Asus My Cinema U3100 Mini Linux Compatible USB DVB-T Tuner Vs. AverTV Volar HD Nano

My experience with Avermedia devices has mostly been a pleasant one. Well, on windows platforms at least. My last employer purchased a fleet of Avermedia PCMCIA DVB-T/Analogue/FM cards for the work laptops, for network monitoring purposes, and they were fantastic.

When I was looking for a DVB-T USB tuner for my private laptop, I recalled the tough time we gave the Avermedia devices and how well they worked. Seemed to me, getting another Avermedia device was a great idea so long as there was Linux support. Avermedia claims Linux support for their AVerTV Volar HD Nano, but in truth I have wasted many hours configuring computers, installing kernel modules, and make installs. Admittedly, if I had've compiled the first driver and left the computer alone, it would still be working. Unfortunately, I made the decision to upgrade the Dell E6500 from 10.04LTS to 11.04, tried to get the HD Nano working. Then bought a new Dell E6320 and tried to get the thing to work on 11.04 on it. I am partly to blame for the hours I have spent, however, if Avermedia manufactured a device that was compliant with linux out of the box, I would still be a happy customer.

Ubuntu 11.04 - Broken Superblock

What a shitfight. The E6320 has a standard charge and express charge mode. I prefer longer charge times for extended battery life. I entered the BIOS to ensure standard mode was selected. Reboot, and the /root is broken.

Bummer.

I grabbed the USB $7 OS I built earlier, booted and found this walkthrough. I'm really glad I had a USB build ready to go...

Because I'm paranoid about people deleting really useful information, I've copied the steps below... I did not write this. All credit to the original author.

Join Diaspora Alpha

2nd September 2011 UPDATE: I received a reply on twitter from their Diaspora account, indicating this is Parr of their decentralisation plan for social networks. I received an invite to Diaspora... or D*, as it's becoming known in the twittersphere.

I was asked what my thoughts are, and it's simple and complicated at the same time.

To put it bluntly, D* has the potential to be just another social network struggling to fight against the established giant that is Facestalk, or the social network and service to end all social networks.

Ubuntu 10.04LTS on Acer D255E - Card Reader ENE UB6250

Here's the problem, Mrs Six3Seven's Acer Aspire D255E netbook has a card reader that doesn't work.

There are some details in this bug report, and the solution can be found in comment #149.

Dell Latitude E6320 and Fresh Build of Ubuntu 'Classic' 11.04

After having great success with Xubuntu 11.04, the damn thing stopped responding to the power button. A small niggle, sure, but one I wasn't willing to live with. After trolling forums and trying to find a solution until 1am this morning I went to bed without success. Less anoying, but equally difficult to find a solution to was that when you used the panel power button to 'shutdown', Xubuntu would log out to the Xfce login screen. Balls.

Time to have another look at trying to get Gnome working on Ubuntu. Last time I tried to install Gnome 3, but it broke. This time I decided to install Gnome 2, but after just minutes of searching I discover Ubunut 11.04 comes shipped with 'Ubuntu Classic' mode. I felt so dumb.

Clean build of Ubuntu 11.04 'Classic' with 'New Wave' theme

So time for another 'Fresh Build' post. The following is how I've set up this machine...

Installing Virtualbox 101

I use a virtualisation of windows inside my linux builds so I can deal with my windows dependency quickly and easily. Let's not kid ourselves, some things just won't work (easily) in linux. Take Dynojet's Powercommander software...

Dell Latitude E6320 and Xubuntu 11.04

Hardware issues continued with the new Latitude. The Ubuntu certified E6320 has a different hardware spec to the machine I bought, and while I might be able to extract some of the hardware devices from the E6500, I wanted a more complete OS solution.

UPDATE, 27 August 2011: I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 'Classic'... see this post to see how stupid I was being and some set-up instructions.

Ubuntu 10.04LTS on Dell Latitude E6320

Wireless Networking (wlan)
There was a drama with the install... when I bought this thing I was half expecting to have compatibility issues with the 3G card, but I wasn't expecting the Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6205 (802.11 a/b/g/n) WiFi card to be a problem. Bleeding edge, huh?

New Geek Toys on Their Way

This week I dropped the hammer on a Dell E6320 i5 laptop, and a Samsung Galaxy S II.

They both should arrive early next week, so I might do some unboxing pics and a bit of a review.

The E6320 will work with my E-Port Plus docking station, 13.3" screen, i5 2.5GHz (+ 'turbo'), 4BG RAM and a spinny hard disc and cost $728 delivered.
Plan for the Dell is to install my 64GB SSD, install Ubuntu 10.04LTS install, with W7 32bit running in Virtualbox. I'll also run a 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent with eSata transfer adapter to carry data.

The SGSII is a 1.2GHz Android device with 2GB of internal storage.
Plan for the SGSII is Oxygen ROM install. Should be pretty swift.

Bulding a Light, Full Featured Linux Portable USB

Ever needed to help someone fix their Windows computer that won't boot?

Ever wanted access to your own email, bookmarks, or applications?

Perhaps you want a persistant operating system on a USB flash drive... this is part one of an experiment I am doing. Step one for me is to decide on a build of Linux to run from flash memory. Step two is to try an put that into practice on the USB storage of the HTC Desire Android phone.

Problem with the Android phone is the USB storage doen't seem to wake up fast enough for the boot loader on my laptop to pick it up. I'll work on that later...

For now, I want to practice setting up a build. I have a 4GB SanDisk Cruiser Blade flash drive I picked up for about $7 from Office Works. It's small and light and should suit the key ring fine.

Oxygen 2.2 Released Today

UPDATE: 3rd August 2011.
A new hboot for Oxygen 2.2 can be found here, see post #16.
Direct link is here, and md5sum.

Adam Green release Oxygen 2.2 today over at the Oxygen forum... here's what he has to say about the release:

dBm - Watt, Attenuation, Gain Calculator for Android

I've built a simple dBm - Watts conversion tool. Why? There are loads of calculators and conversion tools out there for Android, but none I can find have included a conversion to work with RF power.

This simple conversion tool will convert dBm values to W and mW. It will also tell you dB gain for mW RF power levels. This is handy in my line of business where spec sheets and test data mixes dB, dBm, W and mW when talking about the same RF device.

Setting up a new Ubuntu 10.04LTS build

I was just thinking about the optional extras I like to have on a fresh build... Ubuntu comes pretty well ready to use out of the box, however there are some things I like to have that aren't open source, but are freely available to use.


This is a list of some of the things I would normally install.


UPDATE: If you want to suggest additional applications/components, please leave a message in the comment section below.

Android SDK, Fastboot, ADB with Ubuntu 10.04 and HTC Desire

NOTE: In all cases, USERNAME should be replaced with your own username.


These instructions were written using a 10.04.2 build of Ubuntu and it should be fine for both 32 and 64 bit versions of the operating system. We'll walk through how to prepare your PC from start to finish, so this should be the only instruction you need.

Instant Notifications in Android

UPDATE: As of C15th July 2011, Twitter for Android now does push notifications... now if only Tweetdeck would give us an update with push.

You love Android, but waiting for your notifications is totally naff. Thanks to notifo and push.ly, now you can have those tweets within seconds... thanks to @philgoodism for the tip.

Bummer! Lost most of the posts in the import...

When I migrated all the nerdy stuff from the main Six3Seven blog, I used the export tool.  It only exported the main page and left the post-jump (full entries) behind.  Which I deleted.  Ooops.

So I'm working on filling in the blanks.  Please bear with me...

EDIT: I've removed the dead posts and started populating the blog with the some useful stuff again...

Ubuntu 11.04 - not starting out well...

I just had a notification to upgrade Ubuntu on my good laptop to 11.04.  I figured, 'why not?'.  Why not indeed... before I managed to even re-start the machine I ran into dramas.

Avermedia AVerTV Volar HD Nano A867R install

I installed this on an earlier Ubuntu based linux version, and now with a fresh build of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, I'm gonna have to do it again.  I seem to recall it being a complete bitch with a poorly written readme, they are Taiwanese, after all. I can't remember how I finally got the thing to work, and I wish I'd made notes...

That's ok, I'll make some now!

Blogaway

I'm using the Blogaway app for Android to make this post... the interface is simple enough.

You can download Blogaway from the Market. And it's free, which is the best price.

   

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