It's been quite some time we shared. You teached me so much about my imagination, about good and bad. You have probably been one reason why I am now where I am, studying computer science and beeing the person I am. But only now I have seen the last episode (of 7 seasons, each about 25 episodes) and I'll definitely miss it.

Well, for all of you who didn't know yet: I'm a StarTrek TNG fan. It must have had something todo with the time in which the TNG series was produced -- following the stories and characters was an inspiring experience. Nearly every episode is full of explorations of the human soul, tries to show the heights and depths of us and how we can decide where to go. I guess, much of that comes from Patrick Steward who plays an intellectual, culturally rich and yet strong Jean Luc Picard and alot of that is not just roleplay, I bet.

I have to admit, in my youth StarTrek characters were my role models. The ideals of which TNG is full of are pure and rich and I feel lucky to be influenced by them (don't get me started on comparing them to new "science fiction" series like StarGate or something like that).

So, I just want to say thank you to all the writers, actors and visionaries who produced Star Trek - The Next Generation.

Since I published some of my pictures. I don't know why, but somehow I got frustrated with photography. But taking a look over my unpublished shots got me a little excited again. I think I'll go out today, maybe I find something like this:

The Hauppauge Nova-T-Lite is a low budget DVB-T USB 2.0 Stick and comes complete with a passive antenna. Here in Germany you can get it for ~20€. It doesn't have an internal MPEG2 decoder, but this is completly fine, since even ancient CPUs can decode MPEG2 in software. It also includes a working IR receiver which can be used to read signals from some remote controls (even if the package doesn't include one). It seemed to be compatible with my RC5 remote, but I didn't go into IR support further, since I already have a working homebrew serial IR receiver.

My first straight forward attempt was to make menuconfig with the gentoo-sources 2.6.25 kernel and select the according driver. This is the DibCom 0700 driver called dib-usb-0700. After that an additional firmware is needed, which I thought the package manager would provide (DVB_CARDS="usb-dib0700" emerge -av media-tv/linuxtv-dvb-firmware).But the version numbers were slightly of, so a created a symlink with the correct name to the installed firmware image (may have been a mistake).

Everything compiled I rebooted, the driver and the firmware got loaded successfully and I started a channel scan (w_scan). But I just got no channels. Well, this could be a problem of bad receiver signals which would have been very bad. Berlin Lichtenberg is know for it's bad FM behaviour (architectural reasons) but I didn't know this was true for DVB-T, too.

So, a look into dmesg and syslog showed some sort of I2C errors... At first I didn't take them too serious, but they correlated with scanning retries. So I read the linuxtv wiki page more carefully. And right at the top it said I should install bleeding edge v4l drivers. Gaaaaaaah! Abandoning your package manager is a bad thing to do to your system --there is no make uninstall. But Gentoo provides an ebuild for that :) "emerge -av media-tv/v4l-dvb-hg" provides you with a checkout from their sources. Bad thing is, there was a syntax error in one of the v4l drivers so the package wouldn't compile :(

The solution I came up was then to manually get the Mercurial checkout, make menuconfig on these sources and exclude everything I didn't need, compile with make and then make install and modprobe the modules. Bad thing to do ... but well ... it worked after all. Next thing to do was to get a recent firmware. Seems like the gentoo firmware package is heavily outdated. The new firmware (you can find the link in the linuxtv wiki) even had the correct filename for the kernel driver.

So after this procedure the I2C error messages were gone and it finally worked.

But ... someone really has to update the gentoo packages and add a way to do a make menuconfig for the v4l-dvb-hg sources before they get buildt. I think I'll open some bugs...

So, I'm always having fun with running new hardware under linux. It somehow gives you a satisfactory feeling when you finally got it working. But (there is always a butt ;) ) sometimes it's just not right straight forward. The usual and most elegant way for getting a new device working is to get a recent kernel (sometimes even a git checkout from kernel.org is needed), fire up make menuconfig and select the new driver as a module or compile it in. Then you reboot with the new kernel and the device is working. Sometimes you'll need some kind of magic additional firmware which your package manager should provide. It will put a binary image into /lib/firmware which the kernel driver will load uppon activation. This not so elegant anymore but still sufficient.

The device I bought is the Zyxel NWD210N, a WiFi 802.11a/b/g/draft n USB Stick with MiMo, as far is I could see it. lsusb shows it as "Bus ... Device ...: ID 0586:3416 ZyXEL Communications Corp". In the hope that there will be native Linux drivers (as there are for some native Zyxel chips) I decided to give it a try. The butt this time is, that it does not use a Zyxel chipset, but a modified Atheros chipset (as I read somewhere, of which I can't find the URL anymore). The athXk drivers also don't work for this thingy so I had to fall back to ndiswrapper.

ndiswrapper is a kernel module that emulates a part of the Windows API for WLAN drivers and loads these Windows drivers to support a natively unsupported WLAN device under Linux. While this is a highly controversial practice it works quite well for the Zyxel NWD210N. To get ndiswrapper working under Gentoo Linux you have to:

1. USE="usb" emerge -av ndiswrapper
2. download and extract the Windows driver (according to your architecture) from zyxel.com
3. install the driver with "ndiswrapper -i Driver/WinXP32/wlanurn.inf"
4. insert the kernel module with "modprobe ndiswrapper"
5. plug in the device and use it with whatever tools you prefer (NetworkManage, wpa_supplicant)

If you want to add ndiswrapper support to your boot configuration, you can add the line "ndiswrapper" to you /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 file.

Hopefully someone from either Zyxel or Atheros someday cares about opening the specs or even supplying a native driver.

In an attempt to free content from a default-deny regime, this is for google to eat:

Free ISIS!

This is really cool:

mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /var/tmp/portage

emerge -auDNv world

Since compiling is mostly IO limited, this really reduces compile times and saves your harddisk. Found on mbaer's blog who found it in the gentoo-wiki.

- drank coffee

- learned Python

just kidding

my opinion so far: seems reasonable

missing so far: strong typing, explicit variable declaration -- i'll never get used to these all new and fancy (and sloppy) languages