After running my MythTV frontend on an old MicroSoft XBOX for a few years as a ‘proof of concept’ I recently got the go ahead from the Missus to replace it with something a little snappier.

The old XBOX did a pretty good job all things considered. But with just 64MB of RAM it was never going to have the most responsive interface in the world, so the time has come to replace it.

After moochas googling for a suitable PC that could live happily in the living room under the telly, I decided to build a fanless mini-itx system in as small a case as I could.

Sometimes you might need to mount a DOMU’s disk in DOM0, so that you can edit files, or even recover them in the event that your DOMU is broken and fails to boot.

My original website (The Sinclair Archives) was removed from the Internet in 2000, and I thought I’d lost the content forever. But while sorting through a load of old cd-roms destined for the bin I stumbled across a 10 year old backup disk that contained a copy of my old website. On the old site was a short interview I’d done with Matthew Smith, the programmer of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.

To convert most video files into DVD compatible mpg files, mencoder is a good option.

The following will convert to PAL widescreen format.

I decided it was time to change my mobile phone. Being a Linux nerd I decided to opt for an Android based phone.
There are quite a number to choose from. The HTC Hero being the most popular, but at the time this would have cost me £360 of my hard earned cash.
T-Mobile have released an ‘own brand’ phone, the pulse, manufactured by Huawei. At the time of writing you can get one for under £150.

The pulses spec is very similar to that of the hero, but with slightly less memory, leaving just 60mb left to install new apps into. For reasons best known to google, android apps cannot be installed onto the SD card which is a real shame not least for the apps market in general.

I’ve just installed the 64bit version of Ubuntu 9.04 onto my main desktop PC. Everything was going well until I wanted to print a document.
No, my printer was correctly detected and when I clicked ‘print’ the printer burst into life as expected. But after printing about half of the first page the printer just stopped. My printer is a HP Deskjet F2100 series (F2180 to be precise).

I tried everything, google didn’t throw up anything useful, I installed later HP drivers but noting fixed it.

After a lot of head scratching ad experimenting I did notice something odd. The USB device as owned by a user I did not have permissions for. I wasn’t expecting this to be the cause of the problem because if it was due to permissions then surely the printer would not print at all?!?

I was wrong, and adding myself to the group that owned the USB device has fixed it. As this seemed quite off the wall I thought I’d share…

For distros that don’t support XEN compatible installers the easiest way to create a PV (ParaVirtual) DOMU is to install as a HVM (see my other article entry for this) ad then once installed, convert it to a PV DOMU.

There are several reasons why you might want to go with PV instead of HVM. The main two that spring to mind are PV’s offer better performance/lower overhead and PV DOMU’s allow PCI passthrough. Although apparently XEN 3.4 can now do PCI passthrough with HVM, as long as you have an Intel chip with vt-d.

This article will start off where my previous “Installing a XEN hvm DOMU” left off…

For this to work your CPU and motherboard needs to support vt (intel) or amd-v. You can check this by looking at the flags in /proc/cpuinfo. Your looking for either vmx or svm on the flags line.

If you’re doing this from your DOM0 then these flags may not actually show up. Instead type xm info and look for ‘hvm’ on the virt_caps line.

For my hvm install, i’ll be installing Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Linux.
I have copied the live CD ISO onto my XEN DOM0 and will be installing directly from the iso rather than burning the CD. I have also created a 10GB LVM logical volume to act as the disk for my new DOMU.

This is a quick guide to setting up a Linux software RAID mirror (aka RAID 1).

There are a couple of toolsets for managing raid on Linux, raidtools and mdadm. This guide will use mdadm because imho it has better commands and features for monitoring.

Right, first you’ll need a couple of disk partitions of about the same size. These should be on separate disks or you’ll be defeating the point of raid mirroring