[wplug] [wplug-announce] The Open Pitt, Issue 9

Vance Kochenderfer vkochend at nyx.net
Fri Feb 18 08:12:17 EST 2005


                              THE OPEN PITT
      What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania

===========================================================================
Issue 9                       February 2005                   www.wplug.org
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In this issue:
  Wireless Tunes
  January Roundup
  Hot Off the Grill...
  Linux in All the Unusual Places

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                               Coming Events

Feb. 19: Tutorial, Topic: System Administration.  10am to 3pm, 1507
         Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
Mar. 5:  Central Pennsylvania Linux Users Group Security Conference.  10am
         to 6:30pm, Messiah College, Grantham, PA (registration required)
         <http://cplug.net/conference/>
Mar. 12: Installfest.  10am to 5pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
Mar. 19: General User Meeting.  10am to 2pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU

                    The public is welcome at all events
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Wireless Tunes
by Drew Celley

I've heard it said that one in ten Americans has an MP3 player of some
sort.  That's a pretty big number, though I'm not one of them.  Why
wouldn't I have an MP3 player?  I built my own portable radio station
instead.

I was inspired by a _Wired_ article about the Radio Re-Volt project at the
Walker Art Center in Minneapolis <http://projects.walkerart.org/radio/>
where people are creating their own radio stations using tiny inexpensive
transmitters and a little creativity.  The FCC is quite prohibitive when
it comes to broadcasting in commercial airspace, so while I will skip over
the free-speech activism issue, I suggest everyone do a quick bit of
reading through their message boards, understand the issues, and and read
what other bloggers have to say about it before powering up your
transmitter.

After reading the above and doing a little bit of research, I found
instructions at Jiggybyte on how to hack a popular MP3 player accessory,
the Belkin Tunecast II FM transmitter
<http://www.jiggybyte.com/tunecast.htm>.  I went promptly to EBay and
bought a used one for under $20.  When it arrived, I immediately cracked
it open, cut out the antenna wire, and soldered a full wavelength-long
piece of wire onto the thing (about 9 1/2 feet), using the instructions
from Jiggybyte as a guide.

I had to scan the dial with a couple of radios to find a quiet spot on the
FM dial which would let me hear it clearly enough.  The Tunecast is most
useful in this scenario, because it lets you choose the transmission
frequency across the range of 88-108 Mhz.  Most little FM jobs for MP3
players do one of 4 stations, and they don't have a backlit LCD display.

After all this, I plugged the Tunecast into my laptop and fired up my
favorite player.  It just plays, and the Tunecast converts the audio
signal from the headphone jack into an FM radio signal.  From there, I use
a $4 FM radio and a pair of headphones and can navigate up to about 50
feet away without too much interference.

If you're interested in simulating a real radio station, take a look at
<http://ross.sourceforge.net/>.   It's got lots of good links and
discussion about open source software for radio automation and related
topics.  I am kind of excited about using Festival's text-to-speech
synthesizer for RSS feeds between songs, a la
<http://geekradio.sourceforge.net/>.

Lucky for me, nobody knows my tiny $4 FM radio isn't an MP3 player, and I
think I like it that way.

Drew Celley lives on the South Side and runs wifimaps.com and
pghwireless.net.  He has written for O'Reilly and Associates and other
publications.

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January Roundup

Jan. 15 General User Meeting: Ryan Brown of The Burgh Live
<http://www.tblive.com/> spoke about User Mode Linux (UML).  UML is "Linux
on Linux"--it allows you to run multiple guest instances of the Linux
kernel as if they were ordinary userspace programs.  This can be useful if
you are doing kernel development; a crash will take down the guest, but
not the whole machine.  Or you can divide a large server into virtual
hosts and safely give customers root access to the guests.  Ryan covered
issues like selecting a root filesystem, networking, and utilities for
administration.

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Hot Off the Grill...

Recent software releases

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 revision 4 was released on January 1.  This update
adds security and bug fixes to the stable "woody" series.

Mandrakesoft announced on January 4 the availability of two new products:
Corporate Desktop 3.0 and Corporate Server 3.0.  Featuring the 2.6 Linux
kernel and a 5-year support lifetime, they are intended to compete in the
marketplace with the major enterprise distributions.

The FreeBSD Project released FreeBSD 4.11 for i386 and Alpha architectures
on January 25.  It is moving to "Errata Branch" status with only
well-tested fixes to be distributed hereafter.  New development has been
shifted to the 5.x branch.

Despite his recent illness, Patrick Volkerding put out Slackware 10.1 on
February 2.  It includes the latest versions of X11R6 and KDE and fully
supports both the 2.4.29 and 2.6.10 kernels.

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Linux in All the Unusual Places

It's no secret that most desktop PCs are capable of running Linux.  Here
we review some other places it's being used--or can be made to run.

IBM
In late 2000, IBM made big headlines by announcing a billion-dollar
investment in Linux development.  They followed this up by supporting
Linux across all their server lines, up to and including zSeries
mainframes.  Now IBM is offering two Linux-only servers: the OpenPower 710
and 720.  Based on IBM's POWER5 processors and starting at under $5,000,
these are squarely aimed at the small and medium business market.  Your
choice of SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be
pre-loaded.

Silicon Graphics
SGI has put a great amount of effort into its high-performance Altix line,
shipped standard with Linux.  The Altix features a NUMA (non-uniform
memory access) architecture where each processor has memory that is local
to it, but still available to other CPUs.  This falls somewhere in between
an SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) machine where all CPUs share a common
memory pool and a Beowulf cluster, where each node has its own separate
memory.  The Altix is geared towards scientific computing applications. 
WPLUGers had the opportunity to see an Altix 350 when Michael Skowvron
brought one to show off at the January meeting.

Hewlett-Packard
HP is still struggling to find its way and work out its product lines
after merging with Compaq.  Last autumn saw HP dip its toes into the Linux
pool with the release of the $1,200 nx5000 laptop running SUSE 9.1.  All
the hardware features are supported, though the modem, wireless card, and
DVD playback require proprietary software to operate.

Laptops, Laptops, Laptops
If HP's limited offering doesn't satisfy you, here are three other sources
for your mobile Linux fix: Linare, Linux Certified, and EmperorLinux. 
They sell either whitebox laptops with Linux newly installed, or
name-brand laptops which have had that other operating system replaced
with Linux.  The founder of EmperorLinux boasts a collection of thousands
of "Designed for Microsoft Windows" stickers, each one ripped from a
laptop he's rescued.  <http://www.linare.com/>
<http://www.linuxcertified.com/> <http://www.emperorlinux.com/>

TiVo
Only a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of TiVo owners
know--or care--that the box on top of their television set has a
customized Linux distribution under the hood.  All they know is that it
works.  But there are always those who don't believe in leaving well
enough alone, and they've set up sites like
<http://www.tivofaq.com/hack/>, <http://www.tivocommunity.com/>, and
<http://tivo.samba.org/> to share their hacks.  Perhaps the most common is
to increase a TiVo's capacity with a larger hard drive, but you can also
run arbitrary Linux binaries.

Linksys
Like the TiVo, the user interface presented by the Linksys WRT54G wireless
router doesn't betray the fact that it's running Linux.  While its limited
processing power and memory mean that you won't be using it for serious
number-crunching, it is perfect for running lightweight services you want
to be visible on your network.  A wealth of information is available at
<http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/LinksysWrt54g>.  Sveasoft sells
drop-in replacement firmware at <http://www.sveasoft.com/>.

Macintosh
It may be a surprise to learn that you can buy a Mac with Linux
pre-installed--and Apple doesn't even mind.  Terra Soft Solutions offers
its newly-released Yellow Dog Linux 4.0.1 distribution dual-booting with
Mac OS X on the iMac, Power Mac, iBook, PowerBook, Xserve, and even the
new Mac mini!  <http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/>

iPod
When first released, the iPod only worked with Mac machines, and now has
Windows support.  Of course Linux hackers couldn't stand being left out,
and have developed programs like GNUpod and GTKpod to talk to the devices.

But some saw an even bigger challenge: getting the iPod _itself_ to run
Linux.  Compiled for the iPod's ARM processor, applications available for
iPodLinux include chess, Tetris, Asteroids, and oh--it plays music, too.
<http://www.ipodlinux.org/>

===========================================================================
The Open Pitt is published by the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group
<http://www.wplug.org/top/>

Editors: Elwin Green, Vance Kochenderfer

Copyright 2005 Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group.  Any article in
this newsletter may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, provided it is
not changed and attribution is given to the author and WPLUG.
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