Sony VAIO VPCCB bluetooth driver problems

October 23, 2011 – 12:22 am

The Sony VAIO VPCCB2M0E/B was a recent purchase by someone I know. As always, a new laptop should have a clean installation so as to provide you with the performance you actually paid for. We all know how full of crap computers can be when switched on out of the box…

Bluetooth Troubles

Unfortunately as in this case, there is often a lot of trouble to be had when attempting to download drivers. Now, if you visit the Sony website and download all the related files you should be good, right? Wrong.

It seems Sony have decided to post the wrong driver for the hardware inside this laptop on their UK support site! They refer to a Broadcom device whilst the actual device is:

Atheros AR3011 Bluetooth(R) Adapter

So, if you’ve purchased this laptop and are looking for the best performance possible by installing Windows 7 64-bit – you’ll need a driver for the above instead. You can obtain one such driver here. Thanks to ^Fraggy^ for assistance on this one!

By daftykins | Posted in Hardware, Problem, Software, Windows | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Make Skype v5.5 forget your password

August 15, 2011 – 2:36 am

Just now I forgot to prevent Skype from remembering my password and username after a fresh install – I was rushing and didn’t pay attention to the tickboxes!

It doesn’t seem that there’s any easy way to remove the stored password from inside the program, so I decided to explore the program folder. Here on my old XP laptop, it’s stored in:

C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Windows username>\Application Data\Skype\<Your Skype username>\

Inside this folder is an XML configuration file called… config.xml ! Here’s an example of the beginning of this file…

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<config version=”1.0″ serial=”39″ timestamp=”1313370283.23″>
  <Lib>
    <Account>
      <Credentials3>…there’s a big long hash here…</Credentials3>
      <LastUsed>1313370271</LastUsed>
      <LocalData>42B09F7135F3BA</LocalData>
      <Migration>63</Migration>
      <OMigration>1</OMigration>
    </Account>

From the above, you can delete just the <Credentials3>…</Credentials3> line and your password will be removed from Skype! For other versions of Windows such as Vista / Windows 7 the path will be:

C:\Users\<Your Windows username>\AppData\Roaming\Skype\<Your Skype username>\

By daftykins | Posted in Software, Windows | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Screen rotation with Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu

April 26, 2011 – 3:10 am

I recently set up an old computer on another display, but due to a lack of free space on my desk I rotated it to portrait orientation. Because of this, I needed to rotate the desktop image in the Ubuntu installation to prevent turning my head 90° all the time! To do this, you can make use of the application xrandr. However, you first need to add the following Option line to the Device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to allow it:

Option         “RandRRotation” “true”

This changed my xorg.conf to appear as:

Section “Screen”
Identifier    “Default Screen”
DefaultDepth    24
EndSection

Section “Module”
Load    “glx”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier    “Default Device”
Driver    “nvidia”
Option    “NoLogo”    “True”
Option    “RandRRotation” “True”
EndSection

Once this is done and you restart X (you can just restart the computer if you’re uncomfortable with command line use), you can now run the following command from a terminal to rotate the screen, in my case to the left:

xrandr -o left

I can confirm that this works in both Lucid Lynx (10.04) and Maverick Meerkat (10.10). Perhaps you want to set this permanently? Run System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications and click Add. Within here, enter details such as the following screenshot shows:

startup app

Next time you restart, you’ll see a slight delay as the screen is rotated and Gnome’s panels are adjusted. Enjoy!

By daftykins | Posted in Linux, Software | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Adobe Flash Player v10.2 Linux Hardware Acceleration

April 21, 2011 – 6:18 pm

Since the release of Adobe’s 10.2 version of their infamous flash player, hardware acceleration has been added (albeit on limited hardware). In order to test it out, you’ll need to create a configuration file manually in /etc/adobe/ called mms.cfg containing the following line:

EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1

Now isn’t that memorable? Give it a try! If you’re not too comfortable at the command line and are running Ubuntu, here’s a friendly method:

  1. Run the terminal application from Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal
  2. Type: sudo mkdir /etc/adobe

    (Enter your password when prompted to do so, noting that you won’t see asterisks come up as you type it.)

  3. Type: sudo echo “EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1″ > /etc/adobe/mms.cfg

That’s it!

By daftykins | Posted in Browsers, Hardware, Linux, Software | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

ASRock Ion330 HT, XBMC Dharma (v10.0) & Ubuntu Lucid Lynx v10.04.1

December 24, 2010 – 9:56 pm

You may be claiming deja vu at this title, but I assure you this is a new post! That’s right, look closely and you’ll see that Dharma aka XBMC version 10.0 has been included along with the first respin of Lucid. That’s because Dharma has gone final! So, since it’s the holidays right now, I decided it’s high-time I got my HTPC running it :)

Installation

As always, start with a completely clean and fully updated installation of Lucid Lynx. Sure, Maverick Meerkat is out, but you don’t want to waste the LTS (Long Term Support) goodness of Lucid, am I right? Now although the newest kernel has just got one, unfortunately the CIR (remote receiver) driver only supports the kernel versions listed on the ASRock download page.

Installing the right Kernel

As of writing, the current kernel is 2.6.32-27 and ASRock provide a driver for 2.6.32-25 (amongst others) so -25 will need to be installed and set as the default. You can feel free to remove the kernel version your installation medium had. Using your favourite package manager, install:

linux-image-2.6.32-25-generic

Once that’s on, you’ll need to edit the following file in order to tell GRUB which kernel we want to boot as default on startup:

/etc/default/grub

Edit the line:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0

…to represent the menu item for the 2.6.32-25 kernel:

GRUB_DEFAULT=2

Now I chose 2 because that’s the third menu entry which corresponds with the kernel I want to run. Once you’ve updated the configuration, run the following to update the changes and generate /boot/grub/grub.cfg:

sudo update-grub

Restart and make sure that you booted into the -25 kernel. Note, you could have run update-grub sooner and checked the menu item order within /boot/grub/grub.cfg if you were unsure.

Installing the CIR drivers

Download the corresponding package here and unzip the 32-bit .deb from inside. Install it using your favourite method, making sure to set ‘none’ the first time you’re asked, followed by ‘Nuvoton transceivers/remotes’ the second time. Everything should complete cleanly, but to test the remote is working you can run this program in a terminal whilst pressing buttons:

irw

Use ctrl+c to break from this program. You should have seen the echo’d output of each button press, possibly multiple times given the remote repeats a lot.

Remote Configuration

It seems ASRock have implemented a fix for the missing remote control button (top left on the remote) and so now, the default mappings and remote configurations seem to do everything you need them to do! There might be an exception with the button at the very bottom of the remote, which I usually map to enable/disable subtitles. I will need to test properly to find out.

Because of this, I am most likely NOT going to provide any updated download for the remote configuration. If I spot any mappings I don’t like however, this may change.

Nvidia Drivers

Right now we’ve got the open-source nouveau driver loaded, that won’t do us much good for VDPAU goodness – thus no HD playback. The easiest way to get this installed is to run:

System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers

After a moment to check, you should see the nvidia driver and be able to install it. Restart once complete and you should be good to go. As of writing, version 195.36.24 went on. Run the nvidia-settings program to confirm from:

System -> Administration -> NVIDIA X Server Settings

You can also correct any overscan issues (is the picture overlapping off all four sides of your TV?) from here. Simply change to the page representing your display/TV and increase the Overscan Compensation value until it looks right.  In my case I increase it to 100 on the DFP-0 – (Sony TV) page.

Installing XBMC

Now we can install XBMC itself by adding the APT repository to our known sources:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc

Update the package cache as normal and then install:

xbmc

At this point, HD playback and XBMC operation is all good, but everything is a bit too quiet once again… but hold your horses! There’s a brilliant new way to sort this out :) .

Fixing Audio

The latest XBMC, Dharma, with its’ lovely new add-on system capable of downloading software and plugins automatically – has a special gift for us. This comes in the form of an audio mixer program called – Audio Mixer!

Using the Confluence skin, choose Programs from the home screen followed by Get More… then pick Program Add-ons and install the Audio Mixer. Now, within here I had to unmute my Front, Center, IEC958,0, IEC958,1 and IEC958 Default PCM levels in addition to setting Center to 100%. Once this is done, you can setup which audio type you have by changing the settings in XBMC under:

System -> Settings -> System -> Audio output

- Stereo over HDMI with decoding (no passthrough!):

- Audio output device: Custom
- Custom audio device: hdmi

- Dolby Digital (AC3) capable receiver – OFF
- DTS capable receiver – OFF

- Optical audio with passthrough:

- Audio output device: Defaults
- Passthrough output device: iec958

- Dolby Digital (AC3) capable receiver – ON
- DTS capable receiver – ON

- Surround over HDMI with passthrough:

UNABLE TO TEST FOR NOW.

Amusingly I didn’t need to change the “Audio output” entry for these two configurations to work, so you may want to experiment more. Unfortunately right now I don’t have the hardware to test HDMI passthrough, but I should be able to test one with a Denon AV Receiver amplifier soon.

Finishing up

To finalise things nicely, I would create a startup entry to automatically run XBMC when the user account logs in. During setup, I specified to have my user automatically log in, so my HTPC boots right into XBMC right off the bat!

On the networking front, I set a static IP address on the wired interface and made the box SSH ready by installing:

openssh-server

Other than disabling compiz on the account and any screensaver / power management settings, that’s about it!

Summary & Conclusions

I would like to extend my heartiest congratulations to the XBMC team for a job well done. The guys work tirelessly on this project and in my opinion have really cracked the manual frustration of skin, scraper and add-on installation/updating with Dharma.

I hope this guide assists some of you out there that want to run your ASRock HTPC as a full computer as well as an HTPC. Hopefully I’ll update soon with the success on the HDMI audio front, otherwise feel free to suggest any changes or comment if something didn’t work for you.

Enjoy!

By daftykins | Posted in Linux | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)