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  • EADD Moderators: Pissed_and_messed | Shinji Ikari

The EADD Linux Technical Gibberings Thread

when someone rings my voip number, they get connected to asterisk and if im at home, and my phone is connected to the wireless network, itll ring my mobile. otherwise it goes to voicemail. it's very configurable. can also make outgoing calls over voip from my mobile.
 
Well, if you're into collecting antique telephones, you can have them able to call each other -- that in itself is a good enough reason for many people. And you can arrange to do stuff like call your neighbours using their old 4-digit numbers without the 73 on the front (which retro collectors might appreciate). You can use VoIP for trunking, avoiding the PSTN altogether. The cards are configurable by swapping plug-in modules; you need a green "FXS" module to talk to a phone (they even accept pulse dialling, and you can use a rotary dial for making selections from voice menus) or a red "FXO" module to talk to an exchange line. So you could have multiple exchange lines, although this is now getting into business-ish territory. You can set up phone calls under program control (think, click on a contact's number; your phone starts ringing; pick it up, and their phone starts ringing; they answer and you're connected to each other). You can fire off actions when specific numbers are dialled from one of your internal extensions. You can treat unwanted callers to a chorus of this:

Asterisk is basically a telephony construction kit. If you weren't into Lego or Meccano as a kid, you probably won't Get It.
 
Poor Pagey, all confused on MXE and I regaled her with the step-by-step process of installing Ubuntu 13.10 on my laptop, then forced her to listen to a political activism podcast. Well darlin' that's my life, so now you know :D

Anyway, what a fucking mistake, I was quite happy with the Crunchbang installation I had running before. I was dazzled by shiny new things with big version numbers. Ho hum. Ubuntu, while great for the casual user and very easy to install and get working with quickly, is really not for me, as a I like a very paired down, minimal install and rapid access to configuration like shortcut keys and custom menus. So it lasted 10 minutes and now I'm installing Arch, which is a bit of a departure for me as I've gone with Debian based distros for the last 10 years. But I strongly suspect it is really what I want. So here I go, hoping to get my Arch machine up and running by midday so I can get on with the things I'm doing this to avoid.

edit: just discovered there is an Archbang sister to Crunchbang so she'll be my chosen bedfellow.
 
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Two fucking hours to attempt to upgrade/convert XMBCBuntu to Ubuntu 13.10. Doesn't fuckin' work! Was never guaranteed to work I suppose.

I wish SteamOS would hurry up and make a realease! That's what I actually want. But I want to play games now! That's not happening tonight though. So tomorrow, fresh Ubuntu 13.10 install. Then install Steam and all my games. I can see that taking three hours. Better get started early. Better get the ethylphenidate out a bit earlier =D
 
What's this? No linux posts in 2014 yet? Not acceptable.

In 2005 I purchased a DNUK w425-he workstation. It cost me about £4000. It looks like this:
workstar-dual-smaller.png


Here's the original spec:
Chassis: DNUK SR10569 (mid tower)
PSU: 420W EPS12V
Motherboard: Tyan S2895A2NRF (AMD Dual Socket 940)
Processors: 2x AMD Opteron 280 Dual-Core / 2x 2.40GHz / 2x 1MB cache / Socket 940
Memory: 2x 2.0GB PC3200 DDR / 400MHz / registered ECC
Graphics 1x NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS / 256MB DDR3 / PCI-E x16 / DVI / SLI
Hard disks 2x 250GB SATA / Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 / 7200 RPM / 8MB cache
Optical drive 1x 16x16x6 DVD-RW / 16x16x8 DVD+RW / 16x6 DVD+R DL

I also got this monitor: 20.1 inch iiyama ProLite E511S-B flat panel display

Total cost: £3,782.50

I intended to use it for music production. I installed this audio card:

Delta44_v2008.jpg


And it was great, a very fast machine and I was playing with SuperCollider and Csound and all sorts. Fastest computer I've ever had. But the coolers were so noisy, after a few minutes use it was like a 747 taking off at Gatwick. How am I meant to concentrate on music with air traffic control working from my bedroom (this was in Portia Way off Burdett Road, Mile End. Listen to Pulp's "Mile End":


Jarvis Cocker said:
We didn't have nowhere to live,
we didn't have nowhere to go
til someone said
"I know this place off Burdett Road."
It was on the fifteenth floor,
it had a board across the door.
It took an hour
to prise it off and get inside.
It smelt as if someone had died;
the living room was full of flies,
the kitchen sink was blocked,
the bathroom sink not there at all.
Click to expand...

I am confident I had the fastest computer in a 5 mile radius.

But also the noisiest. I bought a sound proofing kit from Maplin in Liverpool Street when I was working at ABN Amro. It helped, but not a fucking lot. So I struggled with it for years and eventually gave up and bought a nice Lenovo laptop so I could hear myself think. The music production fell by the wayside.

Fast forward 9 years. 2013 is drawing to a close. Valve announce SteamOS, a games platform based on Linux. I got very excited! I set up an old HP/Compaq DC5750 SFF Athlon 64 x2 and a mid-range nvidia card. Nice. Worked OK. But not great. I'm playing Half Life, and it's great. But Metro Last Light just kills the machine. I have to play with the graphics turned down to 1, and I still get stuttering audio. Then there came a straw, which landed on a camel's back: got to the end of the Marshes level and it started crashing consistently, I could make no progress. I broke down in tears. So near, but yet so far.

So, desperate times call for desperate measures. That £3,700 workstation is on a shelf in the spare room gathering dust. It occurs to me, that four opteron cores are faster than an athlon 64 x2. So, I transfer my SteamOS install over to the DNUK box and give it a whirl. It's a bit faster than that DC5750, not a lot but a bit, It's extremely noisy, but I'm using headphones, and most importantly IT DOES NOT CRASH.

Much. Suddenly the machine started throwing ECC errors. What the fuck? Is my Motherboard goosed? Is it the processors? Is it the RAM? I bit the bullet. Placed an order for 16GB of ECC registered DDR400 DRAM - £45 of eBay - Fucking Bargain! - 2 "refurbished" (given a wipe) opteron 280s, an Asus GeForce GTX 660 DirectCU II OC 2GB Graphics Video Card (low mid-end model of their top range card, capable of all that Physix shit, and supposedly quiet). Also, ordered 2 Scythe Samurai ZZ Quiet Top-down CPU Coolers.

The memory and the coolers came today. I installed the memory, and I was expecting it to throw loads of errors because £45 is too cheap for this sort of memory. 1 stick of this RAM should cost at least £70. Well, shock fucking horror, all my memory errors disappeared. I now have 16GB ECC registered RAM and my ECC errors have stopped! Time to break out the 3-MeO-PCP to celebrate. Game plays nicely too, but still, I feel like I'm waiting at Terminal 4 for a flight to Schipol. Never mind, the 3-MeO-PCP has kicked in and the fancy new coolers are sitting waiting to be fitted. Am I capable of doing this though? I open the box and dozens of unrecognisable metal brackets and clips fall out. The instructions are in Chinese. The English instructions say "Fit the cooler to the motherboard". RIght.

Amazingly, 15 minutes later, I have the first cooler installed. The SATA power cable is pressing right up against the heatsink fins, which can't be clever. So I slip a bit of cardboard between the cooler and the cable to introduce "thermal isolation". Sorted. 10 minutes later, cooler 2 is installed. Can it be this easy? Why fucking yes it IS this easy! Power it on. Nice and fast, still a bit of audio stuttering and I can't turn graphics up beyond 3, but the thing is fast and quiet and not crashing. I feel like I'm winning.

Tomorrow, the GTX 660 turns up. My hope is that I will then be able to turn the graphics up to 11 and the stuttering will disappear. Not sure if I can contain myself. It's only been 9 years since I got this box. But it's finally living up to my hopes and dreams! Touch wood, but it seems like one of knock's plans is finally coming together, and knock loves it when a plan comes together :D

OK so I have two Opteron 280s on their way that it seems I don't need. But it's nice to have a spare, and they were only £40.

<3


Oh yeah, raspberry pi. Has been sitting in a box for a year because it was "shit". Thought I'd try upgrading the OS and kernel and see if it makes a difference. Why yes, yes it does. Installed the MPD music player daemon and I'm controlling with Sonata from my laptop. Piped the sound out to my Sennheiser wireless headphones and lo and behold I can listen to all my music and podcasts without having a PC consuming 400W. The thing is great! If anyone out there has put their Pi in a drawer cos it was shit, get it back out and update the software. Mucho improvements. No audio stutterings of any sort. Smooth as fuck, and low power.

It's been a productive day chèz knock and it's put a little smile on my ugly puss.

Ooops I didn't actually mention Linux. I'm running Ye Olde SteamOS on this, based on Debian 7, and it's really, really nice.
 
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what drug addled tosser closed this?

Installed my GTX660. YES! YES I can turn the video up to 11! I win! I win!

Can't get past these pesky monsters though.


Fuck sake :! Turned the thing off to go and do other stuff and now I go back to it and it won't turn back on. I've re-sat all the memory, the video card, various leads, nada. I'm going to have to disassemble the bastard again. Maybe these two new processors which should appear tomorrow are needed after all. Either that or I need a beefier power supply, although the one that's in it is fairly new and fairly beefy. Why does nothing go smoothly?
 
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Hehe. Seems to be a common theme around the peev thread. I've given up trying to work out what is in my head and what is on my poot pretty much. With my *ahem* mad techy skillz I doubt I could tell the difference anyway. I do know I haven't got admin rights on any of my accounts any more though which is somewhat suggestive of the fact I'm not just imagining it. But, given I have no admin rights, there's fuck all I can do about it anyway as far as I can tell. Which is not very far.
 
Shambles said:
Hehe. Seems to be a common theme around the peev thread. I've given up trying to work out what is in my head and what is on my poot pretty much. With my *ahem* mad techy skillz I doubt I could tell the difference anyway. I do know I haven't got admin rights on any of my accounts any more though which is somewhat suggestive of the fact I'm not just imagining it. But, given I have no admin rights, there's fuck all I can do about it anyway as far as I can tell. Which is not very far.
Click to expand...

You mean you can't open a terminal and type

Code: 
sudo su -

and get a root prompt?

Code: 
#
 
Can you try that terminal thing? You should type your own password when prompted for a password. If you get a prompt that ends in # then you can then change the root password without knowing the existing root password (only root can do that):

Code: 
$ [B]sudo su -[/B]
[sudo] password for shambles:[B] [I]your password[/I][/B]
# [B]passwd[/B]
Enter new UNIX password: [B][I]new root password[/I][/B]
Retype new UNIX password: [B][I]new root password again[/I][/B]
passwd: password updated successfully
# [B]exit[/B]
$ [B]exit[/B]

you just type the bits in bold. Pressing Enter every time. I can't remember how au fait you are at the terminal, I'm sure you're at least slightly au fait though :)

then try synaptic again.
 
Just tried that and apparently I am not in the sudoers file and this incident will be reported. Got as far as typing in my own p/w and then got that message. Have had it several times before when trying to do any sudo-stuffs. Been meaning to ask in here - and about another lil issue too actually - but not gotten around to it yet. Any assistance gratefully received :)

Oh, and to be clear, as far as I recall I have never created, entered or changed a root p/w on any Linux installation. Of course that in no way means I actually haven't but certainly not knowingly.

Also, what - if any - is the difference between the root p/w and the admin p/w - I've seen dialogues asking for both at various times and neither accept my own p/w.
 
Well, don't worry about the report I think it ends up in a log somewhere :) Doubt anyone is looking at it.

That's not right at all Shammy. You certainly should be in the sudoers file. I've never seen the like before. A fix involves booting off a live CD or USB stick, mounting the root filesystem at a temporary mount point and adding your account into the sudoers file, or more probably adding you to the sudo group which should already be in the sudoers file. Sound easy?

would be interesting to see if you are in the sudo group. The id command will tell you:

Code: 
$ id
uid=1000(knock) gid=1000(knock) groups=1000(knock),4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),[B]27(sudo)[/B],29(audio),44(video),46(plugdev),60(games),100(users),1001(input)
 
Code: 
uid=1001(me) gid=1001(me) groups=1001(me),4(adm),20(dialout),21(fax),24(cdrom),25(floppy),26(tape),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),104(fuse)

Apparently. Whatever all that means :D

Incidentally, this is that other account that I set up with your assistance on a previous occasion when I managed to lock myself out of my main account. I did manage to get back into my main account for a while but just recently buggered it again. I suspect in a relatively fixable manner inasmuch as I think it's just the xauth file that's buggered. I know I've dealt with that before some time but memory fails. Plus, no admin access on that account either :\
 
Hehe. I do like a Knock with a plan cos am buggered if I have one :D

Got a feeling it may be a tricksy beast to sort out. I've had no luck with live installations and the like either. Nothing that previously seemed to get me out of me lil scrapes is getting me out of this particular lil scrape it seems. I'm really not so great with pooters - you may have noticed :D

Oh, and afaik, those groups are just what it automatically assigned me when this account was created. Although I'm sure I had admin rights and could change and update software initially. Well, maybe not 100% sure actually. It's been like this for a while now and have more or less given up on trying to do anything with it cos it just seems to get weirder each time I've done anything previously.
 
we'll get it sorted, but maybe not tonight. Have you got a boot disk of some kind? If not, not a problem, I can cook one up in a trice.
 
I don't have anything like that, no. I chucked almost all of my Linux discs out a while back as they either didn't work or seemed somehow... altered :sus:

To be quite honest, I think the main reason I've not gotten around to bringing recent issues up in here is that - as mentioned - anything and everything only seems to dig the hole deeper and at least it's currently (just about) useable. I'm kinda nervy to do much of anything to it lest it becomes yet another useless pile of circuitry like all the previous ones :\

Only thing I think has any chance of making a longterm difference would be if somebody who really does know what they're doing were to set the whole thing up from scratch in situ and show me exactly where I've been going wrong. Which is undoubtedly in very many ways over very many years 8)

Not that I'm suggesting that's practical anytime soon but would be nice one of these days to get some idea of wha' g'warnin and how to stop it g'warnin in future. Assuming that's possible.

That aside, you've dug me out of a hole or two (or three or four) before and any assistance really is very gratefully received. If only I could manage to not screw it up shortly afterwards we may even be on to a winner one of these days :D

No rush - I've lived with it for this long and it is at least perfectly usable for the scant handful of purposes I have for it currently. Enjoy the fruits of your shopdash <3
 
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