MBWE Fuel Gauge -> Speedometer conversion

The Fuel gauge on the front of my MBWE is fairly useless, noone cares, so why not repurpose it as a speedometer?

first, stop it displaying the "fuel" Stolen from http://kyyhkynen.net/stuff/mybook/reduce_disk_usage.php

Disable the service that displays the disk usage with the leds in the front panel of your MBWE. Admit it, the feature is pretty much useless and because the service has to check the amount of free space on the disk(s), it is causing disk access.

In order to prevent the service from starting during boot, edit /etc/init.d/S15wdc-fuel-gauge. Comment out this line:

$FGD &

Then stop the service:

# /etc/init.d/S15wdc-fuel-gauge stop

Once all thats done, this is my script (The ultimate in lazy)
#!/bin/bash
INITIAL_RX=`cat /sys/class/net/eth0/device/net:eth0/statistics/rx_bytes`
sleep 10
FINAL_RX=`cat /sys/class/net/eth0/device/net:eth0/statistics/rx_bytes`
DELTA_RX=`expr $FINAL_RX - $INITIAL_RX`
KBPS_RX=`expr $DELTA_RX / 10240 `

let "RESULT = $KBPS_RX / 3"
echo $RESULT > "/sys/devices/platform/wdc-leds/leds:wdc-leds:fuel-gauge/brightness" 
The 3 in there is the scaling factor between the kbps download and the number of lights on. 
Since I'm not often downloading any faster than about 400kbps, and when i am im not really worried about i

0 to 100: lights one led (5 o’clock)

100 to 150: lights two leds (5 and 7 o’clock)

150 to 200: lights three leds (5, 7 and 9 o’clock)

200 to 250: lights four leds (5, 7, 9 and 11 o’clock)

250 to 280ish: lights five leds (5, 7, 9, 11 and 1 o’clock)

280ish and more: lights all leds.


I have the whole thing running as a cronjob every 5 minutes, do that urself

My conkyrc

Contents (what you get out of this)
Weather, HDDtemp, UL/DL speed and cumulative meters, CPU load, Folding@Home status, Remote transmission download status (could be local, easy change), gmail status, RAM usage, Uptime, Date/Time, ToDo list

These all automatically update dependant on the execi variable.

Preface (What you need to get this all working)
Linux OS (Ubuntu?)
Conky (obv, see someone elses guide for how to get that *HINT* synaptic is ur friend)
Transmission download manager (local or remote)
Folding at home installed with origami (could be local or remote using the same logic as the Transmission manager)
Passwordless SSH authentication (if your using this with any remote hosts)
A todo list on the desktop called todo (strange that...)


WARNING I'm lazy so im not telling you why or how this all works. Work it out yourself. I Got alot of the system monitoring stuff from a variety of places (lifehacker i think, my apologies to whoever i stole from).


The Guts (The Guts)
cat .conkyrc
use_xft yes
xftfont verdana:size=8
alignment top_left
xftalpha 0.8
own_window yes
own_window_type override
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
stippled_borders 10
border_margin 4
border_width 1
default_shade_color grey
default_outline_color black
default_color BADCDD
use_spacer none
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
text_buffer_size 512
color1 F8DF58


# ${color 6694B2}${font OpenLogos:size=45} u t

# ${color F8DF58}${font StyleBats:size=16}8${font} Battery: ${battery_percent}% ${battery_bar}
TEXT
${color BADCDD}${font weather:size=82}${execi 600 ~/scripts/conditions.sh}${color}${font}${voffset -25} ${execi 1200 ~/scripts/pogodynka.sh}
${font weather:size=28}x ${font}HDD ${execi 1 ~/scripts/hddmonit.sh}�C
${font PizzaDude Bullets:size=16}v${font} Up: ${upspeed eth1} Kb/s
${font PizzaDude Bullets:size=16}r${font} Down: ${downspeed eth1} Kb/s
${font PizzaDude Bullets:size=16}M${font} Upload: ${totalup eth1}
${font PizzaDude Bullets:size=16}S${font} Download: ${totaldown eth1}
${color ffffff}${font StyleBats:size=16}A${font} CPU0: ${cpu cpu0}% ${cpubar cpu0}
${font StyleBats:size=16}A${font} CPU1: ${cpu cpu1}% ${cpubar cpu1}
${font StyleBats:size=16}Y${font} ${execi 10 origami monitor | awk '/Progress:/ {print $2}' | sed '/%$/N;s/\n/ /' }
${execi 600 ssh REMOTEUSER@REMOTEHOST /opt/bin/transmission-remote -l |sed 's/ [ ]*/\t/g'| awk -F'\t' '/ing/ {print $3,"\t", $9}'| sort -rn}
${color F8DF58}${font FreeSans:size=16}@${font}${execpi 300 python ~/scripts/gmail_parser.py GMAILUSER GMAILPASSWORD 3}
${color C2E078}${font PizzaDude Bullets:size=16}J${font} $mem / $memmax
${font StyleBats:size=18}P${font} Work: ${uptime_short}
${font Radio Space:size=14}${time %A %d %Y}
${font Radio Space:size=55}${time %H:%M}
${color F8DF58}${font FreeSans:size=10}${color0}TODO:${color1}
${color F8DF58}${font FreeSans:size=10}${execi 30 cat /home/USERNAME/Desktop/todo}

Getting Skype to work with weird webcams.

I'll keep this as informative.
If your webcam works in ubuntu (I'm running the 8.10 RC atm, fantastic btw) under cheese but not with skype, I did a bit of digging and cheese uses v4l2 (the 'new' webcam api) which inherently screws up skype that uses v4l1.

So, its easy enough since i came across this post and after chasing up my own system locations (this guy must be on 64bit, but i didnt ask) dead easy, instead of in the terminal going
# skype
look in your library directories (/usr/lib/ or /usr/lib32/) for v4l1compat.so,
# LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/v4l1compat.so skype
this, obv, preloads that library forcing skype to use teh right interface library.

If my explanation is wrong please correct me

Links

As Other Folks have been going in a GTD fashion, I'll be throwing useful websites and links into this post so my sievelike menory can cope with the multitude of things that come to my attention.

LectureFox Free Online Lecture Directory
MyBook Hacking Easy Peasy List Of Tutorials For Screwing with the WD My Book WE II
13 Of the Best Linux Tutorials and OpenCourseWare on the Web
Best Passwordless SSH authentication tutorial I've seen (complex but simple)
Google Courses Looks pretty good
SSH quick reference
The Academy The Videos look quite good
Euler

Primers Coming Up

Thru my work I'm thrown into alot of technologies that i dont nearly know enough about and as with alot of tech related things, the education scene is basic basic basic..GURU with little or no gradiation, so what I'm going to do is post what i learn when i learn it and where i learn it from and hopefully it'll be useful for someone else, and I'll also take the opportunity to rehash stuff I've already done.

ATM I'll probably be doing Bash scripting, Perl Scripting, XML, and whatever UNIX stuff comes up whenever I'm writing, but for now and for a relativly simple start; X display fowarding...

This is the setup: Linux/Unix based "client" and "server"; in my case I have headless systems that i fiddle with from time to time, but after a while vim just becomes a pain, and as for viewing html files etcetc copying things back and forth is a pain in the ass.

The solution is already there; From its beginning the X server has always been client server based on some level. Basically what were gonna do is tell the server to use the client as an X display; this is controlled thru an environment variable, strangly called DISPLAY

Lets assume were using SSH. *nix SSHd has a simple system for fowarding and routing the relevent X ports (these wont show up in your "tunnels" tab if your using something like putty, but you shouldnt be using putty anyway)

Theres two versions of this fowarding ability, X and Y. in a nutshell, X is compressed and encrypted. Y isnt. On slow links, Y is probably your best bet, also some servers dont support the X flag. Also also, some sysadms disable this X fowarding.

Anyway, to the point. 

login to the server thusly

client# ssh user@server -X

then when you get a shell check to see if DISPLAY isnt already set (some servers are good enough to do this for you)

server# echo $DISPLAY

if your lucky it'll say localhost:10.0

otherwise it'll probably say :0.0 or something similar

If your in this unlucky situation, just enter

server# DISPLAY=localhost:10:0

then try it out, by running the clock and forking it into the background (&)

server# xclock &

Job done. Later

Long Extended Break: Hardware Update

So, gonna do a quick write up on my current setup.

Ok, from the top:

Linksys WRT54GL DD-WRT v24 std firmware (also running on the bottom right screen)

Generic Wireless headphones (not used since i heard someone else on the channel :P )

top screens : Windows server 2008 AMD Athlon X2 64 6000+ on an Nvidia MCP 65 based motherboard carrying 6GB, with the dangerous RAID 0 arrangement of two 500GB sata drives and an IDE 320GB for essential backups. (this system is hidden, lol)

The bottom two screens run off of an old Toshiba Laptop that i "repurposed", more or less the keyboard has been removed and the screen flipped around and re positioned, Intel Celeron something or other, 512 MB memory, 60 GB HDD, running Ubuntu Hardy Heron that i mainly use for chat, downloads, news, system monitoring and notes.

Fairly standard hidden speakers and everythings as hidden so i get to be messy the rest of the time. 

As for functionality, i use the laptop as an always on remote access hub that also lets me dial into work from anywhere. Also, since the laptop is keyboard mouseless, I use synergy to automatically start the client on the laptop (using the desktop as the server)

FYI easy enough to set up, just insert this:

/usr/bin/killall synergyc

/usr/bin/synergyc (server)

in these

/etc/gdm/Init/Default

/etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default

/etc/gdm/PostSession/Default

/etc/gdm/PreSession/Default

And this more or less starts and stops the server at every stage of bootup and login (note, you are not going to get to play with BIOS options et al, read the synergy FAQ

Anyway, Otherwise, I've been working on alot of bash script that I will post about separatly, but I am going to be learning perl so i will hopefully be using this thing alot more than usual.

Later guys

EEEpc note

Ok, got the 900, sorry this blog is very very late

Pros:
AMAZINGLY small, you wont believe how small it is until you use one
The keyboard is just managable
the Webcam is amazing quality when it works
More responsive than i imagined
The Extra 16GB SSD really helps
Wonderfully fast bootups (If you never plug it in to any accessories (other than charger) set the Boot Booster enabled under the BIOS, trims a second or two)

Cons:
Battery life less than expected
Wireless strength depends on the driver you use
Webcam and Webcam-mic not fully functional (currently) under Ubuntu 8.04


What I've done:
Managed to get a dual boot system between the Xandros OS and Ubuntu 8.04 by resizing my home partition on the 16GB SSD and installing in there (dont bother with a swap drive)
Grub works wonderfully and straight out of the install i still have both the standard and recovery boot options thru xandros.

As for install, use this
And for tweaking use this BUT to fix the sound you have to go back in and re fix alsa (the 700 tweak doesnt work for the 900)

• Edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and change the line “options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-dig”to “options snd-hda-intel model=auto”

• ALSO, run the following command:

sudo alsactl store

• Run:

sudo alsactl restore

I think that was all i had to do for basic operations.

Also got Kismet and the Aircrack-ng suites working with a bit of giggery pokery with an aim of stealing my dads old GPS and getting gpsmap to work properly, My personal recommendation is to install both from source, in the case of aircrack, you need to go into the folder that was built and make sure that all of the generated binary files are copied to /usr/bin or /usr/sbin depending on how paranoid you are (I'm not) because the install script doesnt install airmon, aireply, ivstools, packetforge, and a few other things i cant remember off the top of my head

As for the kismet source, i use source=madwifi_ag,atho,atheros and instead of relying on kismet to open the card as monitor, i use airmon and wlanconfig to kill the other interfaces first, eg

sudo wlanconfig ath0 destroy
sudo airmon-ng start wifi0
kismet (i did the suidinstall of kismet so there is no need for sudo. for a single user system the suidinstall is probably easiest)

I cant really talk about the performance of aircrack because truth be told i wouldnt have the patience for a 900MHz to get thru that kinda work, i collect as many packets as i can and get my dual core 3GHz 64bit system to do the dirty work (also usually do this over ssh if i can get an alternate connection, am working on a system where the ivs file can be emailed and an email reply will be sent back, with either the key, or "MEGAFAIL")

Anyway
Battery life. thats a joke. Its less that the 701 my dad has. yeah, yeah, i know, its more powerful, bigger screen, that wud be fine if it wasnt just the UK getting the kneecapped batteries:

List of countries getting 5200mAh battery:TW,HK,USA,CAN,IT
4400mAh:UK

If anyone is reading this please go to http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=27140 and make your voice heard, cus i want the battery that was handed out to reviewers! (the forum explains it better than me)