At first I thought my wife had done some housekeeping of the favourite station list, but knowing how she relies on me to do most things with tech in the house I figured is was unlikely. So instead of confronting my wife, I decided to re-add them all and was perplexed as to why only stations for China were listed. Why was this? Had Sonos done some deal with the Chinese authorities to only allow streaming of stations based in China?

So figuring there was something wrong with the my Sonos setup I pointed my web browser to http://tunein.com and got the ever famous message from Safari:

Safari can’t open the page “http://tunein.com/” because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection. This sometimes occurs when the server is bust. Wait for a few minutes, and then try again.

If you have ever lived or even travelled to China and used the Internet, you know that 9 times out of 10 this means the site is blocked by the GFW (Great Firewall of China). Many popular sites are inaccessible from China, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook to name just a few. Sadly this message is almost a daily occurrence. So why has this happened all of a sudden because for the last 6 months all has been well and BBC Radio 4 can often be heard around my apartment?

When I eventually got hold of the news I realised that this clamp down could have been because of the recent issues relating to Bo Xilai and his alleged links to the death of Neil Heywood. I stupidly hoped that after a few days the block would be lifted.

So was my UK Internet radio listening doomed forever while I lived in China? As it turns out, no is the answer. I have since been able to source direct URLs for streaming my favourite stations and then add them manually to my Sonos system. BBC Radio 4 can once again be heard in my apartment.

So is all this blocking a complete waste of time? I actually think mostly it is. Being more tech savvy than the average man on the street I can more easily understand how to use proxies, VPN’sw etc to bypass the GFW and actually access most things on the Internet from China. So if you really want to access Twitter, it maybe inconvenient to do so, and you might have to do some research, but you can. So I believe that those members of the Chinese population that want to access blocked content can do so if they try hard enough, and the rest of the population who frankly don’t care (and I am sure that is most) will be happy to use the home grown equivalent social networks (Weibo and RenRen).

Although most believe that the Chinese Government is concerned about how social networks could be used to create social unrest, I actually believe this is only part of the picture. China has not only the largest population in the world, but also the largest online population. If this population solely used websites from the rest of the world then any revenue that is generated from these users benefits the rest of the world and not China. So, the home grown social networks not only allow government control, but also ensure any revenue generated will benefit the China economy. No wonder Mark Zuckerberg has been vacationing in China and allegedly having talks with the Chinese authorities over the potential return of Facebook.

I think it will be interesting to see how the worlds most Internet savvy Government maintains it’s control over the population’s Internet access in the coming years. While most of us in the rest of the world believe our access is free, the recent announcement by the UK government to bring in new legislation to monitor email and web usage is a step towards the model used in China. UK Citizens you have been warned!

The computer I am using is a Dell 1525n which has an Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller. After my initial install of Jaunty Jackalope beta all was well, the graphics card was detected and Compiz enabled. This however was short lived as some days later I applied some updates and Compiz could no longer be enabled.

On investigation I discovered that Compiz had ‘blacklisted’ my video card. I have yet to find out why because Compiz has worked without complaint on every version of Ubuntu since Gutsy Gibbon.

I was initially gutted and planned to downgrade to Intrepid, but not to be defeated I did some searching and found out that you can force Compiz to skip the black list checks. To do this you need to create the following file:-

~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

and add the following line:-

SKIP_CHECKS=yes

After this I was then able to enable Compiz and continue working as I have done for the last year or so. So far I have not seen any issues, so it is still a mystery as to why the GM965/GL960 was blacklisted.

I hope this helps somebody!

The question I had was how on earth do I go about doing this? Although Drobo provide an SDK with the information on how to do this, what I needed was a step by step guide to give me a push in the right direction. Fortunately I came across this blog post which takes you through the steps of compiling MediaTomb. This was exactly what I needed. I am familiar with compiling applications for my Ubuntu system, what I wasn’t familiar with was cross compiling – I didn’t know where to start!

I was a little nervous about doing all of this on my main system, so I created a virtual machine of Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 using VirtualBox. I followed the instructions to the letter up until the compilation of the libraries, I then substituted the webfsd compilation, and the result is now available for download at the DroboSpace Developer Community

Recently I purchased a Pinnacle Soundbridge (Roku Soundbridge outside of the UK) and wanting to be bleeding edge I check out the Firefly Media Server website and discovered that the latest nightly build is version 0.9-svn-1696. According to the descriptions of the various releases this had several bugs fixed, including a major memory leak. The author kindly produced deb packages for most versions of Ubuntu except for Gutsy, so I decided to see if I could compile from source and get the latest up and running. Not being a Linux expert I did some research and did not find a single guide that was 100% correct, so I have hopefully captured all the commands that I used to get this up and running. I hope this is sufficient information for those like me who are unfamiliar with compiling from source.

First of all open a terminal window. We are going to install all the project dependencies. This can be achieved with the following command:-

$ sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev gawk gcc g++ make libid3tag0-dev libgdbm-dev libavahi-client-dev libnss-mdns avahi-daemon avahi-discover

Some of these may already be installed on your system, but just select yes when prompted to install those that are missing.

Now we are going to create a directory to install the source into and move into it:

$ cd /opt
$ sudo mkdir src
$ cd /src

Now we must download the tarball from the Firefly Media Server website.

$ sudo wget http://nightlies.mt-daapd.org/dl.php?FILE=mt-daapd-svn-1696.tar.gz

Before we can compile the code we need to extract the contents of the tarball and move into the directory it creates:

$ sudo tar -zxvf mt-daapd-svn-1696.tar.gz
$ cd mt-daapd-svn-1696

Now we are going to configure the environment and make sure we have all our dependencies installed correctly:

$ sudo ./configure -prefix=/usr --enable-sqlite3 --enable-avahi

If this runs without an issue enter the following:

$ sudo make

Followed by:

$ sudo make install

Before we can start the server we must create the configuration file, we can start with the one provided with the source package, copy this one to the correct location as follows:

$ sudo cp /opt/src/mt-daapd-svn-1696/contrib/mt-daapd.conf /etc/mt-daapd.conf

You can then edit this file using your favourite text editor, but if you want to say within the terminal enter:-

$ sudo nano /etc/mt-daapd.conf

Ensure that you modify the following:-

dbtype = sqlite3
runas = root
mp3dir = /path/to/your/mp3/files


This should be all you need to do at first, read the documentation for details of the other configuration commands. You should be able start your Firefly Media Server with the following command:-

$ sudo mt-daapd


You can see the web interface by pointing your browser to http://localhost:3689, entering a username of admin and password of mt-daapd. You can change localhost to the ip of the machine if you are accessing from a different machine to that which the server is installed.

The bad news is that I went to use it today and it isn’t working again!   So this needs further investigation.   If anybody can point me in the right direction then please drop me a line!

• ASUS A8N5x Socket 939 Motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200
• 2.5GB DDR RAM
• ASUS Nvidia GeFource 6200 256MB PCI-E video card
• LSI Megatrends 150-4 SATA RAID Card
• 3 x 320GB SATA configured in a RAID 5 Array
• Epson Perfection 3590 Photo Scanner
• Canon Pixma IP5000 printer

The only piece of hardware that has specifically been chosen to work with Linux is the LSI Megatrends 150-4 SATA RAID card. I discovered that most of the RAID provided on motherboards is referred to as Fake Raid which requires software drivers in conjunction with the hardware. Unfortunately there are not many (or maybe any) that are supported under Linux so I decided to find a cheap hardware RAID card that was supported.

All in all Ubuntu 7.04 and Ubuntu 7.10 worked out of the box with the above hardware, with one exception. The Epson Perfection 3590 Photo Scanner. Doing research it appears that there are not many of the modern day scanners supported under Linux, which is a real shame. I however will keep searching to see if I can find a solution and get this scanner working.

In general I am impressed with the hardware detection. I have installed Ubuntu 7.10 on a cheap Chinese laptop that is about 4 years old and it works perfectly, including the wireless card! So I would certainly not hesitate anybody giving it a go!