Harsh J

Am mixing a lot of words ain’t I? This is for September + Hectic.

There’s the college technical events coming up on 14th, named ‘Pragmatics’. I’m responsible for the code event under it, and can almost smell the deadlines. Then the next day I leave for the college-provided tour across Kerala and a part of TN itself. All nicely ending with the Indian Python Conference 2009, around the month end.

Since my first Modem+Router died (Was a Huawei SmartAX MT882), I got a newer one called UT300R2 by UTStarcomm. It looked sleek and all that but the landing page of the router seriously lacked options, giving only stuff like WAN config (For PPPoA, PPPoE, Bridged modes, etc.) and LAN config for DHCP, and almost nothing else.

I’m someone who requires port forwarding, virtual servers, etc. a lot for my daily work, and the lack of that option was a really bad thing; plus, being so attached to the internet, I didn’t want to go looking for a firmware upgrade solution and risk bricking it. Now, after about 2 months of getting this router, I realize I was stupid not to look beyond the landing page. It did have all the options, just not on its index page!

The feeling of being ultra stupid swept over me as I went to main.html via the history URLs (the old router’s landing page was main.html), and there it revealed all the options of the router, including some more from my former one! All I had to do was to go to http://192.168.1.1/main.html instead of simply http://192.168.1.1/, which I usually type. Gah, their simple cleverness worked against me!

Finally got around to re-installing ArchLinux onto the new PC and it was a long irritating week with GRUB errors, FS corruption, etc..

I must’ve caused the GRUB 22 error by extending a logical partition on Windows via its Disk Management tool, after deleting another. I tried fixing it with whatever solutions I could find, including reinstalling the whole bootloader but it seemed like the partition table itself was misaligned after the change. Both of my linux partitions turned Primary and thus the issue. So it came to the time of Reinstallation #1.

This next time I ran into an FS corrupted error after performing the entire net-install again; no idea how that happened and none on fixing it manually either, which was what it kept asking me to do. So I popped the disk back in and let it do an install again, bleh.

This time it went well, I installed KDE 4.3 as well overnight and it was done. Except that nasty HAL and PolicyKit issue that makes your blood boil even on the currently non-existant planet Pluto. Its the one which keeps giving you Permission Denied errors (accompanied with the type of Policy and the auth_admin_keep_always messages). I remember fixing it once before on Ubuntu 9.04 by writing my own /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf XML file but that didn’t work out well this time and I had to use KDE’s System Settings – Advanced Tab – PolicyKit Authorization applet to let it grant my user proper permissions. The following screenshot describes what I applied to all items under the HAL’s storage section, and it did the work. For automounting on login, I had to add a simple entry to HAL’s policy files giving it a true hint. Messy work, but it’s finally over!

The next issue I faced was that the music player on KDE, both Amarok and Juk, had long delays before it began playing a file, or between tracks. Plus, I couldn’t even seek the files in it. The solution, I figured, was simple – To switch Phonon (The multimedia framework of KDE/Qt) from its GStreamer backend to XINE. Installed the newer phonon-xine backend and it was done as well. Although I read that GStreamer is much more mature than XINE today, this will have to do until.

That sums up this week, I guess. Besides the ongoing internal tests of course, that’s a whole new post that doesn’t need to exist.

P.s. Windows 7 impressed me. I must be losing it.