Livebox automount of usb HD

Ok, I'm streaming from my Mobistar Livebox to my PS3, but no thumbnails, bad directory structure, ...
So, I'd also have Mediatomb installed on my laptop, and want to be able to use that too.

Mediatomb needs a mounted filesystem however, whereas I now connect to it via smb://livebox/DisquesUSB/HD204UI/data/ in Dolphin.

So here how I mount that on the different systems:

cd /media/
sudo mkdir liveboxUsbHD

test it:

sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=theuser,password=hispass //livebox/DisquesUSB/HD204UI /media/liveboxUsbHD

The directory /media/liveboxUsbHD should contain the files.
For automatic mounting:

cd /etc/init.d
sudo kate start_smb

And have this file contain the above line

#!/bin/bash
sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=theuser,password=hispass //livebox/DisquesUSB/HD204UI /media/liveboxUsbHD

So we use smbfs, cifs should work too and is even needed if a real windows share. Anyway, the file contains your password, so hide it and give it correct permissions:

sudo chmod 550 start_smb
sudo update-rc.d start_smb defaults

In case the samba share is not available on start-up, you can create the link on a later time with:

sudo ./etc/init.d/start_smb

That's it!

sound out on Dell studio XPS

I bought some nice boxes so as to be able to have nicer sound for the radio stations I listen to, but look, the headphone out jack of my dell studio xps is not working in Kubuntu 10.04!

Apparently the default for sound is using the bios configuration, and as I see no sound option in the bios that means I cannot repear the error there. All info to fix it is on the ubuntu community wiki.

So, for this laptop, fire up eg Kinfocenter, and see under sound:

Audio devices:
0: STAC92xx Analog (Duplex)

Mixers:
0: IDT 92HD73C1X5

Looking at the HD audio models documention, we see

STAC92HD73*
===========
ref Reference board
no-jd BIOS setup but without jack-detection
intel Intel DG45* mobos
dell-m6-amic Dell desktops/laptops with analog mics
dell-m6-dmic Dell desktops/laptops with digital mics
dell-m6 Dell desktops/laptops with both type of mics
dell-eq Dell desktops/laptops
alienware Alienware M17x
auto BIOS setup (default)

So as said, the BIOS setting is the default. So let's change it to dell-m6:

sudo kate /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

and add at the end of the file:

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6

Reboot, and yes, sound is available on one of the headphone out jacks. The above line is also what is listed on the forum. Should you know how to make both headphone out to work, let me know.

A0 poster with latex

I had to make an A0 poster for a conference. As I had my source in LaTeX, I tried for the first time to do it with latex. It worked better than I thought.

First, at UGent, one can print the poster with http://www.elis.ugent.be/nl/designjet

Second, a latex base file using columns and posterboxes, is at http://www.sgeier.net/poster/. I had to change it a bit to get it working ok though: remove some /hfill and /vfill calls, add some \mbox{\ } as needed.

Note that in Europe, you would want to create an A3 example, then scale it by 2.8 to obtain an A0 poster. So you need the following width and height in the tex:

\def\layoutwidth{297mm} % A3 portrait, A0 when scaled 2.82
\def\layoutheight{420mm}
\def\numcolumns{3}

The above produces a bad dvi file when compiled with LaTeX though, you need to run the command

dvips -Ppdf -G0 -o poster.ps poster

to obtain a nice ps file okular can nicely show. You can then print this to an A3 printer with good results.

Third step is to scale it to A0 poster. You need the poster_resize script for this:

csh poster_resize poster.ps 2.8

This creates a poster.resize.ps file which is an A0 print. If you do not have csh, sudo apt-get install it!

Fourth step is to create a backup: split the A0 poster in 16 A4 sheets you can plot on a colour printer and glue together yourself:

poster -iA0 -mA4 -pA0 poster.resize.ps > posterA4.ps

That is it. If you do not have the poster program, it should be available in your package manager (sudo apt-get install poster).