So for some of you who know me, I’ve been going on about the eeePC laptop for sometime and I recently (today) received a free eeePC 4G Surf from my bank. As I switched to some new account type and jumped through all their hoops. Needless to say I am pretty pleased so far and can’t wait to get hacking on this thing. Enough with the talk, on with the pictures.

I was even more impressed when I found out lirc now offers direct support and I no longer had to use venky’s build.

However as usual I encountered an issue. I was able to compile and install lirc without issue. Using irw produces output from the multi-median remote. But it also highlights another issue. The ir receiver just randomly stops receiving signals and hangs for about a minute. This was very frustrating and I hit the forums trying to find an answer. All I could find was from an earlier revision of lirc from around 2005, after that nothing.

As far as I can understand it, it appears that LCDproc is interfering with the ir receiver somehow. So here I am stuck with lirc that kinda works and no real solution. I will continue to search for the answer but until then, I’m stuck using a keyboard, which is not ideal.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

The setup went okay, although I must admit I encountered some issues with the whole frontend/backend slave setup which I will detail in a later post.

This post is about blanking the screen as I often fall asleep while watching a movie or show. This increases the chance of screen burn in, and is something I want to avoid.

I am still researching how this can be done automatically but in the interim I have come up with the following solution. I have setup the power button on my hauppauge remote to execute a script with changes the runlevel from 5, to 3. Essentially stopping the frontend and bringing the system down to a terminal.

Since most default installs automatically blank the terminal after a set period of time of inactivity I am set. Now when I am drifting off and far to cozy to get out of bed to shut off the monitor I can simply press power and let the system enter runlevel 3. Then after a few minutes the screen will blank automatically.

To get this to work I added the following configuration to the .lircrc file in /home/mythtv.

# Power Button begin
prog = irexec
button = Power
config = /home/mythtv/powerbutton.sh
end

With that done the next step is to create the actual script that will switch runlevels. (Keep in mind this assumes your mythtv user has sudo access to run the init command) The following script is run from /home/mythtv/powerbutton.sh.

#!/bin/bash
 
RL=`/sbin/runlevel | awk '{print $2}'`;
LOG="/home/mythtv/pb.log";
 
if [ $RL -eq 5 ]
then
   # shutdown
   sudo /sbin/init 3;
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: [$RL] switching to runlevel 3\n" >> $LOG
   killall irexec
   sleep 1;
   /usr/bin/irexec &
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: starting irexec.\n" >> $LOG
   sleep 1;
   setterm -reset
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: resetting terminal.\n" >> $LOG
   sleep 20;
   RL=`/sbin/runlevel | awk '{print $2}'`;
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: switched to [$RL], exiting.\n" >> $LOG
else
   # startup
   sudo /sbin/init 5;
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: [$RL] switching to runlevel 5\n" >> $LOG
   sleep 20;
   RL=`/sbin/runlevel | awk '{print $2}'`;
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: switched to [$RL], exiting.\n" >> $LOG
fi
exit 0

With that done, all that is left is to test it out. Of course you will need to either reboot to pickup the changes or restart lircd, then the mythtv frontend.

Keep in mind this is just temporary solution and not something I plan to keep doing. I know there are probably far better ways of doing this and I will be looking into them in the future.

A contest, thats right a script writing contest. Now I am no expert, but I do like to write scripts, and do like to tinker. At first I had no intention of entering, but I figured I’d give it a try and see if I could improve the script.

I tinkered and I tinkered, and finally got something working, started adding features and before I knew it I had something pretty good and useful. So I submitted it. My entry can be downloaded here.

So what is it? What is it used for? Well it allows you to make http requests to webservers via the command line. You can view the header information and raw html output.

I’m not sure how I will stack up, or how many entries have been submitted, but wish me luck still the same. For me it wasn’t about winning, it was more about writing something useful.

I used baghira to do most of this and followed the guide located here. Now I like to think I got really close, and I was very happy with the overall look and feel of the system. But the more I used it the more problems I found.

It seems baghira doesn’t play well with common linux programs like the Gimp, Firefox, and others, causing them to show up completely black, crash, or to just run like ass.

For what it was worth it was a fun exercise, but I don’t think I will try it again. Perhaps there are other forms of eye candy for linux. I will continue to play around until I have the desktop install I want. Take a look at some of the screen shots I took of my efforts.

The following instructions describe how to successfully setup the imon vfd for use with MythTV on a Fedora Core 5 system running at least a 2.6.16 kernel and above. These instructions are modified where needed from the original site venky.ws. Also these instuctions do not activate the IR receiver that comes included in the imon vfd in the LC10M enclosure, simply just the lcd display.

Stand Alone Driver for imon vfd

Prerequisites:
You must have the kernel source or headers in /usr/src/linux that exactly match your running kernel. The installation instructions below assume you are running a 2.6.16 kernel or above.

Installation:

Download the stand alone driver here

# tar xvzf imon_vfd.tgz
# cd imon

Remove the following lines from the imon_vfd.c file:

line 122 owner = THIS_MODULE 
line 147 owner = THIS_MODULE 
line 162 mode = DEVFS_MODE

Check for devfs_fs_kernel.h

# ls /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`-`uname -m`/include/linux/devfs_fs_kernel.h
No such file or directory

If you do not have the devfs_fs_kernel.h file, just create a blank file.

# touch /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`-`uname -m`/include/linux/devfs_fs_kernel.h

Before we run the make command I like to modify the Makefile and remove the `name -r` bit. Replace it with the real name of your kernel.

# make -C /usr/src/linux SUBDIRS=$PWD
# modules
# make install
# depmod -a
# modprobe imon_vfd

Now check to make sure the lcd device has been created.

# ls /dev/lcd0
/dev/lcd0

LCDproc 0.4.5 for imon

This is the most recent stable version of LCDproc together with the iMON patch.
Prerequisites:
You must have the kernel source or headers in /usr/src/linux that exactly match your running kernel.
Make sure you have the autoconf and automake packages installed.
Make sure you have ncurses-devel installed.
Install the standalone iMON VFD driver.

Installation:

Download LCDproc from here

# tar xvzf lcdproc-0.4.5-imon.tgz 
# cd lcdproc-0.4.5-imon
# aclocal; autoheader; autoconf; automake -a 
# ./configure
# make
# make install (as root) 
# cp LCDd.conf /etc

Now add an entry for the imon_vfd so it will be loaded at boot time.

# echo "/sbin/modprobe imon_vfd" >> /etc/sysconfig/modules/lirc.modules

Finally add LCDd to the rc.local file so that it is started at boot time.

# echo "/usr/local/sbin/LCDd &" >> /etc/rc.local

Lastly be sure to enable the option for LCD output in the MythTV options menu.

To get around this, I started looking into various ways of controlling the permissions. I also wanted this to be mounted during boot, but first I needed to make a mount point.

mkdir /filer

Now I started playing with various methods to mount the share. The best method I was able to find was as follows.

mount //server/share /filer -t cifs -o gid=99,uid=99,dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777,rw

In the above example, you can see that the share is mounted to /filer using the group id of 99 and user id of 99. On my system, these id’s are owned by the nobody user. Which is basically just a guest account. This will allow everyone to write to the mounted share.

The next step is to have the share mounted during boot up. So I needed to add an entry to the /etc/fstab file. Below is the entry I placed in my fstab file.

//(Servers IP)/filer /filer cifs gid=99,uid=99,dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777,rw 0 0

Now whenever the server is restarted I can be assured that the share will be mounted with the permissions I wanted. After a quick test reboot I can now see that my share is mounted, and the permissions I wanted are set aswell.

root@myserver ~]# ls -ld /filer
drwxrwxrwx  1 nobody nobody 0 Sep 16 23:58 /filer

To use, place all of the contents into a file anywhere on your system. I called mine, daily_backup.sh and placed it in the directory /root/scripts/. Once the script is in place, change the permissions to make it executable.

chmod 754 daily_backup.sh

Now modify the script changing the options and directories to suite your system and environment. To create the crontab entry, as root run the following.

crontab -e

Then add the following line, which will execute our script everynight at 3:01AM.

1 3 * * * /root/scripts/daily_backup.sh

Below is the script as it is setup on my system. Feel free to modify it to better suite your needs. As aways comments are welcome and appreciated.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Daily backup
#
 
########################################
## Backup location options
 
# Location of remote backups
BACKUPDIR="/filer/Backup";
# Set to no if not backing up to a remote mount
VERIFYMOUNT="yes";
# Local mount point of remote server
MOUNTNAME="/filer";
# Database username
DBUSER="sampleuser";
# Database password
DBPASS="samplepass";
# Day to run full backup
DOWFB="Sun";
 
########################################
## Backup data options
 
# Space separated directories to backup
DATADIRS="/var/www/html /etc";
# Space separated MySQL databases to backup
DBNAMES=( mysql mydb1 mydb2 );
 
########################################
########## End User Options ############
########################################
 
 
########################################
## Variables and checks used by script
 
LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt";
set $(date)
 
if [ "$VERIFYMOUNT" == "yes" ]; then
  RESULT=`mount | grep $MOUNTNAME`;
 
  if [ ! "$RESULT" ]; then
    exit 1;
  fi
fi
 
########################################
## Create backup of data directories
 
if test "$1" = "$DOWFB" ; then
 
  #######################################
  ## Weekly full backup
 
  if [ ! -d "$BACKUPDIR/data" ]; then
    mkdir -p $BACKUPDIR/data
  fi
 
  tar cfz "$BACKUPDIR/data/data_full_$6-$2-$3.tgz" $DATADIRS
  rm -f $BACKUPDIR/data/data_diff*
 
else
 
  ########################################
  ## Daily incremental backup
 
  if [ ! -d "$BACKUPDIR/data" ]; then
    mkdir -p $BACKUPDIR/data
  fi
 
  find $DATADIRS -depth -type f ( -ctime -1 -o -mtime -1 ) -print > $LIST
  tar cfzT "$BACKUPDIR/data/data_diff_$6-$2-$3.tgz" "$LIST"
  rm -f "$LIST"
 
fi
 
########################################
## Create sql dump of databases
 
if [ ! -d "$BACKUPDIR/database" ]; then
  mkdir -p $BACKUPDIR/database
fi
 
for db in ${DBNAMES[@]}
do
  mysqldump -u $DBUSER --password=$DBPASS --opt $db > "$BACKUPDIR/database/$db-$6-$2-$3.sql"
  gzip "$BACKUPDIR/database/$db-$6-$2-$3.sql"
done
 
exit 0