Helping a friend connect to Talk Talk broadband

She was having problems, and wanted to know if a DSL modem was a router, so she could just wireless into her DSL modem, seeing as she was having such problems getting it to work.

So... what was the manufacturer name and model of her DSL modem?

smartAX MT882.

A quick search later pulled up the fact it was indeed a modem and a router, as well as some interesting links:
The user manual for the Huawei SmartAX MT882 can be downloaded from driverguide.com [driverid=503416]

There was a Talk Talk specific page at kitz.co.uk which had the following snippets:

You are best connecting this router using ethernet and following the instructions on the setup sheet for an Apple Mac computer.
Ethernet

If you use Ethernet you wont need to install any software on your PC. Simply:-
~ Connect the router to your computers Network card using the supplied network cable
~ Browse to http://192.168.1.1
~ Log in using the default settings username = admin and password = admin
~ From the left hand menu select Basic
~ Select WAN settings
~ Click on the pencil icon on the top right hand side
~ Set your username and password as given in your TalkTalk welcome letter
which should be in the format of yourphoneno@talktalk.net
~ Click Submit
~ Click Save all
~ Click OK

and a discussion on the broadbandbuyer.co.uk forums about connecting to Talk Talk using that Modem/Router.

Artec Ultima 2000e+ scanner, and how to get it to work.

First of all, you need to get hold of the firmware for the scanner.

In both Windows and the Unices, there is a little bit of firmware that gets uploaded into the scanner - as far as I can see it gets uploaded every time the scanner is used. (This is some new definition of firmware that I wasn't previously aware of. It seems to get loaded into the scanner's volatile memory rather than being actual firmware).

For the Artec Ultima 2000e+ scanner, this piece of software is e2kPlus.usb and it is kept in \windows\system32\drivers

I got it by going to the Artec web site (I Googled "Artec Taiwan") and clicking on "Customer Support" | "Downloads", scrolling down to the bottom of the page to "Legacy Product Drivers" and clicking on "Legacy Products", an then looking for:
Ultima 2000 E+ Scanner driver only for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Notice: If your system is Win XP, please follow Readme for updating.


Select V1.32 from the drop down at the right hand side. In Konqueror, nothing happened for me. So I fired up Firefox, and headed back to http://www.artec.com.tw/Service_e/nl/home/Old_drivers.htm

The file that appeared in my download folder was called V132.exe. Time to use it in my installation of Wine.

I copied it to /home/insert-your-user-account-name-here/.wine/drive_c/ and right clicked in Konqueror to set the permissions to 'executable'

I then ran it at the command-line via wine c:\\V132.exe. (in fact, I ran it by

wine c:\\V132.exe &> /home/insert-your-user-account-name-here/scannerInstall.log
so that if there were any problems, I could look at the logfile.

It went swimmingly - second time round. The first time, either the download got corrupted, or I had not set V132.exe to be executable.

V132.exe was a self-extracting zipfile, which extracted several files to \windows\temp - the important file is e+V132.exe.

I right-clicked in Konqueror, set the permissions for \windows\temp\e+V132.exe to executable, and ran it via

wine c:\\windows\\temp\\e+V132.exe

It installs a shedload of files, but the interesting one is c:\windows\system32\drivers\e2kPlus.usb

Blogspot crashed Konqueror. Again

I pressed the 'Edit' button for an earlier entry, and down went Konqueror. The KCrash information is in this logfile.

Bits for my old laptop

The good news is it's not difficult to get replacement ancillaries for that old Acer 735C.

The other good news is it's definitely Unix-capable, as it's a 486SX-33. I can remember the years I used NeXTStep as my primary operating system on that spec of PC.

The bad news is a new PSU is $60 plus shipping. And a new battery is $90 plus shipping. Assuming shipping is in the region of $20-30, that's starting to be a significant lump of money. What else could I buy for £90? I could get my Psion 5MX repaired.

(In fact, I ought to do that anyway, so I can take a big pile of ebooks with me on holiday).

Another week, another blog

I've started a new blog, where I'm going to put all my Wine gaming posts. They were starting to take over.

For anyone who's interested, they're now at Playing games with Wine. And it's true - I have now actually played a game with Wine, instead of merely playing the game of attempting to get Wine to run a game.

Little by little, I'll move the old posts over there.

Deep deep deep in the dark dark loft

... I found the laptop. An Acer AcerNote 735c, with a French keyboard. Unfortunately, the power supply unit (PSU) was nowhere to be found. And the connection from the PSU into the laptop is a truly bizarre one.

The chances of stumbling across one are remote. Even assuming the laptop's battery is any condition to be re-used. Grrr.

Using Blogspot better

1) I need to learn how to get Blogspot to accept in-lined links to URLs.

That last post had the usual <a href="Dan's Site URL">Dan's Site</a> malarky, and Blogspot kindly removed all it's usefulness.

Don't you just love it when machines are sure they knew what you want, even when you had told them the opposite?

2) I need to find a way to use blockquotes, or something similar, here so the commands I type into Wine and the messages Wine gives me stand out from my rambles.

It's not just me who reads this!?!

The site has been visited and read by Dan Kegel, one of the Wine QA bods.

Thanks for your helpful comment, Dan. I hope at one point to be sufficiently up-to-speed to submit incident reports that are useful enough to be used by the Wine team.

Dan has lots of helpful hints for bug-reporters, new and old, to the Wine project, all on-line at The Wine QA Project. [http://www.kegel.com/wine/qa/]

Capturing Wine's messages better

Up til now I've rune the games from the command line, as suggested somewhere in the Wine web-site.

This means that all the messages and error messages that Wine produces appear on the screen. Which is good.

Unfortunately, games often change the screen display resolution. After the game has ended (I suppose 'crashed' is the technical term) I find I can't copy and paste the whole message, as some has disappeared off the right-hand side of the terminal window, and has gone forever. Items like:
fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 94 (SPI_GETMOUSETRAILS)
appear as
fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 94 (SPI_GE

I'm sure you'll agree that this is Less Useful&tm;

So, I need to send the messages to a file, not to the screen.

And there is a cunning Unix command called '>' for this. It sends all the messages Wine sends out to whichever file you name after the '>'.
wine c:\\CAVEDOG\\TOTALA\\totala.exe > theNameOfTheFileYouWantTheMessagesToGoTo

In my case, I used 'WineTA070529-02.log'

But, it's best if all the Unix system's error messages go to that file, too. We need the '&>' command. It sends both sets of messages to the named file.

So, in the end I used:
wine c:\\CAVEDOG\\TOTALA\\totala.exe &> WineTA070529-02.log

Fun with Wine - Total Annihilation, part 2

As suggested, I set the "Audio" "Hardware Acceleration" for Wine to "Emulation".

I started a terminal session, typed
winecfg
at the prompt, then selected the Audio tab, clicked on the DirectSound Hardware Acceleration dropdown, and selected 'Emulation', and tried again.

fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 94 (SPI_GETMOUSETRAILS
fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 93 (SPI_SE
fixme:d3d:IWineD3DDeviceImpl_GetAvailableTextureMem (0x191388) : st
fixme:ddraw:IDirectDrawImpl_SetCooperativeLevel (0x190b10)->(0x1002
fixme:xrandr:X11DRV_XRandR_SetCurrentMode Cannot change screen BPP

And then the game started up. The intro played, tho' the sounds intermittently would get very loud, or become white noise. Which seems to be caused by
err:dsound:DSOUND_MixOne underrun on sound buffer 0xd252b8

Fun with Wine - Total Annihiliation

I entered:
wine c:\\CAVEDOG\\TOTALA\\totala.exe

and got A dialogue box saying 'Error: Sound System Initialisation failed'. The shell also displayed this:
fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 94 (SPI_GE
fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 93 (SPI_SE
fixme:d3d:IWineD3DDeviceImpl_GetAvailableTextureMem (0x191358) : st now, returning 64MB left
fixme:ddraw:IDirectDrawImpl_SetCooperativeLevel (0x190ae0)->(0x1002
fixme:xrandr:X11DRV_XRandR_SetCurrentMode Cannot change screen BPP
err:wave:DSDB_MapBuffer Could not map sound device for direct access (Input/output error)
err:wave:DSDB_MapBuffer Please run winecfg, open "Audio" page and set
"Hardware Acceleration" to "Emulation".

I like that last message a great deal. Actionably informative.

Fun with Wine - Installing Master Of Olympus: Zeus

I've installed Wine (the version that comes with OpenSuse 10.2)

I then put the MoOZ CD into one of my CD drives, and typed:

(Well, I then selected 'insert blockquotes' on blogger's editor, and it deleted everything I'd typed up to that point. But to progress, imagine the next line is in fixed format...) [In fact, I've come back weeks later and actually made it fixed pitch.

wine /media/hdc/AUTORUN.EXE

Wine, of course, doesn't recognise Linux file locations, so returned:

wine: cannot find '/media/hdc/AUTORUN.EXE'

So then I typed:

wine e:\AUTORUN.EXE

And it seemed to start up okay. I hadn't expected that, as I had expected it to say there was no such file. The reason is that usually Wine doesn't recognise Windows file locations either - unless they're typed up with Unix/C style escapes for \,[space] and ". So I had expected to be needing to re-type it as wine e:\\AUTORUN.EXE

Still, time to continue.

The developer's logo appeared on screen - but upside-down.

The next spash screen appeared (after a flicker of black screen), and a dialogue box asking me to agree to the software licence agreement.

Eventually it asked me where to install the files, suggesting A:\Sierra\Olympus. I altered that to C:, and pressed 'Install'

By the time the install finished, the following messages had appeared in the shell:
err:menubuilder:extract_icon32 LoadLibraryExW ( L"C:\\Sierra\\Master of Olympus - Zeus\\zeus.ico") failed, error 193
err:menubuilder:extract_icon32 LoadLibraryExW (L"c:\\windows\\system32\\notepad. exe \"C:\\Sierra\\Master of Olympus - Zeus\\Readme.txt\"") failed, error 126
err:menubuilder:InvokeShellLinker failed to fork and exec wineshelllink
err:menubuilder:extract_icon32 LoadLibraryExW (L"c:\\winebrowser") failed, error 126
err:menubuilder:InvokeShellLinker failed to fork and exec wineshelllink
err:menubuilder:extract_icon32 LoadLibraryExW (L"c:\\winebrowser") failed, error 126
err:menubuilder:InvokeShellLinker failed to fork and exec wineshelllink
err:menubuilder:extract_icon32 LoadLibraryExW (L"c:\\winebrowser") failed, error 126
err:menubuilder:InvokeShellLinker failed to fork and exec wineshelllink
err:menubuilder:extract_icon32 LoadLibraryExW (L"c:\\winebrowser") failed, error 126
err:menubuilder:InvokeShellLinker failed to fork and exec wineshelllink
err:menubuilder:extract_icon32 LoadLibraryExW (L"c:\\winebrowser") failed, error 126
err:menubuilder:InvokeShellLinker failed to fork and exec wineshelllink
err:menubuilder:extract_icon32 LoadLibraryExW (L"c:\\winebrowser") failed, error 126
err:menubuilder:InvokeShellLinker failed to fork and exec wineshelllink

Now that the install is done, I typed:
wine c:\Sierra\Master of Olympus - Zeus\Zeus.exe
and got the response
wine: cannot find 'c:SierraMaster'
so typed the escaped version
wine c:\\Sierra\\Master\ of\ Olympus\ \-\ Zeus\\Zeus.exe
and a little dialogue box popped up, titled "Tutorial File Error" saying:
Missing pak or sav in Basic tutorial 0

When I okayed that, I got one saying
Missing pak or sav in Basic tutorial 1

Okaying that got a
Missing pak or sav in Basic tutorial 2
and so on up to basic tutorial seven. Whereupon it changed to:
Missing pak or sav in Advanced tutorial 0

It turns out there were 8 of them, too. Once the last one was declared missing, the execution stopped.

Just one more click is all I ask

Why, oh why oh why, does Konqueror (the file manager) not let me choose how many clicks will activate a file?

You know the drill - you open a folder, and with the mouse, you select the file you're about to copy or cut. But before anything happens, the file is opened, and you have a display of it's contents, instead of a display of its folder with that file selected.

Grrrr.

Posting that last entry crashed Konqueror

Ironic, isn't it?

I think I'll start posting my crash logs too.

I think this latest Konqueror crash log is telling me it's time to get more debug info on my system.

About time I started blogging.

I've decided that this is probably the best place to keep a journal of my fun getting Linux to run.

I started off with InfoMagic Linux v2.5 in 1996 - a commercial Slackware distro.

More recently, Mandriva Free 2006, which I abandoned because I never discovered how to install a Flash plug-in for Konqueror or FireFox for it.

I moved to Slax, and that was very satisfying. After a while though... I just felt too much of a wimp running Linux from a CD.

Currently, I'm using openSuse 10.2. It appears to have a weird memory leak in X.org tho', (and I'm not the only person who thinks this).

I've been a confirmed thttpd user too. But it only allows statically-compiled CGI programs to run, and I'd prefer to write CGI in Ruby, so it's time to explore the world of other web servers. I think I'll go with a LASeR focus (Linux/Apache/Sqlite/Ruby) or else I'll go BARMy (BSD/Apache/Ruby/MySQL).

It also has OpenOffice 2. And it's spreadsheet sucks up enormous amounts of memory. (I think I may drop back to OpenOffice 1.5 to get back to a managable memory footprint for a spreadsheet) Plus it's version of Kopete crashes daily. As does the KMuddy I installed.

The things that intrigue me are autopackage, GoboLinux, and PC BSD. All targetted at desktop users.

I also plan on getting openWorkbench running under Wine.

And I'm going to try to get an old old old laptop running Linux too. So I can type in the garden.

All the while, my focus will tend to be on usability for (non-developer) desktop users. And keeping a hopeful eye out for genuinely helpful Linux help. Too much Linux 'help' is short-tempered, snidey, sarky or requires telepathy.

Hmm - that ought to keep me going for a while.