Well, this turned out to be some kind of adventure. At least when you need it urgently to work as expected on a business trip.

Seems we need much more testing in this area. Anybody volunteering to provide me some more hardware of this area so i can make sure it works in future? (e.g. bluetooth stereo headset etc.)

I have to admit until now I hadn’t much to do with bluetooth at all, but after a salesman here in Ottawa (here for OLS) advertised me this thing would work nicely under linux.. i somehow expected we’d do nice here, but to my frustration i found we have plenty of room for improvement here.

To make it short, after a lot of hours going through hundreds all different howtos and documentation i really was desperate i never would get this thing workin… when i finally realized our packages are broken in 11.0. Or at least bluez-audio which contains libaudio.so that seems to segfault immediatelly after connecting to the device :-(. Fortunatelly the latest factory rpms have this fixed and also work on a 11.0 system.

Download them either from official factory repo or from seifes home buildservice project.

Please be aware that i am absolutely no bluetooth expert and all this might just be crap and i was just lucky this worked by chance for me, but perhaps this is also helpful for some more (but try on your own risks..).

After you upgraded your bluez* packages and installed bluez-audio you can make the headphone functionality make work with two simple files to create, but that solution won’t work for simultanious voice transfer for current voip softphones (like e.g. ekiga, kcall, xten etc.).

But if thats enough just:

1. Install new bluez* packages (including bluez-audio) from above
2. as root create the file /etc/bluetooth/audio.service with this content:
[Bluetooth Service]
Identifier=audio
Name=Audio service
Description=Bluetooth Audio service
Autostart=true
3. as normal user create the file ~/.asoundrc (yes, really in your home directory) with this content:
   pcm.bluetooth {
type bluetooth
device “00:00:00:00:00:00″
profile “auto”
}
   (with the address after device being that of your bluetooth headset; findable e.g. via kbluetooth or with hcitool scan on pairing)
4. restart bluetooth service (rcbluetooth restart as root)

From then on you have new alsa device called “bluetooth” many newer audio-/multimediaplayers can acces (e.g. for mplayer: mplayer -ao alsa:device=bluetooth ….).

Sadfully for e.g. ekiga and other softphones this does not work. There we have to use/ i had to use the old snd-bt-sco module so i get a new additionall complete sound device. When back in germany or when time permits i’ll package this so this will just be simple kmp package to install, but for now heres a tar ball with the fixed sources (so they compile with a 11.0 kernel).

1. Deactivate above method by setting Autostart to false in /etc/bluetooth/audio.service
2. Download and extract the tar ball fseidels-btsco-05a.tar.bz2
3. cd into the new dir and issue (as normal user) “./configure“
4. then “make“
5. and as root in that directory a “make install“
6. if not already done install kernel-source package
7. cd /usr/src/linux
8. as root “make cloneconfig“
9. as root “make prepare“
10. cd back to the btsco directoy and there cd into its kernel subdirectoy
11. issue a “make“
12. copy the snd_bt_sco.ko module to /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/weak-updates/ (as root)
13. issue a “depmod -a” (as root)

To start/use it

1. restart bluetooth service
2. pair your headset (e.g. with help from kbluetooth)
3. issue “hciconfig hci0 voice 0x0060” as root
4. issue a modprobe snd_bt_sco as root
5. start “btsco 00:00:00:00:00” (as root; with the address parameter being that of your headset)
6. chmod 666 /dev/dsp1 (as root)
7. chmod 666 /dev/mixer1 (as root)
8. as root issue “alsamixer -c 1” to adjust volume settings

now you have a workin new /dev/dsp1 sound device you can set in the audio settings of ekiga and other voip softphones and use it like expected.

Hope this helps anybody and hopefully i will soon find the time to package this up as decent kmp with automated udev-rules so it gets easier to use.

Just wanted to drop a quick note to say thanks to all the IT/IS workers out there!  Today is your day!

http://www.sysadminday.com/

This article has the steps for the installation and configuration of the CA ARCserve 11.5 SP3 backup server for Linux and the CA ARCserve OES Agent on SUSE OES 2.0 Linux.

read more

You’ve seen the stats… 70-85% of all IT shops have Linux in use.  More and more of them are using Linux and open source for “mission critical workloads”…  Bill Snyder from InfoWorld posted a blog entry that highlights a report that indicates what he calls “the open source jobs boom”.

Looking for a good job in IT? Sharpen your knowledge of open source development frameworks, languages, and programming. A just-published study of available IT jobs found that 5 percent to 15 percent of the positions now on the market call for open source software skills.

Written by consultant and author Bernard Golden in conjunction with O’Reilly Media, the 50-page report attempts to document the spread of open source in the enterprise. Although the study did not quantify the actual percentage of open source products used in the enterprise, the strong growth in available jobs — in a period when overall IT job growth may be slowing — points to a surprising breadth of adoption. Indeed, the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software.

(full article)

Interested in getting a Linux certification under your belt?  Novell offers four technical and one sales certs:

• Certified Novell Salesperson (CNS) - Linux
• Certified Linux Administrator (CLA)
• Certified Linux Desktop Administrator (CLDA)
• Novell Certified Linux Professional (CLP)
• Novell Certified Linux Engineer (CLE)

Not to mention the other product certifications we offer which are for products running on or designed to compliment your Linux environment.  More info on all of these certifications is here.  You can also check out some good community or free resources here.

Traditionally - mainly because I also have worked as sysadmin for years - I enjoy to celebrate SysAdminDay every last Friday in July.

I would like to thank especially all system administrators which support my work and keep the stuff running. For my work at SUSE/Novell this mainly is the SUSE R&D-Admin team. Kudos to Thomas and his crew for being available all the time and handling all kinds of requests very fast, efficient and straightforward. I deeply appreciate your work! Of course I also would like to express my thankfulness to all people at Novell’s IS&T.

As a user of the openSUSE Build Service I also depend on the work from some of my colleagues from my team and department. I am grateful for being able to use such a fast, reliable and innovative service.

The LinuxTag-Admin team, which is completely volunteer driven, also deserves my gratitude. I would like to mention our team lead Kester and moreover Stefan and Michael from Speedpartner for sponsoring infrastructure and joining our team.

Furthermore I am fortunate to have Emme as my friend - it is highly reassuring to know you have someone to ask in cases you need a dam good tip or just another crazy idea to find another approach to a problem. The hack-nights with you have always been very inspiring!

Last but not least I send my greetings to my former colleagues and friends at the MPII.

It looks like as of July 7th, this blog had an anniversary.  I’ve kept several blogs and sites over the years, but this one is by far the longest I’ve had one in operation.  I really think that it’s due to me finding the openSUSE project.

I’ve always had a desire to help out with open source projects in some way and the openSUSE community kickstarted that for me.  Thanks to the whole community for keeping me active and thanks to the readers for skimming my crazy rants and raves.

I almost wish I had some of my old site backups, it would be interesting to read over some old posts.  I’m going to dig through some dusty external drives to see if I can’t bring back some old material.

Thanks again, and happy anniversary altbit.org!

My cool new machine was already sent back for warranty repair. The external display, connected to the docking station, did not get a signal anymore, so the motherboard had to be replaced. Ok, bad luck, but nothing to worry about. I had another similar machine (nc2400, the predecessor of the 2510p) to use during repair, so it was not that bad. But what really pisses me off is the fact, that i needed to boot Vista, just to reactivate the built-in UMTS card. When I first had to do it after fitting the card into the machine, I was thinking that it might be Sierra Wireless who needs the card to be “activated” or that I just had overlooked some BIOS setting in my eagerness to use the new toy, so I did not bother too much.
But today - I had of course booted Linux and wondered where the ttyUSB* devices had gone - I searched all the BIOS settings and everything, but there was just no device appearing on the USB bus. So I finally had to boot Vista, start HP’s “Wireless Manager” and switch it on there.

That’s 10GB of valuable harddisk space wasted, just for an UMTS activator program. I hate that.

Shame on you, HP guys. I’m really pissed.

I'll provide PDF and HTML versions soon.

• Put out latest ooo-build.git with tweaked commit messages.
• Team meeting.