The PS3 is probably the best, and reasonably priced, Blu-Ray player on the market. Now that the HD format wars are over, it was time to get a Blu-Ray player

All the Windows hype about the “Media Editions” of Windows was never very clear. Apparently the Media Edition contains the features necessary to serve various files to the other entertainment systems in the home. Music and video players can play files from your desktop harddrive via these servers. Now with a new PS3, Media Services is becoming more useful. It will be interesting to play photos and videos from a server. The PS3 only has a 40GB harddrive and the file management features of the PS3 are very primitive.
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Ubuntu and Windows can work together on a network of course, using winbind and samba. But Ubuntu doesn’t come that way and the configuration of Samba needs some work to make it happen.

I’ve got my systems all file sharing now, but it took some doing since I’m not a Samba expert.
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When settings files are transferred as part of a program update, it may be interesting to assure that the files are not corrupted, or changed in such a way that the program is compromised. One can do this with XML Signatures.
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I recently purchased a 15″ PhotoFrame for what seemed like a great price of $250US. Of course now they have a WiFi version for $270. But I have a 17″ LCD monitor that wasn’t pulling it’s weight anymore, so I wondered how much trouble it would be to make a PhotoFrame from that.
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I chose Puppy Linux 3.01 and burned a CDROM. I’ve got Nero 8, so that part was a snap.

When I booted the CDROM, I got a much better result than for Ubuntu:

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The next problem is installing Puppy on the CF card.
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I’ve installed video and dvd support as discussed in this article in PCTech101.
At this point I’ve installed RPMs from the OpenSuse repository. http://software.opensuse.org/download/repositories/KDE:/KDE3/SUSE_Linux_10.1/

I had to install these rpms manually. YAST refresh of the site would never complete and it would then produce errors that the available RPM could not be found on the site. I downloaded them from the site and then installed them using rpm -Uhv.

These are the components that I have installed in the KDE mm suite. [click for larger image].

When I use any of the video players: Totum, Kaffein, Xine - the audio plays, but there is no video. Is there something else that I need? I get a black screen. No errors. The configuration for Kaffein indicated no errors.

Thanks,
ww

[Updated 10 Nov 2006]

I’ve just started learning how to use CVS on Linux with KDevelop, and there are enough gotchas that I thought it might be interesting to share what I’ve learned. I have used lots of source control in the past, but never CVS. RCS [ages ago], QVCS [windows front end for rcs], and VSS with Visual Studio.

Serious coding on Linux means that I need source control, so I had a look at what’s available. CVS seems to be the long-time standard for open-source projects. But SubVersion is new on the scene, relatively, so I took a look. But after a little study of a few doc pages, including this one, it looks like SubVersion has the nasty habit of suggesting, if not requiring, that your directory tree look in a special way for SubVersion use. That, and the fact that the SubVersion GUI client for Linux looks like it is in its pretty early days, has lead me to choose CVS and Cervisia. Any Open Source code base with a version above 1.5 has got to have seen a fair amount of use.
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I’m working on a Hex Display Widget under KDevelop.

Here’s a first version that begins to work. The options in the view menu work to change the display grouping.

ww

KHexWin test program

VNC, or remote administration, allows a remote desktop service between windows and linux. If you are like me you have a mixed network, and it is nice to be able to reach the linux box from a windows box. One my major interests is to be able to run a Kdevelop app from my windows laptop while I’m watching TV.
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This is a port of the Hellraiser box to Qt / KDE / Kdevelop on SUSE 10.1.

To run the program, use fileroller to unpack the file in a directory and then run the program. The image files must be in the same directory as the program. The instructions are essentially the same as for the Windows Version.

Hellraiser Lament Box Program

The sources are provided here. They are built using KDevelop 3.3.5 and Qt.
Hellraiser Lament Box Sources
There are links in the debug and optimize src directories that point back to the images in the src directory. These may have to be remade after you unpack the archive since links are not relative.

Enjoy.

I found out some of the great mystery of mod_rewrite. Here’s an example that works. Turns out there are errors in the documentation, of course, and this article may help avoid the pitfalls that I have discovered.
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Anticipating your request, here is the entire apache configuration tree.
This one is broken.
Broken Apache Configuration

[SOLVED]
I got this working. Here’s an example configuration tree for SUSE 10.1, Apache 2 and php. Don’t just dump these into your system. I suggest doing a diff - kdiff3 is a good tool - and understand what the differences are before you apply them to your system.

I found that the OUT OF THE BOX experience with Apache was not good. The config for apache is designed to be basically turned off. So you need to make changes to enable anything. You do not need to “reinstall the whole thing” as some folks suggest to get it working. That won’t do anything except increase your level of frustration.

Here’s a working config - at least it works for me.

Working Apache, and php5 config files.

enjoy. I’m not an expert, but if you contact me, I may be able to assist.

ww

A part of the Geodesic program for WIN MFC and OpenGL has been ported to Linux / KDevelop / Qt / OpenGL. It creates and displays a gear object and there are many parameters to change the shape of the gear. The program will be able to export OBJ or POV files of the shape of the gear. It can serve as a complex tutorial of using OpenGL and many other features of
the KDE and Qt frameworks.

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There is a properties dialog with a large number of input fields as follows:

Here is the header definition for the data.
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Work continues with SUSE 10.1 Linux both in configuring the system and in learning to use the KDevelop IDE for C++ programming. There are several interesting items to mention:

• Overlay planes
• Wacom Tablets
• KDevelop glitches
• .ICEAuthority lockouts
• GAIM messenger
• SKYPE
• CD backups

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SUSE 10.1, KDevelop 3.3.3, KDE 3.5.1

RESOLVED: A reply in a forum indicated that there is a known bug with the default configuration that leaves a config.status around that sabotages the entire project. The recovery is to delete all the config.status files in the project and then avoid use of the default configuration.

Developed the program under the debug configuration and then tried to switch to default or optimized configuration. Tried many combinations to try to get it working again, but all BUILD options give errors ending with makedistclean.
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When setting up a test website using Apache 2, php5 and mysql5, the connection to the database failed with AccessDenied. If the password were removed, then the failure looked different. The resolution to the problem is to include localhost explicitly in the host list and set database privileges for localhost. The default is @% which is wildcard, but apparently wildcard does not include localhost.
For a complete description, screen shots and the whole story:
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Using KDevelop 3.3.3 on SUSE 10.1 I’ve ported one of my WinMFC programs to Linux. The GUI is written with the QT3 tool kit and QTdesigner in KDevelop.

When the program is running the appropriate buttons are disabled and the program saves and restores the configuration [interval and Watch on Start] and the site list.

Linux is very culturallycompatible with WinXP. Here are some comments in some random order: Click on pictures for a larger view.

• SAMBA file sharing
• Evolution Email
• GAIM messenger
• MySQL Administrator
• KDevelop IDE C++ Programming

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