Setting up wpa_supplicant on Debian etch (linux 2.6.25.3) June 4, 2008
Posted by noorul in debian, linux, wireless.Tags: debian, linux, wireless, wpa, wpa+psk, wpa_supplicant
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Recently, I was trying to connect to an access point in the room. Some how I was not able to associate to the access point. It took lots of time for me to find out that encryption was necessary and that too WPA-PSK. The following steps helped me to setup wap_supplicant which helps encrypting the stream.
1. Create wpa_supplicant.conf. Mine is located at /etc/
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
ssid="Access Point SSID"
scan_ssid=1
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk="Really Secret"
priority=5
}
2. Put following commands inside a shell script
#!/bin/sh
wpa_supplicant -Dwext -ieth2 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -Bw
dhclient eth2
3. Run the above script to bring the link up.
Now have fun with browsing!
Compile issues with ieee80211 and ipw2200 on linux kernel 2.6.25. June 4, 2008
Posted by noorul in debian, drivers, kernel, linux, wireless.Tags: debian, ieee80211, ipw2200, kernel, linux, wireless
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The latest version of iee80211 (ieee80211-1.2.18) and ipw220 (ipw2200-1.2.2) are not compiling properly on the latest linux kernel 2.6.25.3.
I got the following error when I compiled ipw2200 on my laptop.
/home/noorul/software/ipw2200/ipw2200-1.2.2/ipw2200.c: In function ‘ipw_pci_probe’:
/home/noorul/software/ipw2200/ipw2200-1.2.2/ipw2200.c:11937: error: implicit declaration of function ‘SET_MODULE_OWNER’
In my case I was able to find out a solution from some other project. But there is a patch in the bug database. Here is the link http://www.intellinuxwireless.org/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=1378
But in the case of iee80211, I couldn’t find a straight forward solution. But the following steps helped me. There were several errors across multiple files.
1. I had to make changes to ieee80211_module.c. Here is the patched file.
2. Then the files ieee80211_crypt_wep.c, ieee80211_crypt_tkip.c
ieee80211_crypt_wep.c
ieee80211_crypt_tkip.c
Once I made the above changes, I followed the normal compilation procedure and everything worked fine. Posting this one through wireless internet connection.
Compiling and Installing E17 on Debian Sarge – GNU/Linux. May 25, 2008
Posted by noorul in debian, e17, linux.Tags: debian, desktop, e17, linux, window+manager
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I was struggling to install E17 from CVS on my Debian system. I couldn’t find out the exact steps that I have to follow. Recently I joined e-users mailing list and I got help from one the members. The steps are given below.
cd
mkdir src
cd src
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.enlightenment.org:/var/cvs/e co e17/libs/eet
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.enlightenment.org:/var/cvs/e co e17/libs/edb
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.enlightenment.org:/var/cvs/e co e17/libs/evas
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.enlightenment.org:/var/cvs/e co e17/libs/ecore
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.enlightenment.org:/var/cvs/e co e17/libs/embryo
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.enlightenment.org:/var/cvs/e co e17/libs/edje
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.enlightenment.org:/var/cvs/e co e17/apps/e
cd e17/lib/eet
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && sudo make install
cd ../edb
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && sudo make install
cd ../evas
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && sudo make install
cd ../ecore
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && sudo make install
cd ../embryo
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && sudo make install
cd ../edje
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && sudo make install
cd ../../apps/e
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && sudo make install
cd
enlightenment_start
These steps are derived from the user guide at
http://www0.get-e.org/E17_User_Guide/English/_pages/2.1.html
Here is my initial screen shot.
Struggling with playing VCD on GNU/Linux. May 25, 2008
Posted by noorul in debian, linux.Tags: cdrom, debian, linux, linux+cdrom, linux+vcd, vcd
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Few months back I tried playing a VCD on my linux laptop but I couldn’t play it. I spent some time trying to find out what went wrong. dmesg showed lots of error messages like this.
hdc: command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdc: command error: error=0x54 { AbortedCommand LastFailedSense=0x05 }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
ATAPI device hdc:
Error: Illegal request -- (Sense key=0x05)
Illegal mode for this track or incompatible medium -- (asc=0x64, ascq=0x00)
The failed "Read 10" packet command was:
"28 00 00 00 01 3e 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 "
end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 1276
Even when I tried to mount cd-rom drive and access the file /media/cdrom/MPEGAV/AVSEQ01.dat, I got following error;
AVSEQ01.DAT: ERROR: cannot read `AVSEQ01.DAT' (Input/output error)
I even tried using dd to copy and create an image of the VCD onto hard disk and loop mount it. But this also lead to input/output error. At that time I was not in a mood to spent more time and find out a solution. I use mplayer for playing media files on my laptop. Today I noticed few things when I ran mplayer command. It displayed the following and hanged.
MPlayer dev-SVN-r19208-3.3.5 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz (Family: 6, Model: 13, Stepping: 
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2
Playing vcd://.
track 01: adr=1 ctrl=4 format=2 00:02:00 mode: 1
track 02: adr=1 ctrl=4 format=2 00:18:74 mode: 1
track 03: adr=1 ctrl=4 format=2 37:52:32 mode: 1
When I carefully went through those last three lines I could see the length of the 3rd track to be more meaningful. So I tried playing the 3rd track using the following command and it worked. I need to google and find out why exactly I am not able to access this file directly.
$ mplayer vcd://3
or
$ mplayer -vcd 3
Okay! I have to watch this movie now.
Compiling emacs-unicode from cvs on debian etch. May 25, 2008
Posted by noorul in debian, emacs, gnu, linux.Tags: emacs, emacs+23, emacs+unicode, emacs+unicode+make, gnu+emacs, unicode+emacs
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Emacs-22+ doesn’t support Xft fonts, hence the look and feel of emacs on X-Windows is not that good. But development is going on to provide this feature in emacs. The emacs-unicode-2 branch for emacs has this feature, hopefully this will get integrated to emacs-23.
I followed the following steps to compile emacs-unicode from CVS.
1. Checkout latest source for emacs-unicode.
cd /opt
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co -r emacs-unicode-2 emacs
2. I had a problem with NSTATICS constant in emacs/src/alloc.c when compiling. I think you might face the same problem. You have to change the value of this constant. You have to look for the definition of this constant in emacs/src/alloc.c. I did the following. May be a lower value will also work. Commented the existing definition and added mine.
/* #define NSTATICS 1280 */
#define NSTATICS 2048
3. Now use configure script to generate make files.
cd /opt/emacs
./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft --with-freetype
4. At last the make command
make bootstrap
It took around 5 hours for me to figure out the NSTATICS problem. I hope this will help some of you. If this helps any one of you then drop me a mail. I will be happy.
Western Digital – WD – 120 GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive on GNU/Linux. January 12, 2007
Posted by noorul in debian, device, linux, usb.1 comment so far
Recently I bought this device from Buy.com. There was an $80 offer on Buy.com few weeks back. Before buying this device I plugged one of my friends same device into my laptop. GNU/Linux (Debian Sarge – Linux Kernel – 2.6.17.7) detected it as a hard drive. I mounted the device successfully and was able to look into the contents of the disk. I was quite happy and ordered the same one.I got a black colored device. This device is very light weighted. It has a very smooth casing. Overall the outer look is pleasing. Initially there was no issues in writing to and reading from this disk. As the days progressed it started slowing down a bit and also started throwing sector and block read error along with other errors. I googled a lot but there is no much help. Always I ended up reading that there is a bug in ehci_hcd module. I got some suggestions from few pages asking me to remove this ehci_hcd module and use the older version uhci_hcd.
This can be done using the command “modprobe -r ehci_hcd”
It helped me initially but later I started getting the same old errors again. I think somehow writing to this device corrupts the FAT32 filesystem. After lots of frustration, I plugged in the device on to Windows machine of my friend and tried to read and write. Here also the device failed while writing. The read operation seems to be working fine.
Later I decided to partition this device. I plugged it into my laptop and fired fdisk and partitioned the device into four parts equally. Plugged it back into the windows machine and formatted all the partitions as FAT32. I ran CHKDSK to see any bad blocks. CHKDSK ran successfully without showing any errors. I think my frequent usage of this device under Linux which is having a buggy ehci_hcd driver created this problem. I believe that somehow if there is a sector problem then it should be in any one of the partitions. If it is my bad luck then I can just ignore that partition and be happy with the rest. Since CHKDSK doesn’t show any errors this must not be the case.
Altogether it was a bad experience with this device on my linux laptop. My friends are having wonderful time with this one on their windows machines. I am looking forward for a fix in the kernel. Also I need to try my luck with uhci_hcd again. Let us see what happens.
