September 04, 2009 Archives

Fri Sep 4 20:07:33 EEST 2009

Make Icedove a.k.a. Thunderbird have a Gnome look

I wanted to make my preferred mail client application Thunderbird look a bit more decent and Gnome like. Thus I've downloaded tango_icons_for_thunderbird-0.7.0-tb.jar . The add-on is also available for download via Thunderbird's Official Addon web page . Another option for changing the outlook of Icedove (as named in Debian for some licensing reasons) is to use GNOME-Tb2 a thunderbird theme addon by Hugo Gonçalve.

Fri Sep 4 18:52:00 EEST 2009

A few Christian bands recommended by a friend of mine

I've recently been to a friend's work place for a reason and in the mean time I got a couple of suggestions of a nice christian bands. This are:
1. ApologetiX - A nice christian band who does cover a famous rock / metal / pop songs changing the lyrics with a christian bible based lyrics. More about the band here .
2. Andy Hunter - A Christian DJ who happens to be the creator of the music of some famous computer gmes like for example Need for Speed Undeground.
3. Glenn Kaiser - A band named after the guy Glenn Kaiser who was a long time guitar player and a singer in the great famous christian hard rock band "Resurrection Band" or as we fans call it in short "Rez Band".

Next I'm going to list a couple of nice Christian Industrial bands worthy to listen.
1. Argyle Park
2. Klank
3. BrainChild
4. Chatterbox
5. Circle of Dust
6. Cyber Shadow
7. Juggernautz
8. X-Propagation

Something else really valueable to me is a band called: Neuropunk Ru, I've downloaded this from another friend of mine known under the alias Static. I have to express my gratitude to him for sharing this valueable peace of music with me.

Fri Sep 4 18:36:07 EEST 2009

Make Pulseaudio play multiple sound strems in Gnome 2.26

I've recently upgraded my Debian as you've probably red in my previous posts, anyways. I've noticed that after the upgrade I couldn't play parallel sound streams of let's say rhythmbox and audacious. So logically I started looking for a fix. First I tried to install the
paprefs
debian package. That nice gtk interface for configuring pulseaudio includes a menu called
 Simultaneous Output 
there I've ticked the
 Add virtual output device for simultaneous output on all local sound cards 
hoping that this would solve my issues. However that was no go, so I googled around looking for a solution and I came upon The following forum thread discussing howto solve the simultaneous sound issues. I tried some of the solutions proposed there and figured out the fix for me.
Here is the solution itself:

1. I've created .asoundrc file in my home directory containng:
pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
    }

    ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
    }

    pcm.!default {
    type pulse
    }

    ctl.!default {
    type pulse
    }
I needed to restart my gnome session in order to make the changes in .asoundrc noticeable to pulseaudio although probably simply restarting the pulseaudio server would be a solution that won't require to restart your current gnome session. Cheers! :)

Fri Sep 4 01:21:21 EEST 2009

ipw3945 on kernel 2.6.30

I've loosed big time trying to compile ipw3945 on my debian amd64 system running kernel 2.6.30, unfortunately at the end I couldn't make ipw3945 run correctly. However I'll try to explain just in case if somebody out there succeeds in running the ipw3945 driver on kernel 2.6.30. First I needed to compile the ieee80211-1.2.18 subsystem correctly. That gave me a hard time cause the damned thing won't compile on my kernel version. I've googled about the solution and had to combine a couple of solutions before I succeed compiling. Here is what was required
1. First in ieee80211.module.c change proc_net for init_net.proc_net.
2. Next change in ieee80211_crypt_wep.c and ieee80211_crypt_tkip.c .page for .page_link
3. Next download ieee80211_wx.c-2.6.27.patch.txt
4. Patch ieee80211-1.2.18 e.g. in my case: # cd /usr/src/ieee80211-1.2.18; patch -p0 < ieee80211_wx.c-2.6.27.patch.txt
5. Overwrite the file ieee80211_crypt_tkip.c in /usr/src/ieee80211-1.2.18 with the following ieee80211_crypt_tkip.c file.
6. Now with God's help you might try: # make && make install

Now let's proceed to the compilation of the ipw3945 driver itself.

I've used the the ipw3945-1.2.2 driver from the Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG Driver Website . In kernels newer than 2.6.22 on 64 bit architectures in order to make the driver compile, you have to apply the fix-for-64-bits-2.6.22-onwards.patch patch.
Now enter the ipw3945-1.2.2 source directory and execute patch -p0 < fix-for-64-bits-2.6.22-onwards.patch ,hopefully it should patch correctly.I had to also use the ipw3945-1.2.2.patch patch.
Again patch it with: # patch -p0 < ipw3945-1.2.2.patch.

Next in order to compile it I had to execute: # make IEEE80211_INC=/usr/src/ieee80211-1.2.18 IEEE80211_IGNORE_DUPLICATE=y && make install. Next I have downloaded the ipw3945d-1.7.22 . Untarred the archive file
# tar -zxvf ipw3945d-1.7.22.tgz and last but not least:
# cp -rpf x86_64/ipw3945d /etc/init.d/ The ipw3945 loaded correctly with modprobe ipw3945, however the wireless device wasn't detected ... Even though the failure to make the ipw3945 driver running what I did gave me hope that eventually if I invest some more time and efforts attempting to make it work I could eventually succeed and enjoy the benefits of a better wireless networks signal strengths. Until that happens I'll hold up to the newer iwl3945 to use my wireless.