1. Find something you want to use as your ringtone. It can be an mp3 or wav file or whatever.
2. Convert to wav file if its not already there, minimal survival command: mplayer -ao pcm filename.mp3. You should now have a audiodump.wav file.
3. Download and use Audacity to cut the audiodump.wav to about 20 seconds (mine is 18)

1. Save the clipped wav file and then encode it to mp3, minimal survival command: lame -b 64 -s 44.1 -mm —tt “Title” cutsound.wav output.mp3

Basically, the RAZR V3 needs to have mp3s at 44.1kHz, 64kbps and under 200kb for it to be used as a ringtone. Once you have the file, you need to upload it to the phone using moto4lin. Connect to the phone and place the file in /a/mobile/audio/.

Change your phone to Silent and then delete MyToneDB.db and TempToneDB.db. Power cycle your phone.

Once your phone is back on, change your phone to something other than Silent and then browse for a new ringtone. You should see the name of the uploaded file.

EXT3-fs error (device dm-0) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted

It's not exactly that error that causes the problem, apparently its a page allocation failure. I don't know, I'm never around when it happends and all I ususally see is the above error in my really long dmesg buffer.


A little background is in order, I am using CentOS 4.2 with ext3 and lvm support. It's the default install for a 'Workstation' computer in the graphical installer. CentOS is the 'Community Enterprise OS' which is based off of the RHEL source RPMS. The CentOS people do a good job rebuilding the packages and I have been very happy with my experience.  I don't use RHEL because I have to pay $179 dollars for it. Just to let you know, I can purchase Microsoft Windows XP for less than that! Please! RedHat I don't need to be able to call you for support, I can read your Bugzilla Bug 149088 about my problem. In fact, Google found it for me - it was even at the top of the search results. I can also implement the 'fix' which is to basically not use the Enterprise Linux kernel (the EL series) and use the FC4 'community' kernel. This fix isn't sanctioned by RedHat by the way, it serves to solve the bug reporter's problem and isolate the problem to the EL kernel itself.
Scary stuff that the 'Enterprise' package is inferior to the 'Community' package. Even more scary, the bug was opened on February 18, 2005 and I can reliably reproduce the error on my system. All I have to do is run some disk benchmark tools or do use an application that exercises the disk such as running qmail and receiving several hundred emails (mostly spam).
 
I am currently downloading the CentOS 4.2 RPMs from the CentOS 4.0 rescue disk so that I can reinstall the files that were corrupted and lost during the fsck. I have to use 'rpm --force --noscripts' to install them because neither the rpm command nor yum has a 'reinstall' command line option.
 
In any case, I think RedHat needs to rethink the decision to make RHEL a non-mainstream distribution. They have plenty of smart people working for them but just not enough of them and I doubt they could afford the numbers needed to catch all of these issues and fix them.
 
I wonder how long it would have taken for this to be fixed in Fedora? Isn't RHEL supposed to be based off of Fedora or just the 'idea' of Fedora?

I have been really busy lately so I haven't had much time to work on the TrackPoint driver. It seems to have found its way in to the -mm kernel tree which makes my life easier.

I have become obessed with making my SFF PC quiet and reducing the amount of electricity we use in our apartment. The need for quiet comes from a noisy fan. I want to find a place that sells the Vantec 60mm Stealth fan and grommet as well as some noise dampening material. I don't want to have them shipped seperately as I'll pay way too much. I also ordered a kill-a-watt tool that I can use to measure the amount of electricity devices use. I plan on testing my PC at idle, full load and, on ACPI S3 which is Suspend to RAM or STR.

Which brings me to the relatively exciting thing that happened tonight: I finally got Suspend to RAM working on my iDEQ 200V. I needed to do a couple of things before everything just worked. First I needed to upgrade the BIOS. I was using a BIOS from September 2003 which forced me to turn ACPI off entirely. With the November 2004 BIOS version ACPI works flawlessly. The next thing is that STR works great with one tiny resume problem. It turns out that some BIOS implementations fail to repost the video card's BIOS and as a consequence the video card is never reinitialized. The Linux kernel can't do anything about this because the BIOS sets up the video hard and hands it off to the kernel at boot time. In order to fix this you need to use vbetool to repost the BIOS. One small issue is that this program really messes with your video hardware which means you shouldn't try this with X running on your screen. If you switch to a console then it works great. I created a script to process power button events which works like a charm.

Here's my /etc/acpi/actions/power_btn.sh from CentOS 4.2:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Stephen Evanchik <evanchsa@gmail.com>
#
# Licensed under the GPL
#
# ACPI S3 (Suspend to RAM) for Biostar iDEQ 200V
#
# Power button has been pressed, now:
#
# 1. Blank the screen
# 2. sync the file systems
# 3. chvt to tty 1

test -f /usr/sbin/laptop_mode || exit 0
test -f /usr/local/sbin/vbetool || exit 0
test -f /etc/sysconfig/power_btn || exit 0

. /etc/sysconfig/power_btn

if [ -f /var/run/console/console.lock ]; then
  XUSER=`cat /var/run/console/console.lock`
  su -l -c "xscreensaver-command -activate" $XUSER
fi

chvt 1
sync

echo -n "mem" > /sys/power/state

/usr/local/sbin/vbetool post
/usr/local/sbin/vbetool dpms on
if [ -f /var/run/console/console.lock ]; then
  XUSER=`cat /var/run/console/console.lock`
  su -l -c "xscreensaver-command -deactivate" $XUSER
fi
chvt 7