48 posts from 2006

As the title states, we released the TorrentVolve Beta. There are a ton of bug fixes integrated on the project, and it has been tested extensively on Linux and Windows. Just as a note, here are some of the fixes and features we have done to the project.

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed Linux issue with PHP execution so the application is completely functional under Linux. 
- Server restarting concurrency issue resolved. 
- Fixed Change Password allowing users to change password when they use the forgot password feature.

New Features:

- Archive directory viewing with automatic zipping of directories for HTTP downloads 
- ETA, peers, and torrent total displays on the home page 
- Enabling and disabling automatic page refreshing

This Beta is definitely better than the previous versions of the project. Our software development team also got put into the Summit Awards.

vancottt and I are trying to figure out if the volume of an elephant can fit within the cargo area volume of an H2. However, we couldn't locate any statistics as to the volume or volume integral of a standard elephant in order to do the calculations. If anyone has any information regarding the volume or volume integral of an elephant, please post a comment.

This small tutorial is really just a personal reference, but to those who find it useful I'm glad. I'm currently running a T60p, and the wireless when we upgraded the internet was still slow. With a few optimizations however, one can get the full speed and usage of their network card.

First, go to http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks.
Click on start.
If start doesn't come up, you might need the JRE plugin for your browser. If so, then download and install it.
Click on Results once it has finished.
Fill out the connectivity form for tweak suggestions.

If you are like me, you got a suggestion for optimization.

Under Notes and Recommendations, look for "choose RWIN between some number and some number."
Download DRTCP.
When you open the application, under Tcp Receive Window, put in the second number listed on choose RWIN between some number and some number.
Make sure that you have the right network adapter selected.
Save the settings.
Restart your computer.

Here are my before and afters. The difference is kind of amazing. Thank you vancottt for this information. Have fun.

Well we have successfully released another alpha. It seemed really fast, but the system acts totally different with this new alpha release. You can get this new release at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/torrentvolve Some of the features include:

• Archive browsing of previously downloaded torrents and their torrent files.
• Administration of user archives.
• The ability to reload an archived .torrent file.
• Browsing to other user's archives and getting their downloaded files.
  

We also had a chance to fix some of the current bugs within the system. Some of these fixes include:

• HTML and CSS is XHTML compliant.
• Users can now upload renamed torrents.
• The torrent upload name doesn't have to be consistent with the actual torrent name.
• Layout and graphics tweaks for a more asthetic interface.
• Fixed a security flaw in changing passwords.

One thing I would like to mention is the archiving feature. The point of this system is to clean up the primary interface and allow better access to downloaded material for the system. After a torrent is uploaded, a user can choose to archive it at any time. It removes the torrent from the main interface to clear things up a little. Users can then view archives and re-upload them for seeding, or get the downloaded material of the torrent.

We are working on a number of things for the next release. Some of these new features include:

• Automatic zipping of archive directories for direct downloads.
• More torrent display information.
• Sub-directory listing within archive feature.
• More speed optimizations of the code.
  

Hopefully we will get some more feedback from the community as to what features should be put in the system next. I hope all of our users enjoy this latest release and I will be sure to post more periodic updates.

Fortunatly, throughout all of the commotion of classes, I did manage to complete a project. Although it has been kept pretty much under wraps, I finally released the software alpha to the world today. Projects class brought the opportunity to develop my own open-source project. So I put together a great development team, and 7 weeks later TorrentVolve emerged. It is hosted at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/torrentvolve

What TorrentVolve is:

TorrentVolve is an open-source, multi-user, bittorrent client written with PHP. The intention was to make a web based torrent client that was really fast and supported any torrent client that users would like to use. We definitely accomplished that. The torrent client ships with a server version of Azureus so downloads can start immediately. If you would like to use a different client, we have a couple of interfaces to implement so the system knows how to use your particular client, drop it in the torrent modules directory, and select it in the admin page.

TorrentVolve Development Team:

• Matthew Kruskamp
• TJ Van Cott
• Daniel Galloway
• Charles Pence
• Adam Nielsen
  

If you found that you were having problems installing the lenovo drivers for your T60p sound card, this should help you out. The sound drivers apparently require an hd sound driver from intel which doesn't reside on the lenovo site. Luckily, they are below:

http://download.sapphiretech.com/DRIVER/motherboard/utility/inteldrv.htm

http://download.sapphiretech.com/DRIVER/motherboard/utility/ALC_HDA.zip

How did you pick your Vox name? Does it mean something? 
Submitted by LeendaDLL.  

It is the same name I have used for just about everything.

Introduction
I decided for my reference and by requests of various people, that I would write a full installation tutorial for Ubuntu with all of the cool features of XGL and Beryl on the T60. The cool thing about Ubuntu is it installs and configures a lot of your drivers for you (including wireless) so it is fairly painless to get everything up and running. I wrote this tutorial dual-booting Windows XP with my T60p (2007-93U).

Getting the live cd
Snag the latest desktop download iso from here. Burn it off and boot her up. When everything boots up and you are in UBUNTU, double click the installer. Follow the instructions for partitoning and the keyboard and everything. I will post pictures soon. Then sit back and watch it install. After it is done installing, reboot and pull the cd out.

This is how my partitions are set up.

Holy moly, the majority of our stuff is installed aready. Network support for the T60 hardware is fully functional for both the wired and wireless connection. That definatly makes things easy. You are going to want to be online for this so go configure your networking. It is in:

System->Administraton->Networking

Once you set up your network settings, you can test them by opening up a browser and trying to navigate to a site.

Video
Now that we can access the internet, we need to get the video drivers installed so we can use XGL. In order to do that, we need to change our package manager to have the restricted packages. So open up a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and type the following:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

I went and uncommented every line that started with deb in order to get all of the packages we could use. Also, if you are on a broadband connection, I usually delete the top cdrom line as well. Once this is done, type ctrl-x-y and hit enter to get back to the terminal. Now we must update our packages and it is a good idea to upgrade any packages we have installed and may be out of date so type into the terminal:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade
sudo aptitude install linux-restricted-modules
sudo aptitude install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo depmod -a

There we go, now we have video driver support installed. But we have to set up our xserver to reflect our new found drivers.

sudo aticonfig --initial
sudo aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv

And now, I like to go into my configuration and give myself a higher resolution to run at:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak
sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down to where it says Section "Screen" and look for a section called SubSection "Display with a Depth of 24. Under Modes, I like a higher resolution so add 1600x1200 like shown below:

SubSection "Display"
                Depth     24
                Modes    "1600x1200" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection

Now scroll all the way to the bottom and add the following to the bottom of the configuration file.

Section "Extensions"
        Option  "Composite" "0"
EndSection

Just for those wondering why this is done, the fglrx drivers at the time of this writing don't have support for composite extensions. Now press ctrl-x-y and press alt+backspace to restart the x-server. You should see a higher resolution x-server, and when you log in, things should be smoother. Just to verify, open up a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and type:

glxinfo |grep direct

If the response is:

direct rendering: Yes

Congratulations you have working video drivers!

XGL and Beryl
Well that was fairly boring, now on to XGL. Using your terminal, open up your sources.list again by typing:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Scroll to the bottom and add this line:

deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/ edgy main-edgy

ctrl-x-y to save and exit and now we can get the key. The key? Well the packages are digitally signed with a key for validation and we need to add that key. So type this in command to get the key:

sudo wget http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/quinn.key.asc --quiet -O - | sudo apt-key add -

And it should come back with the response: OK. Now we can install XGL and beryl with our package manager. So type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install beryl beryl-core beryl-plugins beryl-plugins-data beryl-settings beryl-manager emerald emerald-themes xserver-xgl

We have everything we need installed, now we just have to configure it. We are going to create a custom session for XGL. So type the following into your terminal:

sudo nano /usr/share/xsessions/xgl.desktop

When it opens, add this too it:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xgl
Exec=/usr/bin/startxgl.sh
Icon=
Type=Application

ctrl-x-y to save and close the file and then type:

sudo nano /usr/bin/startxgl.sh

When it opens, add this to it:

#!/bin/sh
Xgl -fullscreen :1 -ac -accel glx:pbuffer -accel xv:pbuffer &
sleep 4 
export DISPLAY=:1
exec gnome-session

ctrl-x-y to save and close. We need to be able to execute the scripts we just wrote so type:

sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/startxgl.sh

If you are wondering exactly what we just did with this text editing, we created a desktop entry for our xserver session manager (The first edit). This entry points to our script that executes gnome with xgl (Second edit). Now we just type ctrl-alt-backspace to kill the xserver again. At the login screen, click sessions and select XGL. Now login as normal.

Well things changed, but it looks a little worse then before. Don't worry, we will get to that. We need to test beryl first. Open up a terminal again (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and type:

beryl-manager

Holy wow again. a logo should pop up and all your borders dissapear, and then ... your windows are all wavy when you move them. Pretty cool. Now we have to finish it all up. First thing we have to do is make beryl start on your startup so click System->Preferences->Sessions. Click on the startup tab and click Add. Type beryl-manager under the startup command and press ok. This will make beryl-manager load on the start. However, we also want to make it look a little better so press add again and type gnome-settings-daemon and press ok. Now press ctrl+alt+backspace to restart xserver again and login again.

Wow, super cool huh? The little red ruby is where you do all your configuration. Have fun!

Another little issue I have is accidentally hitting shift-backspace. If you find this is annoying as well, I have another post about it below.

Note: When using OpenGL games and other programs of the sort, it is better to run them using regular gnome and not XGL. You can do this just by switching the session when you login.

For more information the ATI Wiki and the Beryl Project Wiki are both really good resources.

I decided to do a small demonstration of my current desktop with UBUNTU, XGL, and Beryl. I did it at 5 in the morning after working all night so don't expect a terrible amount of quality.