Entries from June 2006 ↓

–en

Finally! Looks like the brazilian government decided which digital TV standard will be adopted here. We’ll have the japanese standard here (news at Yahoo). I hope it doesn’t get too long to reach the regular consumer (me included).

–pt_BR

Finalmente! Parece que o governo brasileiro decidil qual padrão digital será adotado. Teremos aqui o padrão japonês (veja notas no IDG Now! e na Globo). Espero que não demore muito para chegar ao consumidor comum (me incluindo nessa barca).

Agora, cá entre nós, amigos brasileiros, houve um lobby pesado em cima desse padrão. Dizem os analistas de mercado (vulgo teóricos da conspiração) que a Globo (e outros canais) queriam forçar esse padrão para manter os seus monopólios, e isso tudo começou com a forçada nomeação do Ministro Hélio Costa (ex jornalista da Globo). Não sou eu quem está dizendo! Mas que faz sentido, com certeza faz. Leiam mais sobre isso no Centro de Mídia Independente e no blog Alerta Total, e tirem suas próprias conclusões.

Today I bought a new wireless card. It’s a D-Link DWL-G520, rev B3, Atheros chipset, works perfectly with MadWifi (YaST detected it immeditaly as soon as I loaded the kernel module). I’ve got good speed rates (although I still think 30Mb/s isn’t enough), finally managed to make it run in Master mode with WPA encryption (acx111 only do WEP on Master, and ndiswrapper won’t even enter Master mode), and got Kismet working (as a consultant, I’m starting to need to test my clients’ WLAN strenghts).

Related to that, yesterday I also switched my laptop’s Linksys WPC54G for an IBM 802CAG for almost the same reasons. First of all the Linksys’ Broadcom chipset still doesn’t have a stable Linux native driver, and because of that I still have to use it with ndiswrapper (what is rather unconfortable, since it limits the experience in many ways). On the other hand, the IBM card uses an Atheros chipset, so I can also use it with MadWifi. The second reason is that the Linksys card can’t do Super G, while either the IBM and D-Link cards can, so I will manage to get better speeds. Third and last reason: I also needed to run Kismet on my laptop.

By the way, two tips for SUSE users. (a) I couldn’t make SUSE’s MadWifi packages to work correctly because I could only find madwifi RPM, but not madwifi-kmp-* on the main repository (help here?), but simply adding MadWifi’s official repo got everything running. (b) The Kismet package on SUSE’s repository refused to work with the latest MadWifi drivers, so I had to build my own upgraded package (check into my repository).

What happened to my other wireless card? Unfortunately it wasn’t working so well because the acx111 driver has a bug that makes tranfers stall under high load. That’s a known bug and they plan to correct it some time in the future, but unfortunately I can’t help (I know very little C, and even less kernel module programming) and I can’t wait (I often need large transfers from my laptop to my desktop). I’m still deciding if I’ll keep or sell it (anyone interested?).

Nothing against the developers, they just did their part choosing a name they thought interesting, but today I found a software named “Alambic“. The interesting thing is that the word “alambique” (picture), in brazilian portuguese, is the name of the barrel (wood or copper) used for producing cachaça.

Yes, software names can be fun!

This video on YouTube shows a really cool desktop project in which you can manipulate documents just like you do with papers on a real desk. It’s very nice to see that someone is still thinking about new ways of working with computers other than the traditional ones. (Project site)

Yes! OpenSUSE Build Service rocks hard!

I decided to start using this new and awesome service from the nice people that make SUSE Linux. It’s a very comples compilation farm where people put their spec files and sources and build RPM packages for various SUSE releases (from 9.0 up to 10.1) and even other distributions (currently Fedora and Mandriva).

Using this so neat service I can build packages for SUSE Linux 10.0 and 10.1 either on i586 or x86_64 with mere 2 or 3 commands. After successfuly building, the packages are copied to an ftp area, the repository metadata is generated, and everything is automatically mirrored. Is it possible to be any easier?

I’m currently working to move all my packages from the old repository to the new one. So if you would like to give it a try, you just need to add the repositories for 10.0 or 10.1 on your package manager of choice. Mine is (obviously) smart, so, the trick is:

10.0
smart channel –add http://software.opensuse.org/download/home:/netmask/SUSE_Linux_10.0/home:netmask.repo

10.1
smart channel –add http://software.opensuse.org/download/home:/netmask/SUSE_Linux_10.1/home:netmask.repo

I hope my packages are usefull to anyone other than me.

By the way, I’m always open to new suggestions if you need something I could help providing.

Have fun!