Its been a while since my last post, so thought I’d put a few bits together. I’ve watched Batman 2: The Dark Knight, which was OK, very dark, but overly long at 2.5+ hours. Anyone who has watched it will know what I mean when I say it should have finished at that point about half an hour earlier, before going off on the tangent. I thought Iron Man was actually better, it was shorter that’s for sure; about a guy who creates an endoskeleton to escape capture, and goes on to try to save the world with it.

Sun have updated xVM to v2.0, so I thought I’d have another crack at it – this time on my CentOS 5.2 box. I got dynamic bridging setup so that its more like VMWare – i.e. the physical eth0 is bridged to br0, and tap interface is created when you start a guest and removed when you stop the guest. You can access the LAN and internet. The setup is something like the following….

I’ve wasted most of today trying to get my Epson RX425 scanner to work as a non-root user on CentOS 5.2 It worked fine before, so I think a kernel upgrade has broken udev, as I ended up having to edit /etc/security/console.perms.d/50-default-perms to allow less strict permissions on scanners than root-only. It seems that doing it the proper way via /etc/udev/rules.d/60-iscan.rules no longer works – in fact you can put anything you like in the udev rules files and bugger all seems to change even after a reboot!

I’ve just plugged my firewire camcorder into my CentOS 5.2 box and it seems they’ve backported the broken raw1394 drivers that Fedora has into the kernel. Hopefully its fixed in Fedora10, or I’ll be borrowing Mum’s Ubuntu 8.04 laptop to try that – I might try my Mac Mini actually…. I watched The Mummy 3, which was about as good as the other movies, bit of a shame they replaced Evelin and made everyone older – I assume as they’re going to make the next sequel (about Aztecs) the son’s story more than the parents.

I’ve been trying to convert a load of old DVD-R’s to AVI files as its easier to have a fileserver full of movies than to search through hundreds of discs. Its taken days to do just half a dozen or so – mainly due to bit-rot and scratched discs, but also due to old versions of DVDShrink3 and CloneDVD2 corrupting the disc structure, so programs like CloneDVD Mobile and DeVeDe are not only taking 2-3 hours to do the transcode, but also hours to read the bloody discs and correct the structure.