su
rpm -ivh kernel-module-ntfs*

Then load the kernel module:

/sbin/modprobe ntfs

And that’s it. If you want to permanently mount an NTFS partition at a certain directory, add a line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1    /home/username/mydir    ntfs    ro,umask=0222    0    0

It’s best to mount NTFS partitions as read-only, since NTFS support in Linux is still incomplete, and we don’t want to risk damaging the partition.

• OpenOffice.org – Word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, etc.
• Firefox – Web browser.
• Xine and/or MPlayer – Play DVDs and various video formats. (Linux only)
• VideoLAN – Play videos, DVDs, and streams.
• XMMS – Audio player (Linux only). Requires a special plugin to play MP3 and WMA files.
• The GIMP – Drawing and image processing
• The Paint.NET – Simple yet very powerful image editor.
• dvd::rip – DVD ripping and transcoding (Linux only)
• CDEx – CD ripping (Windows only)
• Audacity – Audio track recorder and editor
• VirtualDub – Video capture/processing utility
• FileZilla – FTP client and server (Windows only)
• WinMerge – File and directory compare (Windows only)
• 7-Zip – Archive utility (Windows only)
• gaim – Instant messaging client
• Wireshark – Ethernet packet analyzer (formerly Ethereal)
• Metasploit – Framework for testing exploits
• HxD – Hex editor

Miscellaneous open-source (or otherwise free) things that are nice to have:

• bochs – PC architecture emulator
• DosBox – DOS emulator
• zsnes – Super NES emulator
• VisualBoyAdvance – Game Boy Advance emulator (Windows)
• Basilisk II – 68k Mac emulator
• Project64 – Nintendo 64 emulator (Windows)
• gnuboy – GameBoy emulator (Linux)
• ePSXe – Playstation (1) emulator

At first I tried to use xawtv just to see if I could get a picture. And in fact, it actually showed Channel 3, which got me excited. However, there was no sound, and I couldn’t change the channel. I knew that the configuration of bttv was somehow wrong. After poring over the BTTV HOWTO document, I came up with the following lines to add to /etc/modules.conf:

# TV settings
alias char-major-81 bttv
pre-install bttv /sbin/modprobe -k tuner; /sbin/modprobe -k msp3400
options bttv radio=1 card=3
options tuner type=2

The parameters specified above correctly identify the STB TV PCI card, and even enable FM radio functionality, which the card supports.

After a reboot, xawtv worked wonderfully. However, there was soon a new problem: I installed an updated accelerated video driver from NVIDIA, which made xawtv crash with a segmentation fault. After searching the web for answers, I found the following solution: simply start xawtv with the command line xawtv -device /dev/video0. That’s it!

One more minor issue was getting the program called tvtime to work. This program is vastly superior to xawtv, but it had a slight problem where it automatically turned up the tuner volume all the way, and let the user control the volume through the mixer. This wasn’t good because the STB card clips the audio if it’s above 50% volume, so it sounded really distorted and rectified. All I needed to do to fix this was find the line of code where tvtime sets the tuner volume, and change the default number. The number that it was setting the volume to was 60000 (presumably the maximum is 65535). So I changed it to 32000 and recompiled. It now runs marvelously.
(Update 10-24-04: I submitted a bug report to tvtime, and the author added a preference to control the audio gain on the tuner card itself. Thanks!)

RedHat did not recognize my sound card upon installation, so naturally I thought it wasn’t supported. This was until I stumbled upon a driver at SourceForge that purported to provide support for Aureal-based cards.

I downloaded the project’s distribution files, and tried to compile it… but the compiler couldn’t get past 10 lines of code before it choked. The source files were obviously written for an earlier version of the kernel.

However, all hope was not lost. I downloaded a CVS snapshot of the project (instead of the distribution), and tried to compile that. Miraculously, that only gave one or two errors. Then, all I did was comment out the two offending lines of code, and it compiled successfully. The output was a kernel module called au8830.o.

Installing it was a different issue altogether.

This driver uses a combination of open- and closed-source code. The closed-source portion that came with the driver was compiled with a much earlier version of gcc. Because of this, insmod would not allow me to load the module. It gave an error that the module needs to be compiled with gcc version greater than 3. Fortunately, insmod can be forced to load the module anyway by issuing the -f option.

With the -f option, insmod tried to load it, but reported a few unresolved externals. I realized that I needed to load the soundcore module first. After loading soundcore, I tried loading my module again, and what do you know? It loaded successfully!

/dev/dsp was working like a charm, but sound in KDE (aRts?) wasn’t loading properly. I went into the KDE Control Center, into the Sound Server tab, and changed the server startup setting from “autodetect” to “Threaded OSS.” That seemed to do the trick, and it’s been working fine ever since.

To automate the process of loading the module at boot time, I edited my /etc/modules.conf file and added the following lines:

# Sound configuration
post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
pre-install au8830 /sbin/modprobe soundcore; /sbin/insmod -f au8830
alias char-major-14 sound
alias sound-slot-0 sound
alias sound au8830
alias midi au8830

This will ensure that the au8830 module will be loaded after the soundcore module, and that the au8830 module will be force-loaded with the -f option.