Fladi.at

Because of this: $90 for a simple Plug-in? You must be kidding!

At least this is the final prove we all needed to realize that the bean-counters have taken over and the techies are leaving. Reminds me of a sinking boat. At least we at the MUG dropped plans for an Oracle cluster in favor of a PostgreSQL cluster.

The performance comparison between Oracle and PostgreSQL was absolutely dominated by the second one. A paper on this topic (only in German by now) will be published later this year.

The source of the unofficial FM4 stream is currently unavailable, thus I can not relay the stream right now. More information on this can be found here:

http://fm4.amd.co.at/

Meanwhile the streams will be offline. Maybe you, the listener, want to take this as an opportunity to ask ORF.at to provide Ogg/Vorbis streams on their own.

The Qualcomm Gobi chipset built into my HP EliteBook 8530w finally works with GNU/Debian Unstable.

It requires a 2.6.31 Kernel and a separate firmware loader plus the appropriate firmware.

ATTENTION: The qcserial driver is currently broken in Linux 2.6.32 and later! Follow my advices only if you are using a Linux kernel version of 2.6.31! You can check your currently running kernel with:

uname -a

I’ve packaged the loader (gobi_loader-0.4) for Debian/Unstable amd64 and i386 (untested) architecture and it’s available at my private repository:

http://debian.fladi.at/

For direct access to the .deb files:

• http://debian.fladi.at/pool/main/g/gobi-loader/gobi-loader_0.4-2_amd64.deb
• http://debian.fladi.at/pool/main/g/gobi-loader/gobi-loader_0.4-2_i386.deb

Install the package according to you architecture and make sure there was no error.

Now for the firmware: Sadly, I’m not allowed to distribute the firmware files due to copyright issues but they can be downloaded from HP:

Qualcomm Mobile Broadband Drivers – Gobi1000 (aka un2400)

Download the “sp45888.exe” file there and extract it to e.g. /tmp/un2400 with cabextract:

mkdir /tmp/un2400
cabextract -d /tmp/un2400 sp45888.exe

You can now find both firmware files at /tmp/un2400/Qualcomm/QCImages/Source/Packages/0/:

• amss.mbn
• apps.mbn

Copy both of them to /lib/firmware/gobi:

cp /tmp/un2400/Qualcomm/QCImages/Source/Packages/0/*.mbn /lib/firmware/gobi/

That’s it, now reboot and once your system is back up take a look at your USB devices with lsusb. You should see the un2400 device there. NetworkManager picked it up automatically as a modem and I was able to configure my 3G connection with a nice and fancy GUI

I know that vampires (especially the sparkling ones) are the big s**t right now but I never really cared about them.

Until now! Searching for english books on the german Amazon site (selecting the category “Englische Bücher” and entering no search term) turned up a list of books with about 50% of them having a vampire theme. Ranging from the unreadable horror of “Twilight” to “Vampire Diaries” and so on.

I think I better start searching for good old Issac Asimov again. I’m pretty sure none of his characters is going to sparkle in any way.

Sitze gerade frustriert mit einer Flasche Club-Mate vor den nicht funktionierenden Streams vom 26c3. Dabei hätte ich so ein schönes Icecast2 Relay am Start gehabt