Archive for the 'linux' Category

Link Layer Topology Discovery first appeared when Windows Vista came out in 2006, but wasn’t very exciting back then, as most people playing with Vista had existing home networks full of XP, which doesn’t support LLTD by default. Now, though, with Vista machines more common and regular people up to testing Windows 7, it’s becoming more than just a curiosity: it actually works now.

This is Windows 7’s network mapper in action at a recent LAN gathering. C7 and Pitchblack aren’t shown in the map; those PCs were running Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux respectively, both of which need a little tweaking to show up properly in Vista/7’s network mapper.

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I’ve started a new page to document my efforts in running an Ubuntu Linux server at home. Right now it’s just Samba and DHCP, but I also run Azureus on it, so there’ll be headless bittorrent shenanigans there too eventually.

“Computer, calculator.”

Silence.

“Computer, cal-cu-lay-torrr.”

“Calculator.”

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Update: I’ve since moved on and started a proper driver guide, including a bit more background info on this device, here: https://tim.id.au/blog/?page_id=121. I’ll leave this page here, but check out the new one too.

Do you have one of these?

I bought one on eBay about 6 months ago, and promptly lost the driver CD that came with it. It actually works out of the box on the latest Ubuntu Linux, but I’ve been completely stuck for Windows support for ages.

Windows XP detects it as an “ISSCBTA”, possibly the least helpful device name I’ve ever seen, and doesn’t know about drivers for it. There’s a driver for Vista on Windows Update, but as far as I can tell that one’s completely broken and useless.

A guy in this thread made an image of the original driver disc and put it up on rapidshare. For the sake of posterity I’m mirroring it here: https://tim.id.au/static/isscbta.zip (13MB!)

I’ve repackaged it in just a zip file, not an ISO in a RAR, so you can just extract it to a folder and run setup.exe without mounting or burning it.

The included software is weird, but functional:

You’ll probably want to remove it from startup items in the start menu too.

The bulk of the info and walkthroughs currently on the net about Bluetooth and Linux were written, basically, in the stone age. You know, back in the days where you had to ./configure and make install your own pile of stones to stand on so you could see above the grass to accurately aim small files at your tribemates.

What I really could’ve benefited from when I was doing this was a dead simple explanation of how Bluetooth is meant to be used and what apps there were for doing it using a plain Ubuntu install.

So, here one is. Enjoy.

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The mobile phone does what you think it does.

Anyremote gives you a way to control a PC with a mobile phone or PDA via Bluetooth, IR or a plain cable. Read about it, it’s cool. In setting up a MythTV box (more on it later), I was a bit stuck for how to control the thing – eventually I’ll dig an IR receiver out of somewhere, and train it to use a DVD remote control or something, but until then I had a USB keyboard with a very short cable. Or until I actually made practical use of my phone’s Bluetooth capabilities and made a remote control out of that instead.

Besides, controlling your computer with your mobile phone is really really cool.

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Viewing a Windows network file share on Ubuntu is easy enough. In the Places menu, click Network, then Windows Network, then the computer you want to look in, and so on and so forth.

Only programs that use GNOME’s virtual file system framework (gnome-vfs) will be able to directly open files over the network like this – Gedit, Totem Movie Player, Evince (PDF viewer) etc (incidentally, gnome-vfs does more than samba; you can also treat things like remote FTP and SFTP/SCP folders this way). Things like VLC, Firefox etc can only see files on the local filesystem, so network shares have to be mounted locally for them. This is done using smbfs.

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