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Nvidia Drivers and Fedora 13 / New Kernel Upgrade

June 24th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted in Linux

For sadism, i wanted to see how badly I could break my system so i decided to run “yum upgrade” via an X session. Rebooted, and saw that my normal loading page was tucked in the top left hand corner. This then dissappeared and gave me green/red lines, noise, etc.

I booted from another Linux OS and trawled through xorg.logs in /var/log/ and found it was struggling to discover my Screen0 for some reason. For fun, i decided to run “yum remove nvidia-x11-xorg..” (cant remember the exact syntax):

xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.i686 : NVIDIA’s proprietary display driver for NVIDIA graphic cards

I then tinkered with rewriting xorg.conf etc and managed to get it back to a running X session, granted at 800×600 (shudder).

I then ran “nvidia-xconfig” to regenerate my xorg.conf for Nvidia now the drivers were re-installed, and then rebooted. Same problem again. Hmm.

After rinse-repeating this process, I twigged the problem – the “xorg-x11-drv-nvidia” drivers were showing as “…2.6.32.12-115″ whereas my new kernel was definitely a 2.6.32.14-127. After rebooting and choosing the 2.6.32.12-115 kernel, automagically everything sprang back into life again.

Moral of the story – dont be a feckwit like me and do something like this, but if you do, try and boot from the kernel which matches the version of Nvidia drivers as above.

HTH

Rhythmbox: How to add plugins

May 1st, 2010 | No Comments | Posted in Linux

So I have had a bit of a “mod session” today; I wanted to get embedded terminal windows working in my desktop using Compiz – after which i decided to see what mod’s i can get for Rhythmbox (my music player de jour).

Now Rhythmbox doesnt particularly make it easy for users to add their own plugins via the GUI, so you will need to do it via the terminal / CLI. In this example, I will be installing the “Jump to playing” plugin for Rhythmbox (download here jump-to-playing-0.3.1.tar.gz ).

First, download the file to your standard directory. Mine is /home/Sam/Downloads . Then, fire open a CLI / Terminal window and change directory to where you downloaded the file to, i.e.

cd /home/Sam/Downloads

Now, you will need to extract the .tar.gz file using a command like below:

tar -zxvf jump-to-playing-0.3.1.tar.gz

In situations like the above, tab complete is your best friend. You will now have a folder created with files inside at the location /home/Sam/Downloads/jump-to-playing . You now need to get these files into Rhythmbox in order to get the plugins to work. Fortunately, Rhythmbox in this sense has been kind and made it fairly simple. All you need to do, is copy the folder and all its contents to /usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins using a command such as:

sudo cp -R jump-to-playing/ /usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins/

This command needs to be ran when your current directory is the Downloads folder. Once you have done this, Close/re-open Rhythmbox and go to “Edit -> Plugins” and voila, your new plugin is available to use.

Sam

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Trixbox: Adding Soft/Hard phones

August 30th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Linux, Networking

In this example, we will be adding soft phones and hard phones to a Trixbox installation. I will be using Polycom hard phones, and the x-Lite client for the soft phones.

Adding New Softphone Clients:

1.         Download and install X-Lite from http://www.download.com/X-Lite/3000-2349_4-10547103.html

2.         Once installed, you will need to reboot.

3.         On loading of Windows / Linux after reboot, it will ask you for the SIP Details – this is what tells the softphone where to log-onto, etc.

4.         The “DOMAIN” field is actually the IP of the TRIXBOX, e.g. 192.168.1.1.

5.         The Username and Authorization Username are the same, e.g. “100” for the test accounts.

6.         The password is whatever the usernames password is, e.g. “100” for the test accounts.

7.         Click “OK” on the SIP accounts page after entering all the details above, and then click “close” on the following SIP page.

8.         You should now be presented with the X-Lite phone, stating “Your username is XXX” where 100 is the test account username.

9.         You can dial other numbers on the network by entering the number and pressing the green phone symbol.

Adding new hard phone clients (PoE phones):

First of all, we need to add the handset to the server. Make sure you have the MAC ADDRESS to hand, it is available from the menu: “Menu -> 2. Status -> 2. Network -> 2. Ethernet”. And will resemble “00:04:AD:X2:Y2:F3” for example.

Log onto the server from a client in the same subnet, e.g. if the server IP is 192.168.1.1 you will need to be 10.0.0.X. To login to the server, open up a web browser and go to “192.168.1.1”. This will load up the bog standard Trixbox webpage. At the top right there will be a “switch” button, click on this and it will prompt you for a username and password. Use “maint” as the username and “password” as the password.

Once you are in, navigate to the PBX Menu, which on mouse-over will make a drop-down menu appear. In the drop-down menu select “Endpoint Manager”. Once this has loaded, choose “Polycom Phones” and “Add Phone”. This is where you will need the MAC address handy. Once you have input the model and MAC address, click “Submit” and the phone will be added.

1.         Unbox hard phone and plug it into a POE port on the switch being used.

2.         Default administrator password for POLYCOM phones is “456”.

3.         On the handset, press the MENU button. Scroll down to “3. Settings”, and subsequently down to “2. Advanced”.

4.         Enter “456” as the password and press the “Enter” button.

5.         Go into “1. Network Configuration” and Scroll down to “IP Gateway”. Enter the IP Address of the Trixbox, e.g. 192.168.1.1 and press enter (NB: Use the # key to change the format).

6.         Change the “SNTP Addr” to the Trixbox also, 192.168.1.1 for example.

7.         Once this has been done, press the back arrow. It should prompt you to “cancel, resume or save”. Save the config and you will drop back to “Admin Settings”.

8.         Go into “2. SIP Configuration” and then into “Server”. Change the Address to 192.168.1.1, press ok and then the back arrow to get out of the Server options.

9.         Scroll past “Out Proxy, RFC2543 Hold, Calls Per Line” to “Line 1” and go into the Line 1 options by pressing the tick icon on the handset.

10.       Change the display name to whatever is relevant.

11.       The address and label would be “101” where the username is 101. Auth User ID is also 101 where the username is 101.

12.       The Auth Password would be “101”, using the example.

13.       Once this is all configured, press the back arrow twice, and you will be prompted to “Cancel, Resume, Yes”, select yes to save the config.

14.       After a few seconds delay, the LCD Screen should come up with “RECONFIGURING” and a small beeping noise should be momentarily made.

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