I have wanted to be part of an open source software development business for a long time. Ha. I’m quite giddy right now, because I just happen to own one.

I have a number of little development contracts out right now to develop a variety of tools, website extensions and generally muck about with technology. What’s really cool is that I am using exclusively open source tools and environments to do the work in.

Ha, this great.

So long, and later.

At this moment, I am sitting in the secure boarding area of the Calgary International Airport awaiting my flight (connecting through Salt Lake City) to New York. Thinking back on the week, this has been pretty interesting as far as these things go.

I have several contracts running in parallel at the moment (a couple websites in addition to a couple more hardcore kernel projects).

The most interesting (steepest learning curve) was setting up a VPN for a small carpentry business here in town. Granted, I want to move away from the IT end of the software world, it was very interesting nevertheless.

Anywho, we’re now boarding so I am wrapping up.

So long, and later :)

As I had mentioned in my earlier post about the re-organization of comlore.com, some people noticed that my old blog location (directly at comlore.com) was still available, but just wasn’t being updated with new posts.

Problem is that those pages have been referenced by the search engines as well as a multitude of links scattered around the internet. So for the time being I set up redirects to the equivalent pages on at the new location (tbullock.comlore.com).

Anyways, the moral of the story is that the top level of comlore.com is going to remain as a redirect for the next couple of weeks until the majority of the traffic that was hitting my blog, shifts to this new location.

-Ted

Ever since the speakers on my laptop decided to die, I have been looking for ways to get audio out of the machine.

There are a couple options:

• Don’t have sound
• Use headphones, or a speaker connected to the headphone port
• Use a network sound server

Given that I love the concept of tinkering around with weird technical thingamajigs, I decided to give the latter a try.

So here is what I want to do.

My mythtv frontend in the living room is connected to a very decent speaker system, also, there are other “always on” machines around the house which are hooked up to speakers.

I want my laptop to auto-detect the existence of the sound systems on these machines and connect to them at a push of a button, then route all of my computers audio through those speakers.

Anyways, I have not been able to get my laptops pulseaudio client to connect to a system wide instance running on the media server. If anyone has gotten a similar system running, I would love to hear about it.

Let me know.

-Ted

Last night I had one of those tinkering fits that occasionally over take me, and I updated my mythtv operating system to openSUSE 11.1. Since there aren’t any really good instructions for this procedure (even the mythtv wiki is a bit stretched), I figured I’ll post my instructions here.

My backend (and frontend) machine:

• Pentium D 920
• 1Gb Ram
• Hauppauge PVR-350
• 900 Gb hardware RAID 5 (4 x 300 Gb) with Areca ARC-1210 controller
• Geforce 7300 GS

With the exception of the video, all the components in the machine here have good out of the box drivers.

Anyways, I chose the basic X11 installation from the DVD, since I wanted to avoid installing too much extraneous software.

The majority of the install is done from the command line so here goes (As best as I can remember):

zypper ar http://packman.unixheads.org/suse/11.1
zypper install mythtv-backend mythtv-doc myththemes mysql
rcmysql start && mysqladmin -u root password mysecretpassword

mysql -u root -p < /usr/share/doc/packages/mythtv-doc/database/mc.sql

mysql -u root -p mythconverg
   grant all on mythconverg.* to mythtv@"%" identified by "mythtv";
   flush privileges;
   quit;

Then with a running X session run the setup program, and there is plenty of documentation available for this on the mythtv wiki

mythtv-setup

Next I created a user “myth”, installed gdm, and configured the autologin, note that no password was set here for the user “myth”

useradd myth -m
zypper install gdm
sed s/DISPLAYMANAGER="xdm"/DISPLAYMANAGER="gdm" /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager
sed s/DISPLAYMANAGER_AUTOLOGIN=""/DISPLAYMANAGER_AUTOLOGIN="myth" /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager

Next I started yast and from the run level editor, I added both mythbackend and mysql to the start in run levels 3 and 5

Finally to get the frontend to display upon boot I edited the file /home/myth/.dmrc to read

[Desktop]
Session=mythTV

Restarted the machine to test all was well, and I was up and running.

Not bad, as far as time goes either. In total the installation took me about an hour and half.

-Ted