Welcome Home Uncle Jim

My uncle Jim is coming home from California today. It has been years since I have seen him and I am pretty excited. When I was just a budding young awkward pre-teen, uncle Jim taught me about the nerdier things in life. He introduced me to IRC, quality Sci-Fi and most importantly role playing games!

It might be time to invest in a new 20 sided die!

Quote That Made My Day

“We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today.”

—outgoing Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan on the party’s Internet strategy, quoted in The Washington Post, January 5

Studio Plans

Like I mentioned in a previous post Steve and I are planning on doing some recording out of my garage. With the never ending supply of local bands in the area I think we could make a few dollars and have a blast doing it. I started planning the studio in February and after a few months of revisions and research I have completed the final working plans.

The dimensions are approximately 18'x24'x8' and it will all fit in my existing 2.5 car garage. As I move from stage to stage of the construction I will go into the details of each part of the build.

So far I have torn down the existing drywall and insulation from the walls. I have also started ripping out the electrical runs and outlets. I am currently working on reinforcing the external walls to provide maximum soundproofing. This will involve a layer of 1/2" rigid foam, 5/8" drywall, Green Glue, 5/8" drywall and fiberglass insulation to fill the rest of the space. This will all be placed against the outside wall in between the studs. The illustration on the right shows how it will be laid out. It is from a top down view and not to scale but gives a good visual of the whole outer leaf of the wall. The rigid pink foam is to cover the nails protruding through the sheathing so the drywall will have a flat surface to go against. This is the only step I have completed so far. Once I start hanging drywall I will post an update with some pictures.

openSuse 11.1 on Virtual PC 2K7: noreplace–paravirt i8042.noloop clock=pit explained

Seeing how I have some serious free time at work and have been studying for the Linux+ exam, I decided I needed a Linux machine at work. I am using openSUSE 11.1 with VPC 2K7. Now there are plenty of howtos out there so I won't post another one. I am going to explain something that seems to be a common thread throughout almost all the distros and VM software.

Most people seem to hit a point where the install will freeze on them, they have mouse problems and/or they have system time issues. The common fix is to add noreplace–paravirt i8042.noloop clock=pit to the boot parameters. At first I had little understanding of what this really did aside from clock=pit and most google searches only turn up more howtos than explanations. So, here is my nowhere near expert look at these parameters.

clock=pit:

This was the one command I actually understood in depth. This tells the kernel clock to use Programmable Interval Timer (PIT), the only Linux 2.6 kernel clock that does not correct for lost ticks. It is this lost tick correction that causes Linux 2.6 kernels to gain time ahead of the host OS's system time. FYI, the other two Linux 2.6 kernel clocks are PMTMR and TSC. I do not believe that it is this command that fixes the freezing issue. This simply fixes time keeping issues for once you have Linux up and running, as always I may be wrong.

i8042.noloop:

This command was pretty tough to get a good explanation on. The short answer is that a lot of VM software uses PS/2 mouse emulation and the i8042 mouse and keyboard driver for Linux does not play well with it. This should be enough for most users and the parameter fixes the mouse issues in VP 2K7. Of course I wanted a bit more. Looking into the code for the driver it appears that the driver sends a 3 byte loopback test to the AUX port to detect the mouse. The mouse should send a 3 byte response and then the driver can use the mouse. This looks to me to be how the driver sets up USB mouse support but I am not sure. So why does this cause an issue within a VM...I have no clue! My best guess after about an hour of googling, installing openSUSE to VP takes a loooong time, is that VP uses software emulation that to the driver looks like a USB mouse but responds to the loopback test incorrectly. This cause a error or my guess is an infinite loop in the test and voila no mouse or a frozen mouse. So by disabling this loopback test I am guessing that the driver never probes the AUX port for the mouse and simply responds to the PS/2 emulated mouse as if it were a real PS/2 mouse.

noreplace-paravirt:

This command is pretty simple. the noreplace simply forces the loading of paravirt-ops. paravirt-ops is a virtualization performance enhancement. I did not look into how it works too much but it appears to modify Linux to run specifically on a VM. My guess on this one is that Virtual PC does not natively support paravirt-ops and so that is why we need the noreplace parameter.

Of course all of this could be totally wrong and in which case I owe the Internet some bandwidth...

Linux+: Week 1

I started studying for my Linux+ exam this week. As part of my studying I setup a dual boot laptop with Fedora 10 w/ GNOME and openSUSE 11.1 w/ KDE. The laptop is just an old HP with a Pentium M 1.6GHz and 512MB of RAM. Both distros installed fine and I am dual booting using GRUB with no problems. My only hang up was that openSUSE kept running the processor at ultra low voltage. All I did was change the power settings for the processor to disable dynamic frequency scaling. I would suspect the problem to be with the laptop and not the OS.

My first impressions of the distros are good. I am really digging the Fedora, I prefer it over the others I've tried so far. I didn't spend a whole lot of time in either distro last night so I will have to post more on the nitty gritty later. I may have to build a nicer Fedora box with a Windows VM.

As far as the exam goes I am confident that I can install and configure Linux. Past that I am still pretty rough so the studying continues. One neat trick I have learned is the whereis command. It returns the full path to the command and the location to the man page. Having grown up on DOS and Commodore Basic 2.0 I really enjoy having a way to find those less often used command paths.

One Year Later...

Thought I would give this whole blog thing another go around. So here is the depressingly short update on the past year.

I am in snake limbo, I am undecided as to whether or not I will continue trying to breed boas. I still have the big female and could grab a male and give it another go but something about that idea sits funny with me. The psychoanalyst in me says that since my male died and the female gave birth to stillborn babies around the time my grandfather was passing I have balled the whole lot up into one big mess in my head. I truly have no desire to breed or even keep snakes right now.

I am however embarking on another business venture, this time with Steve. Well, really it is more like building a really expensive club house for grown men... but don't tell my wife. Steve, pending the arrival of his 2nd child, needed to relocate some super sweet recording gear. So, we are converting my detached 2.5 car garage into a studio. I plan on posting build pics once the construction gets interesting. I am also planing on going back to school for audio engineering sometime in the Fall.

I am still employed as a Network Systems Engineer but now I actually give a rats ass so I have been bringing my certifications up to speed. I am currently working on my Linux+ exam and finishing off my exams for my MCSA. And again I plan on returning to school to get at least my A.A.S. in IT with a programing option. My hope is to sharpen my now extremely dull VB and C programing skills while building my network certifications.

Stuff not pertaining to me, my wife is kicking butt in culinary school and now working for the Brass Elephant downtown. My little brothers are playing little league, one sister is barreling into teenagedom and the other is now working and has her learners.

So that's my year in four paragraphs. I promise future posts will be more interesting.