FreeBSD 7.0 was released yesterday.  dax is currently running 6.2-STABLE, so I'm debating whether to move it to 6.3 and then do the upgrade to 7.0-RELEASE, or just go directly to 7.0.

Yeah, I'll probably break a couple of things.  No pain, no gain!

More specifically, Pakistani ISPs announced YouTube's netblocks, and their upstream provider, PCCW, was stupid enough to leak them to the world.  This caused an outage lasting almost two hours:

This follows a recent story about the Pakistani government instructing all ISPs to block YouTube.  Most likely, the goal of advertising these netblocks was so they could display some "site is blocked" message.

A nice discussion can be found on NANOG.  It's screwups likes these that make me wish all ISPs would use tools like RADb to populate prefix-lists and do sanity checks when allowing customer routes to reach the DFZ.

I tried to take some photos of it, but I think it would have been better with a telephoto lens.

Work gave me a BlackBerry 8820, today as a replacement for my aging 7250.  At first, I didn't think much of it - new phone, big deal?

Well, I am impressed.  The unit has a crystal-clear display, supports A2DP right out of the box, and paired with my Motorola S9 headphones like a charm.  Sound is excellent, but I suppose anything is better than the crappy A2DP implementation that is BlueZ audio (skips all the time).

It's got four radios: GSM (EDGE via AT&T, so it works great in my condo), 802.11b/g, 802.11a, and Bluetooth.  The 802.11 implementation supports WPAv2, and connected without hassle to my home network.

There's also a built-in GPS, which I haven't messed with yet, but supposedly works well.

I just need to get use to the wheel/ball thing, now…

It's finally gone:

The screen on my dad's IBM ThinkPad R40 died about a month ago, so he picked up a new one via eBay.  The laptop and screen were dropped off when my parents were driving through Charlotte, and I agreed to perform the replacement and give it back during my next trip to NJ.

Looks like we both forgot to check something.  See the photo gallery for details.  It actually ended up working…

This is what happens when SRP is misconfigured:

<rant/>

Background

I use my Mac mini as an HTPC, connected to my Westinghouse LVM-37w1 HDTV via DVI-D.

I got sick of OS X 10.5 the other day because it's too darn slow, and decided to upgrade it to Debian/GNU Linux.

I'd tried this once before between OS X 10.4 and 10.5, and it had resulted in failure, mostly because I was unable to get Xorg 7.x outputting 1920x1080@60, although the Linux FB console worked just fine.  Anyway, I continued…

Installation

I burned a copy of the latest testing image (currently Lenny), and booted the installer by pressing C after pressing the power button.  Yes, this works with Bluetooth HIDs since the host adapter operates in HID mode by default (requires an hid2hci after booting).

Unfortunately, each time the installation tried to install Yaboot, the kernel would oops when apparently trying to mount an HFS partition:

I thought it was odd, since I didn't create any.  So, I wrote about 128MiB of zeroes to /dev/hda, rebooted, and modprobe -r'ed hfsplus before the installation of Yaboot.  That seemed to work.

X11

Upon bootup, the Linux framebuffer console appeared in 1920x1080 at 60Hz.  So X11 should work, right?  Well, that's what I thought last time, and turned out to not.  Here's what fbset said:

mode "1920x1080-60"
    # D: 138.504 MHz, H: 66.589 kHz, V: 59.936 Hz
    geometry 1920 1080 1920 1080 32
    timings 7220 80 48 24 2 32 5
    rgba 8/16,8/8,8/0,0/0
endmode

I didn't bother trying the X11 fbdev server, since that didn't work last time.  I then spent hours playing with various modelines, and trying lots of things, but couldn't get anything to come up on the screen with the ATI driver.

Now, normally, the LVM-37w1 will display a message stating "invalid mode" when it can't handle the signal received.  However, this time it kept saying "no signal detected" and then going to sleep.  I thought this was odd, but kept going.

Since the Linux framebuffer worked, I thought it might help to convert the geometry and timings from the fbdev output to a modeline.  There's a utility, modeline2fb to convert X11 modelines to a fb.modes-style format, but not the other way around.  Maker from lily helped me out with this, and did the following:

* pixtime = 7220
* left = 80
* right = 48
* top = 24
* bottom = 2
* hsynclen = 32
* vsynclen = 5
*
* clock = 1000000 / pixtime = 138.5
*
* xres = 1920
* xsyncstart = xres + right = 1968
* xsyncend = xsyncstart + hsynclen = 2000
* xfres = xsyncend + left = 2080
*
* yres = 1080
* ysyncstart = yres + bottom = 1082
* ysyncend = ysyncstart + vsynclen = 1087
* yfres = ysyncend + top = 1111

So, the modeline for my Westinghouse LVM-37w1 that will display 1920 by 1080 pixels at 60Hz should be:

Modeline "1920x1080" 138.5 1920 1968 2000 2080 1080 1082 1087 1111

Unfortunately, this didn't work initially, although the Xorg.0.log said it was outputting 1920x1080.  x11vnc worked, too.  So, out of the blue I substituted Driver "ati" for Driver "fbdev" and got something on the screen.  Woo, success.  Maybe?  Not entirely…

fbdev issues

Unfortunately, the fbdev driver doesn't support anything fancy like XVideo, 3D, or proper DPMS.  So, basically, no 3D games (this is not an issue for me) but more importantly, no XVideo overlay capability.  This means that I can't watch any videos in fullscreen.  MPlayer with the -zoom option plays VOBs at no more than 10fps at 100% CPU.

Conclusions

So, failure again.  But this time, I'm not going back to OS X (would have been 10.4, not 10.5), so I think I'm going to start looking around for a real HTPC, and see if I can co-lo my mini somewhere cheap (where cheap is defined as $10/month..).