Create a new LILO boot image

Creating a new LILO boot image is more than easy. Just pickup your favorite image and resize it to 640x480 px. You can use Gimp for resizing images. I like to use the command line what I'll show here. The point is that you get a image with a size of 640x480 and max. 256 colors (8 bit). The only intention to change my LILO screen is my HTPC (running XBMC) because I have found a really nice image for it.
What ever, just take a look at your image with file:

Adding goom audio visualisation to XBMC

This article is based on my prior released XBMC article which can be found here.
Goom is a very nice audio visualisation which you can use with XBMC. This article will describe how to setup goom and howto setup XBMC with goom support. First download the goom sources:

# mkdir /usr/src/xbmc
# cd /usr/src/xbmc
# wget -c "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/goom/goom2k4/0/goom-2k4-0-src.tar.gz"
# tar xf goom-2k4-0-src.tar.gz
# cd goom2k4-0/

ORA-28002: the password will expire within 7 days

When you try to connect to Oracle and you're getting the following error:

$ sqlplus "sys/password"
...
ERROR:
ORA-28002: the password will expire within 7 days
...

Selfmade HTPC with Slackware and XBMC

I have found some time to reinstall my HTPC with the current Slackware64 14.0 release and the current XBMC 11.0 release. As usual I installed everything from scratch and this article is a simple tutorial to install XBMC on Slackware. I like to use Slackware as base OS for XBMC because it is very slick and simple by default. In this tutorial I assume that you have a basic Slackware installation running with at least a small window environment (eg. Fluxbox). Before you can install XBMC you need a few more packages. All dependent packages are installed more or less the same way. The next lines will show you which package to install and how to install it.

Change user properties in AIX

Today I needed to change the umask value for a user in AIX. It was set to default: 022
That means that files will be created with 644 permissions. To allow the user to create files with 666 permissions by default I needed to change the umask value for the user. First I checked the current umask value:

# lsuser sneill
... umask=22 ...

Mount an ISO image with Solaris

Before you can mount an ISO image with Solaris you need a block device. An ISO image is only a normal file so you need to make it available as a block device. The right tool for this is lofiadm. With lofiadm you can make files available as block devices:

# lofiadm -a /root/sol-10-u10-ga2-sparc-dvd.iso
/dev/lofi/1

VxVM enable failed: License has expired

When you work with Veritas Storage Foundation then you need a valid key. Otherwise you might encounter the following message:

VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-1589 enable failed: License has expired or is not available for operation
        transactions are disabled.

vxdisk list: state=disabled

Today I had a strange situation with VxFS. When running vxprint I saw several disks in error state. A closer look at the devices gave me a clue:

# vxdisk list stor1_42
...
c1t20140080E518D5C0d26s2        state=disabled  type=primary
c3t20140080E518D5C0d26s2        state=disabled  type=primary
c4t20150080E518D5C0d26s2        state=disabled  type=secondary
c2t20150080E518D5C0d26s2        state=disabled  type=secondary

Scanning and playing DVB-T

I found a USB DVB-T adapter in my USB spare box and I thought it would be a more or less nice idea to check if it is still running. Since I haven't watch TV in years that could be interesting.The first thing I did was to plug in the adapter and check for firmware messages:

# dmesg| grep firm
[ 4501.549255] dvb-usb: found a 'Afatech AF9015 DVB-T USB2.0 stick' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
[ 4501.550498] dvb-usb: did not find the firmware file. (dvb-usb-af9015.fw) Please see linux/Documentation/dvb/ for more details on firmware-problems. (-2)

IMM

Yesterday I had the 'pleasure' to play with an IMM - one of these dinosaur management processors shipped by IBM. The system was still online so I couldn't do too much. Here is what I could do:

Connect and help: