Category Archives: Software

XVideo on VGA laptop output with radeon driver

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I’ve been doing a lot of playing with MythTV using Mythbuntu. One of the nice things it supports is diskless booting of frontend systems so I thought I’d try it out on my old laptop. It worked quite nicely until I was about to start displaying any video through the VGA output to our TV, then you’d get a blue screen rather than the video but the video would display quite nicely on the laptops own display. Needless to say that was pretty suboptimal. 😉

The reason that happens is that with the free ATI Radeon driver in Ubuntu the XVideo overlay is assigned to the first display (the built in LCD) even if you’ve disabled it through the XRandR config in your xorg.conf file. I tried a lot of mucking around with various Xorg settings and got nowhere until I stumbled across the rather simple solution!

The xvattr package is in Universe in Ubuntu and I make it happen each time by putting the command into the /etc/mythtv/session-settings file (just can just create it if it doesn’t exist, it just gets sourced by the mythfrontend command on startup).

Sadly I don’t think I’m going to be able to use the laptop after all because it doesn’t have line out, just headphones, and that doesn’t appear to be enough for my amp. 🙁

50%+ of Standards Norway Tech Ctte Resign Over OOXML Approval

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Thirteen of the twenty three members of Standards Norway have resigned over its decision to recommend OOXML to ISO when 19 voted no and 2 voted yes for it (one of whom was Microsoft). The Inquirer has a rough Google translation of the letter, which says things like:

Standard Norway chose to defy their own technical committee and vote yes to a specification that is immature, useless, and unworthy of being called an ISO standard.

and the damning:

The administration of Standard Norway trust 37 identical letters from Microsoft partners more than their own technical committee.

Ars Technica describes that last issue as:

Standards Norway has defended its conduct and asserts that its vote in favor of OOXML approval was based on the outcome of a public inquiry in which a majority of the responses it received encouraged support of OOXML. The standards body has also admitted, however, that a significant number of those responses were identical submissions authored by Microsoft.

All the ex-members say they will continue to work towards meaningful standards outside of Standards Norway.

Google Chrome

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Oops..

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome.

The Wikipedia page has more info, apparently it’s based on WebKit. Expect the Windows beta in the next day or so, with Linux and OSX to come. Open source of course.

Microsoft goes back on IE8 standards promise for Intranet sites

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So much for Microsoft promises, according to El Reg:

The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.

The icon they’ve selected for standards compliant pages is also a little odd..

I do prefer El Reg’s idea that they use the ACID2 test image instead..

Breakin – stress test and hardware diagnostics for Intel and AMD systems

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At the start of August Jason Clinton from Advanced Clustering Technologies Inc. posted a link to the “Breakin” tool that they created (and open sourced) for hardware stress-tests and diagnostics. He wrote:

We have a tool on our website called “breakin” that is Linux 2.6.25.9 patched with K8 and K10f Opteron EDAC reporting facilities. It can usually find and identify failed RAM in fifteen minutes (two hours at most). The EDAC patches to the kernel aren’t that great about naming the correct memory rank, though.

If you read the website though you’ll find it does a lot more than that, which is pretty cool. Be aware that it does use the Intel and AMD closed source maths libraries though if you’re sensitive to non-free software.

MythTV Electronic Program Guide HOWTO for Australia

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Chris Smart has written an excellent little guide for getting a decent program guide into MythTV in Australia. It walks you through how to go from scratch through installing and configuring Shepherd to getting the data into the MythTV database. I’ve just used it on my Mythbuntu box and it’s looking good!

Next step – get it to record Time Team every time it appears.. 😉