Zein’s place on the net

Sometimes I accidentally add a misspelled word to the dictionary in Firefox. While trying to undo this, I found that the only way to do it is manually as per this post.

OK folks, the sunray uses ESD and I have mplayer and vlc working. I have not yet discovered how to get the mic working.
I know the mic is working because this works but I have to kill esd first.

cat $AUDIODEV > /tmp/file #(speak into the mic and press ctrl-c when you finish)
cat /tmp/file > $AUDIODEV

It has been 3 Months since I have seen my daughter and I miss her terribly ! My wife sends me photos so I can keep up with the rapid changes. Boy, do these kids grow

I am sharing one of the latest photos (and one on my favorites) where Mariam shows her great adventurous spirit and in deep contemplation, plans how to get out of her cot.

Tomorrow I will get the keys to my new apartment! Every time I think about this I give thanks to Allah. Finding a place to rent is one of the most difficult things you can do here in Canberra.

The apartment is just a 20 minute walk from campus. It is also about 5 minutes from Dickson shops. I hope I will happy here

my apartment

The first time I saw a sunray was when I was doing my undergrad (2001). It was love at first sight. And even though the AAST wasn’t using them (there were about 4 thrown in a box), there was no chance of me getting my hands on one

Fast forward to 2007! I am at the ANU and I end up with 2 sunray1 devices. One of the best things about the Department of Computer Science is that when they are about to throw things out, they leave it in front of the Technical Support Group’s Offices for about a week! usually a student will pick things up!

So you could say I get first picks either way I am now the proud owner of 2 sunray1 devices. During the last 2 months I also picked up a 17″ CRT and a few old machines that were pillaged to produce a dual PIII800Mhz system with 768MB of ram and 2 13GB HDDs!

Today I installed SRSS3.1 for Linux and I am presently writing this post on the sunray! words can’t describe how cool this is :). And when I finally move out of Fenner It will even better!! This is a silent device… no moving parts whatsoever. Since I have no room at Uni accommodation I have the sunray sitting next to the server (which is very noisy) but as soon as I move out I will be able to stick the server where it will not be heard.

Anyway here is how I went about setting up the server.

      apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

      apt-get install sun-java5-jre sun-java5-plugin

      ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.08/jre /etc/opt/SUNWut/jre

The Installation was pretty easy. I do however seem to have a problem with audio. When I login in I get the login sounds. That is the last sound I do hear. I am unable to play any audio… so I am working on that.

The other thing that might be of interest is that I had always thought that the sunrays were net-bootable PCs. It turns out that they are not! they are rather a continuation of the server. so when you login on the sun you are working on the server.

I will of course post something if/when I get the audio working properly.