McGivrer's Home - Frenchy soul about life

Feb 3 / 3:50pm

Acer Revo 3610, Ubuntu 9.10 and XBMC !

For my 37th anniversary (sic) my dear honey wife offers me a brand new ACER REVO 3610 with an Atom N330 with 2GB RAM and 320GB HD, running the full featured and beautifull new Windows 7 from our friends from Redmond Firm. Totaly excited, the Geek in me connect the "box" to its TV and VGA flat screen and start playing with the small "beast".

Playing HD video on a 40"Samsung LCD is incredible fluid and smooth ! Microsoft HD player work very weel.

But but but, Windows 7 wifi Atheros drivers are not so powerfull and, due to low power of my Wifi Box, and due to long distance between it a the Revo, only (40% of power) prevent Wifi from well working :( and can't connect without a "low connectivity" status.

ok.

Where is my Ubuntu USB key ?

Starting my Live Ubuntu 9.10 on the Revo and... WHAT ? all is working out of the box ! Including the not working Wifi in the Win7 OS (due to long distance between my internet box and the Revo) !!

So, only listening to my heart, I decided to install Linux Ubuntu 9.10 in dual boot with Win7 (we never know...).

And cliking on the "Install Ubuntu on my Disk" icon onto the Live Desktop, I started the Quick Install process.

Reboot

And ...

Freezing and blinking on the "old text mode" console, asking for user to logon. but no keyboard and no mouse !

Digging the web with my laptop, i've found this very interresting post explaining how to install Ubuntu on the Revo with Boxee. And their is 2 most interresting things:

One is about HDMI Audio, about using the console version of the alsamixer to get it work by "un-muting" the "IEC958 1" output canal. Without this activation, my Revo was mute !
The second was in comments of this post, discribing the exact symptoms of my problem with the blinking screen: Don't install from the Live desktop, but directly from the USB key initial menu, (second obtion in the displayed menu, just after selecting the prefered language).

So, I just have to restart the Ubuntu install process and it will work ?

All my hopes were based on these small comments, pray and re-install...

So after 2 tries, the good way consists in creating an USB key without persistance, and on menu of Usb live key, select direct "installation" (second item in the menu).

And it Rocks !!!

After first boot on the brand new install, install the last version of the NVIDIA driver and all work well, even the HD Video reading !

Just for your information, to install such driver, follow this short lines of commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys CEC06767
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-190-modaliases nvidia-glx-190  nvidia-settings-190

Then to install XBMC, just go and run this lines into a gnome-terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc

Good luck, and have fun

Comments (0)

Jan 20 / 2:27am

SCRUM and Agility process for big project

Today, I'm going to attend to a workshop based on agility methodology apply to big project management.
Try to give feed back soon !

Filed under // agile agility management methodology project scrum

Comments (0)

Dec 28 / 4:17pm

'Wish you A merry Christmas !

Just a small post to wish all the people a merry christmas and an happy new year for 2010..
Just have to wait for 2 days and we will switch to a new SF year ! If we follow the famous book "2010: odyssey two" from author
Arthur C. Clarke we would have been on Moon and start traveling accross our Solar System, and installed a
Mars Base Camp... Where are NASA, ESA and other occidental actors ?

Will Indian or Chinese space agencies reach first these great targets ?

Some credits for the photos:
1. 2010: odyssey two - first british edition 1982 found on wikipedia
2. Mars Explorer - ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
3. Mars Rover - a NASA artist's view

Click here to download:

Wish_you_A_merry_Christmas.zip (144 KB)

Comments (0)

Nov 30 / 2:55pm

Iceberg Office

Working in a cold atmosphere is not so easy... cOLD Hands on the keyboard and mouse often input wrong words and left click n wrong place ;) Dear mister president, would you swith on the warm AC, please ?

Filed under // hot iceberg office switch on warmer

Comments (0)

Nov 30 / 2:33pm

Typography and the Web

Here is the most interresting presentation I've ever red on this hot subject: how to integrate types into your own web site or into your customer's website, without falling into the standard Verdana, MS Trebuchet, Tahoma, Serif and other fonts already installed, ready to use on each desktop computers ?

Parts of the answer are in the following sharepoint :

Beautiful Web Typography v5.3 Edge of the Web presentation

View more documents from Pascal Klein.

Filed under // design font-faces fonts types web

Comments (0)

Nov 16 / 1:35pm

My Land !

Is our land not so beautiful ?

Filed under // auvergne country france parc des volcans view

Comments (0)

Nov 3 / 7:35am

Migrate to Ubuntu for VirtualBox Purpose

To optimize resources usage, we've decided to use virtual machines on our development workstation, first to obey, delpoy one time and run multiple times, and in a second time, to have a workload gain during team assembling.

We've first used VMWare. But due to some bugs and hardware overload, we switch to VirtualBox.

And here, we match exactly the need and the tool ! A last issue must be corrected, and it's directly linked to one of the limitiation on the Host OS : Windows XP and the RAM limit to 3Gb.

So an idea raise deep in my brain: why not switching to an other OS without such limitation : Linux ?

A new choice is now offer to our team: Debian or Ubuntu ?

As far as I know, Ubuntu rely on Debian, so this is not really a technical choice, but usability and accessibility choice. And according to my own experience with both of the systems, my opinion is going to Ubuntu with it's strong support from Canonical and all the community, and particularly the french one (because I'm french :).

Anyway, I'm studying a small prototype to install an Ubuntu OS (9.10, maybe) on each workstation as a host system, and test communication capabilities of this with the Enteprise environement like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office... yes, in fact mainly Microsoft products.

The last release of Ubuntu, Karmic Koala 9.10 is particularly sexy on its desktop decoration and accessibility, and I'm sure that all my collegues will enjoy this new OS.

The subject is a litlle bit more complex because of the enterprise infrastructure ans its constraints: authentification, file sharing, etc...I'm sure that a lot of this feature have already been resolved.

So stay tuned, in a few time, I'll publish some good screenshots.

Comments (0)

Nov 1 / 10:12am

Next games in my collection

Scanning sometime last hits from the game industry, I'm fed off with big blockbusters, the ones that everybody get and play with !

Having some game experience with smallest ones. Here are some of the next ones that will populate my own collection:

Wet, an action-shooter game. no brand new thing in this game: only a Good game to have fun, shooting bad guy's ;)
Risen, the son of Fable 2 and Gothic. Technicaly perfect, it seems to be a very good RPG.
Magna Carta II, after a good experiment on PS2 some years ago with "Tears of Blood", the comeback of the korean rpg style is a well skilled one.

Click here to download:

X360_next_games.zip (1367 KB)

Filed under // console games next x360 Xbox360

Comments (0)

Oct 18 / 9:45am

Gnome Shell

One of the next best evolution of gnome 3 has a name: Gnome Shell
It's a great change in the desktop concept. On the same screen, you are able to launch application, find last document, create, delete, select a virtual desktop in an all-in-on full integrated 3D interface.

Welcome in the next generation of the Linux Desktop.