Special keys on my Thinkpad R60

I’ve been using Gentoo on my notebook for the past year or so which is why my HOWTO wiki on Thinkwiki has started to fall into disrepair. Anyway, i got something working (which was really not a problem, but just something i hadn’t gotten around to.) The special keys are now (almost) fully functional.

I created the file ~/.Xmodmap

with the contents:

keycode 115 = F13
keycode 162 = XF86AudioPlay
keycode 164 = XF86AudioStop
keycode 144 = XF86AudioPrev
keycode 153 = XF86AudioNext
keycode 117 = XF86Calculator
keycode 234 = F20
keycode 233 = F19

and then ran:

xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

for now i’m just concerned about keycodes 234 and 233 which are the forward page and backward page keys, just above their respective arrow key. Keycode 115 is the right-click properties menu, but it seems to be tripping something in KDE that is making it difficult for me to get the key to do anything. I used F13 and F14 because there’s no chance of a collision, and i know that they don’t already have a function assigned to them.

I then installed the extension Firefox extension Keyconfig and additional buttons for keyconfig extension.

After restarting, by setting the F19 and F20 to be the keys mapped to the function f4kc_PrevTab and f4kc_NextTab respectively i can now flip through all my open tabs in Firefox with these previously inert keys.

Success!!!

Knoppix on a usb flash drive - Part 3

Well, i’ve managed to eliminate all the other possibilities besides the Sony service partition on the flash card.  It looks like it might have something like that,  but it doesn’t show up in fdisk.  It also appears that (at least without Vista) there is no way to remove it.  (seems like it might fuck up \/\/1/\/D0Z3 \/1$+A) so Sony provides a utility to remove this, but the program can only be run with Vista which, of course, i don’t have.  Well, now i just need to see if i can return this damn Sony flash card and get a Lexar Firefly instead;  i’ve had nothing but good luck with these, plus they’re really small.

Knoppix on a usb flash drive - Part 2

Well i tried installing it on my 1GB flash drive (Verbatim) So that’s

750M on /dev/sda1 FAT 16

250M on /dev/sda2 ext2 (for persistant disk image)

It worked. . . now that makes the fact that the Sony 4GB flash drive doesn’t work even more unusual.

Possible causes:

-on the sony flash card there may be a hidden partition with Sony software that’s preventing the boot

if there was a partition, it’s long gone, so i suspect that this wasn’t the problem

-might have something to do with the 4GB drive geometry

-could have something to do with the extra FAT32 partition on the Sony

-ran syslinux -sf /dev/sda1 first on Verbatim Drive (and used rsync and used different copy order)

-Sony memory stick may simply not be bootable due to other unforseen limitations.

Knoppix on a USB flash drive

I’ve been trying to install the Knoppix 5.1.1 on my Sony 4GB flash drive with the following configuration:
(my flash drive mounts as sdb)

/dev/sdb1 - FAT16 <750MB> (partition with Knoppix on it)

/dev/sdb2 - ext2 <250MB> (partition for persistent image)

/dev/sdb3 - FAT32 <~3GM> (additional storage for Linux and WinD0Ze)

I’ve been following the instructions on this page:

USB KNOPPIX 5.1.1 persistent install from Linux

and this page:

Bootable USB Key

(or at least a hybrid of the two documents)

So far. . . .no luck. I’m going to try it again on my 1GB flash drive for proof of concept since i have had other linux distros on it using syslinux. If this works, then i’ll have to figure out what’s preventing it from working on the 4GB flash drive.

persistant X Server host rules

We11 i’m certainly not f33ling v3ry 1337 +0day; i still haven’t figured out how to solve the damn xhost problem. I have a clue though. I have found that this persistent behavior is normally configured through /etc/X0.hosts

I say normally because i’ve found that Gentoo sometimes works in quirky ways in terms of it’s general adherence to Linux principles. Anyhow, i have no idea the syntax of this file since it doesn’t exist on any of my systems (Gentoo, Slackware). Anyway, i’m fucking around with it, maybe i’ll sort it out here when i have a chance.

Turn the display off at night

I usually fall asleep watching MythTV, but when the program ends, it leaves me with a blue screen on all night long. In addition to makeing it more difficult to sleep, it’s definitely shortening the life of my LCD monitor. Anyway, my quest was to be able to use cron to turn the monitor off (since MythTV turns dpms off and i couldn’t find a way around this.) I think i’ve finally succeeded: i just stuck this stupid little script:

#!/bin/bash

export DISPLAY=:0
/usr/bin/xset dpms force off

in a file called /usr/local/bin/monitoroff.sh

which is sudo chmod +x  /usr/local/bin/monitoroff.sh

This is, of course after having run the

xset +local:

command.

I’m currently trying to figure out exactly where i need to drop that xset +local so that this is default. I need it on my notebook and my MythTV box.

On my notebook, so it can prompt for fingerprint entry upon attempting to log into kde at startup (right now it’s a bonus “feature” that only i know that only the fingerprint scanner will allow a successful login into KDE) On the consoles, the prompt is in text, but before KDE starts up and before i can issue the command manually, this kinda hacked screen saver and my initial fingerprint prompt are not going to work until i figure out exactly where this actually goes. . . further updates as events warrent.

Mplayer transcode to XVID in 2 passes

From any format to XVID MPEG-4 in 2 passes

mencoder <infile> -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -o /dev/null

mencoder <infile> -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=2:vbitrate=<bitrate> -o <outfile>

(this is great for converting those youtube flv’s into something playable on your Clie (or other inferior media playback device)

You don’t care

I’m changing this blog to be my technical blog. All future posts will be regarding various issues regarding Slackware and Gentoo Linux, interoperability with WindoZe, MythTV, and some miscellaneous hardware stuff. There will likely be a lot of video related information in general. I am probably going to delete all past posts that i’ve made. If you happen to be some ghost that actually reads my site and have some way of not getting counted by the counter, fear not as all of the posts have already been moved to my new news/gossip site on wordpress.com.

So, my new blog which is actually the old blog:

http://j0nk.wordpress.com

(jonk is spelled with a zero, not an ‘oh’, in this font they look nearly identical)

and this spot will be taken over with technical information.

The IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R60 Slackware HOWTO will stay where it is.   If i update the one on Thinkwiki or if someone else improves the page, i will try to keep that up to date here, but i’m not promising.