Traveling, Wifi and USB

I set up my Thinkpad X24 as a dual-boot configuration. Aside from some video experiments in Cinelerra, I haven’t done much with it.

While traveling, I noticed that nobody is using 802.11a/b. They’re only using 802.11g. So I picked up a little USB wireless adapter, to try to get wireless working. I didn’t have a CDROM drive, so I figured that ensuring that it worked on Linux was important.

So I went into BestBuy and did a search on the chipset…. Bingo. The Hawking HWUG1 adapter seems to be supported. It even does promiscuous sniffing and stuff.

Anxiously, I take it back to my car, ready to try to get on to some free access points. I plug the thing in to the back of my machine…


[ 391.688000] usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 392.172000] ieee80211_init: failed to initialize WME (err=-17)
[ 392.184000] iwlwifi_rc80211_simple: Unknown symbol iwlwifi_ieee80211_rate_control_unregister
[ 392.184000] iwlwifi_rc80211_simple: Unknown symbol iwlwifi_sta_info_put
[ 392.184000] iwlwifi_rc80211_simple: Unknown symbol iwlwifi_sta_info_get
[ 392.184000] iwlwifi_rc80211_simple: Unknown symbol iwlwifi_ieee80211_rate_control_register
[ 392.192000] wmaster0: Selected rate control algorithm ’simple’
[ 392.300000] usbcore: registered new interface driver rt2500usb
[ 392.304000] usbcore: registered new interface driver rt73usb
[ 392.600000] phy0 -> rt2500usb_enable_radio: Error - Register initialization failed.


Ugh. Just try to figure that one out without an Internet connection.

So I boot Windows. It seems to want that driver CD for which I have no CDROM drive.

Blegh.

A few days later I found a student who was able to transfer the contents of my CD to a USB keyfob where I was able to pull the drivers.

Ubuntu: 0
Windows: 0

Windows is working fine with wireless now. I have no time to figure it out in Linux.

Linux is a Tool and a Philosophy

I completely give up on the notion that Linux is superior on the desktop.

It’s not.

No advocate will be able to convince me otherwise. Especially if they “haven’t used Windows in years”. I’m not going to spend time trying to convey the vastly superior performance of my machine under Windows XP than under Ubuntu. I’ve encountered this problem for years under multiple versions of Windows and I’m not willing to compare it any further. It’s not helpful to anyone.

Advocates do a huge disservice to Linux when they make broad claims of ease of use and performance.

That said. Linux is useful to me because I administer Linux servers professionally. It’s a tool. It has particular characteristics and features which can help me. It has many characteristics and features which hinder me.

Now on to getting Ubuntu to use LUKS on my X24.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedFilesystemHowto7

I Add/Removed gparted, created a /boot, did a cp -a to get stuff into the new /boot, did a little dance to get rid of the old /boot fired up grub-install.

I made some mistakes along the way, but I was able to fix them by:

• booting with the LiveCD,
• mounting on /mnt/root and /mnt/root/boot, then
• editing my /mnt/root/boot/grub/menu.lst
• running grub –root-directory=/mnt/root /dev/sda

My old menu options looked like this:


title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=5f0be2ea-329e-476b-91b5-2320b9f20f23 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
quiet


My new ones look like this:


title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root (hd0,3)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=5f0be2ea-329e-476b-91b5-2320b9f20f23 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
quiet


My partition table now looks like this:


root@pigeon:~# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0×00043c78

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2433 19543041 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 2434 4866 19543072+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 4880 30401 205005465 5 Extended
/dev/sda4 4867 4879 104422+ 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order


Video Stablizing Filters, Advocacy and Feature Lists

I was just experimenting with Premiere’s capabilities and I’m quite disappointed with the stabilizer. It’s crap.

• Top Left: Adobe Premiere Elements (filling using background), 45 Minutes to process

• Top Right: Deshaker through Virtualdub and AVI Synth: about 50 minutes to process (2×25 minute passes)
• Bottom Left: Power Director (hey, some website with a probably fake review suggested it), 3 minutes (!)
• Bottom Right: Unfiltered (as I say in the video, I think I was dehydrated)

(The 4-way image was produced using AVI Synth… awesome program. )

It seems my expectations are set way too high by Deshaker. As an example of when FOSS beats out the commercial apps, VirtualDub and AVISynth are GPL, although the filter appears to be closed but free for distribution and use. For the Linux zelots, VirtualDub and AviSynth (2.x) are good examples of FOSS packages not available on Linux.

However… it seems that Cinelerra may have the Depan filter which can be used to track a fixed object and alter the borders of the image in order to remove motion from a clip.

http://avisynth.org.ru/depan/depan.html

From the website, Depan is a half implementation of Deshake. DePanEstimate is required to figure out how DePan will move the panning. It’s unclear to me that Cinelerra has this aspect of the filter, but there’s an awesome demo out there of something slightly related:

Now that’s good advocacy. Good documentation would be more useful, but good advocacy gives me some hope.. better than “do it yourself freeloader” or “try a 5-figure commercial package”

Unfortunately, this means means trying to install Cinelerra again. I have to install Ubuntu on my notebook anyway, I may have to have a peek at this silly Ubuntu Studio distribution.

The Promise of Ubuntu 8.04, Data Recovery and Video Editing

There are some promising improvements in Ubuntu 8.04. I’ll have to try an upgrade, maybe even to fix the boot sequence of my Linux drive (after my repairs, it is reporting Error 17 on boot). Simplified X11 configuration, support for multiple monitors of differing sizes, and that new audio system are all promising.

I might just need to fire it up today just so that I can try taking a binary dump of a flash card to try to recover all the photos and videos I lost. The data recovery worked partially. I lost all my MP3s. Most were truncated, all the file names were lost and the organization of them. The same unfortunately applies for a detailed set of films and photos I took of some archaeological sites in Crete, and a hiking trip through the Samarian Gorge.

I’m still very bitter about that.

In the meantime, I’m downloading Adobe Premiere elements. Can somebody explain to me why I might want to consider comparing it to Broadcast2000/Cinelerra/Open Movie Editor

You can watch the history of Linux video editing unfold with these three apps:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/08/11/magazine/broadcast2000.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinelerra

http://www.openmovieeditor.org/index.html

Of course I can’t actually get it to work, and nothing in Linux seems to have a deshake filter, so while it is almost there, it took 8 years to get there, and there are free tools in Windows that get most of the job done, but still leave me quite willing to fork out $100 for a reasonable tool. Wine doesn’t seem to cut it for the free Windows tools.

Film Gimp/Cinepaint and Open Movie Editor might help me in 2012.  In 2008, I just don’t have time to think about it.

Time to take the Richard Stallman Philosophy. I think it was Richard Stallman, the idea that if there is no free software available to do what you need to do, then it’s reasonable to use commercial software.

…48 hours later, the horror of GPM

From past experience, I unplugged the keyboard so that I wouldn’t accidentally hit enter.  Photorec stops the process without asking for confirmation.

When I got home, I decided to jiggle the mouse so that the screen blanking would clear.  I accidentally touched the right-mouse-button.

Right-click to paste is demented.  Ditto for middle-click to paste.  It seems I highlighted a CR at some point.  BAM.  Quit.  No prompt.  Process over.

I guess before I restart the process, I’ll manually sift through the smoldering heap of 15,783 unnamed jpg files, 2,396 mp3s, 248 oggs and 95 movs to find out if my vacation photos and MP3 collection were recoverable or not.

…40 Hours Later, the Joy of NFS

For the past 40 hours or so, my little notebook has been serving an NFS volume to my desktop.  Both of them are running recovery CDs.  The desktop is running Photorec, the notebook is running an NFS server.

This morning, when I was looking for the power supply for my workstation, I pulled the cord and saw the little notebook turn off.

Unfortunately, the little notebook has no battery in it.  The existing battery got toasted ages ago.   40 hours into scouring a drive with that utility could be lost… if not for the fact that NFS and EXT3 are so absurdly robust.

I powered on the notebook, mounted the ext3 FS, edited the exports file, ran dhcpcd, and poof.  The NFS mount was restored to its former glory.

15 hours or so to go before I get to see what kind of images come out of a data recovery attempt on that mostly virgin drive.

a bad day.

So I backed everything up, rebuilt the OS and restored what I could.

What I could?

Yep.

For some reason my tar command got the first 40GB of my data, but stopped thereafter.  I don’t care so much about the recoverable stuff, and I got most of the unrecoverable stuff, but a complete, organized set of photos from Greece, my entire MP3 collection and a few other things are missing.

The photos tick me off the most.  I only have a copy of half of them on a drive that I originally unloaded a lot of them from and a few others on an SD card.  Burning this to disk was on the to-do-list

I’m experimenting with PhotoRec to scour my drive for jpg and mov files.  Yeah, a new OS was loaded on there, but we’ll see what I can get.   This thing is interesting from a forensic perspective.  Awesome tool.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

There are Two Copies…

… of the NTFS boot record. One at the beginning of the NTFS volume, one at the end.

http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/01/24/easily-restore-a-corrupt-ntfs-boot-sector/

“Could not find a valid backup boot sector”

Pah.

I found a recovery boot disk, it came with TestDisk 6.6.

• Recover boot sector
• search mft
• Rebuild Boot Sector

No go.  hmmm…

Downloaded 6.9

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

executable binary. Nice.

An exhaustive search using the tool found the second file table.  I was able to write out the partition table, although the machine still won’t boot.  Given this machine evolved from chaos more than being intelligently partitioned, and the resulting partition table doesn’t look quite right, I’m going to back up the contents of the drive onto that little 250GB notebook drive I just picked up before I go any further.*

This’ll take a while.

* yes, I know I should have taken a dd of the drive before doing anything…

Windows has Betrayed Me

I was getting so tired of fighting, that I simply had to try reactivating Windows. Something changed at the MS end, so the automated line worked just fine.

It was a breath of fresh air to be able to adjust my monitors to reflect my physical desktop layout, to hear more than one sound being played at a time, etc, etc, you’ve heard it all.

Anyway, for some reason, Windows tagged my Linux disk as a FAT12 disk and called it “C:”. This shifted all my Windows drive letters and trashed all my apps. Annoying. A bit of finagling, and a touch in the registry later, I managed to get it back to C:, but it would not boot properly.

Now while it is nice that Ubuntu gave me the option to boot Windows, it did not direct it to the Windows boot loader, it directed it to the OS boot. This means I’m SOL if I’m trying to get to the recovery console or safe mode.

So I pull out my grey-market DVD to try to get a recovery console together for Windows. Then I make a…. mistake.

fixboot. I’ve got to look into this. FAT12 encoded bits were vomited on to my pristine NTFS and EXT3 partitions. Stupid underdocumented Microsoft command line utils.

This includes a lot of personal data (there’s plenty backed up, but given that I was fighting with Linux to play sound properly and meet my basic needs for a month, backup was unfortunately not on the top of my mind. After all, do you *see* anything about backups in this blog?

The good news is that I merely toasted what I think would be the boot record, partition table and boot block. Most of NTFS and hopefully EXT3 is kept in the “middle” of the disk. Both my Windows boot partition and my Ubuntu partition are trashed. The partition table on the Ubuntu side is truly jibberish, but I have trouble imagining how Windows vomiting some FAT12 data on to a EXT3 and NTFS volume would result in *real* data loss. I’ll probably have to rebuild the OSes, but the data should be fine. It’ll just be a trick to figure out how exactly to extract it.

Playing an AVI

Okay. I did some flirting with the dark side again.

Somebody told me that I should see the film “Wickerman” but under no circumstances should I pay for it to contribute to the rottenness and depravity that is the film. It would be unethical, so I was directed to leech it through a torrent.

So, I leeched a nice 700MB AVI through a Torrent.

To play the AVI, I had a problem. There was a luminous multihued ghost image appearing on screen. I tried to manually adjust the video modes, but regardless of the app or the mode either it would show me nothing but a small rectangle of a letterbox in the middle of my screen, it would show me an image with a luminous multihued ghost image a few inches off to the left, or it would play back so slowly and unstable, that it was absurd. To top it all off, the audio would also play with that weird crackle or snap every minute or so.

I was frustrated. Very frustrated. I didn’t want to spend the night hacking with my machine, I just wanted to watch the fricking film so that I could see the horror which is a bad film.

So here’s how I watched the film. Something Linux just was utterly unable to do for me:

1. I copied the film to a USB key
2. I plugged the USB key into my circa 2002 X24 laptop
3. I plugged the 24″ monitor into my circa 2002 X24 laptop
4. I plugged my USB speakers into my circa 2002 X24 laptop
5. I installed Virtualdub, by clicking, downloading and running it

The machine doesn’t do USB 2.0 (it’s too old!), so I didn’t want to wait for it to copy back to the little notebook.

To top it off, when Linux copied the film TO the USB key, it didn’t close the device. Yeah, I was frustrated, but even after the LED on the drive stopped flashing, I was surprised that it didn’t actively try to sync removable devices. Maybe Windows does it by eliminating or continuously flushing the write cache. A write cache on a device which wasn’t around at boot time like that is a bit silly. It didn’t warn me about “unsafe device removal” nor did it offer a method obvious to me to flush the cache. The closest I could find was to right-click the drive icon and unmount it. I had to wait a fair while after the copying “completed” to be able to unmount it without a nebulous “this is in use” error.

Anyway. No word of a lie. Windows automatically set the USB speakers to my default, automatically set up mixing, automatically detected and started using my external monitor, warned me that I was using a USB 1.1 port for a 4GB USB key, and allowed me to install and run Virtualdub, all without even thinking about asking me to reboot.

The video played flawlessly right from the key. Flawlessly. Simultaneously driving a pair of USB speakers and reading the video driectly from the flash key. This machine has 1/4 the computing power, 1/100th the video computing power, yet it completely floored my modern Linux box for ease of use and performance.

I won’t conclude that Linux itself is crap. None of this has anything to do with anything I use Linux for on a regular basis professionally. As a server OS, it is awesome. As a server OS, you don’t touch ATI drivers, you don’t touch USB speakers, plug and play is not an issue, audio mixing is not an issue. You want simple, stable and reproducable. While Package managemnt and stupid config scripts have challenged that, for the mostpart, Linux still kicks ass there.

However, for the desktop, I’m deeply disappointed.