Whispers of R’lyeh

Yet again I’ve let the site go.

Have been busy learning Poser 8, trying to get into Flash, and designing http://dbdguild.org

So I’ve been struggling with the eth5k drivers (and the madwifi alternative) on the tablet – both connect fine as long as my AP is unencrypted, but as soon as I add either WEP or WPA Personal security it just fails. In a last-ditch attempt to get wireless comms up, I’m installing the Windows XP network drivers into Linux using ndiswrapper.

Step Six: Installing ndiswrapper

apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

I’ve previously extracted the driver into /home/user/wireless

cd /home/user/wireless

ndiswrapper -i PRISMNIC.inf

modprobe ndiswrapper

ndiswrapper -m

Followed by a reboot, picking a religion at random, and offering up a prayer.

It didn’t work.  However, I got a warning that /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper needed a .conf extension – so I quickly renamed and rebooted again…

Aaand still not working

To be continued…

Step Five: Installing Xine

A nice short one today

apt-get install xine-ui

And then

xine <avi file>

plays back anything from my mounted media library quite happily. No messing with codecs or anything

I decided at the last moment to avoid NFS, because of the lack of security in its default form, and my lack of understanding of how to configure it in a more complicated way.

Also, CIFS mounts mean I only have to do this once, and my Windows machines can use it too

After adding a SAMBA share on the server, it was pretty easy to mount on the tablet:

Step Four: CIFS Mounts

First off, I needed to

apt-get install smbfs

to add the filesystem support.

Then it was just a matter of adding

//shire/media    /mnt/media    cifs    noauto,username=xxxx,password=xxxx,uid=1000,gid=1000

to the /etc/fstab file

After everything I said against Poser before, I took one look at the screenshots of the new Poser 8 UI and was sold.  Obviously if it turned out to be another clunky mess I would take advantage of the 30-day money back guarantee.

But as it turns out, I shall not need to.

Poser 8 is a dream to work with.  Granted, I still prefer DAZ Studio’s content database and rendering engine, but I’m happy I now have a usable version of Poser for creating clothing and things in.

Step Two: Ubuntu Desktop on USB

I’m usually a server person: I like to know my install is free of “desktop toys” before installing a minimal gnome plus whatever I want.  However, this time I needed an install that would boot directly into a desktop environment once it had finished, so I could ditch the USB keyboard and start using the stylus and a onscreen keyboard.

Getting an Ubuntu Desktop ISO onto a bootable USB stick was as easy as grabbing UNetbootin and running it.  I decided to go with a 6GB partition for Ubuntu, resizing the existing XP Tablet Edition to 14GB (just in case I still wanted it later – it would be easy enough to wipe and reformat it to ext3 later if I wanted it for Ubuntu)

Everything installed perfectly, was then just a matter of a few stylus taps to get an onscreen keyboard via System>Preferences>Assistive Technologies

There was a bit of graphics corruption on some text, which I’m hoping will disappear once I install the updates from the internet.

Step Three: Networking

The good news: Ubuntu picked up both the onboard ethernet and wifi natively.

The bad news: Try as I might, I couldn’t get the wifi to connect.  It could see my network, but just rejected every combination of the WEP key I could come up with.

As with the graphics corruption, I’m not going to worry about this until I’ve installed all the latest updates – which I’m now doing via the onboard ethernet.

To-Do:

• Get wifi working
• Fix graphics corruption
• Strip out unwanted crap
• Install word processor, web browser, and email
• Look into handwriting recognition possibilities
• Configure remote VNC connection to server
• Configure NFS to my server’s media archive
• Configure Freevo to play my media archive
• Configure the TV capture card on my server, and set up live streaming to the tablet with some means of remote control to change channels!

The RM RTAB910 Tablet is actually a Tatung TTAB-910e, rebadged and resold by Research Machines in the UK to educational establishments somewhere around 2003.  They’re now turning up all over ebay as they reach the end of their useful school lifetimes, and I was lucky enough to pick one up for £70.

I’d been looking for something tablet-ey for roaming ebook/browser use, but the normal price for a Tablet PC is around £1000, with the only real budget option being the £350 Fizzbook Spin.  I couldn’t afford either, so was saving for the Fizzbook when it struck me that I don’t really need a brand new one, and something second-hand and lower-spec would do just fine.

I say lower-spec, but compared to modern Netbooks a P866 processor and 256MB of RAM running Windows XP and Office 2003 at a half-decent speed really isn’t that bad – and I thought was pretty amazing for the price.  All I really need is something with a decent-sized display thats capable of acting as a thin client into my wireless network so I can stream movies, or read ebooks, or surf the net.  Then once I noticed the amount of these things being sold, I figured others might like a little how-to guide on turning these into productive members of society.

I made sure I picked a seller with a decently-high rating, and who had sold a few tablets recently with positive feedback, to limit the chances of being stuck with something unusable.  Even so, I was expecting to have to maybe replace the HDD for the price it was listed or do some other work, but was pleasantly surprised when it arrived in full working order (and even a battery charge).

Specifications

866Mhz Processor
256MB Memory
20GB HDD
2x USB 1.0 Ports
Built-in Wifi
Onboard Intel Network Adaptor
Onboard Intel Graphics

- This is for the RTAB910-S01 “Student” version that I have.  There was also an RTAB910-T01 “Teacher” tablet which added a fingerprint sensor for security plus a PCMCIA slot, which theoretically would be useful for adding in a PCMCIA-to-USB2.0 card.

Step 1 – Booting

The RTAB910 has no drives, so to install a new OS you’re going to need to either plug in an external USB CD/Floppy drive, or install boot files onto a USB stick.  I used Hiren’s Boot CD, and followed the instructions for putting it on a memory stick.  Then its just a matter of using the “Universal TCP/IP Network” option from there to map to boot into DOS with a mapped network drive – I’d rather do this than be limited to the speed of the USB 1.0 ports, plus I had no idea where my external USB drive caddy was anyway.

I took the opportunity here to clone the hard drive, which had arrived with a nice working install of Windows XP Tablet Edition plus Office 2003.  My plan was to wipe the drive and install Ubuntu Linux onto the tablet.  Normally I’d have chosen Debian but I recently found Ubuntu was better for quick and simple installs without having to mess around downloading essential functionality seperately.

One of the first issues I ran into is that Samba by default doesn’t accept LanMan authentication any more – see http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2008-September/061363.html for details on turning this back on.

That problem solved, the machine ghosted happily over the network, so I can put it back to a near-factory state in the future if I decide to.  Or if this project doesn’t work out.

To be continued…

I was about to write about this, but somebody else already beat me to it.

Honestly, you have no idea how much it annoys me when someone uses the word “authentification”.  The word does not exist, people!*

It seems to be fairly widespread, I’m sad to say, amongst pieces of Linux and other open source software documentation, commonly within systems to authentiCATE users on websites.

Other alternative unwords in use are “authentify” and “authentificate”.

*Perhaps it does outside of the English language, but in that case write the entire document in that language, please!

I get a bit annoyed when I read posts explaining why people shouldn’t bother with the “toy” DAZ Studio and use “grown-up” Poser instead, such as one I read in the Platinum Club forums today.

Yes, DAZ Studio is lacking in a few features Poser has still, such as the ability to create dynamic clothing, and a few tools necessary for tweaking new created figures, but when you compare it to the position, say, a year ago – Studio is catching up fast.

DAZ Studio now has dynamic clothing, although you can’t create your own yet.  Studio also has about 90% of the tools to create new figures from scratch, with the remaining 10% you can work around in 3D modelling software or may not even need at all in some cases.

DAZ Studio is actively supported by a company interested in pushing it out free to as many people as possible in order to sell content.  Poser is … uh.. well, I heard rumours about a version eight coming out soon (after a couple of years of languishing at a nearly-compatible with Windows XP level), but Smith Micro don’t exactly scream about the product from the rooftops.

DAZ Studio has a nifty, fast-ish UI built on Qt.  Poser has a clunky heap of crap that uses so much of your PC’s horsepower drawing unnecessarily graphic UI controls that theres barely anything left to do the actual 3D work with.

DAZ Studio comes as a free base package with additional tools available to purchase as plugins as and when you need them.  Poser comes as an expensive, but complete, package.  The majority of users just looking to throw scenes together and render probably will never touch half the menu options in Poser.

Studio has a lot of support on the DAZ site, including product info pages, tutorials in the wiki, and active forums.  As far as I can find, Poser has a couple of pages on the Smith Micro online store.

DAZ  Studio lets me throw a quick scene together in minutes and render it quickly.  In that time with Poser, I’ll probably still be waiting for the screen to update after I clicked to open a panel in the UI after the third crash in a row.

And if anyone really wants to get into a rendering argument with me: Poser uses a custom rendering engine.  DAZ Studio uses an industry-standard Pixar Renderman-compliant engine used in Hollywood – 3Delight.

I tend to frown at Poser the same way I used to frown at WordPerfect – a piece of software people have gotten used to because there wasn’t any real alternative at the time, and are scared of letting go now there is.

On a side-note, I’m considering doing a weekly review of DAZ model releases.  Something to think about…

So I’m sitting waiting for my monthly DAZ 3D coupon to appear, and figured I had a bit of spare time to catch up here.

Twilight Dawne and Vanguard have been taking up most of my time for the past couple of weeks, while I got to grips with the artwork side of things.  Other than that things have been mostly quiet.  Okay, mostly I kept them quiet to stop myself going mad.

Meds are keeping me pretty docile.  Its hard to work up any enthusiasm for anything.  Still, the alternative is … not good.