Are you new to linux and want to learn about it or have never used it before? Then now its your turn to download openSUSE 11.2 and give it a try. Besides the installation DVD images you can also download LiveCD images to run linux on your computer without installation – the harddisk will not be touched. Find more information in the openSUSE wiki about whats new in this release.

On Friday I’m going to upgrade a friend’s computer and install two new hard disks. In order to save some time I wanted to preinstall the operating system (the one of my companies’ cooperation partner). Up to then it was a good idea. But then I connected one new disk to my computer and booted the XP Home installation CD. No hard disks installed was the short message after the installer probed the system. I realized that this CD must be so old that it had no SATA drivers – or at least not for my mainboard.

I searched for the driver CD of my mainboard and – thinking like a developer who wants to be nice to the users – booted again, pressed F6 when prompted to include 3rd party drivers, inserted the driver CD and found that the only way to hand new drivers to an XP installation was via floppy.

But I have no floppy drive in this machine. Nor has my PC in the living room, nor has my Laptop. A month ago I cleaned up my cellar and got rid of my last PC with a floppy drive – a Pentium 133 machine that I got in 2001, when it already was used (Siemens wanted to get rid of it back then). Well … no way to solve that, it seemed. I didn’t want to give up that easy and crawled though my board with PC components and really found a lonely floppy drive. But then I recalled that I also disposed my collection of SCSI and floppy cables – nobody uses floppies any more and everything is SATA nowadays, I kept some IDE cables as my file server still has an IDE drive.

So the next objective was: get a floppy cable. When I almost gave up on this I had a look in an old ASUS mainboard box where I keep some manuals in – and amazingly there was a brand new floppy cable still in its original package. Ok, great, now I could connect the floppy drive with my mainboard … but stop, it needs a small power plug – but there was none. As my power supply has cable management there must be some power cords left in its packaging … so again, searching for a cable – but that one was easier to find.

But what is a floppy drive without a floppy. Those I disposed about 5 years ago after I created a last backup of thier content on my file server. So now it became quite hard. I even had to search in those tow boxes with unused stuff that I left untouched for three years now since I moved into my current apartment. And astonishingly there were about 10 floppies left.

Then the amazing thing happened. After over 5 years it was the first time I logged into my own workstation with a floppy drive connected. Ok, the workstations changed in the meantime from a custom built one to a MacMini and now I’ve got a custom built one again (does not look as nice as Apple products but its a lot cheaper and much more flexible).

Well, the rest of the story is short: formatting the floppy with KDE was easy, installing wine to extract the SATA drivers on the CD from the self extrating *.exe archives went smoothly as well, and so did the installation of XP in the end. It just was so curious to use a technology again after such a long time (5 years can seem long). Maybe I now start to understand what it feels like for the computer poineers to touch a Zuse or to power on a DEC PDP-7.

The friend who brought me the disk kindly came by the next day to help with the operation. According to the recipes I found here and here, we had to connect the hard drives service port to a serial console via a RS232-TTL converter. My friend prepared the RS232-TTL converter, brought a stable power supply as we needed 5V to operate. My task was to prepare the operating table, find a serial cable and a computer with a serial port, a two-pin-connector with wires and to get to know minicom.

So and here is how we did it:

RS232-TTL converter

First we connected the converter to the devices. The docking station of my notebook has a serial port, so I connected it via a serial cable to the converter. The three wires coming from the converter had to be connected the hard drive directly. We fixed the ground wire with a screw of the board. The Rx and Tx connectors had to be connected to the Tx and Rx connectors of the drive (so just cross them). Thats where we used the two-pin-connector. On the drive the pin next to the SATA connector is the Rx and next to this one is Tx. The other two are reserved and we did not need them.

The most tricky part was about to be next. We had to interrupt the power supply for the motor of the platters but keep everything else connected properly. And it must be possible to remove this interruption during the operation. We unscrew all srews a little and pushed a piece of paper between the contacts of the board and the connector, and fastend the srews just a bit.

So much for the preparation. Let’s start. Here is my minicomrc I used to communicate with the drives firmware:

$ cat minirc.seagateBug
# Machine-generated file - use "minicom -s" to change parameters.
pu port             /dev/ttyS0
pu baudrate         38400
pu bits             8
pu parity           N
pu stopbits         1

Now we connected the the SATA power cable to the drive and let minicom establish the serial connection. And really, I got first contact with the drive:

Even the error codes the drive dumped to the screen were correct according to the recipe. So we were on the right track. Now it was just about to properly retype the commands into minicom and patiently wait for the drive to complete the commands. Here is a screenshot with some comments in it.

Hacking the firmware (commented)

Then finally we were done. But we did not repair the drive, but only reactivated it. Now it can run into the same bug again any time (but only on startup, so we would notice). So we tried to prevent as many restarts as we could. The first thing I did was connect it to an external SATA-2-firewire case and use the first startup of the disk to backup all important data. The second thing I did was connect the drive to the onboard connectors of my workstation and boot from the firmware upgrade CD I downloaded from the Seagate website the day before and deployed the new firmware to finally get rid of the bug.

In the end the disk felt quite well back in its original machine. Fortunately we had nothing more to fix within the installed system (yes, it was the other operating system).

Btw. the commands we sent to the drive took serveral seconds each to process, so we had to wait for for them to finish. Disconnecting power too early would have broken the disk. Thats why I connected all vital systems to my UPS for this hack. If you happen to have such a Seagate drive, my deepest regrets to you and good luck for your recovery hack.

Anyway, the sound engineer of our choir sent me his USB stick via snail mail. He recorded our last gig with a hardware MP3 encoder which dumped some garbage into the MP3 file and even corrupted the filesystem. He could not copy or play it with his M$ system. So I was interested if it can be repaired.

It turned out to be very easy to fix. The filesystem was just done with a fsck.msdos -a. But for the MP3 file I needed a tool and found mp3splt. I decided to enforce to write new id3 tags and to cut the first 5 seconds and the quite a few minutes at the end of the recording (they were empty anyway). Btw. cutting MP3 files into pieces without to recode the material is the main purpose of this tool. So I just ran:

mp3splt -1 broken.mp3 00.05 118.00

This created a new and valid MP3 file with just our gig – thanks to the mp3splt authors.

Well actually I do not use these online photo albums (yet). The nice thing about them is, you can show a huge pile of photos to someone without having to send him tens of eMails with 4 or 5 photos attached to each – depending on resolution, file format and the allowed size of attachments of the receivers mail server.

On Saturday, 2008-11-15, I had a concert with my gospel choir Profil and a professional photographer took photos of us. Liberally he offered to send me the images to put them into the gallery of our website. As I am a geek of course I asked for the images in their original resolution (maybe we want to use them in some print material).

Today I finally got an eMail from him, and guess what: He uploaded all the 240 images to his Picasa Webalbum. Its nice to see the slideshow online in the browser or to get a an overview in the thumbnail view. But I wanted to download the real data on my disk to work with it. On the website I did not find any link to download that stuff. I could click around to get the image in original resolution, but only one at a time and it took about 5 clicks to get the real download link.

Google itself told me to install Picasa on my system. Another blog described a way how to download the images with the Firefox plugin Downthemall. I also found a Java applet and a Mono application that could have done the job. But I didn’t want to install some big blob just to download some images from the net – this is insane.

Then, thankfully, I found this page. It provides a simple Bash script that can download Picasa Webalbums just by passing it the URL. It even knows about nested albums and you can specify exactly what you want to download. The script is licensed under GPL3 or later so I’ll host it here as well (to never lose it). Just put it in your ~/bin folder or even in /usr/local/bin

Now assume you got a link to the Picasa album GNULinux of the user abhishek.amberkar. The link you got looks like this: http://picasaweb.google.com/abhishek.amberkar/GNULinux

All you have to do to download this album is this:

mkdir newPictures
cd newPictures
picasaweb-download http://picasaweb.google.com/abhishek.amberkar/GNULinux

See the linked site and the scripts help for the usage. It supports listings of albums and images and once you downloaded something you do not need to specify the full URL any more but can download the next album just by name. Veeeery cool. Thanks “Loïc Cerf” for this great script. Now its a matter of a few seconds to download enire albums.