30 days with Ubuntu 7.04 (feisty fawn)

[anyweb]

Day 10

 

Can I watch TV ?

 

I tested an Avermedia USB 2.0 TV box today with ubuntu. It wasnt recognised by the OS as far as I could tell via lsusb, and I

tried some guides on [/url][url=http://linuxtv.org]http://linuxtv.org but it seems that my particular model of USB tv tuner is not supported (not listed on their Hardware compatibility list)

 

I may look into this later, but either way I'm not too fussed as I also had the same issue with it via FCR6, I plugged it into the Ubuntu laptop to see if anything had changed, and well, nope, nothing has changed. And yes I did try the System/Administration/Restricted Drivers Manager but it just told me nothing was found (more or less).

 



 

 

 

I do have a supported USB tv tuner box though, so I may get to try that one yet :)

Docking the laptop

 

I will now attempt to dock the laptop and I presume the correct way of doing that would be to boot the laptop while docked, but for the laugh I'm going to dock it while still powered on and with some uptime since my last reboot

 

anyweb@anyweb-laptop:~$ uptime 00:01:01 up 7 days, 9:20, 2 users, load average: 0.16, 0.29, 0.16

 

ok the docking didn't go to well, when i connected it (powered on) to the docking station, there was no video on the external lcd so I cycled through the FN F8 keystrokes and still nada. finally I restarted X with ctrl_alt_backspace and now, when I pressed FN F8 the laptops lcd went black and that was it, no video externally either. So I tried those keystrokes some more times and nothing was happening. Finally I pressed the power button on the laptop with the hope that it would gracefully shutdown (seeing as I could not SEE anything). But that didn't work, so I had to do a dirty shutdown by holding in the power button.

 

However, once I powered it back on, I have video on the external LCD while docked, so that is cool and i'm writing this now while docked. However, no audio, so I check all settings in Volume Control 2.18.0 and nothing makes a difference until I connect my speaker cable direct to the laptop.

 

 

New updates available

 

I have new updates available so I choose to install them.

 



 

The updates look interesting and are related to HAL (hardware abstraction layer) so this could be exciting. While I'm waiting for the updates to install I move a window around (as xgl is now re-enabled after the reboot) and really enjoy the wobbly effects that it offers especially seeing it on a 19 inch LCD. The spinning cube desktop effect is also very nicely done even on this lowly laptop.

 



 

More on the mplayer issues

 

I've now figured out that the mplayer issue isn't mplayer but gmplayer. If i start a vid via mplayer in CLI it works fine, if i try the same one in CLI I get an error.

 



 

see this

 

anyweb@anyweb-laptop:~/backup/music videos$ mplayer some_music.m2vMPlayer 2:1.0~rc1-0ubuntu9