. Both delivery problems (the eee took about 3 months to be actually delivered) and an unusual amount of linux driver problems were the main causes of this.

The components I got in the end were:

• Asus Eee Box B202
• One “Terratec Cynergy DT USB XS Diversity”, a dual DVB-T tuner USB stick
• an external DVD rewriter

I’m totally satisfied with the eee box. Sure, the manual was only available in languages I did not speak, the linux on it was something I hated instantly — but all that is meaningless because thanks to teh power of GNU/Linux and hardware with open source drivers, I can just install something I like. It’s a nice piece of hardware that now has Easy Peasy, a version of Ubuntu Linux for Eee PCs/Boxes.

Not everything was easy, something were barely possible. I mean, adding new USB device ids to a driver is something not many people manage to do. It was another tragic case of a hardware producer suddenly putting different hardware into a device with exactly the same name and no visual differences. I really walked into the nearby store with a hardware compatibility list. I found the “Terratec Cynergy DT USB XS Diversity” with was of course not the one that was supported out of the box in spite of identical name and looks. In addition to the problem of having to patch the drivers, I was also facing strange bugs and a misunderstaning of the available documentation.

The rest was really easy. Installing EasyPeasy was basically just inserting the CD into the external DVD drive and clicking through 7 questions or so; only complicated by my insisting on a self-sized partition table. no complications.

The installation of mythtv and lircd was no problem either once the mysterious remote control bugs were fixed by someone from the linux-dvb developers (and me finally getting that I was trying the wrong way to fix things).

All in all I’m really happy with my new media center. For me this showed something about hardware support for linux:

It doesn’t matter if the software you deliver on your hardware is utter crap, as long as there are free drivers that third parties can use to create better software.

Some time ago I started to capture some of my favourite works as videos to preserve them and finally got around to set them up here in my blog. Burning Chrome
(3rd place at the South Sealand Party 1996)

I still consider this the best demo I made. It shows at least traces of a real concept instead of being mostly focused on effects and tech details — and I still like Mortimer Twang’s music in it.

The name, apart from being ripped off a short story from William Gibson, is related to one of the effects in fact being a coldly burning chrome object.

Jammin

This one has the fame of being teh first haujobb demo ever. In fact only one intro (Love, Peace & Teddies) predates it. Jammin is a improvised demo without lots of concept behind it. Just some effects, graphics and music thrown together. Even the synchronization with the music is purely accidental.
I was suprised that it was as successful as it was (and it even came close to becoming first at that party).

KnickelBreaka

This was an advertisement for our diskmag Friendchip. A disk mag was something like a magazine on a disk containing articles and demo reviews and in case of Friendchip lots of chip tunes. Friendchip really came into existence, but only had a single issue (Most likely due to the fact that no one liked the friendchip compiler I had written in Amiga E ) This intro is pretty short but very nice presentation wise (Although I don’t know what I thought when I chose the colors of that morphing thing).

Derrick (Ansicol Intro)

This intro was wrapped around a collection of ANSI graphics done by Cyclone (ASCII charset graphics with ANSI color codes meant to be used as login / logoff / headings for BBS systems ). The intro has a very nice chip tune and is also remarkable for being the birthplace of the Haujobb mascot (see top of the post) which has since then found its way into almost every Haujobb production. And it even has a name: The Kopuli (neuter when in German)

Generation X

This demo, which was my second large demo for Haujobb, at least deserves a (dis-)honorable mention. Formally it was my most successful demo but in fact it was my worst failure.

Being the first part in a series of shamelessly ripped of Book/Short story titles for demos it was meant to be a big demo. I collected better effects, planned better than I did with Jammin and tried to get the thing ready for the next big demo party, which happened to be the Nexus 1995 taking part near Karlsruhe/Germany. I really worked hard on it, including not really sleeping for days, but did not manage to get it done in time. The party had already started and I was still not ready. I was about to give up. Sleep deprived, a few hundred kilometers away from the party place, the code still not ready. Then Jazz called and said that the deadline for demo submissions had been moved due to not enough demos being there and that the organizers would even be willing to accept my entry. Hauke, a friend of mine, volunteered to drive me and Wave the 400km to the party place and did so in a reckless, but timely manner. Generation-X got accepted as entry. Although it was only half finished I thought it would be okay and already planned to release a more polished version of it after the party was over. But then, right in the middle of the competition show, on the big screen, a professional sound system blasting its sound — it crashed. Badly. Guru Meditation error and all. It was really really embarassing. They even started it again. And it crashed again, exactly at the same position. (Turned out the machine it ran on had a funky memory layout which led to the demo overwriting parts of its own code with graphic data. *ouch* ). But the demo nevertheless won the 1st place. Partly due to lack of competition, partly due to good ol’ Haujobb PR.

After the party I was really glad that everything went relatively well and planned to work on the more polished version of Generation-X. The problem was that I just couldn’t. I had written Generation-X in the same style that I had written Jammin – a giant bunch of assembler code with no real structure. While that worked out nicely for a small demo like Jammin, it turned out to be a catastrophe for the more complex Generation-X. Whenever I fixed something here it broke there and vice versa. The project just died a cruel death in my hands and there was really nothing I could do for it besides rewriting it completely (which made no sense for that demo). So I abandoned it — buried the whole project, never released the more polished version. In fact I think there was never an official release of Generation-X besides the version a trader friend of Jazz talked me into giving him. I even lost my copy during a data accident. So if you ever come across it, it’s not the real thing, the real thing died a gruesome death.

There were two positive things coming out of this: First I wrote my own little Demo-OS, allowing the effects to be modularized effectively. And second this taught me more about the need for structure in code than any lecture ever could — I will always remember it as an example of what not to do.