Plantronics GameCom 780 under Linux, when using it as an analogue device has always been touchy for me; 1% volume is unusably loud for me. However using it as a digital output has always been fine in my experience. Under Ubuntu 13.10 (and Debian unstable as of the posting date) the digital device is missing out of the box. The fix is to edit /usr/share/alsa/cards/USB-Audio.conf, find the "Plantronics GameCom 780” 999entry (line 46 on my Debian unstable laptop and Ubuntu 13.

A few weekends ago I picked up the looqs Meebox from Novatech. I would link to the looqs site, but as of the time of writing it's currently unavailable because they've not renewed the domain (edit: this is now resolved). TL;DR: The meebox is cheap because it's cheap. Runs an old Linux kernel, given time could probably get your own/other distros running, but I called it a day due to (lack of) hardware performance, the likelihood of not increasing its performance with custom “firmware”, and the fact that the vendor site wasn't available to dismantle a firmware update file at the time.

I've been the happy owner of a Gigabyte GA-HA65M-UD3H-B3 for a little while, however any drives connected to the Marvell 88SE9172 chipset have never been recognised. Turns out that the standard AHCI driver supports it just fine; it just doesn't know the vendor and product PCI identifiers. Simple fix is to teach the kernel about them post-boot; /bin/echo 1b4b 9192 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ahci/new_id This basically tells the AHCI driver to load itself for the vendor (1b4b) and product (9192) ID.

Whilst it's possible to get Debian, and by proxy Ubuntu, running under Hyper-V it's nice to see that Microsoft are potentiallygoing to officially support them along side CentOS, Red Hat and SuSE. As someone who is running Debian and Ubuntu under Hyper-V I would heartily welcome this official support. Sadly I suspect that if Gupta really does represent Microsoft's view, then the odds of getting on the official list is probably going to be quite low; "Gupta says Microsoft is drawing the line at ‘touching’ the Linux code.

It's hardly a first, but I did find some of the information out there a bit spread out. So, just incase I need to go through this again, I figured a ‘blog post might be interesting - doubly so as I've not really got anything interesting from work, that I can blog about at the moment! So, a bit of background. The AppleTV (ATV) is basically a dumb x86 PC - Pentium M 1GHz, 256MB of RAM, 40 or 160GB PATA HDD, 1x USB 2, 1x IR receiver, 10/100Mb ethernet, 801.