New FXS/FXO Card

Well the initial experiments with the X100P card (single line) went well. The card itself was a little flaky, but the overall concept looked good. So I decided to take the plunge and get a real TDM card. I decided on the OpenVox A800P card. This card is a knock off of the Digicom TDM800P, but at 1/3 the cost. I got the card with 2 FXS and 3 FXO daughter-cards. This well allow me to reuse all the phones in the house and several other devices without change and also allow me to run 3 outgoing lines. The card is large and requires a power connector (due to the FXS options). I actually had a hard time getting it into my PC case. Especially with the 3 hard drives I have in that machine. I have a total of 5 drives connected to the machine, so I may need to rethink that layout in the future.

Anyway, again getting the card installed and working was tricker than expected. I followed the instructions on the OpenVox website on how to get the drivers working. They didn't even compile, but it was due to a kernel issue. So I made a minor patch to the OpenVox drivers and then it compiled. Again the dahdi-tools had trouble with the card. I had to force some of the things to work. Hopefully, when I reboot the machine next time it all just comes up. I would think that the hardware drivers would be better than this.

I setup asterisk and I've made a couple of outgoing calls, the call quality seems ok so far. I'll have to test it on a longer call next week to ensure it doesn't drop, this is a problem the X100P card had.

Desktop Eye Candy

I was reading the post about a good looking desktop by Seif Lotfy on My sexy desktop I really liked some of the things that he had setup but there were others that were not for me.

For example he was using some docks and the mac-ish menu bar at the top. Both of these tools really don't work for me and my daily usage. I also didn't care for the scroll bar in the theme. But I did find somethings that I like.

1. The background - I have to admit the wood background is quite nice.
2. The grey theme and the dark panels. I've been using the grey theme "Inverted" for awhile, so I stuck with that.
3. The icon set

So I used his background

I chose the "Inverted" Gnome widget theme
I chose the "Inverted" Window border
I chose the "Faenza-Dark" Icon set, it can be found here
I chose the "comfortaa" font that Fedora is using, it can be found here there is a Fedora rpm available for this as well, just search for comfortaa. The Droid fonts also look quite nice.

Now it gets a little tricky, but not bad.


Set your panel background color to color name: #716968, which matches the selected color of the title bar of the active window from the theme, keeping the colors consistent.

We set the panel to be a dark color, but the theme has dark text so to be able to read the text on the panel, we need to alter the font color on the panel. We do that by altering the theme colors.

Edit ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and add the following lines. These lines change the dark font color to white on just the panel and the user-switch-applet.

style "panel_color"
{
fg[NORMAL] = "#eeeeee"
}
widget "*PanelWidget*" style "panel_color"
widget "*PanelApplet*" style "panel_color"
widget "*user-switch-applet*" style "panel_color"

Then logout and log back in. And you should get a desktop that looks something like this:

Comments?