Setup Debian Wheezy with 2 monitors ATI Radeon

Oh I had some trouble here...

• With black screen problems after installing the drivers from Radeon.
• Dragging windows to different display problems when installing drivers from Radeon. I don't know enough on how to fix this, if someone does please let me know as I would love to use the latest drivers from Radeon.

So my fix for all of this was to use the smxi tool. What a superb set of scripts!! Really saved me days of messing about. Just take a look at the documentation on the site, it's quite straight forward and it guides you through everything nicely.

You can also use this tool for a few other things apart from setting up your graphics card. I used it for that mainly.

When it came down to the options you could select the latest or previous versions from AMD, or select the Debian fglrx.

I tried the latest from AMD and got so far with that. It definitely stopped my black screen on startup but then I had a dragging window problem between monitors :-( which I don't know how to fix yet.

I just stuck with the debian fglrx install and that worked superbly. I just had to run amdcccle afterwards to just configure the monitor sizes correctly and also set the overscan on my second monitor so it removed the black border.

And that was it!

Hope this helps someone else.

Debian Wheezy - How to remove annoying shutdown beep

I found many solution out there to turn this annoying system speaker beep off, but none seemed to work for me. Eventually I found a little something in amongst the thread.

What fixed it for me was a combination of 2 things, one was to remove the "pcskr" module (although I found this the softer of the system beeps) and the other was to go into alsamixer and select the sound card that contained the "Beep" and mute it. Yes "mute it" setting it to "00" does not work. To mute this select it and press 'm'.

So a quick summary of exactly what I did...

• Add "blacklist pcspkr" to a blacklist.conf in the /etc/modprobe.d/ directory. This will prevent the pcspkr being loaded on start up.
• Start "alsamixer" in a terminal, select the sound card (Press F6) that contains the "Beep" (you may have more than one listed and maybe more than one with a "Beep" in this case I am not sure what to do, but try muting one at a time to see what works or maybe both). To mute select the "Beep" and press 'm' you should see the "Beep" muted. Press Esc to exit and it should be saved.
• You can now remove the pcspkr before you restart by typing as root "modprobe -r pcspkr", this will remove the module now before you reboot.

And that should be it :-)

TL-WN821N with RTL8192CU for Fedora 18

Well I had a little bit of trouble with this wireless dongle on Fedora 18 but with the help of a few links all seems to have gone well. What I seemed to find out is the current default driver does not work so well and you need to get the driver source, blacklist the default drivers, compile the new drivers and install the module. Let me explain with a few easy steps...

• Possibly you will need the kernel-source, kernel-headers and gc++ installed prior to the following instructions. 
• Get the latest drivers from the following link, download the driver Linux Kernel 2.6.18~2.6.38 and kernel 3.0.8.
• Blacklist some of the current rtl drivers, by adding the following to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf 
• blacklist rtl8192cu, 
• blacklist rtl8192c_common, 
• blacklist rtlwifi

• Just doing an install.sh of the driver didn't quite cut it, I needed to apply a patch for it to compile, I used the 2 attachments found on this link from the user tim_philips.
• I downloaded both attachments, potentially you need an account to download them but I am unsure.
• put the download of the driver, the txt and sh file in the same folder.
• Run run in terminal as root user: bash ./patch_rtl8188C_8192C_usb_linux_v3.4.4_4749.20121105.sh
• If you want to know what the script does, you can take a look, it just unzips a couple of things applies the patch and makes and installs the driver.
• One other thing if yo update your kernel, chances are you need to redo all of this, doesn't take 2 minutes :-)

That should be everything. Hope this helps. Potentially you need a reboot just to remove the currently installed drivers or you can take a look for them using lsmod and doing an rmmod <with the module names that you added to the blacklist>

Here are some helpful links...

Link on ubuntu 

Realtek 8192cu Fedora 18

Compile and install rtl8192cu driver

Realtek driver

Updating QNAP firmware and using openssh

Just a quickie...

If you are one of the people who wants a more configurable ssh connection to your QNAP NAS box and have configured the use of openssh like from one of my previous blog posts and you notice that after a firmware upgrade of the qnap NAS the ssh doesn't seem to allow connections any more. This is usually with a "Connection Reset by Peer" error.

In this case it means that the openssh sshd has been overwritten by the firmware upgrade.

Dont Panic! Its an easy fix, you just need to re-copy the openssh sshd back over the default one on the NAS and restart your sshd either in the terminal connection to the NAS box or through the web administration tool.

So looking at James Lick's post again, its just the following 2 lines after connecting to your NAS box via telnet (well that is what I use at least):

• mv /usr/sbin/sshd /usr/sbin/sshd-orig
• cp /opt/sbin/sshd /usr/sbin

Now a quick restart of your sshd, this can be found in the web admin tool, 

• Network Services, 
• Telnet/SSH,
• Click Allow SSH connection to disable it then apply
• When its disabled, re select it to enable it and then press apply.

That should get your ssh back up and running.

Setting up printing and scanning of hp photosmart C310 printer over network with fedora 18

Here is what I did.

I installed the hplip packages: (sorry I don't know if I added any extra repository, but if you don't see it the only repositories I have added are the "rpmfusion free" and "rpmfusion free -updates")

• HP Linux Imaging and Printing Project
• Files needed by the HPLIP printer and scanner drivers
• HPLIP Graphical tools
• HPLIP Libraries

Once I installed them I opened up Hp Device Manager (I pressed the search app button i.e. windows button).

Once open...

• Selected Network/Ethernet/Wireless netowrk
• Click Show Advanced Options
• Select Manual Discovery
• Type in IP address of printer (you can find this on printer press the wireless button on the display, the ip address should be listed, usually something like 192.168.0.<Something>)
• Click Next
• Your device should appear in the list and selected.
• Click Next
• Click Add Printer
• You will probably need to enter your root/admin user name and password

Now the printer should be installed and also the scanner. 

You can check that the scanner is installed by using terminal and entering "scanimage -L" this will show you all scanning devices possibly webcams also.

You should be able to start up the scanning software and start scanning.

This link helped me :-)

Using Oracle Java with libreoffice Fedora 18

Problem I was having was that I didn't want openjdk installed as I need Oracle's Java environment to be able to develop some android apps. I am not fully sure if I needed to remove the installation of the openjdk I guess I didn't and all I needed to do was to update the links and environment variables to point to the installation of Oracles Java. Anyhow I removed the openjdk instead and this is how I did it.

What I did here was to remove the installation of the openjdk without it trying to remove the libreoffice using following command. Use the appropriate version of the openjdk to remove it.

rpm -ev --nodeps java-1.7.0-openjdk

The --nodeps will remove the package without the libreoffice.

Now I installed Oracle's Java rpm downloaded from JavaSE Download, just by double clicking it, it then installs it. After completion of the installation, libreoffice seems fine and so does my development environment.

You can check which version of java is wired up if your not sure, by using the command:

java -version

When I was trying to do this I managed to get myself into a pickle with versions of java being installed, as I couldn't remove Oracle's Java using the software tool in Fedora 18. The software tool seemed to crash all the time, so I removed Oracle's Java from the command line instead, I used the following commands:

rpm -qa | grep jdk                            (This to find out the name of the package I wanted to remove)

rpm -ev jdk-1.7.0_13-fcs.x86_64    (This to remove the above package)

for some reason the software tool wasn't updated with the removal of the package but I ignored it for now.

So I found I had to do the order of removing the openjdk package, which I believe removes all the environment for java, so then installing Oracle's Java would reset them and then libreoffice continued to work.

I also imagine if there are any updates in the future that require openjdk to be installed it will be installed and thus wiping your Oracles Java environment variables. I haven't found this yet, but I am sure all I would need to do to reset them is too re-follow the above.

Remove openJDK, Remove Oracle Java, Re-Install Oracle Java. 

Hope this helps someone else too. :-)

Fedora 17 and 18 headphone socket fix

The Problem...

My headphones produce no sound from jack socket when using Fedora 17 and also Fedora 18. The sounds card I have is:

• 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)
• 02:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Redwood HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5000 Series]

I found the above be executing the "lspci" command, you can use "lspci | grep Audio" and that should find similar to the above.

The Solution...

I got my solution from here.
All I did was to create the file /etc/modprobe.d/dist-alsa.conf and add the following lines:

• options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6-amic
• options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1

Ok I found an issue when I tried the above setting of setting the model to dell-m6-amic, my microphone stopped working, I then found a little information on this thread that stated that was for the analog mic, so I changed the setting to dell-m6-dmic which is for a digital mic.

How to know which model to choose this link is very useful! This has some info too but pretty much the same.

Then reboot, potentially you don't need to reboot and there is a command to restart the sound system, I am not sure on this, so reboot it was for me :-)

Hope this helps someone else out too :-)