Several weeks later, I gave in and purchased an Xbox 360 (the one with HDMI out.) We (the girlfriend and I) had debated between getting a Wii or a 360 for quite some time - but with all the extra entertainment features (live multi-player gaming, Netflix streaming, and videos) of the Xbox, the choice became clear and it was eventually approved by the girlfriend. She has since become quite the gamer chic (playing “kids” games like Harry Potter, Golden Compass, etc) and takes great pride in having more Xbox gamer points than me.

Even with the greater resolution capabilities, the girlfriend was complaining that TV channels looked no different than with our previous standard definition TV and cable box. True enough. One Saturday afternoon we hopped on the bus up to the Comcast store and upgraded my cable from cheapy analog to digital along with the HD cable box (with DVR) from Comcast. After all the connections were made, we fired it up and *presto* - HD channels coming in at 1080i and the complaining ceased immediately. From time to time I can even hear her say that she’s “…so glad we got a new HD TV.”

With all this new equipment and cables running all over the place it was time to upgrade the entertainment center furniture. A quick trip to Ikea solved that. After screwing in the last shelf, I realized that I had never measured the TV’s dimensions and those of the entertainment center. Panic stricken, I ran to the junk drawer and fished out the tape measurer. Lucky for me, the 37″ fit perfectly - with a few inches to spare all around. A 40″ TV *may* have fit (depending on the brand) but I was glad that I had settled on the 37″. The cable box, Xbox 360, and antiquated Pioneer stereo receiver all fit perfectly. The living room was really coming together now.

For months, the living room remained as such - HD TV, HD cable box, Xbox 360, and simple stereo audio. Then, the girlfriend kept coming home from Costco or Best Buy with DVDs and it got me thinking. Why were we purchasing DVDs when the new standard has become Blu-Ray. Why waste money on a dieing format? It was then I decided we needed a Blu-Ray player. While at Costco several weeks later, a Samsung BD-P1500 Blu-Ray player was on sale for $149 (display model) and I quickly snapped it up along with a couple Blu-Ray movies (Cast Away and an Italy travel guide.) One more piece of HD equipment to check-off the list and a new hard and fast rule in the house: no more purchasing DVDs (if it can be helped.)

The final piece of the living room entertainment system was a 5.1 surround sound setup. I will admit that TV and video connections and display formats and resolutions I know and understand, being a bit of a computer nerd. But audio formats and standards, I know very little of. I couldn’t tell you the difference between DTS, Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic, Dolby Pro Logic II, Neo 96, etc - it was enough to make my head swim. And it still does. (Why so many formats?) I have been wanting a 5.1 setup for years and years now - even before my total living room upgrade dream, but have always put it off because it seemed so daunting and confusing. But when my weekly Newegg.com circular email arrived with a Polk Audio 5.1 speaker set for $199, I jumped into the world of HD audio head first.

The speakers arrived and I immediately began staging the front, center, and subwoofer channels with speaker wire. The surround channels required a bit more work. I went up to my local Home Depot and purchased white plastic wiring conduit that has sticky tape on one side. I also purchased two ceiling speaker mounts. After carefully measuring out speaker wire (and leaving a loop of several extra feet) my 5.1 system was mounted and wired but lacked a 5.1 receiver.

This is where my troubles began. Which one to choose? What features did I really need? Should I opt for a 7.1 setup to “future proof” the living room? How would I connect it all? After several months of research and discussion forums and feature comparisons and price shopping, I realized that I did not need anything “fancy.” A simple 5.1 receiver with one optical input would suffice since currently all my devices connected directly to the TV via HDMI with a standard RCA stereo cable back to the receiver. I figured I could replace the current RCA cable with a TOSLINK optical cable to the new receiver and would be done with it. Easy-peasy right? Well, as it turns out, it’s not that easy. Keep reading to find out.

I went back to my local Best Buy and purchased the ultra sleek and clean looking Harmon Kardon AVR-154. Again, lucky for me, it was on clearance for $229. I picked it up and went home excited that the snowball had finally stopped rolling. I ripped open the box, yanked out the old receiver, connected all the speaker wires and the TOSLINK from the TV that I had already staged beforehand. I gently picked up the beauty to insert into the entertainment center only to realize - *it was too tall.* Not even close. About 3/4″ too tall. Width and depth were fine, height however was not. My heart sunk into my chest. I looked over to the girlfriend and said, half seriously, that we needed a new entertainment center. The daggers in her eyes told me that was not an option.

So, sadly, I boxed the Harmon Kardon back up, and reconnected the old stereo receiver. I then fished for the tape measurer again and calculated the absolute dimensions of the slot available to the receiver. The following day, I returned the Harmon Kardon at Best Buy. With tape measurer in hand, I began the process of finding a receiver that had the features I needed but was also good quality and could fit into the entertainment center. Only *one* brand had a receiver that fit those requirements: Yamaha. I grabbed an employee and requested the Yamaha RX-V365BL. He returned shortly only to tell me “we’re out.” It seems my luck had run out.

Several weeks had passed and I decided to go back to Best Buy to see what they had. Finally, it was in stock. Again, I yanked out the old receiver, connected the speaker wires and TOSLINK cable to the new Yamaha, and… perfect fit. I powered on the TV and was immediately underwhelmed. I popped in a Blu-Ray, and again, underwhelmed. I tweaked with receiver settings for a while and got it to sound much better, but, nothing like I had expected. I guess that’s all 5.1 will get you, or so I thought.

Weeks go by living with sub-par “5.1″ sound. Then one day, while at a friend’s house playing Xbox 360, I noticed his 5.1 surround sound system absolutely *rocked.* That’s when I knew something was up with my set up. I got home and looked closely at the receiver display - it has a little diagram of 5 speakers, and only 2 were lit up. Interesting. I checked the TV menu to see if there was option to turn on 5.1 sound for the TOSLINK connection. No such option existed. After a bit of research on Samsung’s website, I found this little piece of info in the FAQ section:

If the source is a digital component such as a DVD player, and you have connected the source and the TV using HDMI, and then connected the TV to your Home Theater using Digital Optical connections, you will hear only two channel sound from the Home Theater. Your TV can not transmit 5.1 channel audio from an HDMI digital source through the Optical connection.

Bingo! I went out and bought enough TOSLINK cables for each device to connect directly to the receiver. After all the connections were made, the difference is astonishing. And finally, I have true 5.1 surround sound.

In summation, if you plan on upgrading your entertainment setup, heed this advice:

1) Take your time and research. You don’t have to do everything all at once. I was able to score some awesome deals because I was patient and waited for the right moment, buying one component at a time every couple weeks or months. I started this “project” in the fall of 2008 and finally finished it in the summer of 2009.

2) Go for higher TV resolution over more screen real-estate (Blu-Ray and video games look much better) and, despite what some people claim, you can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, especially if you’re into sports.

3) Regardless if you are going to upgrade your entertainment center furniture or use your existing furniture, know the dimensions your furniture can support! On a side note, it seems *most* audio receiver manufacturers are building devices that are 8-10″ in height! So plan accordingly. I had to go with a receiver I didn’t really want because none of the others would fit. If I could do it over again, I would have chosen the devices I knew I was eventually going to get, written down their physical dimensions, and then bought an entertainment center around them, instead of the other way around.

4) If you connect all your devices to your TV via HDMI, and your TV has a TOSLINK out, it probably *does not* output 5.1 audio. Double check your TV’s user manual or online FAQ.

** UPDATE **
Apparently, Blu-Ray supports Dolby True-HD and DTS-HD signals and they can only be carried by HDMI cable. So, I have since returned to Best Buy, returned my Yamaha 365 and upgraded to the Yamaha RX-V465 which supports Dolby True-HD and DTS-HD encodings as well as 4 HDMI in (with audio pass-through). I also purchased enough HDMI cables to connect every device directly to the receiver. Well worth the extra money and time spent. The True-HD and DTS-HD encoded Blu-Rays are absolutely stunning.

Why would one want to install Linux on an external USB hard drive instead of setting up a dual-boot type system? Well, for starters, the intended target for this OS is my laptop. My laptop hard drive already has Vista installed and I didn’t feel like using a partition editor to create a new partition using the free space on the drive. Also, installing a second hard drive in a laptop is simply not an option. I could have opted for installing a small-footprint Linux distro on a USB thumb drive, but I wanted a full-featured OS that was not limited in any way.

The main reason for this little project is that I can only be truly happy in a Linux environment when I do serious (web development) work. I love having a local MySQL, Apache, and PHP installation. I love having access to a terminal. I love using Subversion via CLI and I cannot stand PHPMyAdmin.

Now, normally, I don’t do any major development work on my laptop - it’s an e-mail checking, web browsing, IM’ing, and general computing type machine that runs Vista (oh come on, it’s not that bad.) But, I will be working out of the company’s Sacramento office for several days next month and I’d like to bring my laptop and get some actual work done. Because I am picky about my development environment, I decided to duplicate my work machine on an external drive that I could simply plug in to my laptop (or any other computer that supports booting from an external USB hard drive.)

So without further ado…

I opted to install Fedora 10 with the external drive attached to my desktop system - which, fortunately for me, shares much in common with my laptop. Namely, both systems have a 64-bit processor, 2 GB of RAM, and an ATI video card. In theory, it shouldn’t matter which system you attach the drive to for the installation process, so long as you don’t install the 64-bit version when the intended target is a 32-bit system. If you want an install that can be plugged into any system, you may want to opt for the 32-bit version of the OS. Also, if you install the OS on a platform with an ATI video card and then attach the drive to a system that has an Nvidia graphics chipset (or vice versa), you may have some video card driver issues when first booting into Xorg, but, then again, Xorg may detect the proper video card on boot up and correct the issue automatically.

The installation itself was straightforward enough - connect the external drive to the computer, insert Fedora 10 install DVD, reboot computer, select external drive as installation target, and install the OS. The whole installation process took several hours - mainly because I opted for the additional repositories during installation so the final install would be 100% up-to-date. Also, working on an external drive is always going to be slower than an internal drive.

Once the installation was finished, I rebooted my desktop in the hopes of being able to test it out. Alas, my desktop did not want to boot from the external drive even though I had selected “USB hard drive” as the boot device. I thought maybe GRUB had not been properly installed on the external drive, so I booted up the Fedora 10 DVD and did a “Linux Rescue” session, reinstalling GRUB. This did not fix the situation.

Dubious this installation would work at all, I proceeded to disconnect the drive from the desktop and connect it to the laptop (Toshiba Satellite A215-S7437) for a final test. During the BIOS POST, I hit F12 to bring up the boot device selection list and crossed my fingers. In the boot list that eventually appeared, the usual devices were present: CD/DVD, Hard drive, and Network - but there was also a “USB memory” device present. I selected this device and low and behold, Fedora 10 began loading and in no time at all, I was presented with a log in screen.

Impressions and observations so far…

The system is far more responsive than I thought it would be, considering it’s running from an external USB 2.0 drive. That being said, it’s obviously not as fast as an internal drive. But I find it to be more than adequate for more needs.

One glitch I have come across is when connecting another (USB powered) external drive to the laptop - it causes the primary external drive to reset and the whole system locks up. I suspect this is a limitation of the laptop’s USB hardware - but it could be a kernel issue as well.

mount: cannot mount /dev/root on /sysroot

The solution, as stated in the previous post, is to boot into a known working Kernel, and re-build the initrd image. Create a backup of the original before you proceed, then apply this command within the /boot directory as root (with the correct Kernel version instead of the example below):

mkinitrd initrd-2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686.img 2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686

Now reboot and let it boot into the new Kernel. You should be good to go!

After what seemed an eternity of POST data, a Grub menu was presented. I exhaled. Maybe everything was going to be fine? Maybe the drive had been “put to sleep” and for some reason could not resume from its state of slumber? A bad APM or ACPI driver? A small power surge during the night? I pondered the possibilities. After five seconds, the kernel began loading and I continued my morning routine believing all was well.

Finally sat in front of the desktop, the final bits of the kernel were finishing loading when yet another kernel error reared its head. Though not nearly as severe sounding as the previous error, it still did not bode well:

mount: cannot mount /dev/root on /sysroot

After searching for possible solutions to this well documented “feature”, I booted up a previous Kernel (I knew there was a reason I was keeping a half dozen old Kernels installed on the system) and decided to rebuild the initrd for the latest installed Kernel (2.6.27.15-170.2.24) on my system. I backed up the existing initrd, and ran:

mkinitrd initrd-2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686.img 2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686

I then rebooted the machine hoping my troubles were now gone. After a lengthy POST, a Grub menu showed up. So far so good. I selected the default (latest) Kernel and again held my breath. After a few moments, the log in (run level 5) screen popped up. Success!

Or so I thought. I quickly logged in and instantly noticed that it was taking forever to load the desktop and never really finished. It didn’t take long before I figured out that Compiz was not loading. What now?! I ensured that the fglrx (I use ATI products) module was indeed loaded at boot:

lsmod | grep fglrx

The fglrx module was indeed being loaded at boot which meant that Xorg was not able to load its drivers for fglrx for whatever reason. On a hunch, as root, I compared time stamps for the various xorg.conf* files to see if any had been modified by a system update. I ran:

ls -lFa /etc/X11/xorg.conf*

Curious. Xorg.conf had indeed been modified the day before. I knew it was not me, so maybe a system update? I compared the current xorg.conf to previous xorg.conf* files and discovered something very bizarre: Two lines from the <files> section were missing. The two lines that were missing were paths to the Xorg modules paths. I copied and pasted the missing lines back into the xorg.conf file, saved, and then exited the text editor. I logged out of my X session and manually rebooted X by pressing:

<ctrl> <alt> <backspace>

I logged back in and everything was back to normal.

The question I have is this: What happened to my machine from the time I left work the previous night to this morning? Did demons crawl into the box and possess it? Very strange.

However, here is the catch: VMWare Tools is not available as a separate download and only comes bundled with the VMWare Workstation and, moreover, VMWare Workstation is not a free application.

There is a way to get around this though. As of this writing, it is still possible to download a “trial” copy of VMWare Workstation. You will most likely need to uninstall VMWare Player (if it’s installed) and then install the evaluation copy of VMWare Workstation. Once VMWare Workstation is installed and you boot up your virtual Windows or Linux OS, simply click VM->Install VMWare Tools… in the menu. This will automatically connect an ISO image on your hard drive to the virtual CD-ROM/DVD drive. For Windows users, this means the “autoplay” feature should automatically bring up the installation program for you. For Linux users, it will mount the drive and open a file browser, where you can either install the RPM (recommended) or install from source.

So what happens when the evaluation copy of VMWare Workstation finally expires? If you enjoyed using it and found it to be far superior than VMWare Player - why not consider purchasing the full-blown version? If this is not possible, you can always remove VMWare Workstation from your system (via Add/Remove Programs) and re-install VMWare Player. The installation of VMWare Tools will not be removed if you remove VMWare Workstation.

Another option is to copy the VMWare Tools ISO files (each OS should have its own ISO file) from the VMWare Workstation installation to a backup location for future use. This of course assumes you have purchased the full version of VMWare Tools. Doing a search for “.iso” should show you the location for your installed version. Once copied to a backup location, you can now easily mount the ISO file within your VMWare virtual environment and install VMWare Tools.

As the weeks went by, I found that I rarely needed to boot into Windows, and, if I did, I only needed to be in the OS for just a few minutes. Rather than having to reboot each time to switch into an OS, I decided to jump into the world of virtualization.

I knew I could simply install Windows into a new disk image, but why do that when I already had a dedicated drive with Windows XP installed? Besides, if reinstalled, all my settings and drivers and programs would need to be reinstalled - no fun! So I began researching into using VMPlayer (free) with an entire disk of a pre-installed OS - and it is indeed possible.

I followed the directions step-by-step to Run Your Windows With VMware (the site requires a free registration in order to read the article - but getting your hands on Linux Mag articles is a good idea anyway) but ran into a few caveats:

VMplayer insisted it could not find the windows.vmx file.

This was resolved be ensuring that the files had the proper owner/group and permissions to read and write. Because I was logged in as root (via su) to do most of the legwork in creating the needed files, VMplayer did not have the sufficient read/write permissions. It may also be necessary to add the user to the “disk” group - for direct access to /dev/hdX or /dev/sdX. If you do add the user to the group, make sure to log out and then log back on again for the changes to take effect,

Once this was fixed, VMplayer began booting Windows XP, and the familiar logo and progress bar soon appeared. My hopes were dashed when the system suddenly “blue-screened”, which brings us to the next caveat:

0×00000007B Stop Error

After much research and wildly varying opinions on various blogs I think I may have rooted out the problem. 0×7B errors are a controller/drive error - in other words, a driver issue. You see, when you boot within a virtual environment, everything is virtualized, including hardware. So although I had the correct drivers installed for my hardware in native mode, Windows XP was running in a virtual environment with a different set of hardware. Here’s what you need to do:

1) Reboot the machine and boot into your Windows OS natively. After logging-in, you need to create a new hardware profile. Open up the control panel, select System, click the Hardware tab, and click the Hardware Profiles button. Now copy a hardware profile by selecting an existing profile and clicking the Copy button. Give your new hardware profile a name like “Virtual” or something similar.

2) Now that we have a dedicated hardware profile for our virtual environment, we need to prep the system by rebooting the machine once again, and once again boot into your Windows OS natively. However, when you boot into Windows, it should now stop and ask which hardware profile you would like to use. Select Virtual or whatever you called your new hardware profile.

3) Once the system has booted up and you have logged-in, we need to change some drivers, namely those of the IDE controllers by forcing them to be Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller. Go to the control panel, select System, click the Hardware tab, and click the Device Manager button. Now, click the plus sign next to the IDE/ATAP Controllers label. A list of your controllers should now be seen. Begin by double-clicking the secondary controller and then clicking the Driver tab. Now click the Update Driver… button. Select No when asked if Windows Update can be used to find a driver for you. Select Install from a list or specific location (Advanced) and click Next. Now select Don’t search… and click Next. The following page will display drivers that are compatible for your system. You must select the Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller driver and click Next. Repeat these steps for the Primary Controller as well. Usually Windows will tell you that you must reboot for the changes to take affect after you update the Primary Controller driver, be sure to agree to this but as the system reboots, select your Linux OS.

Now that a compatible set of drivers are installed, you should be able to start up VMplayer and successfully boot into your Windows OS. But remember, you must choose the Virtual hardware profile when the system boots within VMplayer and the standard hardware profile when you want to boot natively.

In the next entry, I’ll discuss how to install VMtools - a set of drivers specifically for the VMplayer/VMworkstation environment that greatly improves performance and adds some pretty cool functionality.

Please set up a repository path in include/config.php using $config->parentPath or $config->addRepository

See the installation guide for more details

you need to do one of two things.

1) Move include/config.php into the WebSVN root OR
2) Edit include/setup.php by changing:
require_once 'config.php';

To

require_once 'include/config.php’;

For some reason, WebSVN is looking for config.php in the root folder, even though it resides under the include directory by default.

After checking a few settings and verifying the mail server was indeed up, I reset the router and cable modem but to no avail. Finally, it dawned on me: “Could it be true? After having the same IP address for nearly 5-years, has Comcast finally chnged my IP?” The answer, unfortunately, was “Yes”.

I quickly logged on to dyndns.com (my domain registrar and DNS provider) to update the IP addresses for a half dozen domains that are hosted on my server. After only a few minutes, the changes had propagated and I was back in business again.

Losing my trusty IP has been like losing an old friend - I could always rely on it being there (even after modem reboots.) Let’s just hope this IP change does not become a recurring event or I will have to switch providers.

(Command died with status 1: "/usr/local/yaa/bin/yaa.pl". Command output: Cannot continue, becouse [sic] no lookup maps were defined. )

Looking through the sparse “documentation,” there is no mention of where to put the configuration file. I moved the yaa.conf file to various locations around the file system without any success. Finally, I took matters into my own hands and edited yaa.pl by hand. If you find yourself in the predicament, give this a try:

1) Copy yaa.conf to wherever you want it to reside. I chose the standard configuration path of /etc
2) Edit yaa.pl using your favorite editor and change the following line of code from:

$YAA_DEFAULT_CONFIG_FILE = $module_dir . YAA_SLASH . ".." . YAA_SLASH . "conf" . YAA_SLASH . "yaa.conf";

To:

$YAA_DEFAULT_CONFIG_FILE = "/etc/yaa.conf";

Of course be sure to replace /etc with the path of where you copied your yaa.conf.

After a quick test, I received my autoreponse. Double-checking /var/log/maillog showed no errors or complaints from YAA.