Lee Maguire » Linux

Mounting the K750 under Linux

Lee — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 23:42:18 +0000

Mainly for the benefit of search engine users, here’s the HAL fdi I’m using for the Sony Ericsson k750 under Linux.

 



  
        
          
            memory_stick
            false
            
             portable_audio_player
            generic
storage
            info.udi
            audio/mpeg audio/x-mp3 audio/aac
          
        
        
          
            k750
            Sony Ericsson k750
            true
            false

Shuffle redux

Lee — Sun, 08 May 2005 21:42:05 +0000

And talking of Linux hardware – much of the (minimal) fussing about getting the iPod shuffle working under Linux that I mentioned back in March is now unnecessary. The version of gtkpod in Debian/unstable now has shuffle support – and the automount process can be simplified by a simple xml file I modified from development files and dropped into /etc/hal/fdi/local-ipod.fdi. So I guess that for later distros you won’t even have to do that.

The following allows shuffle to be automounted (based on its USB id) under /media/ipod (where both gtkpod and rhythmbox look for it). (updated 2005-11-23)

 



  
    
      
        
          
            ipod
            iPod: 
            info.product
            true
            false
             portable_audio_player
            storage
            ipod
            info.udi
            audio/mpeg audio/x-mp3 audio/aac
            true

Random hardware

Lee — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 11:45:35 +0000

I was given a brand-new iPod shuffle this weekend (thanks Che!). Not only do I now get the fresh experience of owning technology that’s not already considered obsolete, I also haven’t owned a piece of personal stereo technology since the crappy generic-brand personal cassette player I had when I was 13.

While I’m not a Apple design fetishist, it is a lovely little object. And its smaller, cheaper, simpler approach is more in line with my own tastes in personal tech than the previous models. And the lanyard will make it ideal for some kind of… exercise. Importing the high-octane electronica soundtracks from first-person shooters and racing games should do the trick.

And really, it only looks like a sinister techno-cult talisman when worn over a black turtleneck.

Unlike, well, almost everyone I know, I’ve never spent weeks ripping and encoding my CD collection. I could never spare the cycles to run MP3 players, so I let the Napster revolution pass me by. And since I don’t use Windows or OSX at home, I’m certainly not going to be using iTunes any time soon.

So my first job was to rip my CDs - apt-get sound-juicer, a fairly straight-forward CD ripper for Gnome. Sound Juicer, by default, rips tracks into to the hacker’s choice audio format, Ogg Vorbis. Sadly the Shuffle won’t play these directly, so .oggs would need to be transcoded before being synced to the iPod. And juicer doesn’t support Apple’s favoured MPEG4 AAC codec (although an FAAC plugin exists for the gstreamer framework it’s built on). So it’s back to the lingua franca of digital audio distribution, MP3.

But, of course, the pure Debian distribution doesn’t support MP3 encoding out-of-the-box (as it were). But like various other codecs and other programs affected by patent issues, support can be added by adding a repository (tainted with the stench of practical compromise) to your apt sources.list.

But even admitting these sites exist is a betrayal of the free software movement. So I won’t.

But, since the devil makes all the best digital media, you’ll probably already have added one, and thus the following should do the trick:

apt-get install gstreamer0.8-lame

The next task is getting linux to talk to the iPod. Fortunately, upon plugging it into a USB socket, it presents itself as a virginal USB mass storage device and thus appears as a fresh SCSI disk on the system. Since it uses the variable naming of the removable SCSI devices, we need to set up a dynamic symlink using udev by adding the following into /etc/udev/rules.d/local.rules:

# iPod shuffle

BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="iPod", KERNEL="sd*", NAME="%k", SYMLINK="ipod"

Then mkdir /media/ipod, add the following to /etc/fstab and restart udev

/dev/ipod /media/ipod vfat rw,user,noauto,sync 0 0

I then apt-got gtkpod which gives a graphical playlist manager allowing syncing. Sadly the latest release predates the launch of the shuffle, and it emerges that the shuffle uses a different database than the disk based iPods, thus older software can read the data on the shuffle, but it can’t modify it.

Fortunately for me a short-term solution has appeared, since those dedicated ipod-owning perl-hackers have, this last weekend, released GNUpod version 0.98, collection of ipod management scripts now with Shuffle support.

mount /media/ipod gnupod_INIT.pl -m /media/ipod # on the first use only gnupod_addsong.pl -m /media/ipod ~/Music/Foo/*.mp3 mktunes.pl -m /media/ipod umount /media/ipod

And I’m all set. Hurrah!

Networking UML under Debian

Lee — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 15:38:02 +0000

I recently needed to setup the networking on a Debian box with three network cards on three different networks, each assigned three IP addresses – two of which would be assigned to taps for UML hosts.

It was actually a little more complex that I was expecting. Of the few configuration examples I’ve seen on the web, none of them adequately covered the mixing bridges and tunnels in “/etc/network/interfaces”.

Weirdly, even though I’ve been using it for a few years, it’s only now that I’m beginning to grok ifupdown (the Debian way of configuring network interfaces). It’s a powerful, simple, and extensible enough to support fairly complex actions with simple, elegant, configurations. For example, ”uml_proxy_*” handles inserting static routes and ARP proxying.

The downside, sadly, is that it’s near impossible to provide any definitive documentation of “interfaces” – good luck finding documentation for ”uml_proxy_*”!

The following “/etc/network/interfaces” requires the extensions provided by resolvconf, uml-utilities, and bridge-utils to run correctly.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto umltap0_0 umltap0_1
auto umltap1_0 umltap1_1
auto umltap2_0 umltap2_1

iface umltap0_0 inet static
        tunctl_user uml
        address 192.0.2.30
        netmask 255.255.255.240

iface umltap0_1 inet static
        tunctl_user uml
        address 192.0.2.26
        netmask 255.255.255.240

iface umltap1_0 inet static
        tunctl_user uml
        address 10.140.1.3
        netmask 255.255.255.0

iface umltap1_1 inet static
        tunctl_user uml
        address 10.140.1.4
        netmask 255.255.255.0

iface umltap2_0 inet static
        tunctl_user uml
        address 10.51.1.143
        netmask 255.255.255.0

iface umltap2_1 inet static
        tunctl_user uml
        address 10.51.1.144
        netmask 255.255.255.0

auto br0 br1 br2
iface br0 inet static
        pre-up ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 promisc up
        address 192.0.2.27
        netmask 255.255.255.240
        network 192.0.2.16
        broadcast 192.0.2.31
        gateway 192.0.2.17
        bridge_fd 0
        bridge_hello 0
        bridge_stp off
        bridge_ports eth0 umltap0_0 umltap0_1
        uml_proxy_arp 192.0.2.30 192.0.2.26
        uml_proxy_ether br0
        dns-search example.com
        dns-nameservers 192.0.2.17
        post-down ifconfig eth0 down

iface br1 inet static
        pre-up ifconfig eth1 0.0.0.0 promisc up
        address 10.140.1.2
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 10.140.1.0
        broadcast 10.140.1.255
        bridge_fd 0
        bridge_hello 0
        bridge_stp off
        bridge_ports eth1 umltap1_0 umltap1_1
        uml_proxy_arp 10.140.1.3 10.140.1.4
        uml_proxy_ether br1
        post-down ifconfig eth1 down

iface br2 inet static
        pre-up ifconfig eth2 0.0.0.0 promisc up
        address 10.51.1.142
        netmask 255.255.255.240
        bridge_fd 0
        bridge_hello 0
        bridge_stp off
        bridge_ports eth2 umltap2_0 umltap2_1
        uml_proxy_arp 10.51.1.143 10.51.1.144
        uml_proxy_ether br2
        up route add -net 10.51.0.0/16 gw 10.51.1.129 br2
        post-down ifconfig eth2 down

Treason uncloaked!

Lee — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:39:44 +0000

I just got an email from logcheck consisting of lines similar to the following:

kernel: TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 218.69.139.x:43090/80 shrinks window 1468046648:1468049476. Repaired.

Treason uncloaked! Fantastic. Another unintelligible, jocular message flagging unusual error conditions. Very “printer on fire”. (Either that, or a babelfish translation of something that sounded reasonable. And to be fair, you’ll only see it if TCP debugging is turned on.)

Considering the use of the exclamation mark, it’s not clear if the uncloaking of treason (mine or others?) is anything to worry about. ”Repaired” is reassuring, I suppose - but might this a symptom of a fresh exploit? A new worm?

Googling suggests that it’s a bugfix from linux 2.4.7 for dealing with broken TCP implementations. The code explains itself as:


  /* Receiver dastardly shrinks window. Our retransmits
   * become zero probes, but we should not timeout this
   * connection. If the socket is an orphan, time it out,
   * we cannot allow such beasts to hang infinitely.
   */

I especially like the use of “dastardly” in the comments. From now on kernel messages, for me, will have voice of an announcer on some pulpy 30s radio serial. “Who knows what evil lurks in the packets of men? RFC3514 knows…”.