After a bit of searching i came across a page on the ubuntu wiki
which started to point me in the right direction.

For my vpn connection i have had to remove the usepeerdns entry. Leaving that in place stopped the box from being able to see the net.

Now the server could see the vpn network so I started to look into methods of making the network available to my other pcs. This stage was the hardest to find information for and everyones version seemed to be different.

This is what worked for me (i found my information at here and here:

1. I added ipt_MASQUERADE to the bottom of my /etc/modules file
2. In /etc/ppp/ip-up i added the following:
   if [ "${PPP_IPPARAM}" = "myvpn" ]; then
ip r a <vpn ip range>/8 via <vpn ip> dev "${PPP_IFACE}"
iptables -F;iptables -t nat -F;
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o "${PPP_IFACE}" -j MASQUERADE
fi
3. bring up the connection using pon <yourconnection>. Test that you can ping both the local network, remote network and the internet
4. Secure it by adding the following before the fi in step 2
   
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -i ! ppp0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -P INPUT DROP #only if the first two are successful
iptables -A FORWARD -i "${PPP_IFACE}" -o "${PPP_IFACE}" -j REJECT

5. Drop the previous connection using poff and then reconnect. The VPN connection should now be correctly setup and you should be able to ping local, vpn and external machines as before
6. Create a route on your pcs that point traffic to your VPN’s ip range through the Linux system and you should now have VPN access

I hope this helps people that are trying to setup a vpn connection and then share it between there local machines. The only thing that i am now missing is dns from the vpn. Its not a major problem at the moment but it would be a nice to have feature. I will post my findings once i have some time to investigate.

When i had my HTC Vox (or Orange SPV E650 as orange themselves would like to call it) this was no so much of a problem. I could type so quickly on the keyboard I had no need to keep reading back through the text i had previously. Now with my HTC Touch Diamond texting takes a lot longer so its nice to see the last sentance or two that i have written.

Thanks to this thread i have now successfully changed the size of the field that is provided.

Details are as follows:

1. Go to the windows directory on your phone
2. Find file threaded_sms.htm
3. Find line: <Inbox:content id=”COMPOSESUBJECT” width=”98%” height=35
4. Change the height=35 to whatever you like.
5. Save and soft reset your phone.

I have changed mine so it looks like <Inbox:content id=”COMPOSESUBJECT” width=”98%” height=50. This gives me 3 lines of the text im writing rather than two.

In the end I did a fresh minimal install of ubuntu 8.10. On my initial boot I came across a grub ‘error 18′. After some investigation i realised the boot partition was bigger than the size supported by the motherboard. Did another install but this time added in a small 300MB boot partition. Now the system boots happily! Happy days!

The next issue is related to groups. I installed vlc-nox and placed my init script back into its home on the new install. I tried to run it but it failed horribly with VLC complaining about unable to open /dev/video0. After trying a few things (i installed the vlc package amongst other things) i decided to check out the permissions of /dev/video0 and that is where the problem was. The device has permissions of 660 with a owner of root:video. So I added my user to the video group. Rebooted and tv server was back to normal!

So reminder to self: Check permissions first. Then anything else!

v4l2-ctl –set-ctrl temporal_filter=0 –set-input=5

Once this line is in place the ghosting issues i was seeing vanished. The set-input of course tells the pvr to use the scart input.

This post is mainly for a reminder in the case i ever rebuild this box. However there is possibly some chance someone might find this useful!

To do this simply  type “about:config” in the address bar of Firefox and press Enter. `Filter` for ‘browser.backspace_action’ and change its value to 0 (zero).

Simple as!

Ok… so i did not know what to put in my first blog entry :p.