Serious, potentially hardware-damaging e1000e driver issue on Intrepid

This e-mail appeared in my inbox just now. If you're thinking of trying the Intrepid Alpha6 CD, you should know this information. I'm publishing because not all the people who want to test will be on the ubuntu-dev mailing list.

Dear developers,

Reports have been coming in that the e1000e ethernet driver for Intel GigE chipsets, as included upstream in Linux 2.6.27, may under certain conditions irreparably damage your ethernet hardware by corrupting the on-board firmware.

While we expect alphas to include a fair number of bugs, and rely on your continued support and testing to help resolve these bugs for Ubuntu releases, bugs that damage hardware are quite another matter.  As a result of this bug we must recommend that users do *not* use Intrepid alphas, including the LiveCDs, on machines with Intel GigE ethernet.

Efforts to safeguard the hardware of affected users are ongoing, though initially this will consist of a workaround in the form of disabling the e1000e driver.  Alpha 6 CD images will not be re-issued for this fix, so affected users are advised to either use daily CD images once a resolution is in place, or to wait for the release of the 8.10 beta, due to be released on October 2.

Further discussion of this issue can be found on the ubuntu-devel mailing list at
<https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2008-September/026559.html>,
and progress on resolving this issue can be tracked at
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/263555>.

--
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/

Wireless on a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7413

David took advantage of my offer in the sidebar to do the leg work for his problem:

Hey, I have an ubuntu question - I have a A215-S7413 toshiba notebook and I'm trying to get the wireless card to work in it. People are throwing words like ndiswrapper and stuff around and I have no clue how to make it work. Can you email me a step-by-step how-to?

I'm going to start by explaining how difficult finding this information was, not to complain, but to show why David had such a hard time solving his problem. It took me a few days' casual Googling in my spare time to get what I needed. (The websites referenced are at the bottom of this post.)

Because I didn't have the laptop to work on, my first search left me with no specification information at all. The only lead took me to LaptopKing [1], a parts vendor, which implied that the laptop might have an Atheros AR5BXB72 PCI mini wireless network car, which should work with a recent MadWifi driver. I asked David to try to enable the driver in the Restricted Drivers dialog.

David sent me an e-mail back pointing to the Ubuntu Forums [2], which didn't help because the card doesn't show up on the PCI bus, which is very weird. David told me that it's on the USB bus instead.

Widening my search took me to a couple of lists and forums [3], which showed that some of the Toshiba Satellites had a Realtek card on the USB bus. It sounded good, so I went with it, and turned up a driver download site [5] which confirmed that David's model uses that driver. Really, I'm lying. David's model comes with one of two cards, either the mentioned Atheros or a Realtek. Talk about screwed up!

Finally, I hit paydirt and wound up over on Data North's description of Ubuntu on the S7407 [6], which has the same card. It's quite detailed. There's also an Ubuntu Forum post [4] about the S7437 and the Linlap entry for the A215 series in general [7].

While I can't be completely sure that David's problems will disappear, the final verdict is that there's a native driver for the Realtek wireless card that's probably on his A215-S7413. Run

lsusb | egrep '0bda:81(87|89|97)'

to check if you have this card.

David needs to download the modified driverfrom the website [8]. There are two "modified" drivers available, and I'm not sure which one he needs. I'd try the more recent one first if I were him. Next, unpack and run

./makedrv

./wlan0up

 Configure wlan0 from there. To make it automatic on bootup, edit /etc/networking/interfaces to look something like this:

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
   wireless-essid       my-network
   wireless-key1        s:mykey
   wireless-mode        managed
   wireless-channel     6

pre-up               /root/rtl8187b-modified/wlan0up
   post-down            /root/rtl8187b-modified/wlan0down

Point the pre-up and post-up to wherever you unpacked the package. It only works in managed and ad-hoc modes. This information is available in the FAQ.

I hope this works for you, David. Let me know. It turns out that there's a more wordy explanation on an Ubuntu Help page [9], if you need it. It has a little different method, too, if mine doesn't work for you. Anyway, you should be on the right track now.

[1] http://www.laptopking.com/kingpartdetails.asp?ref=2765&category=boards
[2] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=644512
[3] http://lists2.ssc.com/pipermail/linux-list/2007-October/029344.html
[4] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=862641
[5] http://www.drivershq.com/Drivers/Toshiba/Satellite/A215-S5849/4183/9941/37546/13821/ModelDrivers.aspx
[6] http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/blog/linux-on-the-satellite-a215-s7407/
[7] http://www.linlap.com/wiki/Toshiba+Satellite+A215
[8] http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/rtl8187b/
[9] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ToshibaSatelliteA215S7422Guide

Linux's Position in the Top Amazon Sellers

Here's a rundown of the top laptops at Amazon and the OS standard with them. The results may change at any time so I've written them down here. Jump down if you just want the summary.

1. ASUS Eee PC 1000H XP Home
2. Asus U6V-B1-Bamboo 12.1-Inch Laptop Vista Business
3. Asus F6V-C1-Green 13.3-Inch Laptop Vista Premium
4. Asus F6V-C1-Pink 13.3-Inch Laptop Vista Premium 
5. Asus F6V-C1-Black 13.3-Inch Laptop Vista Premium
6. Asus F6V-C1-Blue 13.3-Inch Laptop Vista Premium
7. Apple MacBook MB403LL/A 13.3-inch Laptop OS X
   
8. Acer Aspire One 8.9" Mini Laptop XP Home 
9. ASUS Eee PC 900 16G Xandros Linux
10.  MSI Wind 10" Mini Laptop XP Home
11.  Acer Aspire One 8.9-inch Mini Laptop Linpus Linux Lite 
12. Apple MacBook Pro MB133LL/A 15.4-inch Laptop OS X
13. ASUS Eee PC 901 12G XP Home
14. ASUS Eee PC 900 16G Xandros Linux
15. Apple MacBook MB404LL/A 13.3-inch Laptop OS X 
16. MSI Wind 10" Mini Laptop XP Home 
17. MSI Wind 10" Mini Laptop Linux Novell SUSE 
18. MSI Wind 10" Mini Laptop Linux Novell SUSE 
19. MSI Wind 10" Mini Laptop Linux Novell SUSE 
20. MSI Wind 10" Mini Laptop XP Home 
21. MSI Wind 10" Mini Laptop XP Home 
22. ASUS Eee PC 901 20G Xandros Linux 
23. Toshiba Satellite A205-S5871 15.4-inch Laptop Vista Premium 
24. HP Pavilion DV6910US 15.4-inch Laptop Vista Premium

Of the top twenty four (the first page),

• Seven are Vista Premium or Business
  
• Seven are XP Home
• Three are Xandros Linux
• Three are Linux Novel SUSE
• Three are OS X, and
• One is Linpus Linux Lite

To consolidate the numbers, that means

• Fourteen of some form of Windows (58%)
• Seven are some form of Linux (29%), and
  
• Three are OS X (13%).

These are not at all market share numbers, because the top ten spots have eight Windows machine, one OS X laptop, and only one with Linux, but the numbers are still encouraging. Even if there were more detailed sales information on the page, Amazon is not necessarily representative of the rest of the computer market.

I'm going to hazard a guess of 5% for Linux, an equal number for OS X, and 90% for Windows. Who knows what happens when the laptops get home.

Apple does much better on the Desktop page, getting the top spot and five of the top ten, but Linux doesn't appear anywhere on the top 25. I know, you're shocked.

The "Appliancising" of Free Software

Ever since I watched the fledgling Free Software movement take hold a few years ago in Thailand, I've thought that the current trend of what I'll call "appliancising" was the natural end game for Free Software (and really all OSes in general).

There's an interesting article up at Computerworld about how Red Hat and Suse got cut out of a huge deal in Germany. Essentially, a German company ran into some problems with Suse that soured the deal, so decided to move to another platform. While the obvious competitor was Red Hat, the company didn't need a full Red Hat contract, so they decided to go with CentOS, an untrademarked version of Red Hat ES.

HP, the company's hardware vendor, officially supports Red Hat, so HP is also supporting CentOS with extra management applications for the Munich-based company.

I find the whole story quite interesting and maybe telling about where we'll be in a few years.

The eeePC from Asus uses Xandros, but not a stock Xandros. Asus contracted Xandros to create a special (maybe we'll call it "branded") version specially for the eeePC. Asus is using this as a selling point. Asus easily could have developed their own version, but they didn't. Why is that? Asus' Splashtop, now available on virtually every motherboard, is making waves the way Dell's meager Ubuntu offering never could, but Asus, a Taiwanese company got that technology from DeviceVM in Silicon Valley.

So, before I go into some more examples and a prediction or two, I want to take a step back in time, to when the grass was greener and life was simpler ... my childhood. Back then (the 70's and early 80's), computers were pretty simple. There was no talk of an operating system choice because there really was no choice. Unix vendors sold the hardware and the software as a unit. They were intimately tied to each other. The home systems were the same. I'm not sure I can call the built-in BASIC interpreter for my Model I and "operating system," but that's really what it was, and there was no way around it for a long time. Apples didn't have choice, either. Things haven't changed on that side.

Back to the present, when Mac OS X is the gold standard in the press. The hardware is theirs. The OS is theirs. Most of the apps are theirs, and they have nice little tie-ins like the iPhone and the iPod and the iTunes store. Whew. That's a lot of "i"s. People who like Macs love them. Asus runs the eeePC the same way, and would be smart to have an eeePC store or at least a line of peripherals and add-on software just like Apple. Your NAS (QNAP NAS pictured above) now comes with a customized Linux or maybe FreeNAS if the manufacturer is pushing to market fast. It works. There are no hassles. It's not really upgradable, anyway, so why should the average user need to think of it as anything but an appliance?

Square One (pictured right) is a home internet server allowing a user to (from the website):

• Create a local area network of up to four PCs (more if you add an external switch or wireless access point)
• Share one Internet connection for the whole network
• Back up files to and share them from Square One’s networked hard drive
• Connect a USB printer to Square One and print from any PC
• Run a full-featured web site, web forum, or blog without paying expensive hosting or colocation fees

This is a pretty attractive set of features, and the operating system appears to be a custom Linux distribution. Does the purchaser care? No. Does the web site even mention Linux? No.

How about the Zonbu (left)? It's a desktop appliance which does automatic upgrades and backups to the Zonbu server. Its selling point is "hassle-free computing." With everything Zonbu does, it's trying to remove headaches from desktop computing. The user just needs to turn the thing on and use it. It's a real appliance. Zonbu uses a tweaked Gentoo installation (is there any other kind?). The system gets great reviews and is compared to a Mac though costing only US$99 US$299. So far, though, uptake is really slow. I'd buy one if I lived in the U.S. Note: As pointed out below, Zonbu appears to have changed their pricing model and strategy. They now sell the computers, support, and OS separately. This move makes them much less interesting.

Then there are the phones. Just the way the iPhone is a cut-down version of OS X, the Android (prototype is pictured to the right) and OpenMoko phones are Linux. Who really cares, though, except gear heads? The average guy just thinks that the phone looks good and has cool functions for a reasonable price. Phones always have been appliances, though, right.? There's no real movement happening except to multi-touch displays and desktop-like functionality. Wait. I guess that is pretty important. You desktop in your hand. Yeah. A desktop appliance.

I promised a prediction or two. First, this looks bleak for Red Hat and Suse, right? I mean, when this Munich-based company decided to standardize on a new version of a Linux operating system, they chose CentOS, which means Red Hat did the development and didn't get any of the money. You know ... one of those situations that brings up the question "How do you make any money?"

I don't think it's so bad, though. Look at Asus. They are paying Xandros and DeviceVM, even though they could have logically done something in house. It only took Canonical a couple of months to push out the Ubuntu netbook remix, you know. Asus is a hardware company, though, and I'm pretty sure they don't want to get into software beyond developing drivers and tweaking a BIOS (which they purchase, too). If fact, I'd be willing to bet they don't really want to do drivers or the BIOS, either.

Five years from now, we'll have "the end of the desktop," which has been predicted for years now. It won't really be dead, but phones, netbooks, and Zonbu-like appliances will take a good share of it. I doubt Zonbu will be on your desk, because the first to market rarely is the one to make a big splash. Linux vendors will continue to make ends meet (but not become uber-wealthy) by supplying the expertise to "appliancise" their distributions for these hardware manufacturers, just as BIOS makers continue to make money. The support number for your Ubuntu netbook will probably actually be routed to a Canonical help desk where they'll be sure to answer the phone with your supplier's name instead of their own. Users will purchase online updates and add-ons, probably caring little about the Free nature of the software. Even hardware houses which try to do their own thing in-house will contribute back upstream just to keep future costs down.

Techies, of course, will continue to tear the appliances apart, mod them, and generally use them in ways they weren't designed for.

Intel is going to suffer

 

Images from hothardware.com

Ooooh! I love competition. AMD is finally back in the running (not the lead) with the Phenom and the new ATI cards are head-to-head with NVidia.



The real news is that VIA has released the Nano reference board, and it's being compared to Atom boards across the net. The conclusion? VIA is definitely winning the comparison with a 20-30% lead in performance. The power usage probably favors the Atom, but some tests of total power usage per task fall to the Nano.



The real news, though, isn't about cycles: it's about marketing. Intel has artificially segmented its market to keep Atom from eating into the low-end desktop CPU sales. How do they accomplish this? Well ... by limiting choice of course. Board manufacturers are limited in what extra goodies they can put on: no second RAM slot, no digital video, and no PCI-e. Just look at the boards in the pictures above.

• Memory slots: 2 vs. 1


• Network ports: 2 vs. 1


• SATA channels: 4 vs. 2


• Expansion slots:



• PCI-e vs. PCI


• Compact flash slot vs. nothing


• MiniPCI vs. nothing

For a price difference of about 10% for the better CPU and a much more capable board, i know which one I would choose.



Intel has a choice of letting go of the reins and losing money to itself in the low-end desktop market or giving large portions of that market to VIA.

ATI Radeon HD 4870 with Linux Driver

I root for ATI. They are doing a lot of good stuff for the OSS communinty right now, and AMD.ATI can be a really good combination if ATI doesn't shoot itself in the foot. I read the review of the new ATI card (with a Linux driver shipped on the CD) over at Phoronix (linked in the title, above) and was discouraged for the first few pages of the benchmarks, but then ... well ... I think Phoronix says it best:

When using anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 had an immediate and significant advantage over the NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX competition and the earlier Radeon HD 3870. Like the Radeon HD 4850, when the HD 4870 wasn't using advanced rendering techniques, it had fallen behind the 9800GTX. With id Software's Doom 3 with 8x AA, the Radeon HD 4850 was almost 30% faster than the GeForce 9800GTX. When it came time to test the Radeon HD 4870 in the same configuration, it was over 50% faster than the GeForce 9800GTX. The biggest performance delta was with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars where the Radeon HD 4870 was 68% faster than the 9800GTX and 25% faster than its Radeon HD 4850 sibling. In the open-source Nexuiz game even, the Radeon HD 4870 was 32% faster than the 9800GTX. When turning on both 8x AA and 16x AF, the Radeon HD 4870 remained on top in every test with a striking lead.

Wow. We'll wait for the new NVidias to arrive, but I certainly like a market of multiple, linux-compatible cards with great performance.

And I don't even game!

Ubuntu on Shuttle's New US$199 Computer

Shuttle has put out a new, small form-factor computer for just $99 barebones and $199 complete. While computers like the Everex have been available at 199 for a while, getting a small one used to set you back a lot more. The complete review is available at Tom's, linked above and spanning nine pages. I'll try to condense the information into something less time consuming.

The hardware is not super-powerful, of course:

• Intel® 945GC Express Chipset
  
• Intel® Celeron® 430 CPU
  
• Built-in Intel® GMA950 graphics
  
• 800/533MHz FSB
  
• Intel® Flex Memory Technology
  
• Dual channel DDR2 533/400
  
• Intel® HD Audio 5.1 channel
  
• Four USB ports on rear I/O
  
• 10/100 LAN using Intel® 82562G Ethernet Controller
  
• One PCI slot
  
• Two SATA at 3Gbps
  
• One PATA for up to two devices
  

(Tom's Hardware)

Unlike the Everex computer, which is based on Via's chip, there are kernel and Xorg drivers for everything on the Shuttle, meaning that wiping the supplied (and new) Foresight off the drive and installing any flavor of Ubuntu should be easy. Making the bootable USB will be the most difficult part. For the record, I wouldn't even do that. Instead, I'd get a netboot image and the kernel/initrd, put them on the Foresight drive, and use the already installed Grub to do a net install. If anyone actually wants to do this, please ask me, and I'll write up a how-to for you.

The GMA950 is not going to run current games in Wine for you, but it will do all the fancy compiz effect with only minor tearing. A lot of the 3D games native to Linux work, too, but I can't get Savage2 to start up. That may be related to the graphics or it may be a 64-bit bug. I haven't tried to track it down yet.

The 80GB is, of course, 79GB more than you need for a basic install, so there's no problem with space, and the 512MB RAM is enough to run 2-3 apps at a time. Installing the Hardy beta release will give you Firefox 3.0, which uses close to half the memory of the previous version. Bumping the RAM up to 1-2GB will give you a machine that will never fall over one you (physically, the center of gravity is probably too low ;) ).

You can also order an external power supply for completely silent operation, USB wireless (though any RaLink rt73 USB from your local hardware storee will work fine, too), and a bluetooth adaptor.

Quite a deal for a small form-factor computer. You may not want it for your first computer, but it's pretty close to what I run as mine.

Are Thin Clients Still Viable?

While I was reading the post linked above, and I started to reminisce. While I haven't talked about think clients on this blog, those who know my Slashdot persona of the same name will probably remember some of my posts and journals about them.

I started with thin clients in the pre-1.0 LTSP days. They worked well for what I wanted them to do. Thin clients might not be the best choice for those of you wanting fancy effects, but they make a great defense against 6th-12th graders who do everything they can to mess up your network every day.

At our school in Thailand a few years ago, I got a pallet of cast-off computers from Japan for a song. They had been stripped of all storage except floppies. The guy who got them was going to try to find used hard disks and CD drives, check them for failures, then resell them for about USD90 apiece. I pieced together a fairly powerful (for the time) consumer-level PC, maxed out the RAM, installed a Thai-enabled Linux distribution, and configured LTSP.

Back then, you had to do all that by hand. I learned about NFS, TFTP, and more advanced DHCP issues trying to get that network up and running. Lots of headaches back then, let me tell you. Now, though, LTSP, Edubuntu, and K12LTSP make all that stuff virtually plug-n-play.

I made boot floppies, shoved the drives back into the machine a little bit, covered the bay with plastic, and had nice little P133, 32MB thin clients that worked with virtually no issues. Children who screwed up their desktops got their files deleted and desktops reset, so they were careful not to mess around too much.

Printing was easy. Sound was doable. There was virtually no downtime unless the weather got too hot and the "server" went over.

I still keep up on LTSP, and am finding that a lot of apps (like especially FF) won't work on a thin client with 32MB anymore because, even though the app is running on the server, it stores images in the X server on the client. I understand that FF3 may solve this problem, but FF is not the only offending application.

The end result is that clients which used to be viable and which really do no more work have progressively become less appropriate as thin clients.

The developer world is making a lot of assumptions about the app running locally.

So ... I'm going to do something I rarely do -- ask for opinions. Are thin clients still viable? If my TC needs 256MB to run, why bother with remote X at all? What do you think?

Ubuntu Misconceptions

I read a blog about someone disliking Linux (it's linked above). The About page describes him as being a kid, so I don't want to be too rough on him, but the blog entry contains so many factual error (not differences of opinion) that I just can't let it sit. I posted an answer for him, but since his story will probably be read and believed by his peers, I'm really worried. Here's the summary:

Problems that plague every Linux and make Linux inheritably bad. Hardy is mentioned several times.

1) The file hierarcy sucks.

There's nothing like Spotlight or Windows Search.

The filesystem is incredibly confusing, so that you can't find your files. Includes screenshot of "/" filesystem.

2) Drivers suck. You only have two choices -- install Linux on something you already bought or buy it pre-installed. I can't install Linux because it doesn't have SATA drivers.

3) RTFM and "Write it yourself" responses from the Linux crowd. Linux users are smug and generally jerks.

4) Application installation is difficult. Some stuff is available in repositories, but if you need a special version of software, you're going to need to download SVN and compile it. This kind of problem doesn't exist on Windows or Mac.

5) The desktop environments are incompatible. You can't run KDE apps in Gnome. There are too many distributions. The community need to get together and make one distro to rule them all with one desktop envirionment.

My response (I wrote this before I knew that he was a teenager -- I should have been gentler):

This HAS to be a troll, right?

1) The filesystem. Your files are stored in /home/(your user name). Inside that directory (by default in Ubuntu since 7.10) are:
Pictures
Documents
Video
Music
Templates
Desktop

That’s it. Nothing more. Damn confusing, isn’t it? When you open a file browser, you go to your user directory, NOT the one you showed. There are also very convenient links to these user diectories in the left sidebar. The normal user NEVER needs to go where you showed, nor would it be easy for them to go there. People don’t go wandering through the Windows system files, either, if they know what’s good for them.

The default applications store your files in the appropriate place … by default. They manage it for you. The photo manager tags everything. The music manager uses artist/album. Even the video player has search.

If you want to find a specific file, you use something like the deskbar applet, which will search for file names or by full-text. It also handles dictionary lookups, web searches, application lauching, and many other things. These indexed file searchers (now trackerd and Beagle before that) have been installed by default since 6.10. You need to look harder, like in Accessories under “Search tool” or in the notification area, where a little magnifying glass is waiting for you.

2) Drivers. I won’t argue with you about a lack of Linux drivers except to say that any modern desktop distribution has SATA support. Every one.

You have a third option when getting a computer. Ordering one built to your specifications with known working hardware. This is the route I take and I NEVER need to do any post-installation work on drivers. It takes more work, though, and I can understand your issues with drivers, especially for printers and scanners.

3) Problem with community. You’re in the wrong community. Some, like Slackware, are more aligned with hardcore geeks. The Ubuntu forums FORBID responses like the ones you refer to, though I do want to say that finding jerks on the Internet is not limited to the Linux camp, nor even computer OSes or technology. Anonymity brings out the worst in most people. Welcome to the Internet.

4) Compiling from source. This problem is no different than on OSX or Windows. If the program is packaged for you, you can install it easily. If it isn’t, you’re generally out of luck unless the source code is released, in which case you’ll have to compile it yourself. I recently read about how to compile wget for Mac OSX.

You can complain about the availability of proprietary programs on Linux, and I will agree with you, though OSX seems to suffer a lot of the same problems. If fact, I’d venture to say there are fewer choices for Mac than there are for Linux.

5) Incompatibilities. Granny will never find that her KDE app can’t tun in Gnome because it can. All the major desktop environments follow the specifications at freedesktop.org, meaning that they can communicate with each other. Before that, though, they STILL didn’t have the problem you describe, so I don’t even know where you are getting it from. Window managers will run whatever you give them and don’t care about what libraries the program uses. For example, Amarok (a KDE app) is one of the most popular post-installation add-ons for Ubuntu (a Gnome distributution). The two have a slightly different look and feel, and I don’t like to mix and match because I don’t want extra libraries. Both Cocoa and Carbon apps work(ed) in Mac OSX. This is no different.

Now I realize that you’re unhappy with Linux. That’s your deal. I’m not trying to change your mind or jump all over you. Before you start putting out a bunch of false facts, though, try doing just a little bit of checking on them.

As I said in my first line, these assertions are so wrong on so many levels that I don’t even think you tried.

How do you check if your webcam is working properly?

The thread I link to has some common ideas, mostly involving installing applications which use the camera. You don't have to go that far.

The easiest way to check that it's working properly without installing anything is to run gstreamer-properties from ALT-F2 or the terminal. On the "Video" tab, look for the "Default Input" section and click "test." You should see the webcam's video output.

Also, now that Cheese is installed by default on Hardy, you can use that application. If it goes away in Hardy+1, though, you can still use GStreamer.

The smallest computer in the world!

Holy cow! I want one. No, it doesn't/won't/can't run Ubuntu.
Picotux website

PII 300 128MB Revisited

As you may have read from my previous blog, I tried installing several different versions of Ubuntu on a Windows 98-era laptop with little success.

Well, I went on vacation and came back fresh, and decided to have a go at it again, this time with more flexibility. Since I had actually enjoyed the experience of gOS 2.0 except for a lot of the broken links, I decided to try Enlightenment (e17) on it's own, IceWM, and XFCE4, show them to my friend, and let him decide which he felt most comfortable with.

I could have gone with an server disk and a minimal CLI system to start with, but I didn't have a current server disk, so I got a net install disk
(of hardy) which weighs in at 9.5MB. That way, my ISP wouldn't get any angrier at me than it already was for the ~500GB of bandwidth I used last month. I only had to download the most recent packages available.

I did a basic installation with a command line interface only, then added icewm-experimental. IceWM is an extremely light desktop, meaning it doesn't do anything for you either. I used it five years ago for thin clients. It loaded really quickly on the old machine and changing it to an XP theme made it look familiar for my friend.

I also added some extra repositories for e17 and installed that. It looks pretty and still is quite snappy on the machine.

Finally, I installed XFCE4 from the repos. I figured that I would show the three to my friend, starting with the lightest and fastest, going to the slowest, then let him choose. Since he had limited needs for the computer, he only wanted a browser, MSN chat, and some word processing. I chose Opera from the repos for the browser. It has the lowest memory requirements of any full-featured browser. Since he wanted to do web cam (translated: web sex) via MSN, I gave him aMSN. The Logitec camera worked out of the box with it. Abiword, while not feature-full, was the only real choice for word processors given the system.

I also decided that he might want to play some music or video later, so I installed VLC and Audacious. Audacious is a fork of Beep Media Player, which is an offshoot of XMMS. Beep wasn't available in the repos, so I went with Audacious. It didn't, however, work. I couldn't get it to actually start playing any file, including .wav files. VLC, however, will play both video and sound files, so I just took off Audacity.

When he looked it over, he liked IceWM because of the XP theme. When he looked at e17, he didn't really feel any different about it. XFCE4 failed to start up the session for some reason. It didn't matter. We decided on IceWM, but when he said that he might want to use a USB key later, I got a little worried about automount. I figured e17 would be more likely to have some of that functionality, so I sold him on it.

I took the laptop back, re-themed it to 23oz, set up the bottom shelf with quick launchers and a window list so that he didn't get lost, removed IceWM and XFCE, tested it, and gave it back to him.

I realized too late that I really should have taken another video. It looks sharp, works about as quickly as my Sempron 2800+ with 1GB running straight Ubuntu, and was completely free.

The other two lappies weren't able to be fixed, but I added a USB Ethernet adapter to the one with the broken LAN. I'll install a system similar to my friends on the good one, switch out the hard disks, and repeat.

Two laptops for free. What the hell?

Installing Ubuntu(s) on a Windows 98-era Laptop

My friend told me that his laptop wasn't working, and asked if I would fix it for him. As usual, I didn't make any promises other than that I would do my best. He also gave me two other machines which he said were significantly older and which I could have if I could find a use for them. This conversation was last week sometime, and I'd been too busy for most of the week to even boot them up.
It turns out that all three are from roughly the same time period. The specs are as follows:

1. A Pentium II PE 300 MHz with 128MB RAM and a 4GB drive, running Windows 2000
   
2. A Pentium III 500MHz with 128MB and a 12GB drive, running Windows ME
   
3. One with identical specs as #2, but a different manufacturer and a 10GB drive, running Windows ME
   

He, of course, was using #1 thinkning it was the best of the three. He's not computer literate. It was immediately obvious that WinXP wouldn't run decently, barely skating by on the recommended minimums. Keeping EOL'ed products like Win2000 or ... gulp ... WinME is also a really bad idea. I set about finding something for him. He volunteered that he was open to Ubuntu, which I had installed on some mutual friends' computers.

To make the process easier for me (this wasn't paid, afterall), I went through my stack of CDs to see what I had. Ubuntu 6.06.1 seemed promising, but I couldn't get around the 256MB limit with the desktop version. Installing a minimal installation from a server CD worked, but Xubuntu was still too heavy for the old laptop. I fired up VirtualBox and ran my myriad of test images in 128MB to see what worked. I made a decision to go with either gOS or the Linpus Lite edition for UMPCs. They looked light and easy enough for him to get his head around. I started a download of Linpus and torrented gOS 2.0.

Then I broke out the three machines to see which one would likely work well. I soon found out that my choices were more limited than I thought. Machine #2 had had the LAN jack ripped out of the case. Machine #3 didn't have a working CD drive. Both of them were too old to boot from USB or the network, and I didn't have any way to make a boot floppy. Machine #1 is his, I guess, and I'll take the other two to SE Asia and have someone fix them for a couple bucks. I may even be able to find extra memory for them. 256MB will make them useful kitchen computers. If I can't get the RAM, I'll probably install a minimal distro, connect to via wireless, and use an X Session from another computer.

Anyway, back on topic. The Linpus download was entirely too slow for me, and it hasn't finished yet. gOS, however, finished in under half an hour, so I ran out to get some CDs and burned a copy. While the CD took a long time to boot, it eventually made it, and I started the installation. I switched over to TTY1 to make sure that the swap partition from the server disk install was being used, and there is where I ran into my first problem. The laptop BIOS was programmed to use CTRL-ALT-F# as some kind of display toggle, so I couldn't get back to the X session on F7. Instead, the display would zoom. Reboot and retry.

The second time everything looked fine until the apt mirror update, where the installation stalled for some time. Attempts to restart Ubiquity werre failing, but killing a bunch of processes helped, and I started again. Finally, after several hours, the system was installed and ready to go.

Impressions: The interface is remarkably responsive for such an old machine. There are animated transitions between workspaces and the bar on the bottom works fairly well. The displayed fonts are gorgeous when compared to the pixelated crap that was displayed on the Windows desktop. Firefox takes forever to start, but Windows 2000 wasn't very responsive, either. Once FF starts, it works for everything but flash video -- either the video card or the processor can't keep up. Video is extremely choppy at about a frame per second.

There are several things, though, that just don't work. Some of the links in the bar go to nowhere. The home page for FF is a modified Google search, but searches from there fail with a permission error from Google. The file manger is crap. Finally, CDs appear to mount, but this is an illusion. They are mysteriously unmounted seconds after you open a file manager window. These problems (including the 20 sec start time for FF) are illustrated in the crappy video below.



Overall, I can't give it to my friend this way. I'll be searching for something else. Fluxbox is not an option. Linpus is supposed to work on 128MB. I'll try that next. After that, it's Icebuntu.

Crave TV: Toshiba Spurs Engine puts PS3 Cell chip in a laptop - Technology Videos from Crave at CNET.co.uk

Crave TV: Toshiba Spurs Engine puts PS3 Cell chip in a laptop - Technology Videos from Crave at CNET.co.uk
What do you want to bet Linux will be running on this thing within a week after it's released?

Laptop-specific Packages

I recently wrote a blog about eeeXubuntu and what a great idea it was. I mentioned laptop-specific distros as being a wonderful thing for laptop owners. See http://www.fitzenreiter.de/averatec/index-e704.htm The upkeep on these is huge, though, and it would be easier to just have a package.

Assumptions:

There is one "best" setup for a given laptop model, which includes

• Extra packages from the repositories, including multiverse;
  
• Configuration files; and
  
• Non-free elements, especially Windows wireless drivers using ndiswrapper

This "best" setup is scriptable.

We can use a package with package dependencies, containing the required conf files, using post-install scripts to install proprietary wireless drivers.

These packages can be created using a web form and a script, then added to a launchpad PPA.

Some of these packages would work for both i386 and AMD64, while some packages would require an architecture.

Configuring a laptop should then be as easy as installing the package. Long term, we can look at doing this automatically from the Ubiquity installer.

Questions:
What packages might need to be added for laptops?

• ndiswrapper
  
• custom kernels like in the linked Averatec example?
  
• 915resolution or other Xorg-related packages
  
• card reader drivers (using module-assistant?)
  
• modem drivers (again, using module-assistant?)
  
• irda-related stuff for remotes

What files typically get modified?

• /etc/xorg.conf
• hotkey configuration
  
• suspend/hibernate/other power management configuration
  
• keyboard layout
  
• touch pad? Is this completely covered by xorg.conf?
  
• card readers
  
• irda config
  
• other, special-function keys like multimedia or "E-mail"

What is the process for scripting Windows driver installation?

• Automatic download?
• What if the page has an EULA?

Mock-up of a webpage for user upload (after laptop has been configured) in order to create a package:

Common activities such as using ndiswrapper could be scripted with just entry for the Windows driver location, etc.

We can use the following pages as a starting point:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/
  
• http://tuxmobil.org/mylaptops.html
  
• 
  

I guess that's pretty much the idea. I need feedback and criticism.

eeeXubuntu -- Please, sir, may I have some more?

eeeXubuntu is a sub-distribution of Xubuntu specifically for the Asus eeePC, which I wrote about last week. I have read several blogs about this new distro which cry "Why another distro? Should we have one for every different computer?"

My answer to them is "Yes ... for laptops, at least."

Laptops are the bane of Ubuntu's existence. They create so many support requests. Getting suspend/hibernate working, configuring the wireless, and setting up the right resolution for the LCD is a time-consuming task. Wouldn't you rather download a version of [U|Ku|Xu]buntu with all those laptop-specific tweaks already in place? Install and use, just like the Windows recovery disk the manufacturer supplied.

What a wonderful world that would be.

If you don't want different .iso images, we could just make dummy packages for each model.

Please.

The ASUS Eee PC is coming to Korea!

First, the press release:

ASUS announced the launch of its flagship notebook pc 'Eee PC' in Japan market. Weighting 980g, it adopted 7-inch LCD display and 4GB~16GB SSD.



It is expected to be available in February 2008 in Japan market as well as Korea market.

Now, a review:

And another one:

Finally, my thoughts:

If this appears in Korea at the same price point, I'm getting one the first month. I'll probably replace the system with Ubuntu, so my work, home, and laptop are all consistent, but we'll see.

p.s. I already broke the bad news to Gale.

The Safa Q10 2GB MP3 Player on Ubuntu

I bought a Safa Q10 for Gale last night form the local Home Plus. The biggest chanllenge in getting it set up was changing the menu from Korean t a language we understand. The good news is that there are probably fifty different languages supported, so Gale can get either English or Thai. I guess she'll choose English, because teh Thai font is too small to be easily readable.

Why did I buy an off brand like this one (and one without OGG support, either)? It was 49K won. That's USD52 for a 2GB MP3 player that uses a simple USB mass storage device protocol to interface with the computer.

Speaking of interface, it's sparse. There are few buttons and figuring out how to work the device was a little tricky. Once Gale gets used to it, though, it should be fine. You don't really need to change your play options that often, do you?

Since we have a few songs in OGG and FLAC, I was worried about how to keep Gale from getting frusrated, then I remembered the .is_audio_player file format. I set up the file on her device and Rhythmbox can pull directly from our DAAP (iTunes) server, convert to MP3 if necessary, and deposit in a nice directory structure on the Q10 in one drag-and-drop motion. On Gale's Core 2 Duo machine, the transmission over the network takes longer than the reencoding.

It's a cheap, large-capacity MP3 player. Yay! ;)

The Press Release

Safa rolled out its new mp3 player 'Q10' in Korea market. By applying IMD method, it features ergonomic design with round corners. It is designed to be easy to handle by eliminating buttons on the front that are not used frequently. It supports seven equalizer sound effects and SRS WOW. It also has 2-color STN LCD and various additional functions including voice recording, phone book, A-B repeat, and data storage with password support to protect important personal files.



It runs on internal lithium-ion battery and supports 12 hours of music play and 22 hours of recording. Suggested price is 79,000(KRW) for 1GB and 99,000(KRW) for 2GB.

Installing Ubuntu 7.10 - AMD64

I decided to take my previously installed machine and switch from 32 bits to 64 bits. I was more than a little nervous about the switch since I had done a ton of work customizing the old one.

Some background:
This computer was purchased specifically to work with Ubuntu, so it's almost entirely an Intel machine. As much as I root for AMD, Intel releases all of its specs and writes open source drivers for almost all of its stuff. Here's the spec:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo
RAM: 2GB
HDD: SATA 250GB Samsung
Chipset: i801
Graphics: Onboard i945
NIC: rt8139
Wifi: RaLink rt73usb

My first step was to back up my data. I attached the external drive, hit CTRL-h to show hidden files in my home folder, hit CTRL-a to select everything, then went item by item, deselecting the parts I knew I didn't need, like my .wine directory. Finally, I dragged everything onto the removable drive (46GB!!) and waited. And waited.

While I waited, I burned the Ubuntu 7.10 AMD64 disk image that I had downloaded the night before. It was too easy: I stuck a blank CD in the drive, clicked "Ignore," right-clicked on the image, and chose "Write to disk." Nothing could have been simpler, except that the first CD had an error during write, so I had to repeat the process, this time at a lower speed just to be safe. I used the md5sum command to check the hashes of the burned CD and the image to make sure that they were the same. (I had previously checked the hash of the image.)

I rebooted with the CD in the drive, hit F4 to change the resolution to 1280x1024, and hit enter. Once the live CD was up and running, I immediately ran the install and surfed the web while I waited.

Then I ran into my first problem. The wireless dropped the connection and wouldn't come back up. The security updates failed due to the lack of an Internet connection. Indeed, once I rebooted into the installed system, the RaLink 73 USB device wasn't even recognized, so I busted out the LAN cables. Meh.

Then I started the restore process suing the same method I had used earlier, only in reverse.

I went to Software Sources, activated all the extra repositories and updated the package list. I used Add/Remove to install my normal additions to Ubuntu: ubuntu-restricted-extras (for all the codecs and plugins), Lyx (for writing), Referencer (for my bibliographies), Epiphany (which I prefer to Firefox), Devede (a DVD creator), Pitivi (a VERY simple video editor), Istanbul (for taking screencasts), and the Empathy / Telepathy set (the upcoming Gnome IM / VOIP / Video chat solution integrated into every application). I also updated all the software.

So here I am, typing on my newly reinstalled and configured, barely an hour after I first started the process. F-Spot has all my photos. Rhythmbox still has my songs. Best of all, my documents are all here and Tracker has the index of them. My bookmarks and passwords are even in place. Computational tasks like encoding seem faster, but I didn't do any benchmarks. My 2GB of RAM can now be handled natively, instead of in 1GB chinks. Reinstallation couldn't get any easier. Next time, I won't even have to restore because I've given myself a separate /home partition. I'll still back up before the upgrade, though. Always back up.

Now I need to get to work on the wireless driver ....

Well, that's done. Download the rt73-cvs tarball from serialmonkey.com and grag the sole directory onto the desktop. Install build-essential to set up the build environment. Enter the Module directory in rt73 and type "make" then "sudo strip -S rt73.ko" and finally "sudo make install" to finish the installation. Blacklist the regular rt modules in the kernel and load the new rt73 module.

In /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:
# Blacklist rt73usb
# Blacklist rt2570
blacklist rt2570
# Other modules
blacklist rt2500usb
blacklist rt2x00lib

Set up networking. Done. Maybe ten minutes.

On a side note, this shouldn't have to be done at all. RaLink wireless devices used to work fine. There are many people like me who went out of theri way to buy RaLink specifically because they were supported. I'm pissed at Canonical for shipping drivers which it knew to be bad. They drop. They crash. They just don't work. I filed bugs during the alpha phase. Nothing happened. Friggin' don't ship them if you can't fix them! This situation had better be fixed by Hardy, or the LTS moniker won't mean shit.

Well, I found another problem. Flash isn't installed. Normally, in 32 bit, ubuntu-restricted-extras would install flash, but that didn't happen here. Installing flash-plugin-nonfree appeared to work, but the browser experience is the same as if I hadn't installed it.

It turns out that there's a bug in the 64-bit version, and the fix is linked to in the bug tracker. Installing this fixed all problems. NOTE: Installing packages from untrusted sources is a bad idea.

Next on the agenda is to get a seamless backup and restore system working. TimeVault is my preferrred application for this, but no 64 bit version exists. Compiling my own fails, and there's almost no documentation on dependencies required, etc. Stay tuned for this one.

Dell Moving Forward With Ubuntu 7.10

While I've been pragmatic about Ubuntu 7.10 -- it has many great new features and an equal number of new piquadillos -- I think Dell putting it on their Ubuntu anemic line-up is a good sign of company support for the line.

Most notable in the announcement is encrypted DVD playback via bundling of a proprietary DVD player called LinDVD and the inclusion of a DVD recovery image which doesn't need to take up your precious hard-disk space.
:)