I’ve not really mentioned my Xbox gaming prior to now. The current title I’m playing is Splinter Cell: Conviction – and it’s definitely worth a try. There’s a demo available on Xbox Live marketplace, naturally.
Unfortunately the game is not so distinctly a stealth ‘em up as previous iterations, but it still possesses the same style seasoned fans have grown to love.
Now if only I could find someone to play some co-op with…
It’s music suggestion time again! First off is the debut album by Bombay Bicycle Club – “I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose”…
XX by… XX…
There’s also a brand new album by the Deftones out – entitled Diamond Eyes.
Give ‘em a try.
I’ve been running XBMC with Ubuntu Karmic Koala v9.10 for a while now, but once I got the Intel X-25V 40GB SSD, I wanted to combine the upgrade with a move to Lucid. This post documents the installation process. Although an SSD would already improve boot speed, I wanted to take advantage of all the recent changes Lucid has brought to the table, not to mention being a Long Term Support (LTS) release to boot!
Within this post I have documented the installation process.
There’s nothing hugely special to report about the installation of Lucid, which I did from a USB flash drive. I setup the partitioning like so:
After installation, I used Jockey (System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers) to install and enable the Nvidia graphics drivers. Whilst I would normally do this via CLI package management, I’ve yet to have it go smoothly just by installing the nvidia-current package. I’ve a feeling Jockey does something a little more fancy to disable the nouveau drivers at the same time.
It’s a good idea to run System -> Administration -> Nvidia X Server Settings (or just nvidia-settings for the application name) to confirm all is happy after you reboot in.
Now, to make the following steps a lot easier, I would recommend having the following packages installed already via your favourite package management tool.
The last package there is the VDPAU libraries. For some reason I was lacking these after installing the main Nvidia driver and needed them before hardware accelerated playback would function in XBMC.
You can skip past this step if you don’t have or make use of the built-in CIR remote receiver hardware on the ASRock Ion 330. ASRock have now kindly updated their site to include a downloadable package which supports installation on Lucid. You can get this download here.
After downloading this package, I extracted and installed the .deb package named thusly:
lirc-nct677x-1.0.4-ubuntu10.04.deb
Follow the installation procedures documented within the PDF on the ASRock website if you are unfamiliar with the procedure. You can test the remote by first opening a terminal window, Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal (or gnome-terminal) and typing:
irw
Now when you press buttons on the remote, you should see each input echod on-screen.
Ok, now you’re ready to install XBMC itself! The currently working version for me on Lucid is available via the Team XBMC SVN PPA which you can find here. Configuration instructions are laid out there, but all you need to do is run the following in a terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc-svn/ppa
This will automatically add the package mirror and grab the required key for PPA verification. Once this is done, you can simply install the meta-package, again with your favourite package management tool:
Once installed, you’ll find XBMC on the Applications -> Sound & Video menu. To confirm all is working well with VDPAU, play an HD video and press ‘o’ on your keyboard to see the text:
DC: FF-H264_VDPAU
If this reads FFMPEG, you’ve got something missing.
Now, you may be wondering why the ASRock remote button mappings don’t quite work that well in XBMC. The default configs available seemed to be mapped pretty incorrectly, so I’ve spent a lot of time mapping these myself. Once complete, I transplanted these custom files I’d been using with Karmic in place of the ones available. You can obtain my current version… here.
Here’s where these files need to be placed:
Once these are all in place, either restart the computer or open a terminal and run the following to restart LIRC in order to make use of the new configuration.
sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart
Now you’re all done, so get playing with XBMC! I must add, it rocks even more on an SSD 
After having a bit more time to make use of my HTPC, I’ve discovered a couple of problems, mainly with audio and seeking through video during playback. It’s quite possible these two are related.
Even after fiddling with the settings, I can only get an analog stereo or a surround sound (passthrough audio) video playing during one launch of XBMC. If I play one type (e.g. an HD film with a dolby digital audio track), stop it, then attempt to play a normal stereo sound video – I will get nothing. There won’t even be any UI sounds at this point.
When this happens, I have to close and re-run XBMC to get audio back. Apparently removing pulseaudio will most likely solve this, but I haven’t tried this yet.
I play all my content over a gigabit network connection, from SMB/CIFS mounts to my file server. I won’t bore you with the stats of the storage volume there, but it can max out gigabit at 120MB/sec+ when reading. During HD video file playback under Lucid, it takes a good few seconds to sync and start playback back if i skip forward / rewind. This was perfectly smooth and functional in Karmic so something is obviously amiss here.
Ultimately I think the best thing to do is for those with a working configuration – just leave it be! If everything works for you on Karmic or whatever other type of installation, there’s no need to update yet.
Personally, I am keenly awaiting the release of XBMC v10.05 which I hope to solve these problems. If it doesn’t, then I will get experimenting with workarounds.
I’ll keep you posted!
If you’re like me, you may have jumped on the SSD bandwagon in the ongoing pursuit of a fast computing experience. SSDs are evolving at a tremendous pace, leaving their mechanical forefathers in the dust. Whilst some of us may run Windows 7 atop our SSDs in order to benefit from native TRIM support – the holy grail of SSD usage – not everyone runs the Microsoft OS.
It’s now pretty common knowledge that running an SSD with an OS which does not support TRIM results in performance degradation over time. Depending upon your usage style this might not influence you a great deal, but sooner or later you may begin to encounter this slow-down first hand.
For more information regarding SSD technology, check out Anand’s excellent articles here.
Whether you’d like to regain the performance your drive had when new, you’d like to wipe clean an SSD before use elsewhere or perhaps you’re selling one on – secure erasing your drive is a very good way of restoring it to tip-top shape.
Secure erasing simply tells the controller to forget about its’ tracking of used blocks and return every single one to being empty and ‘free’. This process can be performed using either of two utilities:
For the purposes of this article I will be focussing on the latter.
HDDErase is a small DOS application which in its’ version 3.3 edition is capable of secure erasing the Intel SSDs. The scenario for my testing of this application was the secure erase of my X25-V 40GB SSD which is to go into my ASRock Ion HTPC. So how do we make use of this program? First you will need:
I used a small 4GB Corsair mini flash drive which I have for these kinds of activities, but you can easily do this with far less than 8MB! I also had an ancient floppy drive to hand with a windows 98 startup disk which I used for the system files necessary to make the drive bootable. If you don’t have a disk such as this, you can create one using utilities found here. So here’s what I did:
Here I selected the drive to be quick formatted using system files from the floppy drive, A:. After this is complete you’ll have a nicely bootable flash drive.It’s worth bearing in mind that HDDErase v3.3 does not seem to like nvidia chipsets, so my Ion based HTPC was unable to run the program… it just stalled when it was meant to be detecting drives.
After running the test drive on my Intel chipset based system, the drives were detected correctly. It must be mentioned that I had to change my SATA configuration in the BIOS to IDE compatibility mode however, instead of using AHCI mode. Here’s the process in pictures following booting to the command prompt and running HDDErase:
That’s all there is to it, many a confirmation and all is complete! After this process, the previously installed OS was long gone from the drive showing that if anything, it had definitely gotten rid of that!
Hopefully this will be of use to someone, given the lack of specific information on SSD erase procedures online.
An infected Windows XP machine I recently took a look at had, by whatever method, the fake anti-virus software “Antivirus 2010″ installed. This is one of the typical programs which advertises itself on websites by saying that your computer is infected when it isn’t!
After identifying the process, “av.exe” and fiddling around to remove it, the computer was left with no default file association for .exe files. This was quite the problem as you can imagine, since it prevented any program from running!
Thankfully as I was looking at the computer over a VNC connection, I was able to search for and find the following website:
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/file_assoc.htm
This page has downloads available for the default file association configurations found within the Windows registry for multiple file types.
By downloading and opening the .exe configuration I was able to copy and paste it into a notepad document, which I was thankfully still able to run by opening a .txt file on the desktop.
After saving the file as a .reg on the desktop, I ran it and successfully restored the settings. Finally I could run programs and control panel items again! All from the comfort of home all the way up to England somewhere…
