As Will Smith once said: “I got to have me one of these”:

This software enables almost any pc with a webcam to behave like the Wii. The camera enables you to control your computer with about any object you have. And the good thing for me is they are working on a Linux release as well.

Link.

Alright, I’ve done it. Have been playing around with Feisty and got it all to work on my precious Dell D830. I had a lot of problems with Feisty (you will find the links on the left) so when Gutsy came out I hoped everything would be fixed (it did have the new intel drivers).

Well I was wrong. The problems with Gutsy on my Dell are just too big. My wireless is failing all the time. Compiz doesn’t really work (applets don’t start, settings are not saved). Too much to tell.

So I did it, I switched to hardy. Better to have an unstable release that kinda works than a stable release that just kinda doesn’t work. At least now I know I can’t blame anyone. So as time will pass I will post some updates about my experiences with Hardy.

This information is here for historic purposes. I am not maintaining the ebuilds anymore and they will very probably not work on your system anyway.

With the current amount of ebuilds on my blog it might be hard to find each one of them. So I decided it is a good idea to have them all together.

Here is a list of the ebuilds you can find on my site (if you have questions or comments, please leave a comment with the ebuild):

• Amarok-svn ebuild. This ebuild will build the latest Amarok (the music player for linux) version from subversion. You can�t be more up-to-date
• Exscalibar ebuild. This ebuild enables the moodbar extension for Amarok
• SmartDJ ebuilds. This set contains all the dependencies to install the SmartDJ plugin for Amarok

Here is a list of related ebuilds that are not hosted on my site and for which I don’t have any responsibility (so don’t mail me if they don’t work):

• libgpod-cvs-0.4.0 ebuild. A CVS ebuild for ipod support maintained by Nathan. If you have questions concerning this ebuild please contact Nathan under: nathan at toonetown dot com

Enjoy.

In august 2005 I decided to get myself a home theater PC (HTPC). Before starting the whole event, I wrote down a couple of small requirements for the machine:

• It should ‘look’ nice
• The size must fit the stereo
• The machine must be very, very quiet
• The sound quality should be as good as possible
• The machine should be able to have all ‘HTPC’ functionality without using Microsoft Media Edition

The hardware
As you can see in the list above, most of the requirements (looks, size and noise level), are dictated by the choice of case. Since the machine is going to be located in the living room noise turned out to be the main reason for choosing the case.

Based on the above I ended up buying the following components:

• An HFX classic case in black. If installed correctly (with all the heatpipes, etc.) this case can live without any active cooling. This means it is as silent as a case can be. I got it with the default power adapter (ST30NF 300W) and the iMON VFD-IR. Info.
• An Abit AV8 Mainboard. Info.
• An AMD Athlong 64 Processor 3000+ with Venice core. Although at the time of buying there were faster processors on the market, I chose this one because of the power consumption. Link.
• A gigabyte of RAM.
• The old ATI card that I had laying around, which I figured should be up to the job. It is an ATI Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9600 Pro
• A Hauppauge MCE 500. This TV card basically features two Hauppauge 150 cards in one. So it is possible to record from two channels at the same time. I opted for a version without a remote control. Info.
• A Terratec Aureon Space 7.1. I digitized all my CDs so the sound output of the HTPC is one of the key requirements. After a log of reading on different forums I learned the following two things:
  1. Stay away from Creative as they seem to do funky stuff with their bitrates.
  2. ENVY Chips have the best consumer sound available.

  I chose the Terratec because of the overall positive reviews it had and I must say, it sounds like a beauty. Link.

• A Seagate 250 Gb SATA Hard disc. A little googling showed that for Seagate has an excellent name when it comes down to crating quiet hard discs. Link.
• A BENQ DVD DD DW1640, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive. Because it operates very silently. Link.
• Since I could not have cables in the living room I needed to go with a WIFI card. Finding a wifi card that would work with 64 bit linux proved to be a very hard undertaking. I think I tested about four cards, before I finally bough a Linksys WUSB54GP v4.0 802.11g Adapter. The card has performed very well during the last 11 Months. And with the release of kernel 2.6.17 it’s driver is finally included. Oh, and it looks pretty funky standing up on its feet. Link.

The software

To make sure that everything created on the machine is transportable and free, I chose to install Mythtv on my HTPC. Mythtv features all the PVR functions one needs and it also comes with modules for listening to music and looking at photos. As stated before music is one of the key features of my HTPC and since I completely moved to digital Photos the ability to present slideshows in my HTPC application comes as very handy.
Initially I chose gentoo linux. This worked very well, but took an enormous amount of time to stay up to date. So after 8 Months I turned to Kubuntu Edgy Eft. More on that later.

As it turned out, a lot of the components (both hardware and software) I chose made a lot of problems… So building everything took way more time than planned.

Read more: the hardware arrives.

It seems that I have become the maintainer of the amarok-svn.ebuild. Might as well take the responsibility for the moment, since I need the ebuild for my own good use anyways

Well a lot has changed with KDE, everyone and everything seems to prepare for KDE 4.0, which means that the 3.5 branch has become its own branch and 4.0 seems to be developed in the main branch.

Result was that the default admin directory, checked out in the ebuild, suddenly depended on unsermake and QT4.0. Not directly what you would want. I did a little bit of rewriting of the ebuild, so it will use the 3.5 branch for the admin files (with automake and autoconf).

Works for me.

Update 08/09/2005: had a small error in the ebuild. Fixed that.

Here it is.

I regularly check the SVN builds of Amarok my favorite music program (if you are using linux, go check it out). Since I also use Gentoo, I just needed to have a good ebuild for it. I found a very good file on the Amarok forums, but had some small problems with it (it did too much), so I made a small update.

If you are interested, here it is.

03/06 small update: on the Amarok forums someone pointed out that the same result could be achieved in a more elegant way. The download now points to the more elegant file.

06/08 update: Andrew pointed out that you need to update the ebuild with a couple of things. Please read the comments for the information. Personally I didn’t have any luck lately since the process now seems to need unsermake and QT4. I am working on that.