I know – I haven’t written nerdy things in my blog for months; and I haven’t written any super-duper nerdy things in my blog for going on, er, years.

This, though, deserves recognition. I managed to shoehorn OpenSUSE 11.1 onto an eeePC 1000’s 32GB secondary (home) partition (I need more than the 8GB allocated to the first virtual IDE device, and wanted to save it from as much wear and tear as possible). I’ve setup an SD card as /home (globally disabled atime and used ext2, of course), managed to build a mostly-functional asusosd based upon the eee-osd code on Google, and even got MediaWrap reinstalled so I can listen to XM.

It didn’t take as much work as I was afraid it would; eeecontrol needed to be manually configured from a homemade 10.3 source package, but being that it’s a shell/perl script combo, that took seconds. asus_acpi and the pae kernel were a bit more problematic; it kept wanting to make an initrd without filesystem support.

But, I can do everything that I’m used to on my little eee now, and have my beloved complete KDE 3.5 back.

I know I’m years late – this was in vogue in 2001, back when people still thought LiveJournal was worth posting on.

I’ve just decided upon a new way to come up with a band name for anyone who wants to write whiny, pretentious lyrics with a backdrop of maybe two chords, and lots of crying.

Obtain a pamphlet for any “Bed and Breakfast”, and read the amenities.

Here’s a sample, from here:

“This beautiful Queen room has a private bathroom containing a bath and a shower. Robes and extra towels being provided for use in the spa and swimming pools. Holmes room is enhanced with a heater/fan, television, radio, refreshment facilities and an electric blanket. Breakfast, chosen from our menu, is served to you in the dining room or on the patio in Summer.”

Pick any three words in sequence; paying no attention to sentence construction.

“This Beautiful Queen”
“A Private Bathroom”
“Containing a Bath”
“Robes and Extra”
“Television Radio Refreshment”
“Electric Blanket Breakfast”
“Patio in Summer”

Any of these would make a perfect emo band name. You can’t take “Electric Blanket Breakfast”; that one’s mine.

Much as the overheard rhetoric of recent times, I agree that it is time for a change. I’m selling my televisions, disconnecting my cable, and only keeping basic cable service.

Update: 3 weeks later, and I have not grown a beard or moved to rural Montana. I’ve been getting a lot more done, though!

Children of the 80s, rejoice. It’s visuals are half Robert Plant, and half The Cure, with the sound of a Halmark commercial.

I know! I haven’t written anything here in ages, and what I have, has been incredibly short, or just silly. This isn’t horribly easy, but at least I’ve made it easy for you.. and compared to doing some things in Linux, it is actually quite easy.

Entering the 20th century (in the 21st, natch), I’ve finally got XM. XM has the ability to listen to it online, but it streams as Windows Media (WMV) which is a closed format by Microsoft. You can listen to it on MacOS X with Flip4Mac, but there’s no truely native ability to listen to it in Linux due to the licensing restrictions.

If in KDE or GNUME, press Alt-F2. KDE Users, type “kdesu yast” (without the quotes), then press enter. GNOME users, type “gnomesu yast” instead.

If you’re at the terminal, you’ll already know how to adapt these instructions to do at the command line.

Depending on your configuration, it will ask for your, or the root password. Enter the appropriate one, then in YaST, select “Software” -> “Software Repositories”. If you have the Packman Repository, enable it, then skip past the next paragraph.

If you do not have one, don’t worry! Select “Add a new Repository”, Name it “Packman Repository”, “Edit Parts of the URL”, Protocol is “HTTP”, host: “packman.unixheads.com” (Please check for a local mirror), directory on server: “/pub/packman/suse/11.0/” (or 11.1), Authentication type is Anonymous.

Finally, Save and choose “Refresh now”. Open the “Software Manager” from the YaST window, and Search for “totem”. Select “totem”, and “totem-xine-plugin”. Press “Accept”, and let it install. When it finally completes, choose “Install more Packages” (Yes)

Search for, and install “w32codec-all”.
I like to also install “mplayerplug-in”, since it provides support in places that totem still has issues.

(Optionally) Select “kaffeine”, and let it install. (This is a much more robust player than the totem plugin alone).

If you want to use Kaffeine, there are a few more steps:
Start Kaffeine, “Settings” -> “xine Engine Parameters”.
Choose the “Decoder Settings”, and set both paths to “/usr/lib/win32”.
Save and exit Kaffeine.
Close any running Firefox browser.

Open Your browser, and setup your Netscape Plugins/Programs as required. I’ve provided information on how to do so for Firefox 3.x and Konqueror 3.x. I don’t use Opera, and no longer use Firefox 2.x, so I can not assist you with those.

For Firefox 3.x, choose “Edit” -> “Preferences”. Choose “Applications”, then scroll down to “Windows Media”. Choose “Use Windows Media Player Plugin”.

For Konqueror 3.x, open Konq, choose “Settings”, “Configure Konqueror”, then “Plugins” in the menu on the left side. Select “Scan for New Plugins”. Press the “Discard” button, then click the “Plugins” tab. If you see “libtotem-gmp-plugin.so”, you’re set. Click “OK”. When you load the first time, it will usually default to MPlayerplug-in, with the MPlayer library. Press the first left ‘Down Arrow’, and choose ‘xine’, rather than mplayer. Press the Play button. Viola!

Finally, go to xmradio.com. and login. The totem plugin will be loaded when you choose your channel. Give it about 10 seconds to buffer on a standard DSL/Cable line. There you go – XM in Linux!