So yesterday I spent quite a bit of time debugging an issue with my  Arch Linux server that I hooked up to my TV. When I looked at it the screen was just completely blank and it wasn’t responding to any keyboard commands. So I figure that a reboot would probably fix it. Unfortunately (well fortunately for this blog post), I still had problems after a restart. It seemed to boot up okay after a restart and auto-logged in on tty1 as I had previously set up. However, the hostname was set to “(none)” and it still wouldn’t respond to my wireless usb keyboard.
So I tried bypassing the usb hub and connecting the wireless keyboard to the computer directly, then a wired usb keyboard. Finally I had to dig out my old awesome IBM Model M PS/2 keyboard and after rebooting the keyboard worked fine. So it seemed that the computer wasn’t loading the correct usb drivers. It wasn’t even loading the correct network drivers either, all I had was the lo interface.
Another symptom was the size of the console screen. Typically the console would only be some sort of standard 800×600 pixel screen, but recent kernels and Intel graphics drivers have required KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) which means the console is full resolution (1360×1000 or so). So I hopped over to the Arch Wiki article about KMS for Intel chips and enabled the intel_agp and i915 kernel modules in my /etc/rc.conf.
After rebooting the computer worked flawlessly. The hostname was set correctly, and the wireless usb keyboard worked too. Now I just need to finish my XBMC setup.

* The alt key doesn’t function “properly”
** This means that some bash shortcuts (such as alt+. to recall the last argument on the command line) do not work
* Non-ascii characters are not recognized
** I use non-ascii characters to display some nice things, such as extra spaces at the end of a line and embedded tab characters.

The fix for the first issue is to in iterm go to bookmarks->manage profiles->keyboard profiles and mess with the Global and xterm (OS X) settings for the Option Key. Changing the xterm (OS X) option key from normal to meta fixed the problem for me.

The fix for non-ascii characters is to go into bookmarks->mange profiles->terminal profiles->default and change the encoding from Western (ASCII) to Unicode (UTF-8). Then as long as your font supports it (I’m using the lovely monaco font) non-ascii characters will display perfectly. So you do things like have a git prompt that shows (master↑3‣1), showing that you are on the master branch, ahead by 3 commits, and 1 file that was changed but not staged.

For more info about that zsh prompt, look at: http://github.com/olivierverdier/zsh-git-prompt

But I had to make a few changes to it before I could use it. That will have to wait for a different post.

One way to verify the driver needed is the use the lsusb command which returns this for the wireless adapter:

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 148f:3070 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2870 Wireless Adapter

From there we can verify that it uses the RT2870 chipset from Ralink.

This guide is based on this forum thread: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=316671

Here are the instructions:

1. Partition your sd card
   1. I used gparted and formatted it to ext4, the same as my current /home partition
2. Copy your /home to your sd card
   1. cp -a /home /mount/sdcard
      1. Note: This means you mounted your sdcard at /mount/sdcard
3. Edit /etc/fstab to mount /home from your sdcard
   1. I originally added the line: /dev/sdb1 /home ext4 defaults 0 1
   2. However, this tried to check and mount the filesystem right at boot, but at this time the sdcard isn’t mounted yet so it fails. This is where I needed to use the forum thread.
   3. I changed the line to /dev/sdb1 /home ext4 rw,noauto,user,user_xattr 0 0
      1. The noauto is the key, it makes the filesystem not mount automatically, which means we need to mount it “manually” in one of the init scripts
4. Edit /etc/rc.local to mount /home
   1. Add the line /bin/mount /home

That’s it! /home should now be mounted on your sd card. You can verify by running something like df -h or mount.

Synergy+ is a maintenance fork of the original Synergy project which unfortunately hasn’t been updated since 2006.

I haven’t been able to contribute that much yet, just some help on the mailing list, issue tracker, and wiki. However, I hope to contribute much more in the future.

the line should look something like this:
root 25873 0.0 0.1 4012 1504 pts/1 S+ 20:48 0:00 /bin/bash /etc/init.d/acpi-support start

That second line is the PID (process id) to kill that process you just need to issue sudo kill 25873

Of course, the PID on your system will differ from 25873.