http://www.gilzad.de/blog/content/index.php A new Pivot weblog en nt@inorganic.de Copyright 2012 Pivot Pivot - 1.40.7: 'Dreadwind' Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:44:59 +0100 60 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=10 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=10#comm Before you end up like me, going down to shell, configuring wpa_supplicant by hand and googling for a bunch of results that tell you to exchange nm-applet by wicd, let me tell you what's relevant for us linux users, enjoying the open source b43 driver:
You need to disable qos on the driver and then you're done. Try it the quick way first, before you attempt to change your system:

# rmmod b43
# modprobe b43 qos=0

If nm-applet successfully connected now, you may create a file /etc/modprobe.d/b43.conf and write the following line into it:

options b43 qos=0

Then reboot, then surf. With gnome's nm-applet. After crawling the net for a day, I found all the information here.

Note that this is only supposed to work with the free b43 driver. I don't know how Boradcom's proprietary wl would have behaved. I abandoned it as it causes extreme interrupts on my firewire interface, which makes ffado skip/xrun a lot.

Anyway, I hope the internet is now filled with the right keywords to lead you here, should you have the same problem as I had. ]]> 10@http://gilzad.de/blog/pivot/ default Fri, 30 Dec 2011 23:25:00 +0100 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=8 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=8#comm That's basically the recipe politicians tend to use in _every_ country. Like Bush did it during the Irak war (to gain oil sources and to raise the oil price), like Iran does it with enforced religion all the time, and - as if we wanted to turn back the time - it's happening in Germany again.It's easy to sum up a couple of hot local issues quickly:

• Lifetime extension of nuclear power plants.
  
• Enforced realization of the train station program "Stuttgart 21", which is not really beloved by the citizens.
  

Now, in order to make the people accept new things there are some popular ways that work in a democracy:

• Convince them with strong arguments about your plan.
  
• Have no arguments but cause fear.
  

The first option takes you to have points that make sense. It's hard to convince people of things that make sense. Because if your plan makes sense, then it's logical and if anything is logical, it requires people to think about it. People don't have time and very often not the knowledge or desire to think about things. We are way to concerned about our own stuff. We let them do. That's why we belive we need leaders in some way (a president, a cancellor, a king, a dictator).

The second option is easier. Just in case you shouldn't have the proper arguments, take the second option. It's always easy to cause fear. Still it takes you have some reasons for the fear you want to cause. I mean, hey, us people, we're not that dumb. You have to make us belive.

The second option is so exciting that I like to focus on it:

Suppose you're living in a country with a blooming economy and no one from the outside has a reason to hate this country aswell. So there's not much of serious danger for the insde. Why would its nation be frightened of anything? Now, living in this comfortable country, let's have a luxury plan like..umm..stop poluting the earth. Maybe by stopping the use of nuclear power plants. Okay, we'd have to buy some energy from our neighbours but hey, we can focus on the research instead. No one else is doing this, because no one else has made such a progress like us. Let's make people waste less and make them choose the company that is offering the best prices. And make the energy utility investigate how they can have low prices while they're creating green energy. Let them work for the people. So the company can evolve more efficient green technologies. Listen, people, this way we'll get closer to the ideology of a more social and peaceful life! ...Not working, you can't convince people of senseless plans like this. Esotheric stuf!

Suppose you're living in a country with a weak economy but still no one from the outside has a reason to dislike this country. Well there are some issues in the inside. As a politician you really have a problem now. People don't like you. You're the leader, you're responsible for everything, your plans are just not lucid either. We're impatient and want to see solutions! Now! Time for you to go.

Suppose it's not very important whether your ecomomy is wealthy or not. You manage to create enemies around you. Like by joining a war against Afghanistan or against Irak. Is there a chance that some people are going to dislike you? Just in case it's not just a couple of countries (that you are attacking) but a majority of Islamic belivers...Oops. Perfect conditions to feel threatened on the inside. Now that makes sense, right? You threaten (and actually attack) someone and because of his revenge you feel threatened. No, sorry, things that make sense are to be forgotten. Forget the part that makes sense. Just remember someone is threatening you. You're being hated. Out of the blue sky! It's them! So unfair! You have to defend yourself. Us, the politicians and the people have to defend ourselves.
What you say? Stop the use of nuclear enegy? Hellooo!! We're being threatened (out of the blue sky), we can't have enough energy. What? Stop S21? Don't you have any other problems?

Enough brainstorming, let's come back to reality.
Currently we do have a terror alert in Germany. And yes, it's the out-of-the-blue-sky-evil-islamists, that we did choose to control in some of their countries. Like Afghanistan or Irak. Well, there was a war - oh, excuse me - conflict going on, you know. So we thought we should better control them, before they control us.
Stupid socialsts chose to do nothing while our good American friends were fighting there for world oil..*cough*...peace. Now the stupid American democrats are leaving those countries and our plan to help them doesn't make much sense anymore. But we have the enemies now and who needs things that make sense anyway? Remember, it's complicated and thus to be forgotten!

Hans-Peter Uhl, a conservative politician said in the German Financial Times: "Those who are still against data preservation haven't understood the threat."

Basically, when we were feeling safer here in the past, the law for data preservation was declined. Good for privacy, indication of safe life and no fear of the other. Do you understand what's going on? They're about to bring back a law by mentioning danger.

So, why, dear Germany, did you have to join a stupid war?

I'm beginning to understand why.

There are those types of people who belive in themselves and thus in people, in us. Beliving that we are able to manage ourselves. Not depending that much on a leader (we don't have to think of pure anarchy now). So if we trust ourselves, we don't need to give away our power to companies that control major parts of the economy and thus have political parties representing their interests.

Then there are those types of people who don't belive in themselves and thus suspect people. Not beliving that we are able to manage ourselves means we need something godlike. The economy. So we are going to give away our power companies that control major parts of the econonomy, having political parties representing their interests. What is their interests? Economy. Does economy have any social rules? No. But it's the god of today, we belive in it. So many things are working well because of it (and it's true). Letting parties handle politics only with economical interests causes them searching for gold without mercy. Germany's motif of joining wars might not be as clear as it was/is for the USA but still it caused enough trouble to feed the interests of some companies that it (or its people) belive(s) in.

If economy is the god, then the politicians created the religion. Us, the people did, too. And we have all of these prophets and whatnot.

I'm not too pessimistic though. I came to the very positive conclusion that it's correct to keep myself independent from the economy a bit. To some part at least. Not radically, I do belive in economy as well.
But I know I'll try to notice the moment when the religion is about to wash my brain. ]]> 8@http://gilzad.de/blog/pivot/ default Sat, 20 Nov 2010 02:04:00 +0100 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=7 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=7#comm Update: For kernel 2.6.38.4 you will need to upload a different firmware to the device than before. Get the newest driver packge from Tevii and replace your old /lib/firmware/dvb-usb-s630.fw
with the extracted dvb-usb-s660.fw. However the driver will be searching for the old file so you need to rename dvb-usb-s660.fw to dvb-usb-s630.fw and then you're done.

---

I searched the net a lot and found out that the TeVii S660 is well supported under Linux. For a DVB-S device that is capable of receiving HD signals (S2, that is not full-HD), it's a rather expensive one, currently priced somewhere around 75,- €.
But having read all those comments, people seemed to have good experiences with it, so I decided to invest the money.

After plugging in the device, there was a good thing. The device id and product id were known. The bad thing was, the firmware was missing on my system yet.
So dmesg told me something like Hey, I've found a TeVii S660 but I can't find the firmware 'dvb-fe-ds3000.fw'.
And I thought "hey, I'm smart" and just downloaded the first file I had found from here. DO NOT DO THIS.
It's important you care about this because else your life will become horrible. Worse than those things that happen, if you don't forward a mass email.

After putting the driver to /lib/firmware/ and reconnecting the usb connection, the driver loaded successfully for one single time but then the device would never again be recognized as "TeVii S660".
What had happened was that the firmware that always resided on my device had been erased. Ever since the device was not being recognized as 'tevii s660' anymore but only its basic circuit board "EZ-USB":


dmesg
[...]
[ 479.072622] usbtest 2-3:1.0: FX2 device
[ 479.072630] usbtest 2-3:1.0: high speed {control bulk-in bulk-out} tests (+alt)

lsusb
[...]
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 04b4:8613 Cypress Semiconductor Corp. CY7C68013 EZ-USB FX2 USB 2.0 Development Kit
[...]


Great, a fresh new USB 2.0 Development Kit for 75,- €. After I had searched the world for a DVB-S device that would work out of the box on linux. Yes, I can see the irony myself. Go on laughing. I bet you're still reading this because you spoiled your device just the same way. And yes, I took the road and got it up running again, so just hang on.

First I was shocked and assumed that the device would not be recognized on Windows, too since the permanent firmware was not there anymore.
After booting up Windows my horrible assumption got confirmed. Yes, the EZ-USB board is not known to Windows, nor can an enforced driver installation of the TeVii S660 flash it with the needed firmware.
Then, stupid me, I saw that TeVii offered linux drivers for the device themselves. So I downloaded, compiled and installed those, hoping that they'd automatically clear any lack of my intelligence.
And there was at least one good thing to see. The driver package seems to contain the correct firmware dvb-usb-teviis660.fw which will automatically be installed to your firmware path. But the lack of intelligence remained. No automatic firmware upload to an unknown USB board.

Getting closer
After having sent an eMail to TeVii to find out if they could help me, I still googled a bit and found this very helpful link., which explains how one can upload firmware to these generic EZ-USB boards . Well, obviously I wasn't the only one trying to do exactly this. That's the great thing about Linux. You're not alone. That page describes how you can upload iHex files to your device using fxload. But I only had a binary firmware and I was not able to upload this one.
So, there was the new job. Convert a binary file to an ihex file. Once again I crawled half the world to find a tool that would do this. The first one I found was File In Hex for Windows and it worked well under Wine. But well, hex is not exactly iHex. Crawl on, Gilzad, crawl on.
Actually, after I had tried to find a tool that would convert Hex to iHex, Google must have noticed what I was actually searching for so I found this German site which exactly describes how to convert binary files to iHex. Awesome!
Luckily the tool that the page suggests for the conversion is a command line tool, avr-objcopy. And if you've just followed the link, you found out that it's available for linux, too. In Debian it's just called "objcopy".
Now we've got all the tools to upload the correct firmware to the cleared device memory. And will it work just like that? Yes, I've been there, here's the steps:

Reactivate TeVii S660

1. Become root.
   su
   
   
2. Make sure you've got the tools fxload and objcopy installed.
   aptitude install fxload objcopy
   
   
3. Convert the firmware 'dvb-usb-teviis660.fw' shipped with the TeVii driver package from binary to ihex, using objcopy:
   objcopy -O ihex -I binary dvb-usb-teviis660.fw dvb-usb-teviis660.hex
   
   
4. Find out the current bus and device number of the USB card:
   lsusb
[...]
Bus 002 Device 008: ID 04b4:8613 Cypress Semiconductor Corp. CY7C68013
EZ-USB FX2 USB 2.0 Development Kit
[...]
   
   
5. Upload the ihex version of the firmware to the device's address by
   using fxload:
   fxload -t fx2 -D /dev/bus/usb/002/008 -I dvb-usb-teviis660.hex -m 0666
   (note that 002 is the current bus and 008 the current device order)
   
   
6. Check if the device has become the Tevii S660 again:
   lsusb
[...]
Bus 002 Device 007: ID 9022:d660 TeVii Technology Ltd. DVB-S2 S660
[...]

   

Congratulations! Now we've got back what we paid 75,- € for in the beginning.
But wait, the device is still spoiled. The firmware is no longer burnt in its flash memory. We need to upload it each it we want to use the receiver.
Well, that R5000-page that tought us how to upload firmware to an EZ-USB board, also teaches us how to have proper udev rules, so the firmware can be uploaded, each time you boot or connect the device. Since R5000-for-Linux is an open source project, we can have a look at the file that shall contain the proper udev rules. Yet another good thing about Linux. Open.

So the conclusion is: We're not done yet.

Set up udev rules

1. Become root
   
   
2. Place your hex file dvb-usb-teviis660.hex to /lib/firmware/.
   cp dvb-usb-teviis660.hex /lib/firmware/
   
   
3. List your files in /lib/udev/rules.d/
ls /lib/udev/rules.d/
[...]
85-hplj10xx.rules
85-hwclock.rules
[...]

   
   
4. Create a text file that contains the rules how to find the EZ-USB board and upload the proper firmware to it. The following two lines should be its content (yes, it's really just two lines once pasted in the editor):
   SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ENV{PRODUCT}=="4b4/8613/*", RUN+="/sbin/fxload -D %N -I /lib/firmware/dvb-usb-teviis660.hex -t fx2 -m 0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{PRODUCT}=="9022/d660/*", MODE="666"
   
   The first line basically finds the EZ-USB board by its device and product id 04b4:8613 and uploads the firmware from /lib/firmware/dvb-usb-teviis660.hex to it.
   The second line finds device that has now changed to TeVii S660, again by its device and product id 9022:d660 and sets read and write access rights to it.
   
   
5. Save the text file with a significant name and a prefix that defines when it has to be executed. I have chosen 86-tevii-s660.rules.
   Considering step 3, this file will be loaded after 85-hwclock.rules. This way I can be sure, the most important system components are up before I attempt to upload the firmware to the receiver.
   
   
6. Place the rules file to /lib/udev/rules.d/
cp 86-tevii-s660.rules /lib/udev/rules.d/
   
   
7. Reload the uddev rules:
   udevadm control --reload-rules
   
   
8. Unplug and re-plug-in the receiver.
   The device's led's should flash blue shortly.
   
   
9. Check if the baby is there:
   lsusb
[...]
Bus 002 Device 007: ID 9022:d660 TeVii Technology Ltd. DVB-S2 S660
[...]
   
   
10. Now the proper driver for your device should be dvb_usb_dw2102
    This one is usually already there in the v4l-package. Check if it is loaded:
    lsmod
[...]
dvb_usb_dw2102 23441 0
[...]

Now we're done.

As I'm writing this, I got a bit tired, so let me write down the last instructions for the client applications without detailed steps:

Now you should use w_scan to create a channels.conf file for your client applications. Do not forget to write its stdout to a file (i.e. channels.conf) and to convert that file's character set to utf-8 (use gedit for example).
For actually using the receiver I suggest you to either use MeTV (me-tv in the Debian repos) or klear.
Though I don't like installing kde libraries on my gnome-system, I prefer klear. Its GUI is very simple, it's lightweight and it allows you to remove channels from your imported channels.conf (it actually overwrites this very file). You'll find this feature very useful as soon as you notice that many channels don't work or don't have the content you desire. I, for instance, only kept the pr0ne channels. ...well, at this point you simply expected a comment like that, didn't you? ;)

That's all for now. Good night and happy zapping :) ]]> 7@http://gilzad.de/blog/pivot/ default Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:30:00 +0100 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=5 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=5#comm The only related bugreport I had found was from 2009.
So any newer packages from the current Sid/Squeeze repositories would not help me making my bluetooth manager use the right python libs. Even after I had created symlinks to lead it to the right libraries, blueman would find Constants.py but furhter files would still be missing.

I ended up compiling the blueman on my own. And it worked out well, I've got it up running again. And since I was a good boy, I created a debian package from the daily branch of the blueman project, it's version 1.22.
So, if you should experience the same issues I did on Debian Squeeze, there you go.

Blueman v1.22, .deb for Debian Squeeze, x86 ]]> 5@http://gilzad.de/blog/pivot/ default Tue, 10 Aug 2010 23:01:00 +0100 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=4 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=4#comm I'll understand this system somewhen...

Since I just wanted a weblog where I can write down things without the need of a DB, I'm not going to care about the looks right now.
And I'm taking a rest after having had a visit in Sweden at Niklas, a good old friend. He's running an own company, 7th Dan Software there by the way. ]]> 4@http://gilzad.de/blog/pivot/ default Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:32:00 +0100 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=3 http://www.gilzad.de/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=3#comm I don't like databases. Well, let me be more careful: I don't like to use DBs, when it comes to simple tasks like just having a blog on a not too frequently visited page.
I had tried Wordpress once but well, it's based on DBs and once my webhost moved, the blog broke down. Fortunately I wasn't seriously using it. But now I want to..
Luckily I found Pivot on this page and it was the only weblog indicated as a DB-independant one.
It was easier to install than I thought so I think I'll have some fun with it.
There we go, this was my first real blog entry.

A little bit about me
Well, I am Gilzad. This is a real name and it doesn't mean that I eat children. Although I got to hear that they're sweet.
I compose music. So if you really happened to see this blog, then expect to get some media from here and thoughts about melodies, composition, audio stuff..you know..the usual nerds.
Talking about nerds, I think I will also use this blog to share my experiences with linux. You know, that love-hate operating system.
And I might talk about cars, technology, energy, environment, coding...

About my name
Gilzad is a Persian name and the country of my origins is so good at messing things up, so chances are high that you think there's something strange about me.
Well, in a nutshell: I'm not religious and my taste of music is not dominated by Hiphop and R'n'B.

But back to the name:
Gilzad basically means born in Gilan while Gilan is a province in Iran.

I've seen only a few Gilzad's on the net. One that might be found unfortunately died many years ago at a party in Sweden.
Another one might be found on Facebook but he's not me.
And then there is me.
And that's all about the Gilzads, baby. ]]> 3@http://gilzad.de/blog/pivot/ default Thu, 05 Aug 2010 02:51:00 +0100