Jonathan's blog

Recently I upgraded to a 1080p screen and a 5.1 speaker set to compelent my Windows Media Center home theatre PC. Suddenly those low-quality 700MB DVD rips with stereo sound and about as many pixels as a Nokia phone from the last millennium don’t seem so great. It was time to go high-definition.

I downloaded a slightly compressed BluRay rip, but it was 15GB and took a week to download. My ISP seems to be rate-limiting filesharers these days, which doesn’t help. I searched for legal HD movie downloads but I couldn’t find any in the UK. Even if there were such a site, there’s still no getting round the fact that a good quality video is going to be at least 10GB.

So I decided to buy a BluRay drive and some discs. I popped the SATA drive into my media PC and it was immediately detected. So I put a BluRay disc in the drive, but Media Center said that software had to be installed to play BluRay discs. That’s OK – not entirely unexpected and hopefully just as simple as installing any other video codec.

The BluRay drive came with a CD of software, including Cyberlink PowerDVD, which said it could play BluRays. So I installed it, and it can indeed play BluRays. Unfortunately it offers no integration with Media Center, and to play a BluRay you have to scrabble around on your hands and knees with the keyboard and mouse.

After some searching online, I discovered an app called TotalMedia Theatre. Several people in home theatre forums had recommended it as an app that sort of integrates into Media Center. It’s a bit ugly because it minimises Media Center and launches its own splash screen before starting to play the BluRay, but at least it doesn’t require manual intervention.

Getting 5.1 audio out of TotalMedia Theatre took a bit of prodding at the settings, and at the buttons on the front of my Sony receiver, but it seems to be fine now. So, my first high-defition, surround-sound BluRay experience tonight will be to watch… erm….  Frost/Nixon. A dialogue-driven political drama. Never mind!

I don’t use Windows much, except on my home media centre. For a while I’ve been running Vista and I’ve generally been impressed with the Media Center application.

I read about Windows 7 and was pleased to hear about the Ultimate Steal protomotion for students (and those with .ac.uk email addresses). The high prices of Vista and of Windows 7 off-the-shelf were a real off-putter for me, but the Ultimate Steal price of £30 for an upgrade seems a reasonable price to me. I’m prepared to pay £30 for a product I will use most days.

So I downloaded the 64-bit upgrade for Windows 7 Home Premium. Unfortunately, I hadn’t bothered to read that it’s not possible to upgrade a 32-bit Vista to a 64-bit Windows 7.

So I converted my DigitalRiver upgrade package to a bootable ISO by following this guide. Booting the Windows 7 installer worked fine – however it rejected my product key. It didn’t give a reason, but I assumed it was because my key covered upgrades only, and not clean installs.

Well, my only choice for using my product key legitimately was to “obtain” a copy of 64-bit Vista from somewhere. I installed Vista Home Premium x64, choosing not to enter a product key and not to activate. I immediately ran the Windows 7 upgrade tool and my product key was accepted. The upgrade took a while but was successful.

What a nuisance!

I decided that I need to sort out the way I do my personal calendaring.

Currently I only use my phone’s built-in calendar. I nearly always have my phone with me, but it’s a bit of a pain to enter stuff on when I’m sat at a computer anyway, and carrying all that information solely on my phone presents a huge risk of loss, theft or breakage.

I need some kind of centralised store of information that is able to sync with all the devices and programs I want to use, namely:

• Some sort of cross-platform calendar client – mainly for use on Linux but also nice to be able to use similar software if I’m on Windows or OS X.
• Sony-Ericsson P1i (Symbian) built-in calendar
• iPhone, for when I get one
• Web interface, for those times when I’m borrowing a computer and can’t install a client.

Google Calendar seems to be a good choice. It’s flexible and can sync with lots of things.

Linux

So I installed Lightning on all my Fedora and Ubuntu machines. It’s a calendar extension for Thunderbird, which I already use. To install it yourself:

On Fedora:
yum install thunderbird-lightning
On Ubuntu:
apt-get thunderbird-lightning

It’s easy to set up, too. Suppose your Google account is joebloggs@gmail.com, then you would…

• Add a new calendar to Lightning by right-clicking in the Calendar area
• Choose On the Network
• Select CalDAV
• Enter your location as https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/joebloggs@gmail.com/events
• Give the calendar a name

OS X and Windows

It’s a little more work to install Lightning on OS X. You have to download the add-on from Mozilla, and install it in Thunderbird. Same story for Windows.

It’s quite straightforward and there are instructions on the website.

When you’re done, follow the same instructions as for Linux to subscribe to your Google calendar in Lightning.

Sony Ericsson UIQ

Setting up Google Calendar on my Sony Ericsson P1i was a bit of a pain, too. The P1i can’t interact with Google natively, I had to set up an account with Goosync to enable this. Goosync talks to Google, and your phone talks to Goosync using SyncML.

But once you have a Goosync account, you can synchronise a lot of handsets with Google calendar.

So first, you will need to set up an account with Goosync. It’s free and very easy. Goosync will ask you to tie your Goosync account to your Google account.

There’s also an option to have the settings for your phone sent automatically to your handset. However this didn’t work for me so I had to enter the settings manually.

Assuming the sync task on your phone has been set up properly, do a  test run to make sure it all works.

• If possible, connect to a wireless network first. If not, 3G will have to do.
• Go to the Main Menu
• Go to Tools
• Go to Remote Sync
• Find the profile that syncs with Goosync
• Find the sync task called Calendar. Make sure it is ticked, and then tap Sync to start off the first synchronisation.

If that worked, you can now run the sync task whenever you like from within the calendar itself.

• Open your phone calendar
• Tap More
• Tap Calendar manager
• Tap Synchronise

That’s all there is to it! Unfortunately there’s no way of making your calendar synchronise automatically at set intervals, but that’s probably a good thing, because you can’t get stung for 3G charges!

iPhone and iPod touch

Coming soon…

My requirements

When I built this computer back in January, I had carefully considered the RAID storage configuration. My requirements were basically:

• Must dual boot Fedora and some flavour of Windows (unfortunately)
• Fedora must have a redundant /home partition, as it holds my most important data
• Windows must have a fast Media (aka /home) partition for my audio work
• Would also be nice to have redundant OS partitions

The initial plan

So I decided to buy a pair of identical 320GB disks for the OS, a set of three 640GB disks for my media. My new motherboard had 4 SATA ports on an ICH10R controller, and 2 SATA ports on some other SATA controller.

It seemed best to set up a fakeraid RAID5 array across the 3 media disks in the ICH10R controller, and to let the OSs do their own thing on the 2 OS disks.

I split both of the OS disks in half to allow Linux software RAID1 (mirroring) across both of its RAID partitions, which would be mounted as /. The two partitions showed up to Windows as C: and D:. It is not possible to use Windows software RAID (aka Dynamic Disks) on a Windows boot partition so I installed Windows on C: and used D: for Program Files.

I created a RAID5 array across the 3 disks using the ICH10R RAID BIOS. Booting into Windows, it was immediately spotted so I cut the device in half and created drive J: for my media. Sorted – it was fast and worked nicely.

No such luck with Fedora 10 (the latest relkease at the time I built this PC). Anaconda, the Fedora installer, was not able to see the RAID partition – it only saw the three separate disks. Try as I might, I could not get round this. Kind of a showstopper.

Onto plan B

I figured that I could avoid using the ICH10R fakeraid by keeping the disks as 3 separate disks, cutting each in half and using three halves for Linux software RAID, and 3 halves for Windows Dynamic Disks. No such luck – Windows is only able to use a whole disk as a Dynamic Disk, and wasn’t able to share it with Linux. Bugger.

What I ended up with

Given that Windows and Linux cannot share a RAID array, whether it be software or pseudo-hardware, my only choice was to somehow divide up the disks.

The two OS disks were fine as they were; Windows was not using RAID but rather a more manual approach to having two disks (OS on C: and Program Files on D:).

Eventually I decided to give Windows two of the media disks and use them in a RAID0 (striped) Dynamic Disk for performance. This still gives approximately the performance of a 3-disk RAID5 array, but without the redunancy. I get around this by not keeping anything permanently on the RAID0 array. It is only used as a cache/buffer during audio work, and the audio files are primarily stored on my server via the network.

This left just a single disk for Fedora’s /home partition. It doesn’t tick the box of having redunandcy, but thanks to my hourly backup script this is less essential.

This diagram shows my current sub-optimal setup. Click for a bigger version. Windows partitions are in red and Linux in blue.

My partition setup

The future

Since setting up this PC, I happened across a blog post that seems to be the answer to my prayers. It’s a bit hacky, but it’s the only documented way I have seen of getting a dual-boot system to share an ICH10R array.

Next time I can be bothered to reinstall both OSs, I will write about it here.

I’ve dabbled in Linux for several years now – I’ve looked after Linux servers at work and at home, and I’ve had a secondary desktop PC running some version of Fedora or other.

Two years ago I switched over my PC at work from Vista to Fedora, and I haven’t looked back. I didn’t have any particularly unusual requirements of a work PC; just an ssh client to configure servers. I actually prefer the GNOME desktop to a Windows desktop, and I’ve been getting on with Fedora very well indeed.

A couple of months after this I decided to install Fedora on my main PC at home. I felt that I’d learned enough about desktop Linux to be able to get it going satisfactorily. And while it’s all good and well having a secondary Linux PC, you get any good at it unless it’s your primary.

The transition went very smoothly on the whole – I got most of my hardware working and I was very pleased with the usability. But it still nags me that there are a handful of things that don’t work (either satisfactorily, or in some cases at all) on Linux, so I’m still forced to keep Windows.

Audio Editing

I’m a massive fan of home audio production. I play a few musical instruments and I own a set of decent recording equipment (see my Equipment List), including a Phonic Helix Board 24 firewire mixer. I purchased the mixer when I was still running Windows XP as my primary OS, and it worked very nicely. I used to use Syntrillium’s Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) and I got on very well with it.

When I moved over to Linux, I was keen to get the mixer working. There exists a project named ffado which strives to get firewire audio devices working on Linux. Unfortunately it doesn’t offer full support for Phonic devices. I did have it working at one point, although it was iffy at best, and a pain to configure each time I wanted to use it.

And while Ardour is a pretty decent piece of software, I had grown used to Cool Edit and Audition and didn’t see why I should move away. So I still boot into Windows for my audio work.

Gaming

This is one of the most common complaints from individuals who migrate to Linux. Their games don’t work.

I’m not a massive gamer anyway, but I did often enjoy spending the odd hour on Age of Empires or one of a number of driving games.

Of course some games work under wine, but many don’t. Of the ones that do, they often have missing features or oddities. So I still return to Windows for my occasional gaming.

Unfortunately, since upgrading my Windows installation from XP to Vista, I’ve discovered that Age of Empires doesn’t work on Vista either. A Microsoft game… on a Microsoft OS. Quality. I don’t play Age of Empires any more.

Scanning

For those who read my review of my slide scanner, you’ll recall that it doesn’t work on Linux (at all) or Vista (at all) so I had to use the XP installation on my laptop to scan in 3,000+ slides.

I also have a Canon LiDE 25 flatbed scanner which is detected and apparently works out of the box on Fedora – but unfortunately the colours are funny and broken. I haven’t found a way to remedy this so I still scan on Windows. At least it works on Vista on my desktop PC.

Other applications

And of course, there are always the rare occasions when you encounter the need to use a specific application that is Windows-only, or a file format that somehow ties you to Windows. Recently, I’ve needed to use Windows for…

• Boson online testing environment – for practising Cisco exams
• Noteworthy Composer – a MIDI editor that’s so good I’ve never found a Linux application that comes close. It does actually work quite nicely under wine with Timidity, but some screen fonts break.
• TomTom Home – software for updating the maps on my sat nav
• Vue – a 3D rendering suite that I occasionally play with

Summary

Overall, it’s a shame I can’t drop Windows completely. The vast majority of my needs are satisfied by Linux, and Fedora in particular has come a long way since I started using it at Fedora Core 5.

So who’s to blame for this dependence on Windows? In my opinion, the blame must lie with the application developers who write their applications and games for only one OS; the hardware vendors who don’t bother to write drivers for any but the most common OSs.

Linux developers work hard to provide drivers and applications for new devices and new file formats. Their task is made harder by manufacturers who stick to closed formats and proprietary devices. It’s a shame, because it ruins my life!

In this guide, we will set up your home Linux server to share files in a Windows-friendly format. This is ideal for interacting with Windows PCs on your network, or for generic appliances such as media streaming boxes.

First we install Samba:

[root@zeus ~]# yum install samba

Before we configure Samba, you need to think about who is going to need access to this. For an enterprise solution, clearly you’ll need some fancy authentication backend. For a home situation, it’s easier to set up a handful of users on your local system. Let’s assume you want to set up access for your wife, Sue.

[root@zeus ~]# useradd sue
[root@zeus ~]# passwd sue

So now Sue is set up on the server and has a password. Now we need to tell Samba that it’s OK to let system users get access to files. Open the file /etc/samba/smbusers. It should already have a couple of entries in, but you will need to add one for each user you want to use the file shares.

# Unix_name = SMB_name1 SMB_name2 ...
root = administrator admin
nobody = guest pcguest smbguest
sue = sue
tvuser = tvuser

We back up and open the Samba config file for editing:

[root@zeus ~]# cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.old
[root@zeus ~]# vim /etc/samba/smb.conf

Delete all the contents of smb.conf. For now just add the contents of the global section below, but don’t close your editor yet – we need to define the shares.

[global]
dns proxy = no
log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log
cups options = raw
server string = Samba Server
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_THROUGHPUT
username map = /etc/samba/smbusers
hosts allow = 192.168.0. 127.
max log size = 50

Now for some examples of how to define shares. The homes example automatically connects each user to their home directory, e.g. /home/sue. If you want this, keep it. If you don’t use your Linux home directories, don’t bother adding this section.

[homes]
comment = Home Directories
browseable = no
writeable = yes

This next one is an example of a media share for a TV streaming box or similar. All users can read it; only sue can write to it.

[media]
path = /media/public
writeable = yes
public = yes
write list = sue

This one is a private share only accessible by sue

[private]
path = /media/private
writeable = yes
valid users = sue

After you’ve defined your shares, save the config, start the service and set it to run on boot

[root@zeus ~]# service smb start
[root@zeus ~]# chkconfig smb on