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Hardware donation: IBM BladeCenter + 10 HS21/22 blades
by Avi Miller 11 Jan '14

11 Jan '14

Hey kids, I have an IBM BladeCenter chassis with 10 working (and 1 non-working) blades that is taking up space in my house. The chassis works great, and has both gigabit ethernet and fibre channel connectivity. The 10 working blades are mostly HS21s with dual-sockets and anywhere from 2GB - 8GB of memory (from memory). There is also an 11th blade I could never get to work, but could be used for parts, I guess. I’m happy to give the entire lot to anyone who’s willing to come pick it up from my house in Melbourne. :) Caveats: this thing is large. Like 5RU or 6RU or something. It’s also massively heavy. Fully loaded, it’s probably 60kgs+ or so. It requires 15A power (cables not included) and has four PSUs, so you need significant power supply (though it’ll run with only 2 connected). And finally, it’s stupendously loud. Like imaging an A380 landing about 10m away from you and then double it. This thing wouldn’t sit under someone’s desk. :) I’d prefer to give the whole lot away in one go, and I’d also prefer to give it to a non-profit or educational organisation, or anyone who is going to take hackvantage of it. I bought the whole lot for about $500 thinking I’d be able to do some virtualisation work with it, but the power requirements and noise just weren’t appropriate for a work-from-home environment. If this sound like something you’d like and you have a server room/basement/garden shed/bunker in which to store it, and some way of picking it up from an outer Northern suburb of Melbourne, please email me directly. NOTE: I can’t power the thing up any more, so please don’t ask specific questions about actual memory sizing or processors. I believe they’re Intel Xeon-esque processors. Each blade also has 2x internal HDDs. Essentially, you’re getting the lot for free, so think of it as a blade centre lucky dip! :) Email me off-list if you can take it off my hands. Cheers, Avi

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Evolution Crashing
by david.zuccaro＠optusnet.com.au 10 Jan '14

10 Jan '14

Hi, Evolution is crashing on when it starts up. This is the error output: (evolution:24495): Gdk-WARNING **: The program 'evolution' received an X Window System error. This probably reflects a bug in the program. The error was 'BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)'. (Details: serial 142 error_code 1 request_code 136 minor_code 19) (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the GDK_SYNCHRONIZE environment variable to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.) I'm using debian and I recently upgraded to 7.3 (not sure if that has anything to do with this). Any ideas as to how I can fix this? Thanks, David ------------------------- Email sent using Optus Webmail

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ALSA USB and motherboard
by Russell Coker 30 Dec '13

30 Dec '13

I have a new Dell PowerEdge T110 workstation to replace the old T105. Both of them lack any proper sound hardware so I've got USB speakers. Some time in the process of replacing the system or the monitor (which is a USB hub and thus changes USB device assignment) sound stopped working in KDE. It seems that the main problem is that there is some sort of sound hardware detected on the motherboard (maybe the built in PC speaker) which causes the real sound hardware to be registered as ALSA device 1. So far the only way I've discovered to make things work is to make the following sym-links to make the USB sound hardware be device 0. # ls -l /dev/snd total 0 drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 60 Dec 9 20:49 by-id drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 80 Dec 9 20:49 by-path lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 9 Dec 18 00:05 controlC0 -> controlC1 crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 3 Dec 9 20:49 controlC1 crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 5 Dec 9 20:49 hwC0D0 lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 8 Dec 18 00:09 pcmC0D0p -> pcmC1D0p crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 4 Dec 9 20:49 pcmC0D3p crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 2 Dec 18 00:09 pcmC1D0p crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 1 Dec 9 20:49 seq crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 33 Dec 9 20:49 timer Is there a way that I can reserve device 0 for the USB device? It needs to be reserved because the motherboard hardware is detected before the USB bus is scanned - if the monitor is even turned on when the system is booted. Is there a way I can make the system just ignore the motherboard device and have only 1 ALSA card? There's only one thing that can ever be useful so it seems best to make it the only recognised card in the system. Thanks -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Upgrading to Fedora 20 using fedup - what is the ISO format wanted?
by Allan Duncan 27 Dec '13

27 Dec '13

I have an iso image of the Fedora 20 install DVD, but when I try to use it I get this: > fedup -v --iso Fedora-20-x86_64-DVD.iso --network 20 usage: fedup <SOURCE> [options] fedup: error: argument --iso: invalid isofile value: 'Fedora-20-x86_64-DVD.iso' > I wrote this exact iso file to a stick. mounted it, and used the "--device DEV" option, and successfully ran the upgrade, so I would like to know for the future what does the "--iso" option really want?

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Linux Friendly Equipment Vendors.
by Robert Shelton 27 Dec '13

27 Dec '13

Hello, I'm curious if anyone could recommend Linux friendly hardware suppliers in Melbourne? We're a small/medium business, and I often get the feeling that server, network and storage vendors want to push non-FOSS platforms and are unable to advise on integration with existing FOSS systems. Would make a nice change to have a vendor who understood the merits of Linux KVM, DRBD, Amanda backup, etc. Cheers, Rob.

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Recommendations for good Linux Haswell laptops?
by Chris Samuel 27 Dec '13

27 Dec '13

Hi folks, Anyone got any recommendations or experiences with Haswell laptops running Linux yet? Thinking that it might be time to refresh my work laptop and a Haswell Ultrabook could be quite enticing.. cheers! Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC

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15" laptop recommendation
by Bianca Gibson 25 Dec '13

25 Dec '13

Hi everyone, My brother is looking for a new laptop. He uses it for generally pretty basic stuff - multimedia playback, web browsing, a bit of gimp. His criteria is: - Ideally 15" screen, 14" would be acceptable - 2.5kg or lower - ideally battery lasting through a day at uni - running ubuntu Please reply all to include him in the discussion. Cheers, Bianca

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kdeconnect - sync your phone and KDE desktop
by Andrew Greig 21 Dec '13

21 Dec '13

Hi all, I thought I would take kdeconnect-kde for a spin, I used the OpenSUSE13.1 version and installed the Android App on my Samsung Galaxy s2. My phone is connected to the WiFi network but the desktop can't see it and vice versa. Has anyone else used this, yet, and do I need to register my phone name in my desktop hosts file for this to work? In theory, when I walk in the door at home my computer should automatically link with my phone. At the moment they are not on speaking terms. Cheers Andrew Greig

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Re: ALSA USB and motherboard
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 18 Dec '13

18 Dec '13

zlinw(a)mcmedia.com.au writes: Oops for got the Subject line Russell Coker said, > Is there a way that I can reserve device 0 for the USB device? It needs > to > be reserved because the motherboard hardware is detected before the USB > bus > is scanned - if the monitor is even turned on when the system is booted. In theory one can cause ALSA to allocate snd devices to a particular alsa sound device number, I have though NEVER though in a good number of years been able to get this to work with any kind of relaibilty. > Is there a way I can make the system just ignore the motherboard device > and have only 1 ALSA card? There's only one thing that can ever be > useful > so it seems best to make it the only recognised card in the system. There are two ways one can compile a kernel with only the sound device driver required present. The second method is simpler than anything else and does work. Do an lsmod and identify the main module that is loaded for the offending device then blacklist this module in .... /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base-blacklist.conf (in debian anyway) This prevents the kernel loading the module. Lindsay

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None
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 18 Dec '13

18 Dec '13

Russell Coker said, >Is there a way that I can reserve device 0 for the USB device? It needs to >be reserved because the motherboard hardware is detected before the USB bus >is scanned - if the monitor is even turned on when the system is booted. In theory one can cause ALSA to allocate snd devices to a particular alsa sound device number, I have though NEVER though in a good number of years been able to get this to work with any kind of relaibilty. >Is there a way I can make the system just ignore the motherboard device >and have only 1 ALSA card? There's only one thing that can ever be useful >so it seems best to make it the only recognised card in the system. There are two ways one can compile a kernel with only the sound device driver required present. The second method is simpler than anything else and does work. Do an lsmod and identify the main module that is loaded for the offending device then blacklist this module in .... /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base-blacklist.conf (in debian anyway) This prevents the kernel loading the module. Lindsay

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