The Dell Mini 9 Rides Again

I read today that Michael Dell does not like Netbooks. He thinks that people buy them as notebook replacements and then are not happy when they don't work well as notebook replacements.

This is at direct odds with the fact that Dell brought back (even for a limited time) the Mini 9 after killing it off because so many people still wanted one, including me.

I can't see using a full size notebook on the two foot diameter table I am sitting at right now at Elevation Burger (one of my favorite Austin eateries) either.

I suspect Netbook's days are numbered though. If Apple or MS ever ship a real tablet PC in this form factor, and even better, use a virtual keyboard like the iPhone's, then the reason for a Netbook will, at least for me, have passed. I can blog from the iPhone of course, but I'd rather use the Netbook for screen and keyboard reasons. Here is a case where the Netbook beats the next smaller form factor (smartphone) all hollow, as well as the next larger (notebook). Sure: I'm a wimp: There are people that have written entire novels using a old cell phone and t9 text entry. Airplane tray tables are another place a netbook wins over a regular notebook.

Dell was very clear that the Mini 9's reprieve was to be very short term. Looking at the web site right now I do not see it any more, though my new Mini 9 arrived yesterday. Even if the M9 is the oldest unit in the lineup, it is also the asiest to upgrade things like RAM and SSD. Dell did not aparently learn anything when they designed the Mini-9, because the 10/10v are much harder to work on. Hello?

By MS's definition the new M9 is not a netbook: it has (gasp) 2GB of RAM. Not allowed. Since the new unit has Linux on it, not Windows, what MS defines is not relevant.

My new Mini 9 came about because I gave the last one to my wife, my Acer Aspire One to my daughter, and so made room for a new Mini 9.

Since this was going to be the last chance to get a Mini 9, I splurged on a few options, adding the 1.3 Megapixel webcam and internal Bluetooth, thus driving the system cost up... to about 229 USD. My Apple Bluetooth Mighty Mouse sync's up and works like a champ. The 2GB 533 Mhz PC5300 memory stick added another 25 USD to the price.

I'll put in a 32GB SuperTalent or Runcore SSD in the near future to replace the 4GB unit it came with. Something far faster than the factory default unit.

That 4GB unit looks like it is having problems anyway: Ubuntu's Palimpsest utility keeps issuing messages that the hard drive is failing: That the hard drive is being used "outside design parameters", although it passes self test. Whatever. I bought this unit knowing that the SSD had to go.

I put as 32GB SuperTalent unit in my wife's Mini 9 and it is *much* faster, not to mention handy to have the extra space.

I never booted the pre-installed Ubuntu that Dell put on this M9. Ubuntu 8.04.1 is just too far back level for me, not to mention that when I booted it on my wifes Mini 9 a while back it was slow slow slow. I love that Dell gives me the option to buy Linux, but I wish it was a more current version, and a better, i386 version, build. The "lpia" binaries of the default install are just suboptimal.

It's an easy fix. I loaded up the current Beta of 9.10 (which GA's this month) and while it took a while because of the slow SSD, it is fast now that it is down. I watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer off Hulu last night without too many frame freezes. That is the point of a netbook after all: look at Net stuff. Well, that, and actually be of a size that you might have it with you at odd times when you need a computer for something but don't have one. Emergency idea documentation. Blog ideas that strike while at lunch. Etc.

The Broadcom Wifi Card required activating a non-opensource driver via Administration/Hardware Drivers. No big deal, but I did have to plug in to the wired Ethernet long enough to have the tool go get the drivers.

With 9.10, and Bilbo from KDE installed, the 4GB drive is nearly full: /dev/sda1 3423336 2891716 357720 89% /. I have a 2GB SD card in the slot to give me some elbow room, and use flash drives to store and move things around.

No fans: The little unit is disorientingly quiet. Unlike the Acer, there is no temptation to play with the power management. It just works. 46C is about as hot as it ever gets.

Like the Acer before it, I imagine I'll get the 8 cell battery at some point (The Acer was a 9 cell actually). Going all day between charges is just too nice.

One of the reasons people do not like the Netbook form factor is the small keyboard, and like any small keyboard, the Dell Mini 9 takes some getting used to. The Acer Aspire 1 keeps the key size ratios the same across all the keys, and more or less just shrinks the keyboard. The M9 went a totally different way. The Alpha keys are nearly full size. numerics are slightly smaller. Punctuation are smaller still. There are no dedicated PF keys at all. It is very weird. It is probably why Dell is pushing the 10 and 10v with its its more normal layout and 92% of full size keys, although the fact that the 10/10v cost a bit more probably helps too.

Time to watch some more Buffy....

Out and about with the Acer Aspire One and Ubuntu 9.04

Please bring your netbooks to the upright and locked position...

As I type this, I am winging my way to the San Francisco Bay Area. The Acer Aspire One (AA1) is in its natural habitat, i.e., a tray table on a crowded 737-800/900 (it does not say which...). All seats are filled, and there is no spare room for anything, much less a large laptop.

Since I last traveled with the Acer, I have made a few changes to the AA1. I upped the RAM to 1.5 GB, so that for a simple edit session with OpenOffice WebWriter, I am only using 11% of the memory. 38% is in use as cache, and the rest is just waiting for something to do. Don't get this wrong though. I am not sorry I upped the RAM, even it it was a real PITA relative to something like the Dell Mini-9 or even an Apple Macbook. If I could have gone 2GB, I would have. On the plane I am trying to conserve power and only have OpenOffice WebWriter open. On the ground, in a library, or at Starbucks I might have seven or eight things going at once, and then the RAM is handy. Besides, on any notebook computer, I like as big a disk cache as I can get to "speed up" (I.E. cache) the writes to the typical 4200 or 5400 RPM disk.

The other big change is that the netbook is running Ubuntu 9.04 GA, and while I experimented with it for a while, I have taken off the Ubuntu NetBook Remix (UNR). Mostly this was because I use Gnome desktops on all my other Linux systems right now, and while I like Netbook remix, I prefer to be able to window the desktop from time to time, even on the tiny netbook screen. Sure, I could use the desktop switcher to run over to classic mode, and then pop open a window and tell Maximus to stop maximizing everything.. but then I'd have to undo all that when I switched back. Ultimately I decided that the eye candy of NetBook Remix was not worth the hassle. I can always turn on Compiz if I want eye candy. What is still impressive to me is that this little unit can do the eye candy with Linux and not be noticeably slowed by it. I will probably replace the XP install on this unit with the GA of Windows 7 at some point, and it will be interesting to compare those two on the same box. Hard to see the Aero effects (even of the tweaked out Win7) working very well, but who knows? Linux can do composited graphics on a netbook. Surely MS won't leave that gauntlet tossed to the ground forever.

Heat and Noise

I experimented around with the 'acerhdf' kernel module, and it worked more or less as advertised, at least as far as keeping the CPU fan turned off most of the time, but I did not like how warm the AA1 became when it was installed, and the Wifi would start to act flakey after a while, so I disabled it for now. Fan runs more especially when on A/C power, but the systems stays cooler to the touch and the Wifi has not wigged out since. I assume without sensor data or thermal scans to back me up that the Atherosw Wifi card was getting too hot.

The main problem that the acerhdf was trying to address was how noisy the AA1 is, but if I am listening to music on the iPhone, or typing blog entries on an airplane, I can not hear the fan at all, so why take the chance of heat damage (further heat damage?). It was all really Dell Mini-9 envy anyway, because that little unit runs dead quiet: Does not even have a fan. Might as well face it: The AA1 is not the Dell, and if quiet is key, get the Mini-9.

A disappointment so far as it relates to heat is how few sensors appear to through ACPI to the lm-sensors code. I run the Gnome applet to monitor that and all I can see are the hard drive (42C right now...) and another one called 'temp1' out of 'libsensors', but it always reads 0C, so whatever that is it is not being accessed correctly. Whatever temp1 is, it did not even appear under Ubuntu 8.10, so I assume someone is working on getting the AA1 sensors mapped correctly. The best computer I have ever had in this regard was the IBM T41: It had a whole raft of instrumentation. CPU, Graphics, batteries, various memory, i/o busses.... the works. I gues you could make the case that the IBM was a top of the line (at the time) business computer, and the AA1 is a 300 USD or less consumer unit... but really: Do thyristors cost that much? Would one on top of the CPU and another on the Wifi card really jack the price up that much? If so, then how about Intel and Atheros just build that stuff in to everything they make?

Battery Park

When I bought the AA1, most of the units being sold had 3 cell batteries and 120GB hard drives. As I noted here in past posts about the AA1, the box my unit came in said it had 120GB HD, but it was really a 160GB, and that is de rigueur these days for the Netbooks with mechanical hard drives.

The 3 cell battery that came with the unit has 2200 mAh, and was good for about 1.8 hours of usage. Another reason I was interested in the acerhdf module was to keep the fan off as much as possible, and make the battery last as long as possible. 1.8 hours is barely more than one meeting, and does not even come close to one Austin to San Francisco plane trip, or one Houston to Alpine train trip.

Backing up for a sec to the heat thing: it should be noted that the fan does run less often when the AA1 is not plugged in. It appears to do a better job dialing itself down, and running with less heat when unplugged, It does this without any obvious slowing of the computer, so I am not sure why it does not manage its power/heat a little better when on A/C.

Acer had 6 cell batteries as an option for the AA1, but I had never seen one at retail back at my time of purchase and come to think of it I still have not. In fact, one Fry's ad at the time noted that they had the 120GB / 6 cell config, and when I went there they had the 160Gb / 3 cell config. Only way I have seen to get a 6 cell battery from Acer as the stock install is to order it that way. That is just my experience, as I have read accounts of people finding them in the wild.

No matter what, the 3 cell I had was just not going to get it done. Even my Macbook Pro from three years ago has longer battery life (and I have not been deeply impressed by the MacBook Pro's batteries, but that is another post). I decided to order a 9 cell, 7200 mAh replacement. There are several makes and models out there, and I found a manufacturer in the US that makes a 7800 mAh unit … right after I had ordered mine. Doh.

Mine came from Global Laptop Batteries, and it appears to be a decent unit. See picts. Ignore the Apple logo. That is just dreaming... or a Dell Mini-9 converted to OS.X. Not the Acer. It is a bad OS.X candidate, not even counting EULA's and all.

Overall the Global buying experience was mixed. The battery shipped almost immediately from Hong Kong, according to the USPS, but from then on it was never really clear where they were. The steep 20 USD in shipping did not buy any sort of enhanced tracking, and the battery was two weeks in arriving.

7200 mAh gives 6+ hours of power cord free time, especially here on the airplane with the Wifi off. Probably closer to seven, but I am not measuring it with any precision. I have used it for three hours messing around and writing this, and still have 4 hours runtime left according to the battery meter. Wonder what that 7800 mAh would do...

If this ebay deal is any good, it would run rings around the deal I got.

The 9 cell battery is tall, and I rather like that, as it angles the keyboard towards me on the tray. Much nicer to type on with the tall battery installed. Cuts less into my palms at the edges of the keyboard, as there is no real 'palmrest' on something this small.

It is a big battery: I have not weighed the AA1, but it is probably 3 pounds now. It is a good tradeoff, especially as the battery is shaped such that now the AA1 has a nifty handle on it, although before carrying it all over the place with the 'handle', make sure the battery lock slide is engaged! I'm just sayin'....

With the 'handle', any extra weight is not really noticeable, and I do tend to carry it around sans bag and power cord now, so I am probably saving weight overall.

Ubuntu 9.04 GA

Ubuntu 9.04 itself is a thing of beauty. The performance on the Acer is crisp until I start trying to manipulate photos. That can insert pauses and make the fan run a bit. Firefox, when pointed at a page with a lots of Web 2.0 stuff like Gmail will also crank up the fan, although the browser stays fast. I run the FF 3.5 beta 4 rather than the Ubuntu sourced 3.0.10 though. One of the things Beta 4 brings to the table is better speed in Javascript, which helps all the Google apps. Except one. Google Gears is not yet updated to support it, so I can not run offline Gmail or Docs without reverting to 3.0.10. No problem: I have both Firefox versions installed if needed.

One app that does not run well is Google Earth. it just needs more CPU/graphics mojo than this little Netbook has. Maybe a Linux native version would work better, but not this boxed WINE version.

With 1.5 GB of RAM, having both browsers running, plus OpenOffice , Rhythmbox (for Internet Radio) , and a few other things is no problem. Everything launches very quickly as well, and relaunches from cache are even better. OpenOffice has been rapped over the years for its slow initialization, but I just re-launched the WebWriter and it came up in 3 seconds. Netbooks may be minimal hardware by todays standards, but Linux is still lean and mean enough to make them seem pretty crisp most of the time... as long as you are not running the a mini-9 with Dells default LPIA Ubuntu 8.04 build... You listening out there Dell?

Aside: I have read that Win7's most basic version will limit one to only running three things at once. With Ubuntu 9.04 on either the Acer of the Dell Mini-9 with its 2GB, I have never hit the limit for how many apps I can open. Either machine stays responsive well past three things running at once. That limit is clearly not being imposed by the hardware. In my testing of Win7 Beta I have seen that while it is faster than Vista, it is slower than XP SP3. Win7 RC is supposed to be faster than the Beta, So I assume that the limit is just there to make people want to install XP SP3 again.....

Do You See What I See?

Even Internet video does not work too bad on this AA1. With Flash 10 installed, I can watch Hulu or MSNBC's news programs while on the road. The screen is bright and beautiful, the contrast ratio better than the new MacBook (but not the new Macbook Pro...), the wide screen perfect for movies. This puts a lie to the recent statement by Apple that Netbooks are 'junky'. Don't believe me: Go in to the Apple store. Fire up iPhoto on a Macbook, and a Macbook Pro. Navigate to the same picture on both, and one with good contrast and lots of black. The Macbook.. the brand new cadillac carved from a block of aluminum Macbook... has dark gray on the screen rather than black. Sorry: no room to be calling Netbooks junky till your own house is in order there Apple.

Video is the leading edge of the Netbooks 1.6 Ghz Atom CPU though: pretty much nothing else can be happening on the computer if you want the video to be smooth. When in a hotel room on the road, the little AA1 is perfect for sitting in the bad and watch programming till ready for sleep. Here is a place where the AA1 appears to slightly exceed the Dell Mini-9.

AA1 to Dell Mini-9 Comparisons

I can watch video on the Mini-9 (when my wife lets me see it) as well, but its screen does not appear to be quite as bright, and since the unit is fanless it feels like it dials itself down to stay cool far faster. It may just be that the Dells stock SSD is just slower. I am looking at the high performance (appears to be mostly from RunCore) and larger stock speed SSD's available for the 9 because while Ubuntu 9.04 does fit in the 2GB SSD, it leaves little room for growth or patching. The SSD price points are shifting so quickly right now it is hard to determine what the best deal is. As i write this, a 32Gb SSD at stock speed is about 80USD, and a RunCore high speed SSD is about 130USD. The main difference is that the write speeds are about 4x faster. Read speeds are a tiny bit slower. For standard writing and web browsing, I am not sure the performance is worth the price.

One of the things I like to use the AA1 for is to listen to Internet Radio. Mostly stations like WBUR, KQED, or Air America, While Rythmbox is a great app for that, the AA1 speakers suck rocks. Here is another place where the Dell exceeds it, as it has tiny but fairly usable speakers at the base of the monitor, facing forward towards the listener. If you are going to have a fat bezel around a monitor, why not use it for something? What a terrific idea! Plenty of room on the Acer monitor bezel for speakers... but no. Music on the 9 is passable as long as it is not serious listening, just low volume background. 'All Things Considered' or 'The Rachel Maddow Show', being mostly speaking voice, come through fine on the Mini-9.

The AA1 by contrast has speakers mounted facing downwards, just under the 'palm rest', and the 9 cell battery tips the unit forward, closing out some of the air space between the speakers and whatever the AA1 is sitting on. I invested 10 dollars in a pair of battery powered speakers, and while they are not great, they are portable, tuck in luggage nicely, and bring the AA1's sound back to at least as good as the Dell mini-9's. They also will run off the USB port for power, so the batteries inside the speakers last a good long while, even though they are AAA size. For really good sound, I have the Altec Lansing portable speakers that I use with my iPod.

Back to Ubuntu

One of Ubuntu 9.04's new features is the unified message center. It took me a bit to get used to that, especially as the NetManager icon sits in it, and when I upgraded one of my test machines to 9.04 I had lost the icon for the NetManager out of the Gnome toolbar, and it was driving my nuts trying to figure out how to get it back. FWIW, should this happen to you, it is called the 'Notification AREA' in the 'add to panel dialog (right click on tool bar to access). Ubuntu also moved the power down / suspend / hibernate button to the notification area from the 'system' menu. Took me a couple times to figure that out. Now that I know what it is, what has been centralized there I like it. It is a very clean way to present all of these functions. Avahi Autodiscover reports what it finds there as well.

Herein lies another reason I switched back to the classic menus from the Ubuntu NetBook-Remix. I keep my tool bar stocked with all sorts of applets: launchers for terminal and Firefox, remote console access, sensor and system performance data, weather, and so forth. NetBook-Remix only displays some of these things, because it re-tasks part of the toolbar for the top of the currently focused window. I get it. It makes great use of the screen real estate, and lets the focused app fill the screen. If I were building a NetBook for a Linux neophyte, I would install NetBook Remix as the default. When I handed the Mini-9 over to my wife, I had NetBook-Remix as the default in fact. It was the first thing she turned off. I assumed that, since she is primarily a Mac user these days she would like UNR better than Gnome. Nope. Her UNIX system programmer genes reasserted themselves immediately. She wanted multiple windows available. She wanted drag and drop to the desktop. UNR was making everything too simple. Oh well. The desktop switcher makes short work of flipping back and forth, though I note she never does. She has left Maximus intact though.

One of the funny things about the AA1 (and probably most netbooks right now) is how often when I am using it out and about at someplace like Starbucks or Taco Bell that people stop and ask me questions about it.

• How well does it work?

• Which one do you have?

• Did you look at any others?

• Are you glad you got it?

• Was it worth the price

• How well does Linux work on it?


• Can you really use Linux to replace Windows?

It's kind of fun to be able to talk about it with people, and, unlike some things, no one appears to find you too geeky or perhaps even a little elitist (a unfortunate common reaction to an Apple MBP). People seem to get that this is a computer that almost anyone can afford. In fact, based on some of the conversations I have had recently, I think there is a great unmeasured consumer group out there: Those who have wanted computers but never thought they could afford one before now. Those for whom this will be not be an ancillary, special purpose computer, but their first and only computer.

Acer Aspire One, Ath5k, and Ubuntu 9.04

In my last post about the Acer Aspire One (AA1) and Ubuntu 9.04, I mentioned that everything was working in Ath5k land. In retrospect, that post did gloss over a few details, so I thought I'd put up a special AA1 / Ubuntu 9.04 / Ath5k post to clarify a few things.

First off, in a fresh install, it probably just works. Maybe. Maybe not. I have not tried it yet. The AA1 I have started as Alpha 6, and has been doing near daily dist-upgrades to pick up new service along the way. As it pertains to the Ath5k module, new kernels and kernel modules. 2.6.28.11.14 is where I am at right now on the AA1. I saw a new kernel come down on a different test box earlier today, so I need to update again.

Previously on the AA1, under Mint, I was using ndiswrapper to get the wireless going, and when I first got the Ath5k stuff going there were a few tricks to it. First, I had to turn *off* ndiswrapper of course. That was easy: I have installed ndisgtk, so in the GUI, I just removed the driver. Same thing as 'sudo ndiswrapper -r net5416' at at command line

At that point, I could *not* see the wireless any more. This is because of the module 'acer_wmi'. The only problem acer_wmi causes on the AA1 is in the ability of Linux to see the Ath5k... but that is bad enough. A netbook without WIFI is not doing what it is supposed to be doing.

If you read through that bug, it says that the very latest kernel has the patch required to fix this rfkill issue. Will try and update this in a bit.

In the meantime: Simple solution is to blacklist it in /etc/modprobe.d. One line file:

steve@kara:/etc/modprobe.d$ more blacklist-acer-wmi
blacklist acer_wmi

You could also just rmmod acer_wmi, and then 'modprobe ath5k' but blacklisting makes acer_wmi stay out between boots.

Ubuntu 9.04 with ath5k on the AA1 is a lovely thing. Wifi recovers from standby without any issues so far. Under Mint/ndiswrapper about 1 out of every 10 time the WIFI would go away some place, and require severe measures to get it back. It also seems to be faster finding and syncing with WAP's now.

Update

It's working. Mostly

I did an 'sudo apt-get update | sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade' and a new kernel came down: 2.6.28-11.39. if you were to look with 'uname -a' you'd think this was the same kernel, since uname drops the '.39'. Have to do a 'dpkg -l | grep -i 2.6.28-11' or something similar to see what is installed. I then erased my blacklist of the acer_wmi in /etc/modprobe.d (see above)

After the service I rebooted, and it still did not work. I manually did a 'modprobe ath5k', and it started working. puzzled, I looked in /etc/modprobe.d and wondered if the ndiswrapper file there was interfering. I did not put it there: Pretty sure it was created when I installed ndiswrapper. I deleted it (sudo delete /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper) and rebooted.

Instant success. Even see the hidden wireless where I am right now.

The wireless blinking LED is not lit though. Not sure why, and don't really care right now. That is a problem for another day. I am just happy to have the Acer_wmi loading so I can see if that makes a difference in how much the fan runs.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 6, the Acer and the Dell

Since I last posted here, there has been a lot of work done on Ubuntu, getting ready to ship next month. What has changed on my end is two things: The addition of a Dell Mini-9 to the mix, and getting Alpha 6 working on the Acer Aspire One (AA1)

The Dell Mini-9

The Dell Mini-9 came into my hands, albeit briefly, last week. I bought it as a gift for my wife, although she does not know it yet. It shipped with Ubuntu 8.04.1, and a "special" low power version of it at that: All the complaints I have seen about the speed of the Mini-9 can be traced directly back other fact that it is *not* an I3/4/686 version of the binaries, but a special compile for the low power version of the Atom called "lpia". It is not horribly slow at that, but it is not great ether. The Acer with Mint 5 on it ran rings around it side by side, and the Dell has 2GB where the Acer has 1.5 GB. Neither are memory constrained, yet the Dell was slower.

Backing up for a second: the Mini-9 came with 512MB, and when I plopped in the 2GB chip, it made very little difference to the speed. A very undramatic upgrade. The good news there is that Linux still runs great in 512MB....

The "lpia" version of the Ubuntu 8.04.1 has another problem: Not much appears to be compiled for it, so if you go into a tool like "Synaptic" and try to add things, rather than the 26,000 some odd packages, that are far less: Forgot to count. Already installed over it. Worse, even with software sources set to do all versions, not just LTS (System / Administration / Software Sources) it still would not update to 8.10.... Because Dell has not done an lpia version of 8.10 yet and released it. The Atom can run X86, so lpia had to go.

For all the trouble with software upgrades, the Dell beats the pants off the Acer for hardware upgrades: The hatch on the bottom opens with two screws, and there is the memory slot, the SSD slot, the WIFI slot, and an empty one labeled WWAN on the mainboard silkscreen. The Acer required taking nearly the whole thing apart to get at the same bits.

Then there is that capability to take a 2GB memory chip (in my case a Patriot PSD22G8002S, or PC-2-6400 800 Mhz). The BIOS on the Acer can only take a 1GB unit. Phooey. And now I have another 512 MB chip to find some use for. Someone needs to make chip stackers again....

The next upgrade the Mini-9 will get will be to replace the 4GB SSD. I tried to get one from Fry's, but all they had were the full length, EEPC style units. The Dell has a half length mini-PCI slot. A quick look around the Internet, and it appears I won't have any problem finding something. Probably a 32GB SSD. Linux does not need that space: It fits easily inside of the 4GB, but as I learned, it is really easier to keep /home on the SSD too and sync it to the SD or USD Flash drives later for backup. More on that in a sec. Coming from the Acer's 160GB moving-parts-hard-drive, it is a very different world.

I created a USB stick with Ubuntu Alpha 6 on it (same procedure as in "Mint 6 RC1 on the Acer Aspire One") and booted the Mini-9 off it. My first pass was to put in a 2GB SD card and make that /home, but that caused all sorts of issues with suspend / resume and reboots, where apparently the MMC driver was not being installed soon enough in the boot so that /home was not available. Grrr.

One thing about the Ubuntu 9.04 installer: They changed the Time Zone selector. Much much much better. Now you just see the 24 time zones. Neat world map too. Thank you Ubuntu folks!

I guess I could take the mount of the SD card (/dev/mmcblk0p1) out of the /etc/fstab and put it in rc.local or something as a mount, so that everything would be up first, but I'll let my wife figure that out. I am not really sure what she'll do with this unit. Another option would just be to have Conduit (very nifty app!) sync the SSD version of /home with the SD card from time to time.

Even though the Dell has a Broadcom Wifi card, Linux loaded it up and it worked right out of the box: In fact, everything did. Install was dead easy if slightly slower than I would have expected. SSD's are slow on write.

I went ahead and installed the Netbook-Remix while I was at it to see how that compared to the Netbook desktop that Dell had provided on the default 8.04.1 install. The answer was that the Ubuntu Netbook stuff is IMHO far better. If nothing else, faster since it is X86, not lpia. But I liked the whole setup better: I imagine Dell will at least think about using the Distro default version at some point rather than continuing to maintain their own version of a desktop, whenever they get around to supporting 9.04.

Turn off Compiz if you use the Netbook desktop. Compiz will load by default, and even works on the little netbook fairly quickly, but the Netbook launcher and Compiz hate each other. Very frakkin ugly.

I tweaked out the Mini 9, and basically have it ready to give to my wife, so now I have to quit playing with it. Its bad enough I opened her present I guess, but Ubuntu 8.04.1 really had to come off there first, or she would have thought the Mini-9 was not so frelling great.

There: A Farscape and BattleStar word, and not half done! Geek Points!

Acer Aspire One and A6

The AA1 may not be as easy to upgrade, hardware-wise, as the Dell, but it is still a nifty little unit. There are two things about it that beat the Dell: The screen is better a little better (brighter, deeper colors), and I like the keyboard better. The AA1 keyboard has slightly smaller keytops, because it has 6 rows of keys rather than five. The Mini-9 drops the PF key row, and embeds those as fn- keys (Like fn-a is F1) in the regular keyboard. Further the Mini-9 messes around with where the single and double quotes are, and the vertical bar, which I use all the time on Linux, is also a fn- type key. PF11 and PF12 are just gone. The Mini-9 BIOS uses regular letters at boot to control getting into setup or changing the boot order.

I liked that the keys were a little bigger on the Dell, so while I prefer the Acer, I could live with the Dell. it will be interesting to see how my wife, a blindingly fast touch typist, adapts to the Dell.

The Acer has my normally prefered Atheros Wifi card, but with Ubuntu and 8.10 and the mess around the "ath5k" drivers that has actually favored the Dells Broadcom chipset. Weird.

Once I had the Dell dialed in with Ubuntu 9.04 A6 and the new Netbook desktop, I liked it so much I wanted the exact same thing on my Acer. As I wrote here back in January about Alpha 3 ("Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 on the Acer Aspire One... briefly"), the Wifi mess was still not sorted, but I was ready to try again. After all, GA is next month! This had to be close I thought.

It is, but it was not easy like the Dell.

I booted the USB, and installed Ubuntu 9.04 A6 for the second time. It installed more quickly than on the Dell, because the SSD drive is slower on writes than the round-and-brown of the Acer. Actually, last time I took apart a disk drive, the platters were silver now, not brown. But I digress...

It booted up, and my misery started. There were two issues, but it took me a while to find them:

1) acer_wmi module has to be blacklisted, or you can not use the Gnome desktop network widget for connecting to Wifi. I had to hand code 'iwconfig' statements at command line till I figure that out. No biggie, but the widget is so much better.

2) And this is the one that really killed me: For reasons I do not know, my repository sources were set to default to Chile. I could not figure out why Synaptic / apt-get update were taking so long to refresh, and why I could only see about 6,000 packages after they had refreshed. It was making me crazy! Lost at least a day to this. The reason I lost part of this time was that until I found the note on an Ubuntu forum about blacklisting acer_wmi I thought I was fighting a network problem with the ath5k stuff still.

As an aside: I am not sure not that I look at it that the problem I was having with the AA1 and the Wifi with Alpha 3 was not the "acer_wmi" thing. I did not dig that deeply then. This time I was determined to make it work.

Next up, the AA1 fan runs way more than it used to under Mint 6. More like the way it does under XP. I do not know why yet. I loaded up "powertop" and had it crank back the write-back settings, and that seemed to help, but it still runs more than it used to. It might be that without the acer-wmi loaded something is not connecting up in power management, but if so, I'll just wait for that to be fixed. I love the Wifi widget too much to lose it. The fan shuts off when the system is unplugged, so it also appears that it is just staying CPU cranked up when it has bounteous electrons.

It all seems so noisy compared to the dead-quiet Mini-9.

The battery life on the AA1 is not great either, and about 2 hours, but it never has been. The battery is just too small. The Dell has a 4-Cell unit, and it good for about twice as much time as the 2-Cell Acer. I should have bought the 4-Cell Acer I guess: I am looking in the after-market at a couple options. The AA1 2-Cell has got to go. It was amazing how much nicer it was to carry around the Mini-9 and not be worried about it running out of power during the day.

Because the AA1 had Mint 6 and a full Gnome desktop on it, I had to clean up the Gnome config files to get the Netbook desktop to look right: Rather than spend a great deal of time thinking about it, I just torched .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome2, and .gnome_private, and restarted Gnome, and the Netbook desktop appeared.

Well, once I turned off Compiz. Boy those two hate each other!

While waiting about today for some lunch, I wrote part of this post on the AA1 in the text editor (since Bloggers interpretation of HTML is kinda sucky) and it was really nice to have the AA1 up on Ubuntu 9.04 with the Netbook desktop. Fast, full featured, and if the usage is slightly different, much easier once used to it on the 1024x600 screen. Several people stopped by to ask about the unit and see how it worked... although one of them was because I have an Apple sticker on the lid. That would be nice: an Apple Netbook. Everything I have read says that is not going to happen though. In the meantime, this all works pretty well. Finally.

Next upgrade to the AA1? I am guessing Mint 7.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 on the Acer Aspire One... briefly

... or, thank goodness for LiveCD's

In truth, when I tested Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3, it was not with a CD at all. Be kind of hard on the Acer: It has no CD, or DVD. With the price of USB Flash drives, does anyone really need CD's or DVD's any more?

I put 9.04 onto on of my flash drives, and booted it to the LiveCD. it booted quickly and without drama. And without Wireless.

This is an Alpha, so no hard, no foul here. I did not like the decision tree that made it so that new Atheros based wireless cards were pretty much cut off in Ubuntu 8.10, and that was part of why I tried this. I wanted to know if this situation had been worked out yet.

No.

Dmsg showed an error in the HAL when it was looking at the Atheros card. They have not gotten here yet. Even though this is kernel 2.6.28, not 2.6.27, this is still broken for now.

Will keep watching, and keep testing. 9.04 still has most of three months yet before they release GA. Based on Alpha three so far, there is a lot left to do. As Richard Meyer suggested here: I may have to try Fedora again....

In the meantime, pulled the Flash drive, and booted back to Mint 6.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 First Impressions

With Linux making slow, tiny, incremental inroads all over the place: In Netbooks, phones, embedded appliances, in the BIOS, not to mention Splashtop, and being credited (over credited I think, but whatever) with the recent malaise at Microsoft (although I liked this interview with Jim Zemlin about the issue), it seemed time to have a look at see what Ubuntu was cooking up for its next major release.

I rarely start this early in a release, but there are a few things cooking at I am very curious about right now. Issues in the current Linux versions that I want to see fixed or software features I need added.

DOSEMU

First up is DOSEMU. In Ubuntu 8.10 it is busted, and the problem is not actually DOSEMU but they way in the Ubuntu 8.10 sets up security (SELinux strikes) for the application. DOSEMU. See bug 216398 for details.

I wanted DOSEMU to work, because according to my benchmarking it is far far faster at running VBDOS programs than DOSBOX. One of my dad's programs (see previous posts) takes 20 seconds in DOSBOX takes 3 in DOSEMU.

As of Alpha 3, DOSEMU is fixed!

HP DV9000 Boot Hangs

Next, there is my dad's HP DV9000 itself. It does not boot well under Ubuntu 8.10. Poorly in fact. It appears that the AMD 64 bit Turion processors, a high precision timer, and the HP BIOS all get together for a timeout party that requires keyboard interrupts to get past. Like about 24 of them to finish a boot. Ick. Appears to be this AMD C1E issue, as documented over at Kernel Trap. The workaround is to add noipic noirqdebug, irqpoll, and perhaps some other stuff to the boot line in Grub. Nice guide on changing all that here. This nastiness appears to have entered around kernel 2.6.19, and is still there in 8.10's 2.6.27. Right now 9.04 has 2.6.28, and so I am hoping it will fix some of this without having to do workarounds on the boot options. I will, but that is not the same thing as it working the way it should.

Quick aside here: This DV9000 appears to have been a particularly problematic model of computer for Linux. In point of fact, it was recalled (at least some models) for BIOS issues, so it was no great shakes for anyone for a while. I don't know why Vista does not hang on boot like Linux does, but I assume without any facts to support this that it is because Linux is seeing hardware features (like the high precision timer) and trying to use them, where Vista does not.

I do not yet know what will happen on the DV9000. I installed it on a Dell D620, and there it boots in under 30 seconds.

Netbooks and MAPI

Those are all reasons I wanted to see where Ubuntu 9.04 was going for my Dad's sake. I have another couple. Netbooks. and MAPI.

As noted here, I have an Acer Aspire One, running Mint 6 right now. I like Mint and all, but there are now and again some issues with certain Gnome dialogs being larger then 600 pixels in length. The account set up for Evolution is one of them. Rumor has it that the new version of Gnome, 2.26, that will ship with 9.04 is more Netbook friendly.

The MAPI thing is for work, and revolves around the fact that we are moving to MS Exchange 2007. I will be losing WebDAV access to email, which means I'm back to using IMAP. That is fine as far as it goes, but my calendar will only be on the so-called Outlook Web Interface. So far, Microsoft has not looked at any lightweight web mail clients and ported them to MS Exchange, meaning I have to use the heavy client they supply for calendaring. Double Ick.

Fortunately the EU has forced MS to publish information about MAPI, and the Evolution folks are working hard on making its namesake work against MS Exchange using the same protocol as Outlook. All this is supposed to ship in Ubuntu 9.04, but as of Alpha 3 Evolution is still back level at 2.24.3. 2.26 (same as the Gnome release number these days) is where the MAPI functionality should ship. There will more about all this over at TalkBMCin the near future.

Other General Impressions

It would not be fair to deeply judge Ubuntu 9.04's current state at Alpha three as being totally indicative of what it will be in April when it releases. Everything that is in is working, and smoothly. The boots seem faster. I'll give it a whirl on the Acer Aspire soon, and see how it works there, but I expect that it will be faster than the current Ubuntu 8.10 based Mint 6 is.

I was slightly disappointed when Ubuntu 8.10 shipped without OpenOffice 3.0, and that has been fixed in 9.04. Firefox, at 3.05 is current, but since FF 3.1 is at Beta 2, hopefully it will be at 3.1 by Ubuntu release day. This is probably less critical on Linux than on OS.X. I have not had any real issues with FF on Linux. The Mac is a whole other story, and a whole other post...

Acer Aspire One: Six commands to a native Atheros driver

There is nothing new in this post that has not been repeated around the Internet (a series of tubes) ... well, not much anyway.

My *next* post will be about Ubuntu 8.10 on an HP DV9000 laptop for the purposes of running VBDOS. It is far more complicated and interesting. This one is pretty simple.

If you are a purist. If you can not stand the idea of running your Acer Aspire One (AAO or AA1) with impure, non-open-source drivers, and you have read here that NDISWRAPPER solves the wireless issues of the AAO and installed it through gritted teeth... then this post is for you. Atheros, being good open source folks, do have a pure, open source solution available to you via the MadWifi project.

It takes six commands to be "pure" (IE, run without binary only sourced drivers such as those NDISWrapper lets you run). It is assumed you have unloaded all the NDIS drivers and stuff. If not, load up NDISGTK (via synaptic or apt-get) and make sure the target system is clear of cruft. The system should have no/zero/none wireless stuff installed before you start step 2 below. Yeah: I suppose removing things first means there is more than six commands...

If you do not have a wired network connection as a backup to the wireless, do step 1 *before* you take off the the NDIS driver....

1. wget http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz
   

2. tar xfz madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz
   

3. cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz

4. make

5. sudo make install

6. sudo modprobe ath_pci

With this you have real, Linux drivers again rather than NDIS windows drivers as I previously noted. This can be both good and bad. So far on the AAO/AA1 with 8.10 (or actually, Mint 6) I have to unload and reload the ath_pci drivers after every suspend or hibernate. Thus:

1. sudo rmmod ath_pci
2. sudo modprobe ath_pci

Sucks... still looking for a better way. Not being a purist, I went back to NDISWrapper for now.

Now in the Handy Hospital Size

This last week has been a very special week:

• On Monday, while chasing the overgrown puppy to keep her from escaping, my wife fell and broke her ankle.
• On Thursday, the doctor said “Going to have to make your wife bionic, I.E., install titanium plate and a number of screws”.
• Friday was spent in the day surgery ward
• And the subsequent weekend was about pain and dealing with a hard headed woman who wants no help from anyone, even when she can’t walk an inch.

I guess being stubborn is endearing at some level. Must be: I am hardly less so. But this isn’t about me....

My title for this is actually a reference to the Acer Aspire One (or AAO, sometimes apparently in blogspace the AA1).

Someone asked me why I use the AAO instead of the Macbook when I am out and about. That was a mistaken impression I had given because I was talking so much about the AAO (such as two recent posts here and here) and not at all about the MacBook. Most of the time the MacBook is with me in the backpack in case I need a real computer to do real work. The AAO, even with a real OS such as Mint rather than WinXP, is suboptimal for extended or serious work. This is mostly because the screen and keyboard, rather than the processor or RAM after the upgrade and with the efficient multitasking OS. (Aside: I have no idea why WinXP chokes on this computer when I try to do more than two things at once, but Linux doesn’t have the limitation, so XP stays unbooted most of the time, except when I am making sure it is fully patched or testing something with IE).

Still, one main reason to have the AAO was for exactly this last week. Lots of time is hospital waiting rooms, lots of getting up and moving from place to place. Lots of chances to pack and unpack the computer. With the AAO’s tiny size and weight, it is all a snap. And worst case, should the AAO be stolen from the waiting rooms while I am nearby but distracted by talking to a doctor, nurse, or what is happening to someone’s baby on “One Life to Live” (Monday in the ER waiting room was all soap day: I guess they didn’t have CNN or MSNBC available on that TV), then I am out the AAO and 350 USD, not the Macbook and my 3,200 USD (from three years ago, to be sure).

On Monday, after they were done putting on the temporary cast and giving me the bad news that the ankle was broken in such a way that they were referring it to a Ortho, the day nurse asked me that the cute little computer was. I replied that this was the “Handy hospital size”. She looked at it, impressed that computers came in such a thing as a hospital size. Then she looked at me with a bit of doubt, feeling correctly that someone nearby was probably pulling her leg. Only seemed fair after what was going on to my S.O.’s leg.

I should inject here that the hospital was/is Memorial Hermann, and that they had an open if slow access point in both the ER and the day surgery waiting areas. Nice. I should also say that compared to our last experience with a hospital emergency room that this whole level of care was much better. It was not without its issues, and it is crystal clear to me that there is both good and bad stuff going on in the US health care system. That is a whole other post.

Friday was more of the same in terms of waiting, and in terms of the utility of the AAO. It was very handy to be able to read all my email from work, and keep every one in the family status’ed on progress, as I learned it from the various members of the staff, or from direct observation. As I moved from check-in to pre-Op to waiting room to lunch to waiting room to post-Op to go-home-prep area, the AAO tagged along and allowed me to stay in touch, even in areas of the hospital where the cell phone was utterly at zero bars. The wifi was omnipresent at MH. The iPhone and the AAO were always in touch.

With every change of location, it was easy to close and tuck the little 2.2 pound laptop back into its Car-DVD-case-acting-like-a-laptop-case. Linux went into suspend mode almost immediately and always recovered (except for the sound server, which is always a goner after the first suspend and takes a reboot to get back. Not like I need that in the hospital though). If I was using the power cord, that took a bit longer to stow. The AAO comes with a long power cord. Good for waiting rooms when you may not be able to sit close to the outlet. With small default battery the AAO comes with, I was using the cord fairly often. I will be watching for a six cell battery for this thing like a hawk.

I supposed I could have done most of surgery day with just the iPhone and an external battery to keep it charged, but reading work email off the iPhone would entail using the craptastic Outlook webmail interface via Safari. Do-able. Not fun, and really not fun for an entire day, From that point of view, the AAO’s screen and keyboard look positively capacious.

While I was being silly with the ER nurse, it turns that in fact, the AAO (with Linux Mint 6) really is a handy hospital size.

Mint 6 RC1 on the Acer Aspire One

Mint 6 RC1 on the Acer Aspire One

Codenamed "Felicia",Mint 6 is due to arrive this month, and RC1 is already available over at http://linuxmint.com.

Mint 6 is built off the solid basis of Ubuntu 8.10, and inherits most of its goodness, and layers on the extras that make Mint my favorite Distro right now. I'll have a post up soon over at TalkBMC about using Mint 6 as the main office distro. This one is about Mint on the Acer Aspire One (AAO) though..

When we last left the AAO I had just added more memory and was experimenting with Puppy Linux. Since that time I have found that the power supplies for my Compaq M300's work on the AAO: Not great: the Compaq PS plug is slightly smaller in exterior diameter, but it fits well enough I can leave the real AAO power cord in the "car 11" DVDplayer" bag I bought to act as the AAO's case. I can have a power station on my desk, and another by the bed, and don't have to unpack the cord. Very handy. Kind of ironic, since the M300 sort of fit the same slot of computing hardware the AAO does.

A friend of mine told me that Mint 6 RC 1 was out, so I went and downloaded it to the MS Windows side of the AAO. The reason for this is that I have some handy tools for making bootable USB fobs over there on MS WIn that I got from the following tutorial on PenDriveLinux:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/11/15/usb-boot-cd-for-ubuntu-810/

There is a sort of beauty to using MS Win to create Linux boot media.

I booted the AAO back over to WinXP SP 3. There I created a mint6 directory on the NTFS partition, and downloaded all the bits noted on the tutorial link above, plus the mint 6 .iso to the new mint6 directory. Next I modified the batch file there (inside the .zip download) and renamed it mint6.bat. The modification was just to change the two places inside the batch file that it refers to the .iso by name to point at the mint6 rc 1 .iso instead.

Then I inserted my USB fob.. that one that had Puppy 4.1.1 on it... formated it, and ran the new mint6.bat. This calls 7zip (7zip also is included in the .zip download) to unpack some stuff from the .iso {handy that 7zip understands .iso}), copies it to the USB fob, and makes the fob bootable with 'makeboot' (also included in the .zip download). It is clean and easy. Whoever created that .zip did all the work.

I have the AAO set to boot USB first by default, so I booted the USB key, and Mint 6 RC1 flew up. Fast. Amazing how much faster USB keys boot than CD's. I then clicked the install icon, and started the install process.

If you have ever installed Mint or Ubunbtu, there will be no mysteries on the install. Same set of screens. Same annoying graphical time zone setter (although it does seem to work a little better than it did, but not by much) When I got to the disk layout, I did the usual manual definitions since this system dual boots. Disk layout on the AAO looks like this in 'fdisk':

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 19457.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x11a8ba38

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 637 5116671 12 Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda2 * 638 4285 29302560 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 4286 5258 7815622+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 5259 19457 114053467+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 5259 5501 1951866 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 5502 19457 112101538+ 83 Linux

I really love that the AAO has a 160 GB hard drive. Since the Acer's box said that it was a 120 GB unit, I resent less that MS Win is taking up part of the space.

• SDA1 is the restore partition defined by Acer and more than likely made useless by this system being dual boot. 5 GB that will probably never be of use.
• SDA2 is MS Win XP SP3.
• SDA3 is '/'.
• SDA6 is 'home'.

I had Mint format sda3, and just told it to mount up the rest as is.

The installer then formated SDA3, and took less than 3 minutes to install the software, and less than three more to download language packs, and then it was time to reboot the system. Total install time was less that 10 minutes.

Up to this point, other than everything having the Mint theme, this was all like the Ubuntu 8.10 install before. This changed with the reboot. Ubuntu 8.10 and the wireless card.

Ubuntu required that I *unload* the Athero wireless drivers before the Atheros wireless card would work. Seems counter intuitive, but that is what worked.

With Mint 6 booted, it could not 'see' the wireless card, and so I assumed that the same thing would work for Mint. Nope. I unloaded and rebooted and Mint 6 still could not see the wireless card. I went round and round. It was odd. The hardware was clearly visible to lspci:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

No drivers would work. This is not good, because Atheros is one of the good guys/companies when it comes to Linux, having fully released Open Source versions of their hardwares drivers.

http://www.atheros.com/news/linux.html

Weirder, this all worked under Ubuntu 8.10. If there was ever any doubt Mint is not the same Distro as Ubuntu, it is erased by things like this. This *is* RC1 though. I have no doubt that this will be fixed by GA, or shortly after: If nothing else, I have read the Ubuntu will be fixing the Atheros drivers in the hardware manager and Mint should pick that up.

This presented me with an opportunity though. Previous to this Mint had always supported my wireless cards so well I have never had a chance to play with their MS Windows driver install tool (System / administration / Windows Wireless Drivers). I know that NDISWrapper is the secret sauce behind this tool, and that is a little controversial in Linux circles. I agree that I would rather the Atheros native stuff be working, but it isn't, and I either need wireless to work, or I need to go back to Ubuntu 8.10. I decided to do NDISWrapper for now.

I pointed the tool at the Windows driver over in the MS Windows partition (cleverly mounted as /windows), and it does *not* activate the wireless card.

/windows/WINDOWS/system32/netathw.inf

It says that it see the hardware, but it does not create the wlan0 device.

Humm.. I grabbed some Atheros Drivers from here:

http://download2.dvd-driver.cz/atheros/drivers/ar5008/xp32-6.0.3.85.zip

And these worked. In fact, wireless seems every bit as crisp with NDISWrapper and these as Ubuntu 8.10 did with the native drivers... if not *better*. That just seems wrong at so many levels. But it is true as far as feelings can measure things. How long it takes to find the WAP and sync up seems to be 1/3 of the time that it used to be under Ubuntu 8.10.

The other malfunction of Mint, and Ubuntu had this as well, is that when I suspend the unit (and it suspends quickly and without drama) and then return to service, I have no sound. The new-fangled PulseAudio sound server does not appear to like suspend / resume operations.

To test out the speed and efficiency of the AAO unit running Mint, I went over to MSNBC and started to watch an episode of Rachel Maddow's show (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908). It herked and jerked something fierce. Sound was smooth though. I had done the same exact thing with the same exact computer under MS Win: I knew the AAO with is hyperthreaded 1.6 Ghz processor and 1.5 GB of RAM had the resources do this. I suspected that Mint had a weird default for the Flash player, or that at the very least this was not Flash 10. Adobe had recently release Adobe 10 for Linux, bringing it to Flash player parity with the rest of the computing platform world. I know it is not Open Source, but I still have hope that one day Adobe will see the light here. Or that one of the Open Source Flash players will catch up enough to play Rachel without digital jitter.

Looking in Synaptic, the flash player installed was called "Flashplayer-nonfree" and was labeled as being "10.0.12.36ubuntu1". Right next to that was one labeled "Adobe-Flashplugin", and it was at version "10.0.12.36-1intrepid2". I flipped them, and sure enough, Rachel was now playing smoothly. That was the main thing. I love my Linux and all, but don't be messing with the "Rachel Maddow" show. I won't go back to MS Windows or anything, but I would start using my Mac for everything Rachel if need be.

The irony that Rachel is on MSNBC is not lost on me either. Rachel, like our new, actual, real president (to be) is a Mac user. And I watch her from Linux... It is a multi-computer-cultural world these days.

Next I fired up an .mp4 rip of a DVD, to see how that would work, and here there were no problems. In fact, the AAO makes a fine little digital show viewer. It's fabulous LED backlit LCD screen is just perfect for watching a programme late at night while the SO snores on.

OpenOffice.org stays at 2.41 in Mint. I had hoped that Mint 6, being released just enough after Ubuntu 8.10 that OOo 3.0 was out would pick up the new OpenOffice, but Clem and company decided to stay with 2.4.1. it may not be that big a deal though. The main reason I wanted OOo was to be able to read MS Office 97 documents, and it turns out Ubuntu and therefore Mint have reached forward with a mod to their copy of OpenOffice 2.4 and grabbed 3.0's ability to read and write to MS's new format. I tested that at the office the other day with a Mint 6 / OOo 2.4.1 install I have there, and it worked great. I am not a fan of the MS for4mat, but I realist enough to know that interoperability is going to be required for a while yet.

I installed OOo 3.0 on a different, Ubuntu 8.10 based computer at the office, and am sort of sorry I did. For now, 2.4.1 is more stable, at least on Ubuntu and probably Mint.

Wrap up: Mint 6 stays on the AAO even in RC1 form. I have the wireless problem worked around for now, but will keep trying to get the real drivers going every time a new kernel point release comes downstream in MintUpdate. In fact, I will reach ahead and install all kernel related stuff ahead of when MintUpdate classifies then as '3's. I really want native Atheros drivers. I also hope the sound / suspend problem gets fixed by a kernel update.

The Acer Aspire One, More RAM, and Puppy 4.1.1

This post is a follow on to my previous post about the Acer Aspire One (AAO).

There is one really bad thing about the Acer Aspire One and that is that to get the hardware I wanted required getting the one that has WinXP pre-installed. No big deal for me: Ubuntu 8.10 is now installed and running very very nicely, and the hardware is just counting the minutes (or maybe its me...) until Mint 6.0 is released so that it can get the latest version. I thought about going to Mint 5R1 of course, but wanted a chance to play with Ubuntu 8.10. The new AAO hardware presented that opportunity.

What is bad about the XP on the AAO is that when my wife got hers, she did not also go to Linux. No.. instead she looked at it as a chance to get a computer she could run WordPerfect X3 on. She still spends most of her time on her MacBook and Pages, and is saving her pennies for a new Macbook, but that means Windows camel has a nose back under the tent flap at the Casa, Yes: I know my Acer 5610 dual boots to Vista, and that my AAO dual boots back to XP as well, but these are for experiments and professional learning, not for production use. I wish Corel would release WP for Linux (a modern version I mean. I have WP8 for Linux) so I could head this off at the pass. Nuts. OpenOffice.org 3.0 does everything I need and more, but my wife is more of a power user than I am when it comes to word processing. Apparently mail merge on OOo is not up to WP X3. Then there is the whole "Show Codes" thing that every word processor other than WP is missing.

The AAO has surprised me with its speed and utility. The Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz processor is hyperthreaded, which to Linux looks like two CPU's. I turned on various monitors like gkrellm and the Gnome taskbar monitors, and can see that the threads are getting different workloads: Linux is taking full advantage of the design. It is crisp. The monitor is also still amazing: the LED back-light making the white color look so clean and bright that the previous king of my monitor stable.. the Macbook Pro... looks a little gray and dingy in comparison.

Despite being crisp with is factory 1GB RAM, I decided it was worth the time, effort, and 22 USD to replace the stock Hynix 512 MB pc2-5300 stick with a 1 GB unit from Crucial. In fact, I decided it was worth taking the Acer apart over and over and over... although that was not the original plan.

I noted in my last post about the AAO that my unit did not match the box documentation: For one thing, I had a 160 GB HD rather than the advertised 120GB. My wife ordered hers from Outpost, and hers is also 160 GB while documented as 120 GB. I got to wondering if I was really limited to only 1GB of RAM on the upgrade, so I went to Fry's and got a Kingston 2GB PC2-5300, and dived into the Acer. I used the instructions here:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/08/28/how-to-add-ram-to-the-acer-aspire-one-netbook/

However, the pictured routines are not complete, and the video gave me the clues for the missing bits. The video also told me that once I got to the part about taking out the mainboard I had a different unit than they did. The screws were not all in the same place, and how the hard drive connected in to the mainboard was utterly different. This made me hopeful that 2GB RAM stick would work.

For all I know, it would. The problem was that the stick I had had been returned as not working, and it did not work in my unit either. I have no idea if this was because the stick was bad or the AAO... even the new one... does not support the larger RAM size. If it does not, it seems a stupid limitation.

I went back in with the 1 GB stick, total 1.5 GB, and all was well with the AAO again. Both XP and Linux felt crisper. I expected Linux to be faster since it is far better at addressing memory, and it uses memory not in use by programs as disk cache. I did not expect WinXP to speed up though.

Quick aside here: XP can only run about two programs at a time on my wifes AAO. I have never tried to figure out if this is a weirdness of hers (as long as she is on MS Win, she is on her own) and XP has not been up enough on mine to know if that is also true on mine. I have no idea if MS dumbed down XP ULCPC even more than XP Home (which would seem redundant and unnecessary but since MS says they are not making as much money because of the Netbooks, it might be true). I can tell you it is not a limitation of the hardware. Ubuntu 8.10 (and soon, I am sure, Mint 6) have no such problems. I have all sorts of things open all the time. My problem is screen real estate on the 1024x600 screen for active tasks!.

If you have researched the AAO at all, you know that adding the RAM to the system unit is not for the faint of heart. I take apart hardware all the time, and at first I did not think it was that bad... till I crunched the right hand speaker cable putting it all back together and had a horrible speaker buzz for a while till I took it back apart and fixed it. Doh. An AAO is not as hard as a G3 or G4 iBook. But it is not as easy as an Acer 5610 either!

It it a total mystery why there is no access hatch over the top of the memory slot. It is on the bottom of the mainboard, and there is an access hatch on he bottom. The hatch lines up with what looks like a place that they might someday solder in a connector for something: maybe a G3 wireless card? But there is nothing there on mine, and to get to the freakin' RAM slot is a complete system teardown...

The Hard Drive that the AAO uses was not what I expected at all. I thought it would be the same form factor as what iPods use. Given the small size and bantam weight, surely it used an itty bitty HD. No. Looks like a standard 2.5 inch laptop hard drive.

Before I leave the AAO hardware for this post, I do have to say that I can not wait till the aftermarket catches up to the AAO. For one thing, there are not yet any decent cases for this form factor. I bought a car DVD player case, and it works pretty well, but it would be nice to have something a bit more form fitting and with a place to stick the power cord. The other thing I will buy as soon as I can find it at a reasonable cost is a 6 cell battery. The stock three cell battery lasts about 2.5 to 3 hours, but part of the reason to have the uber-portable form factor of the AAO is to leave the power cord behind for the day.

Its Not Puppy Love

I do not try to diss Linux Distros for the most part. The people that work on them usually do it out of love, and often for free or for what people donate who love their work. That being said I have to say that Puppy Linux 4.1.1 is not ready for the Netbook form factor... at least not the AAO. Where Ubuntu (with a quick disablement of the ATH5k drivers) works pretty well, and extremely quickly, Puppy 4.1.1 does not work quite as well. Fast... but no 802.11, so what is the point? Web 2.0 pretty well sucks rocks when you can not get to the web.

I followed the directions at PenDriveLinux ....

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2006/03/25/puppy-linux-on-usb/

.... and created a bootable CD. I booted this on the Acer 5610, and created a bootable USB fob (FWIW: I had to replace the USB Flash drives MBR, even though the on-screen directions says you probably won't have to)

I booted this on the AAO, and while Linux boots *fast* it does not detect and load the Atheros drivers in a way that works. I messed around with it: Puppy has a pretty nifty tool for this: but nothing that Puppy provided created a working wireless connection. Sure, I could have gone NDISWRAPPER, and Puppy even has a cool way to load this, but I refuse to go that route on an Atheros equipped computer.

Puppy worked fine on the Acer 5610 with its Intel wireless though, so this appears to be a problem that is specific to the AAO and its very recent Atheros card. Probably "fixed in the next release". lcpci on the AAO says:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

I had a spare USB fob, so I left Puppy on it. The other USB fob on that keyring has Ubuntu 8.10, so if nothing else I have a pretty nice repair tool set with me at all times. Is it geeky to have more than one USB fob on your keyring?

Puppy is interesting and fun to play with: Not the easy-breezy Ubuntu/Mint experience, but amazingly complete for being 96 MB or so. My 2GB fob that Puppy 4.1.1 is on has all sorts of room to spare.

Another day closer to Mint 6......

Acer Aspire One, Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows XP ULCPC edition

Over the years I have purchased quite a number of small computers looking for portable computer nirvana. Things like the HP 620LX palmtop and the NEC 800. Both ran the sucktactular WinCE though. Deep yuck. To get to a real OS, I have build Franken-IBM-X30's because I did not want to pay full tariff on the original units. Better. Much better. But parts are old, and there are some problems with the case design such that mine has a number of cracks held together with glue and tape. Very geeky I guess.

There has always been an inverse proportion between the price and the the size at the low end, except it was more of a bowl shaped curve: really small or really large laptops cost major coinage, and there was always a sweetspot in the middle someplace. It varied a little by manufacturer but it was more or less true across the board. One quick example: I paid less for my Acer 5610 than I did the HP 620LX palmtop. Part of that is time of course: The HP was bought back in the late 1990's. That actually makes it worse: factor in inflation and that HP would be over 1000 USD now. Better example: look at Sony VIAO today: The small laptops cost way more than the medium size units.

The OLPC XO-1 has changed all that. Whether it was meant as a laptop for the children of the world or not, its first and easiest to find effect has been on the creation of the "Netbook" class of computer.

I have an XO-1, bought last year as part of the “Give One, Get One” promotion, and it has been a handy little unit: I wrote here about it standing in for an Apple iBook for my brother for example. The XO-1 has never been a full replacement for me for an small notebook computer though. Two things hold it back: one is that the word processor is not the full OpenOffice WP, and I can not therefore do what I want with the HTML for things like this post, although blogger is wretched at the the way that it imports HTML so maybe that is not such a big thing.

The real problem is the keyboard. It was designed for children, and it works well for them. Me... not so much. A friend of mine, Anne Gentle, who works with the OLPC on documentation carries an external keyboard around for hers. That works, but defeats the purpose of having a computer that I can toss in the bag and use on the airplane.

In fact, as I type this right now, I am on an airplane, winging my way to Denver, Colorado. (Parenthetical Paragraph: be careful about airplanes and Netbooks. Easy to leave in the seatback pocket... having done it while writing this article, and being really happy when Frontier Airlines found it! Yea Frontier!)

The unit I am using is my brand new Acer Aspire One. The AAO fits fairly well on the tray table of this Airbus A319, but the flight is full, so he guy next to me is not enjoying my elbow as I try to type and it keeps swinging over the armrest. I type hard....

My neck is not enjoying the angle either. The screen is tilted forward, notback, in order to get the keyboard far enough away from me. I'll clearly decide in a little while to finish this up in my hotel room and watch a movie on the iPhone instead.

The AAO was 349 USD at Fry's last Friday night, and I have it set to dual boot the special edition of WinXP called ULCPC (just what Windows needed, another SKU) and Ubuntu 8.10 for now. I am in fact using OpenOffice under XP on the plane because the WiFi cutoff switch is not yet enabled under Ubuntu. I have the doc on that, just have not set it up yet. (Later edits done from the awesome Old Chicago restaurant in Boulder using Ubuntu) The box for this AAO said it has a 120 GB HD, but in fact the one I have has a 160GB drive. I am not taking it back to get that "fixed".... My AAO is glossy black and looks like a big iPhone 3G, and this is further enhanced by the fact that I have an Apple sticker (from my iPhone purchase in fact) placed on the lid, so that it looks like a small Macbook. I only have the 3 cell battery in this unit though, and that is something I will probably change as soon as I can find a six cell one. With a six cell battery, this is the first computer I have ever seen that has a chance of being able to run all day long away from the power cord.
Speaking of the power cord, the one that comes with the AAO is terrific, in that it is small in diameter, and very very long. I can see sitting in an airport and actually being able to reach a plug with this one.

The AAO is pretty much everything I have been looking for (to date) in the ultra portable computer department, and slots in neatly above my iPhone and below my MacBook Pro.

Circling back to my "Nirvana" comment: I know that time will march on, and that the AAO will one day look as primitive to me as the HP 620LX does now. The difference is that I never felt the HP or any thing that came before the AAO were even close to being the mini-laptop that I wanted. This little Acer is close.

That brings me to my first problem with the AAO: Windows XP. I don't run Windows anywhere else, and I do not intend to start here with the AAO. XP with service pack three is not a horrible OS or anything, and many will be happy with it. It is just that at Casa Carl we use either OS.X or Linux. I keep Vista around for experiments only, and really don't need XP for experiments. I pretty much know what XP will do, and besides I have a dual boot work laptop (Dell D620, Mint 5 and XP) should I need XP for something. That being said, the AAO will stay dual boot till I have a chance to get Ubuntu totally sorted out. On airplanes for example, I do have to be able to turn off the WiFi card. According to doc I read, I have to tell Linux what to do with the keycodes that the WiFi switch generates. Doesn't look too hard. See here for details:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne

/usr/bin/setkeycodes e055 159 

/usr/bin/setkeycodes e056 158

Looks pretty easy. (Update: Ran this manually, and it works exactly as documented. Cool Beans! Added to /etc/rc.local. Will use Ubuntu on the return flight if I fire up the AAO.) The AAO can be bought with Linux pre-installed, but here is another place the AAO slightly misses the mark for me: No mechanical hard drive versions of the AAO have Linux on them. I wanted the 120/160 GB hard drive and was willing to sort out Linux rather than have a tiny SSD harddrive but have Linux preconfigured.

Here is where I do not get the AAO price point at all. It would seem that the SSD version with it's more expensive disk save money on the OS, and that Acer inverts that for XP so that with the less expensive disk you get the more expensive OS. I want the less expensive OS and the less expensive higher capacity disk please.

I also wanted the real Gnome desktop, not the special one that they put together for the AAO. The AAO also comes with a version of Linux called Linpus, which I never heard of till I started the AAO / Netbook research. I tried to download Linpus to have a look in a Vmware Fusion VM on the Mac, but the Linpus file server kept timing out. I tried Linpus on an AAO at the store (MicroCenter), and decided, based on first impressions, that it was not for me. Linux is Linux more or less, but this one was too simplified on the user interface. Probably great for Linux new folks. Very task oriented. Very iPhone.

Installing Ubuntu 8.10 RC

I was on the road when I bought the AAO, and so I did not have all my usual external devices with me: I did not have a CD burner I could put Ubuntu 8.10 on and then boot. This was not a big problem as I found an easy four step procedure to download the Ubuntu 8.10 .iso, and write it to USB flash fob, make it bootable, and then boot and install Linux from:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/10/06/usb-ubuntu-810-install-from-windows-non-persistent

The only thing I had to change from their documentation was that I had the release candidate, not the beta, so the .bat file had to be modified with the right file name of the .iso.

The AAO, via F12, booted the fob, and in no time I was looking at the very familiar Ubuntu Live screen. Amazing how much faster a USB fob is to boot than a CD. There was one thing I did not expect: The wireless card was not visible. I was surprised because my research into the AAO before buying it (and I looked at every NetBook out there with USA availability) was that the AAO had an Atheros WiFi chipset, and Linux supports those very well. Atheros has open-sourced the driver, and even the firmware bits.

I like to support companies that do the right thing when it comes to device driver support, so having an Atheros card was a big plus for the AAO. Very big.

Since it was going to be dual boot for now, this was not a show stopper: I could always run back to XP and surf and download bits if I needed (Linux can read the NTFS disk space, no problem), so I went ahead and ran the install. Besides, Ubuntu was not the GA version yet. Chances were it would be fixed by Ubuntu, saving me the trouble later.

Since I had a 160GB HD, I went into manual partition mode, gave XP 30 GB, and there is a 5 GB or so recovery partition on the front of the disk. This proved utterly useless recently on my Acer 5610, but I left it be for now. I gave '/' 8GB, set up a 2GB swap, and gave the rest to /home. Formatting the new /home took a bit, but the install flew down after that, taking maybe 4 or 5 minutes. Here is the full disk layout:

steve@kara:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda 
...
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 

19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes 

Disk identifier: 0x11a8ba38 

Device Boot         Start         End      Blocks   Id  System 

/dev/sda1               1         637     5116671   12  Compaq diagnostics 
/dev/sda2   *         638        4285    29302560    7  HPFS/NTFS 
/dev/sda3            4286        5258     7815622+  83  Linux 
/dev/sda4            5259       19457   114053467+   5  Extended 
/dev/sda5            5259        5501     1951866   82  Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda6            5502       19457   112101538+  83  Linux

Once I was booted to Ubuntu, I still had no wireless, but the hardware manager said that the Atheros drivers were loaded. That meant it could see the hardware, but that the drivers were not working for some reason.
A quick boot back to XP (and XP does boot very quickly on the AAO) and some googling with FireFox (the first thing I always install on an MS Windows computer, even before OpenOffice) and I had the solution from the Ubuntu forums: I had to disable the Atheros driver, and then it would load the right bits. Not at all intuitive, but it worked.

Next I installed all the package updates with Synaptic. It was only 100 or so, far fewer than the Beta. A reboot, and the wireless was gone again. I disabled the Atheros drivers again, rebooted, and it still didn't work.
More research, and it turned out the latest kernel regressed the Atheros drivers, and it would not be fixed till after GA. Nuts.

I had so little time in it (Ubuntu installs fast, and this time no /home format required), I just decided to reinstall, and to not let the kernel updates back on to the computer till I had read that the Atheros stuff was fixed again. That is where I am today. One thing: My wireless activity light blinks, even though in the forum they mentioned it would not. No idea what is up there. Glad it works though.

Ubuntu has had no other issues: Compiz works out of the box, even with the tiny amount of video RAM (8 MB). Ubuntu boots slightly slower than XP (something I have never seen before. Usually Ubuntu runs rings around MS Windows) but there is a concurrency setting for boot that should get it going faster, should I get really wrapped around the axle on that issue. Probably won't. It is not slow in any case. It is just that the version of XP on the AAO has been tweaked. Ubuntu figured out the screen size (1024x600) without issue.

I read reports when researching the netbook class of computer that the fan ran a lot on the AAO but I have not seen this. There were some references to Acer making some BIOS changes to fix this, so perhaps my unit is new enough to have that fixed. Running all this time (over two hours) on the airplane, it has never gotten more than slightly warm on the bottom (and later, when on Ubuntu do the edit it was the same. Slightly warm. With the WiFi enabled it still was good for well over two hours).

I set aside a paragraph just to mention the screen. The LED backlit screen is beautiful. What the iPhone screen was to all the phones that came before it, this screen is to every small laptop I have seen. It is right up there with the new Macbook, the Macbook Air, and the like for color, clarity, and crispness (sounds like a diamond commercial). The "secret" in part is surely the LED backlight rather that the Cold Cathode Florescent types of older computers. I read in a review a comment about viewability angle, and I can verify that one oddity: you can go off angle left to right and the screen stays very readable. Maybe too readable for an airplane. Tip it forward or back though and it polarises very quickly. It seems like they took a 1200 x 1024 bit of LCD, halved and rotated it 90 degrees to make this screen.

OS.X

In a perfect world, I would be able to run whatever OS I wanted on this hardware. The hardware is so nice, and so close to what I have been wanting that it is sad that OS.X is not available. Steve Jobs, in replying to a question about when Apple would do a Netbook said that they could not make one at the price point of the Acer that would not be junk. The thing is, from all appearances, the AAO is not junk. In fact, it is utterly amazing what all comes with this unit at this price. All sorts of USB ports (three of them) and card readers and an external VGA connector. Slipcase. Decent keyboard, although I am about ready to toss the CapsLock key out the window (but the don't roll down on A319's). I can't seem to avoid hitting that thing. Most useless key on a keyboard from any manufacturer , and they always make it extra big so I can hit it as often as possible. I have been assured by a touch typist that the CapsLock key is a "Good Thing", and I trust that typist implicitly... but on this one she is dead wrong. The key is evil. Evil I say!

With Ubuntu Linux, I do not have to put up with Evil. A quick trip into system / preferences / keyboard, and CapLock is just another ctrl key. Bye bye evil.
I was tempted by an HP 2133 for one reason. Keyboard. There was one sitting right next to the AAO at Fry's. I played with it. It's keyboard is better than the AAO's. But at 1.2 Ghz rather than 1.6, less hard drive, and coming with Vista rather than XP, and at nearly twice the price (600 USD versus 349 USD), and just couldn't go there.

An Apple Netbook at that HP's price I would probably do though. Hello Steve Jobs or whoever runs Apple? Market calling.