Phil Edwards

Only under Windows - Linux is quite happy to have the keyboard and/or mouse removed and replaced several times with no ill effects. I work for an ISP with a huge data centre and our NOC engineers have a keyboard, mouse and TFT monitor on a trolley which they routinely plug into our hosted Linux servers to check console messages and stuff. No problems at all. Do as CrashDamage has suggested and download a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD and run memtest86 for as long as you can bear to leave the computer switched on. In my case, after running overnight for about 8 or 9 hours, it finally failed, not with a memory error but with a 'processor exception fault' and a hex dump of some stuff which didn't mean a lot to me. The very next time the computer locked up, it ended up in the back yard...

Have to add a "me too!" to what crashdamage said...For quite a while, our family computer (Athlon XP 2600+) would just randomly lock up solid. It happened more in WinXP than in Linux, but the fact that it did happen under both OS'es pointed at a hardware problem. I changed out virtually every single component *except* the CPU over the course of a 2 year period. Sometimes the problem would appear to go away for a while after a component swap, but would eventually come back again. You would not believe the number of bootable diagnostics CDs I now own! I finally got sick of the whole thing, ripped the mobo and CPU out of the case and literally threw it out into the back yard, replacing it with a MSI board running an Athlon64 chip. As I'd kept almost all of my previous components, I had enough left over to build a whole new computer. After adding a second hand CPU, I gave the machine to my wifes mum, and she's been using it with no problems at all for almost 9 months. I was absolutely *convinced* that no way could the CPU be faulty, but it was. Mine wasn't even running hot, either, so I'd suggest you try swapping your processor out first - maybe my experience can save you some frustration. Good luck!

There are a couple of other things that VMWare-tools does for you: 1. Allows you to synchronize time between your guest and host OS-es - This avoids having to run an NTP daemon on every guest instance and also allows the host OS to correct the clock drift that you get under VMWare with some Linux distros. VMware actually strongly discourage having any sort of software-based clock sync on guest instances. The ISP I work for has a huge VMWare ESX hosting farm and you wouldn't believe the problems we get when our clients sysadmins decide to install NTP on their hosted VMWare servers. 2. Enables copy and paste between the host and guest OS - probably a small thing as far as we on this forum are all concerned, but again, can be a huge time saver in a major 'Enterprise' VMWare deployment. EDIT: I've just fired up my vmware-server install and launched an Ubuntu 7.x guest instance I've been playing with. The vmware-tools virtual CD that you get contains both RPM and tar.gz formats, which is exactly how ESX-server does things. You should find that the RPM install of vmware-tools will work without a hitch on most RPM-based distros, and it saves having to b*gg*r about compiling stuff. :P EDIT #2: Just thought of something else that vmware-tools does for you - it enables the 'shared folders' feature, which allows you to have access to specified parts of the host filesystem from within your guest instance. This can be extremely useful for cross-platform development work. You code in Linux and flip over to your WinXP guest to check compatibility.

Nice bit of forensic work, well done! B) One other handy tip is to change the permissions on the gcc binary so it's only executable by root - most script kiddie stuff gets in via processes which run under unprivileged accounts, so this together with the 'noexec' on /tmp can help a lot.

I don't blame you, it would bother me too! Your problem could be any one of a number of things, but your ISPs way of doing things isn't helping. Is there any particular reason why they force their users to do this? I would expect to have to go through a login process in order to use the WiFi in my local Starbucks, but not just to use the internet over my regular connection. I would recommend as a first step finding yourself another internet provider who can give you a normal router or cable modem.

Can you also post the output from 'netstat -rn' and 'cat /etc/resolv.conf'? Edit: the output from 'lsmod' could be useful as well... Saying that 'the internet connection does not work' could potentially cover a lot of different issues, so we need to do some simple diagnostics to be able to isolate the problem for you.

Don't bother wasting your bandwidth downloading VMWare player. I'd recommend grabbing a copy of VMWare server instead - it's also free and does a lot more. All 'IMHO', of course... B)

tcpdump is the tool you need, with possibly ethereal too. 'urpmi tcpdump' 'urpmi ethereal' 'tcpdump -i eth0' will show you the traffic on your eth0 interface - you can dump this to a file for later examination, see 'man tcpdump' for the full gory details. Edited to add: If you need to see what your firewall is blocking, you'll probably need to look at the firewall logs seperately, assuming you mean a hardware firewall external to your main computer.

I've added another note to my long 'howto' post to explain how I corrected a permissions problem which cropped up after leaving my machine on all night to record some stuff. The 'msec' permissions checking kicked in and locked me out of the /dev/dvb/* devices until I worked out what was wrong.

If you're using VMWare workstation, you just need to switch on shared folders in your VMWare guest preferences. Your Win2k instance then see's your Linux filesystem under "\\.host", i.e. you can do Start --> Run --> \\.host and a new explorer window will open allowing access to your Linux data.

Please post the contents of /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/aliases for me...

I remember that selecting this option when installing 2005LE caused exactly the symptoms you describe. Try to do an install without selecting this option.

As promised, here's my blow by blow account of how I got this working under Mandriva 2007...enjoy! This was done on a fresh install of Mandriva 2007 - I'd configured my URPMI sources with the help of the easyurpmi web site at http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ and then ran 'urpmi --auto --auto-select --update' to pull in all the latest patches. I also updated the kernel to 2.6.17-6mdv and did the rest of the work with this as the active kernel. 1. Install kernel-source-2.6.17-6mdv - this will almost certainly also work with the 2.6.17-5mdv kernel that you get after a fresh install, but I'd already appplied all the latest patches before I started playing. 2. Grab a copy of the latest DVB source tarball (v4l-dvb-20060717.tar.gz) from http://www.linuxtv.org/downloads/snapshots/ and save this in your home directory. 3. Create a directory called 'dvb-stuff' and do 'cd dvb-stuff' 4. Unpack the tarball with the command 'tar -zxvf ../v4l-dvb-20060717.tar.gz' - this will give you a bunch of directories and files under /home/yourusername/dvb-stuff. 5. Become root with 'su -' and 'cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.17-6mdv'. Stay as root from this point. 6. Do 'make menuconfig' 7. When you have the kernel config menu appear, press the right-arrow cursor key to highlight the '<exit>' option and press return. Ensure that '<yes>' is highlighted in response to the question 'Do you wish to save your kernel configuration?' and press return. 8. You should be back at a shell prompt at this point. 9. Open up 'Makefile' in your favourite text editor, e.g 'vi Makefile'. 10. Find the line which says 'EXTRAVERSION = -6mdvcustom' and change it to read 'EXTRAVERSION = -6mdv'. Save the amended file. This step avoids the possibility of compiling the DVB kernel modules with a version string which is different to the stock kernel. It probably isn't (if you know much about building your own kernels) the best way to go about this, but it worked for me! 11. Do a 'make clean', followed by 'make'. 12. Watch the output from the 'make' command carefully - when you see it get to the point where it says something like 'CC init/main.o', you can press Ctrl-C to break out of the 'make' process. All we've done up to this point is ensured that all of the kernel compile preprocessor macros have been run, giving you a sporting chance of getting the DVB bits to compile properly. 13. Do 'cd /home/yourusername/dvb-stuff' 14. Open up './linux/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-core/dvb_net.c' in your text editor and go to line 1140. Change this block of code: dvb_net_feed_stop(dev); priv->rx_mode = RX_MODE_UNI; #if LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,18) spin_lock_bh(&dev->xmit_lock); #else netif_tx_lock_bh(dev); #endif if (dev->flags & IFF_PROMISC) { dprintk("%s: promiscuous mode\n", dev->name); so that it looks like this instead: dvb_net_feed_stop(dev); priv->rx_mode = RX_MODE_UNI; /* #if LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,18) spin_lock_bh(&dev->xmit_lock); #else */ netif_tx_lock_bh(dev); /* #endif */ if (dev->flags & IFF_PROMISC) { dprintk("%s: promiscuous mode\n", dev->name); This hack *really* shouldn't be necessary, but I don't understand enough about the way Mandriva build their distro kernels to be able to offer anything other than this 'brute force' solution to the problem. If you don't make this change, the build of the DVB modules fails with an error message which suggests to me that something somewhere has been patched in the kernel source tree, such that trying to compile the 'spin_lock_bh' function fails completely. 15. Make the exact same change slightly further down the code at line 1169 and save the modified file. 16. Now do 'make' and wait for the build process to finish. You will probably see the odd warning here and there as the build progresses, but this doesn't appear to cause any problems in the resulting compiled modules. 17. When the compile has finished, type 'make install' to copy the new modules over to the right place on your system. <edited to add> 17.5 Run 'depmod -a' to ensure that all the new module dependencies and symbol maps get properly updated for the newly-installed DVB modules. Things go a bit wierd if you miss this step out! :-) </edited> 18. Next, you will need a copy of the revision 3 firmware for the Freecom DVB stick. You can download this from: http://thadathil.net:8000/dvb/fw/dvb-usb/d...-wt220u-fc03.fw Save this file in /lib/firmware 19. Now do 'tail -f /var/log/messages'. This monitors the system log file in real time so you can see what's going on. Plug your Freecom DVB stick in. You should see something like this get written to the log: Nov 23 11:51:24 localhost kernel: usb 4-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3 Nov 23 11:51:24 localhost kernel: usb 4-6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice Nov 23 11:51:25 localhost kernel: dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware Nov 23 11:51:25 localhost kernel: dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-wt220u-fc03.fw' Nov 23 11:51:25 localhost kernel: usbcore: registered new driver dvb_usb_dtt200u Nov 23 11:51:26 localhost kernel: usb 4-6: USB disconnect, address 3 Nov 23 11:51:26 localhost kernel: dvb-usb: generic DVB-USB module successfully deinitialized and disconnected. Nov 23 11:51:27 localhost kernel: usb 4-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4 Nov 23 11:51:27 localhost kernel: usb 4-6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice Nov 23 11:51:27 localhost kernel: dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in warm state. Nov 23 11:51:27 localhost kernel: dvb-usb: will use the device's hardware PID filter (table count: 15). Nov 23 11:51:27 localhost kernel: DVB: registering new adapter (WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)). Nov 23 11:51:27 localhost kernel: DVB: registering frontend 0 (WideView USB DVB-T)... Nov 23 11:51:27 localhost kernel: input: IR-receiver inside an USB DVB receiver as /class/input/input3 Nov 23 11:51:27 localhost kernel: dvb-usb: schedule remote query interval to 300 msecs. Nov 23 11:51:27 localhost kernel: dvb-usb: WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom) successfully initialized and connected. Nov 23 11:51:29 localhost kernel: dvb-usb: recv bulk message failed: -110 Nov 23 11:51:31 localhost udevd-event[3312]: wait_for_sysfs: waiting for '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb4/4-6/4-6:1.1/bus' failed Nov 23 11:51:37 localhost kernel: drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c: timeout initializing reports Nov 23 11:51:37 localhost kernel: input: Digital TV Receiver Digital TV Receiver as /class/input/input4 Nov 23 11:51:37 localhost kernel: input: USB HID v1.10 Keyboard [Digital TV Receiver Digital TV Receiver] on usb-0000:00:1d.7-6 20. The next step is to ensure that you have the stuff you need to actually be able to watch TV. For me, I installed the following using urpmi: dvb-apps dvbsnoop dvbstream dvbtune libdvb kaffeine mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-fonts win32-codecs (from the PLF site, http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/) 21. Fire up kaffeine and you should get prompted to select your local TV transmitter, after which you can follow through the channel search wizard. Don't know the name of your local TV transmitter? No problem, take a look here: http://www.dtg.org.uk/retailer/coverage.html Enter your UK postcode and the site will tell you which is your nearest transmitter. <note added on December 7th 2006> 22. If you have the msec package installed, and I believe this gets installed by default now in Mandriva, you'll eventually find that the permissions on /dev/devb/* get altered so that all devices are owned by user root, group video and have permissions set to 660. This means that when you try to tune a channel, you'll get a 'permission denied' error. The solution is to edit /etc/group as root and add your regular user into the 'video' group. In my case, I changed the relevant line in /etc/group from: video:x:82:vdr,mythtv to: video:x:82:vdr,mythtv,phile and this sorted my permissions problem. </note added on December 7th 2006> Happy DVB-ing! I'd suggest you now go off and read up on some of the stuff on the LinuxTV site. One handy hint which had me stumped for a while...you will inevitably find yourself in a position where you're trying to generate a 'channels.conf' file for use with other apps. All of the docs and howtos out there say that you should use a program called 'scan' to do this. Under Mandriva 2007, this program is installed as 'scandvb' and is part of the dvp-apps RPM package. Just substitute 'scandvb' wherever you see an instruction to use the 'scan' command. Please post back here with any success/failure stories based on these instructions.

I've been able to get one of these working in Mandriva 2007 without too much trouble. I'll post a detailed write-up of the process as soon as I can, but it definitely works for me using a recently-purchased Freecom USB-DVB-T stick with a hardware id of 14aa-0225 just like yours. Sorry to 'tease' like this, but it's late (or early, depending upon how you look at it!) and I need to get some sleep - check back here in the next 48 hours and I should have been able to post more information by then!