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.

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.

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.

Mint 5.0 at Home

I recently posted over at TalkBMC about the latest revision of Mint Linux, 5.0 Beta. As usual, when I post things to TalkBMC about Linux I am focused on Enterprise desktop or Enterprise server applications. I said there, in essence that it was hard to believe that this even was a Beta, since it was so stable. At the time I had used it about 24 hours, but as of this writing that has stretched into several days and nothing I wrote there has really changed. Still fast. Still solid. Still beautiful.

Saturday night we decided to stay in. I have been on the road in Boston and Austin for the last two weeks and sitting at home seemed a special treat. It also was a chance to do something I had not been able to for a while: Play with Linux at home. I have had my Apple Macbook with me as my primary computer for weeks now, other than the time I had been able to squeeze in on Mint on my office Dell D620.

I looked over the candidate computers at the house, looking for new place to test out Mint at home. My Acer 5610, of which I have written quite a bit here, is dead now. It stopped having a working trackpad, I took it apart, decided it was not going to be worth messing with, and piled it all in a bag for now. What I do not need is another desktop computer, and a laptop with a broken trackpad is a desktop as far as I can see.

The XO-1 will be getting a new, Fedora based Linux install on it shortly, whenever a small group of XO-1 owners near here next get together. Anne Gentle has the latest and greatest and is ready to get us all in sync. Besides, I am pretty sure the XO-1 would take some serious tweaking to get Ubuntu / Mint going on, and none of what Mint brings to the party is really what the XO-1 is about. Its not about MS WIndows either, but that is another story...

My IBM X30 was running Ubuntu 8.04, and my Dell C400 had Fedora 7. Fedora 9 just released, but I'll not be looking at it for use as a home version of Linux, due to the fact the Redhat has decided that Linux desktops are probably better left to Ubuntu. If you have no idea what I am talking about there, it is a long story, but the ending is that RedHat has decided that consumer desktop computing is not where they want to be right now.

Fedora is not exactly equal to RedHat by any means, but their distro is much harder to get going on home hardware like laptops due to not including any closed source anything, and so many of the wireless cards in laptops still require closed source drivers / firmware.

I needed a laptop for Mint, Fedora 7's old home base was elected. But this led to another problem. The Dell C400 I have I built out of parts, and I never have had a CD for it. It is too old to be able to boot off its USB 1.0 ports with my USB CD drive attached: The BIOS just does not support it. This required pressing into service my IBM X30, and doing something you just can not do with MS Windows.

I took the 80 GB Samsung PATA harddrive out of the C400, and installed it into the IBM X30. I then booted the Mint 5.0 LiveCD, and watched Mint come to life.

The IBM gets its wireless from a D-link DWL-G630 PCMCIA card, since IBM only allows their own 802.11 cards into the mini-PCI slot (#&^$^$*). ALL these stupid 802.11G cards I have laying around here from old laptops and I can't use any of then in the IBM without having to either hack the cards internal ID, or the IBM modified BIOS. And for what? the cards are perfectly good cards. grumble grumble. I digress.

Here is where something weird happened. The wireless card was dead while the LiveCD was running. I have never seen that before. It works under Ubuntu 8.04, and Mint 5 is based off that. What in the world is up there? Maybe this really is a beta....

Whatever: I don't need it to work here. The IBM is just the hard drive host mother. Clicking the install, I go through the standard seven dialog panels, and as usual, answer panel 4 with the pull down rather than the time zone map, which I find useless. I manually set up the disks as well, since I want '/' and '/home' in different partitions.

It takes about twenty minutes for the CD to load up the code to the hard drive, and prompt me to say that it is ready for a reboot. This was about twice what it took on the Dell D620 at the office, and it is purely a sign of how much I/O wait there is in an older CD unit, such as what I have in the IBM. 24x CD rather than 4X DVD. Makes a huge difference.

Now, instead of a reboot, I turned off the X30, and I pulled out the Samsung hard drive, replacing the Hitachi 40GB unit with Ubuntu installed on it, and place the host mother aside. The Samsung goes back into the Dell C400, and boots.

Here is the trick no MS Windows computer can do without all sorts of special stuff, like running Sysprep to get it back to a blank state. Linux does not care that the IBM and the Dell are different computers, with different chipsets, and different wireless cards. The Dell TruMobile 1150 MiniPCI card is correctly configured and finds the WAP in the house without issue.

Even though the '/home' I am using came from Fedora 7 and this is now Mint 5.0 Beta, the desktop is just like it used to look. It migrated to Ubuntu with only a minor issue. I had the gnome hardware sensors applet installed in Fedora, and Ubuntu did not put it in by default. No problem. Synaptic can re-install that.

First I fired up MintUpdate and had it bring down 45 updates. This took less than 3 minutes. Then it found another small set it wanted: Maybe 15 or 20 more: I didn't look. This went in taking less than a minute. I set MintUpdates preferences to show me unsafe updates, but not to automatically select them. A few more updates show up, but nothing that looks like anything I need bad enough right now: an Xorg update to the Intel video driver being the main one of interest.

Exiting Mintupdate, I fired up Synaptic from 'System/Administration' and loaded up the things I usually do. GkrellM, HFSPlus, Avahi, Macutils, hardware sensors and hddtemp: Stuff that tells me how the computer is doing, or lets me work with data exchange via HFS formatted USB disks. Not having MS Windows to deal with, all my data exchange is done on HFS right now. When the Mac and Linux support ZFS, I'll go there next. I know that HFS is not the worlds best File System. It is better than VFAT though.

Nothing of a kernel nature came down, so no reboot required. I exited my userid to restart X and then started to play around with the fully configured Mint 5.0 Beta.

My first point of curiosity had to do with video compositing. MS Windows Vista is a total pig here, needing all sorts of special video hardware to work. My Ubuntu and Mint experience had been that Linux with Compiz requires substantially less hardware: the D620 laptop at the office ran composited video extremely quickly with an Intel video chipset not known for its speed. The C400 is much older, and much much slower. It has the Intel 82830M Graphics controller, a 1.2 Ghz processor rather than two 2.0 Ghz processors, and 1Gb RAM rather than the d620'S 2gb. Its harddrive is PATA rather than SATA, and the C400 is a laptop optimized for power savings and portability, not speed.

I turned on Compiz (System / Preferences / Appearance / Visual Effects), and set it to the custom settings that were pre-existing on the computer: I assume they came with Mint. The computer is slightly slower on screen paints, but not so slow as to be unusable. Not even close. I could use 'System / Preferences / Advanced Desktop Effects Settings' (installed by default now! I used to have to go get that off the CD!) to tweak out a few more effects and go even faster if I wanted. For now my major curiosity has been satisfied: Even on old, minimal hardware, the new video compositing engine of Linux, Compiz, runs rings around MS Windows. I could not even install Vista on this C400 if I wanted to.

Firefox RC1 shipped today, so I imagine it will hit the Mint repositories pretty quickly. Clement Lefebvre, Mint 5.0 guiding light, wrote in his blog the he was keeping on eye of FireFox RC1, and had hoped it would be in the Beta. I had hoped it would too: FireFox 3.0 is a huge improvement over 2.x when it comes to things like memory footprint, memory leakage, etc. Very important on a smallish system like this C400.

One important test of the laptop is how well it web surfs, and so I went to watch Keith Olbermann's special comment a few dozen more times:



I turned on and off Compiz, and tweaked the settings, but the little laptop just can't quite hit the full framerate of the MSNBC video player. Still, it was pretty impressive that no matter whether Compiz was on or off, or at minimal effects or the slightly more I tend to use, the frame rate stayed the same. Compiz was not in the way of the video framerate. The minimal hardware overall was.

When Mint 5.0 GA's, I think I'll be making a trip back to Austin to do an ungrade on my brothers computer. He has not called me even once about Mint 4.0, so it is not giving him any problems. But 5.0 is even better, although I had beeter be sure Google Earth works first: That is his "Killer App"

Update: Suspend / Resume: I forgot to mention here that I had tested the Suspend and Resume functionality. My benchmark for Suspend / Resume is the Apple MacBook Pro.

The default for "Cover Closed' at 'System / Preferences / Power Management" is to blank the screen. I changed that to "suspend" on both the D620 and the C400. Both suspend in about 5 or 6 seconds and the D620 takes about that to resume. The C400 take a little longer, maybe 8-10 seconds. Not as fast as the Apple, but still amazingly good, and a huge improvement over what came before it.

have also tested the hibernate function on Ubuntu 8.04 and the IBM X30. That works as well, but takes more like 30 or so seconds, since it is writing its state to the disk and powering completely down. Power up looks like a normal boot except that at one point it freezes for a bit while it realizes that there is hibernation data, restores than, and then suddenly you are back to where you were. Hibernation appears to have no advantages in terms of boot time over a complete normal power up, other than it saves where you were, which can be handy from time to time.

Universal Writ

I just read an interesting post over at Linux.com buy someone named Susan Linton. Titled "Review: Hardy Heron converts an Ubuntu skeptic", the article has some interesting things to add to the discussion about Linux's readiness to be ones only desktop operating system. I am already pretty well on record about my thoughts on that point, since I have not used MS Windows personally for years and years, and only use it at the office when forced to. My brother and his wife have been using Ubuntu, it close relative Mint, or OS.X rather than MS windows for over two years, and both of them are not computer professionals. Neither has even taken a computer class.

This being the case, you would think that the article would be preaching to the choir, and it was in some areas, but in one case it left me feeling rather ... well... cold I guess.
Here is what Susan said:

The look of mud

Ubuntu has become the face of Linux for most new users these days, and the first impression is important. At first boot, the first thing you'll probably notice in this release is the new login screen and desktop background artwork. The login screen is tastefully understated, but the new wallpaper features an expressionistic heron on a burnt amber background. There's a reason why no other distribution uses brown as its default color scheme. Brown is not an attractive color, and Hardy Heron is just Not a pretty distro.

What bothered me was that I used to think that same way till a co-worker named Richard wrote me about his thoughts on the subject. I wrote about this in part in my "Color Theory" post over at TalkBMC a while ago.

What Richard told me was a simple truth that I had never really considered. He was born in Africa, and to him the color palette that he finds attractive and restful is different than the ones I do. The posit here then would be that at least in part, color preferences are based on your early experiences.

I really started to understand this when I bought my first (and only) home. Located in the high desert of Far West Texas, the colors around me are brown and orange and turquoise and sage. The sky in the evening is every pastel shade in the book, yet amazingly vivid.

What would my favorite color palette be if I had been born there rather than an immigrant?

My favorite color, like many in the West, is blue. Still is. While I am able to change still, indicating that I have not died yet, it seems unlikely that this preference will change. Most OS default themes developed in the West are done in shades of blue. Windows XP added a bold splash of green that I hated for years.

This color preference of the West appears to be changing. Vista is kind of interesting in this regard: It is done in shades of black. Many of the add in themes for XMMS and other themable apps are black, although there are also acid greens and other themes that bring to my mind a trip to "Hot Topic" and speed metal bands.

Ubuntu is not a western distro in many ways. Its intent is to be a world distro: That is a concept at its very core. Just look at the Logo!. Knowing that Linux is all about choice, no one has to leave the single thematic element in any color or even shape that does not please them.

Here this is what I found disquieting: Susan assumes her color preferences to be received wisdom. The phrasing of her personal preference was such that she does not appear to be aware of the difference between a personal bias and a universal truth.

Really: If Ubuntu was as ugly as she posits, then how the heck did it become the predominant one for the Linux desktop? Sure it is a solid bit of work, taking a terrific OS and related applications and integrating them in a smooth and nearly seamless way. Lots of Distros do that though. She is not totally wrong: back when I first looked at it, I was put off from doing much more than looking at it in curiosity as I did not like the default brown theme colors either. I preferred Kubuntu in part because it uses a blue-based color palette as its starting place. What I know now though is that this was a preference of mine, not Universal Writ.

I am not trying to pick on Susan here either. At the very beginning of her piece she states as an opening posit that she has never really much liked Ubuntu. We can infer that she might know at some level that this is a preference thing, even though the phrasing quoted above does not make it appear that this has bubbled up to the top of her mind just yet. Why I even brought it up is that it is something everyone should be mindful of when they say things. There is a difference between the phrase "I prefer blue" and "Blue is Gods Holy Color, and everyone should kneel down before it."

This has further implications than just color. I know why I prefer Linux and OS.X to MS Windows. I know those who would scream bloody murder before someone could pry their Redmond loving arms from around their MS Windows XP license are having an extreme preference too. I have seen Vista. I have used it. I get the preference there.

It is not that they could not do things they need a computer for with one OS or another. Really, the top three OS are all pretty full fledged these days. I can write a post, read email, surf the net, IM, create a spreadsheets, change the colors of the desktop, etc on any of them.

Really: There is enough polarity in this world without adding to it. Looked at another way, I just finished re-reading for the 15 or 16th time Robert A Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land". In it there is a concept of a 'Fair Witness': People so trained as to only speak the truth when they are professionally called upon to do so. It is a sort of trance state that they can enter, but it colors their thinking even when they are not in the 'Fair Witness' modality. To demonstrate, a main character of the book named Jubal asked a Fair Witness named Anne to describe the color of the house on the hill. Anne looks, and replies that "It is white on this side". Jubal then explains that no Fair Witness would ever assume that the house is anything other than what they can see, or even that the house will stay white once they quit looking at it.

That mind set is a lovely thing in my opinion because it removes so much possible false judgement from the situation. It goes no where near "White houses are best" although it would be fair to say "White houses are far better at rejecting solar heat gain than dark color houses", and so if you live in a hot place, white might in fact "be best". Unless you like being hot.

I just wish people would spend just a bit more time thinking about a preference (and I include myself in this), and expressing it as such, rather than stating it as the way that the world must revolve around.

Apple iPhone camera and Linux Mint / gThumb 2.10.6

I have been on the road for a week or so, and I have been using my MacBook for most of the trip. Today I decided to use my Dell D620 running Mint 4.0 at the office instead, since it is better at accessing my MS Exchange calendar via Evolution 2.12. When on the Mac, I have to use Webmail to read my calendar. It works, but not as nicely as Evolution on Mint does.

My office here in Sunnyvale appears to have Faraday cages around it. I have at most one bar of signal on the iPhone, and often I'll walk out to get a drink and suddenly the iPhone will tell me I have missed calls.

Every cell phone I have ever owned uses way more power when it can not reach its cell tower. It appears that the transmitter in the phone cranks up to 700 milliWatt full power to try and find someone... anyone... it can talk to. Out in West Texas, where I get zero cell phone signal, my iPhone will go to zero power in a day. So did my Samsung and Sony before it.

For this reason, I keep the iPhone plugged in to a USB port on the computer de jour when I am in the office. I jacked it into the Linux laptop today for the first time ever, with the expectation that all I would see / hear is the iPhone chirping to let me know it was seeing 5V DC and was happy with the "drink".

I was surprised to see the Linux desktop ask me if I wanted to import the pictures on the "new" digital camera it just found. I said yes, and gThumb 2.10.6 was engaged, and it drained the iPhone in short order. There they were. All the pictures I had taken on the trip so far! Cool beans. Drained is probably not the right word: Copied. The pictures are still on the iPhone too.

Side note: gThumb is not installed on Mint by default, but I had loaded it with Synaptics. 3:2.10.6-0ubuntu1 is the package number, so it is something that Mint inherits from Ubuntu.

I would of course like it better if iPhones were better supported on Linux, but I did not think they would work at all, so this was a pleasant surprise. At least the iPhone pays attention to one standard out there. It sure made it easy to get a picture off the iPhone to use as my new desktop wallpaper! Rogue Ale Public House menu, now on tap... err... screen.

Upgrades to Mint 4.0 Home Linux Desktop

I recently updated my Mint 4.0 office machine to have dual monitors, which I noted in my post called "Two Heads" over at TalkBMC. I have to say is turning out to be a huge time saver for all sorts of things. The other day I was looking at the wide spreadsheet while on a conference call, and was able to see the whole thing at once, and not have it be ultra-tiny fonts I could not read. There is no substitute for resolution and square inches!

That experience made me feel pretty good about the prospects for success of a weekend project at my brothers house. He wanted four things:

1. A new video card so Google Earth would work better

2. His old email back from his old hard drive and Thunderbird

3. A new printer for school work

4. A scanner

I had an Epson 1240 scanner I was going to give him, since I knew it worked well on Linux.

Video Card

Like the upgrade at BMC I went with a GeForce chipset-ed unit. The video card we selected came from the going out of business sale at CompUSA, and had the nVidia 5700 chipset on it. It pretty much had to work, since CompUSA would not be there to return it to.

We pulled out the old, cheap, and feeble video card, and inserted the new AGP unit in its slot. A quick reboot, and it was clear that all was well so far. Screen was there and at the old resolution: I think the cheapo card had been driven by the generic VESA driver and this one was OK with that. I fired up Envy, and it did its thing, downloading the same pile of packages it had on my work system. When it was done, I rebooted, and was greeted with the oddest looking screen: The center of the desktop. No amount of jacking with the resolution or position buttons would return the far right or far left of the screen. I added a Gnome menu to the center of the task bar, and went into the nVidia setup utility to figure this out, and it appears that it was incorrectly detecting the Compaq P900 monitor as being wide screen, 1600 x 1050 or thereabouts. I forced it into 1280 x 1024, and exited X and re-logged in.

It went back to wide screen. It overrode my override!. Doh.

I thought about hand editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to force the resolution in, but pondered for a second to be sure there was not some not some easier way I was overlooking. Then a light went on. I went into the Mint / Ubuntu provided 'preferences / screen resolution' and overrode it there instead, and that took. Then I remembered that at work I had to run the nVidia setup widget *as Root* if I wanted stuff to stick. /usr/bin/nvidia-settings is the location of that widget, for future reference.

Google Earth was now as smooth as silk. One down.

ThunderBird

As was suggested to a comment here to my "Repairo" post, the problem of the missing email was in the dot file. It was not quite what was suggested, but it was close. It was very simple:

• Old Ubuntu based 7.04 Thunderbird put email in ".thunderbird" hidden file

• New Mint 4.0 (therefore Ubuntu 7.10 based) system put Thunderbird email in ".mozilla-thunderbird"

I do feel silly to have missed that! I moved the new file out of the way (mv .mozilla-thunderbird .mozilla-thunderbird.new), then moved the old file to the new name (mvthunderbird .mozilla-thunderbird).

Mail now back where it belongs. Easy. And of special note: *recovered from an otherwise failed hard drive!*. I love Linux.

I do not know if it was Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 that changes the name of the dot file, or if Mint versioned it to be different.

Printer / Scanner

I start this part with an "Opps", as in "Opps I forgot to bring the scanner with me."

While we were at CompUSA with all the other vultures (that is what it felt like), we looked at printers. My son pointed out an HP F4180 Multifunction Printer / Scanner / Copier. It was nearly twenty USD less expensive as CompUSA corporate carrion than its regular already reasonable price. We talked about it for a sec, and went with it.

First off, I usually only buy printers from Epson and HP. Their Linux support is always terrific. Lexmark, as much as I love their keyboards, is a non-starter because they are very bad on Linux, and by extension, Dells printers are off my list, since they are LexMarks. Brother says it has Linux support, but I have just never tried it to be able to say. Getting a printer from a soon not-to-be company was not the time to be trying new things like that.

My default is always Epson. Six colors, color stable ink, separate color cartridges for each color so I only replace the color I am using, and so forth. HP has color stable ink, in some models, and at a premium price. Most of the HP consumer grade stuff is three colors in a single cartridge plus a separate black cartridge.

The big advantage of HP printers: They put the heads in the cartridges, making them easy to refill. If the head clogs up, you just have to replace the cartridge. With Epson, the cost of fixing the heads means that you might as well replace the printer. Still, I have two Epson R380's at the house and like them well. They work on both Linux and the Macs. In fact, the central printer server at my house is an iMac. But I digress.

The HP F4180 plugged in to the Mint 4.0 computer, turned on, appeared in the printer setup menu, configured, and printed all without issue. I clicked on the "Share this Printer" option in the printer setup menu, and then went to my brothers iBook, and set up the printer over there as well, so that now he has a printer for both of his computers.

I installed the Sane stuff with Synaptic, and the scanner checked out just fine as well. Both Xsane and GIMP were able to scan things and save or edit them. Now my forgetting the Epson 1240 was moot.

CD Writer

The CD writer inside the case had failed, and we were using an external, USB attached, generic CD Writer to do that work. My brother wanted to simplify the desk though. Fewer wires laying about. Most of these external USB CD writers are really internal PATA CD drives in a special case, with a special power supply and USB to PATA converter in them. I thought this cheapie CD writer would be like that, and it was. I pulled out the broken CD writer, took the case off the USB CD writer, pulled off the USB to PATA adapter, and installed it in the internal rails. Everything checked out immediately. My operating assumption was that if Linux drove it via USB then via PATA cables was not going to be an issue, but it was nice to see that born out. Now he has a USB/PATA adapter for use with draining data from PATA hard drives, should the need arise.

And Now, the Point

All of this work happened in one day (one small part of day in fact), and was almost trivially easy. Sure, I knew what I was doing going it. I had tried that chipset on Mint already. I knew what kind of printers worked on Linux already. My experience as a Linux person made these upgrades a non-event for my brother. He will now return to happily being a user that can surf the world with Google Earth, print out things, and scan things, and never really know anything about the underlying complexities of it. To him, it will just be a simple computer that does what he needs it to do.

Any vendor supporting Linux can do the same thing, and do it more easily than other OS's because they will have the source code to see how it all works (See my most recent post over at TalkBMC for some thoughts around that).

More evidence that Linux is ready.

Repairo: Fixing a hand-built Ubuntu based Linux computer

Linux has a reputation, well earned, that it will run on much more marginal hardware than most other OSes. I have brought it up on some truly itty-bitty gear over the years, and the embedded / Cell phone end of the Linux market certainly runs on tiny CPU / Memory footprints.

For all is capabilities though, Linux is not magic (thus the Harry Potter reference... well, that and the fact that I drive my daughter nuts by knowing more Harry Potter quotes than she does). Linux can not solve all the problems of the world (although OLPC is making a mighty effort in that regard), and it can not run on utterly non-boot-able, busted to the rafters hardware. Case in point, my brothers Ubuntu 7.04 system.

The Hardware

The hardware in question has a long sad history. The computer is a hand-built that contains bits of my daughters first Linux computer, a Mandrake unit back then. As various parts have failed over the years: Mother boards, Power supplies, video cards, it has sort of become the proverbial 'favorite hammer' (I.E.: This is my favorite hammer. I like it so much that I have kept it for years and year, replacing the bits when they broke. Why, I have replaced the handle three times and the head once...)

This hodgepodge of computer bits had been in for a new MB with 1Gb if RAM in the recent past, and was sporting a AMD processor that was rated faster than the new MB could clock it out: 1.8 Ghz under-clocked to 1.6 Ghz. The Sempron runs very cool though. The video card was the cheapest thing they had at Fry's about 3 or 5 years ago, and there were three Maxtor hard drives from three different generations of the computer all snuggled into the desktop computer frame rails. Two were seriously whacked out. Bad I/O, unrecoverable data checks, you name it. They were not even connected anymore. The third one decided to commit computer-hari-kari. It was the newest, a 250GB unit that was not more than about three years old. When a hard drive decides its time has come, you pretty much have to just let it go along its dark and random path. It is sad of course. Like most things in the area of dieing, it is those who are left behind that feel the pain. In this case, non-booting computer equals no access to email, Internet, or holiday gift giving lists lovingly crafted on the machine before the hard drive set out on its own.

The Software

A previous MS Windows computer resident at my brothers house had been rebuilt for the last time. The Semi-annual Windows re-installs had become more and more tiresome, and I had a brainwave: I had this hardware sitting at my house, and I hardly used it. I have switched to all laptops for work, play, and testing with one exception at the office. My hand-built home system, running Fedora 6, was idling quietly in the corner doing nothing. The iMac had supplanted it's role as print server and file server.

For all its hand-built past, the computer spec'ed out better than the gear my brother had: his MS Windows systems were also hand-me-downs from other in the family when they had upgraded, and that was all he needed or wanted. He is an amazing carpenter, and to him, a computer is just a tool, not a lifestyle. He uses them, but he also just wants them to work. His laptop is an iBook that my daughter and I built for him out of parts off eBay, and he likes the Mac well because it is painless. I thought Linux could be similarly painless

Dell had just announced they were going to support Ubuntu, and my brother lives in Austin where Dell is. The news was everywhere, and it seemed like it might be time to propose a move off MS Windows. My hand-built unit had no MS Windows license, and I doubted MS Win would even work on the hodge-podge of gear without some serious driver TLC. Work I was not going to do. I love my brother, but really: I am done with fixing MS Windows. Call it a quality of life issue.

I proposed the new-to-him computer and Ubuntu, and all my brother wanted to know was whether or not Google Earth would run on it. That was the killer app for him, As Ubuntu had that as an option, I told him it would, and formatted the 250GB unit and installed Ubuntu 7.04. I thought about Mint, but went with Ubuntu because of all the buzz around it at the time. Sure, Mint starts with Ubuntu and adds stuff, but I decided to go "Marquee" here.

This should have been the end of the story, except that I spent all that time mentioning the history of the hardware (repeating things I have posted elsewhere) to lead up to what happened a year or so after my brother got his Linux unit.

The Linux Experience

In the year or so that that Ubuntu 7.04 computer was there, it hummed along and just did it's job. No muss, no fuss. I used the default Gnome interface, and laid it out to somewhat resemble the Mac: Task bar at the top, etc.

Then one day when I got a call about the video being all wacky. The computer video card had come loose when the computer was moved, and needed to be reseated. Not really a Linux problem: Linux has to be able to tell the MB to send electrons to the video card. It's just picky that way. All was quiet again till a few weeks ago. I was in SanFran. It was cold and rainy, and the call came in that the computer would not boot. He read me some stuff off the screen. I walked him through a quick FSCK of the 250GB drive, but it was bad. Really bad. Permanent damaged hard drive bad. Like the video card thing, except that there is not way to put the little bits back onto the hard drive. It was not going to boot, and that was all there was to it. No operating system in the world, not even Linux, can deal with having a hard drive lobotomy, at least not when that was where Linux was storing its brain. Sure, I could boot the Ubuntu install disk, and run in LiveCD mode. This was not considered optimal though.

The good news was that we were already planning a family get-together, so he brought it along.

We can rebuild it: We have the technology

As much use as the Ubuntu computer might be, that does not map to wanting to spend a huge amount of money to fix it. Any time a computer has to be repaired, it is an exercise in the same math one uses to decide whether to repair the car one more time. Everyone probably has different ideas as to what is worth repairing, and what is not. My number right now is about 500 USD. More than that and the computer should probably be replaced. The is a personal number of course, and I base it off the cost of a new system. In this case, I could by a new Acer 5000 series laptop for a around that price on sale someplace, and have a computer that works as well or better than this desktop-unit of-suspect-parentage.

This was a failed hard drive. Everything else worked. Fry's had a 320GB unit on sale for about 70 USD, so that followed us home.

I brought Mint 4.0 with me this time. Last time I was going for Marquee, but my brother was now comfortable with Linux and the Gnome interface. It took a couple of minutes to replace the hard drive, and a couple more to boot Mint 4.0, and then about 10 more to go through an install. He had not watched me do Ubuntu 7.04, but after watching Mint 4.0, and having been witness to years of MS Windows rebuilds he asked me the unanswerable: 'Why do people still use Windows?". I admitted that I had no idea. I have had people try to explain it to me, but it seems to be like Color. I like Blue. I can't tell you why. I just do. Except in cars, where I prefer White. Go figure.

I explained as I did it my manual intervention with the default disk layout: I always lay out 10/2/remainder for this kind of system. 10 GB for "/", 2 GB for swap, and the rest of the hard drive for "/home". Makes upgrades easier, and especially ones where I cross distributions.

A reboot, and Mint was on the air...err... on the hard drive.

I also quickly put the default Gnome menu back, since that is what he knows.

Even Better

Now I had my fingers crossed. I installed the failed 250GB hard drive into a USB/Firewire external enclosure, and attached it to the new Mint 4.0 unit. And what I had not dared to hope happened: Linux could read the old "/home" partition! All the damage was up front, in the OS partition. We pulled over all his personal data with only one issue.

Thunderbird.

I thought Thunderbird uses either .thunderbird or .mozilla as the place to keep it's brains when it is not running. Those were what I copied over. When he got home, and re-connected to the Internet, and fired up, Thunderbird went into "New Account Set up". Doh. Looks like I'll make at least one more house call on this unit to get that figured out: There are emails they want to keep .. someplace.

I was planning a house call anyway. That hand-built's video card is slow slow slow. Even the cheapest card at Frys today is four times better than the one he has now. A new card would help Google Earth run way better. And that after all is the "killer app".

Not Quite Dead Yet, plus Ubuntu and Mint

OK, sure. It has been a while since I wrote anything here. It has been everything I can do to keep my corporate Blog up to date recently.

Since my last post from India (back in the end of October), I have been to Vancouver, the Gulf Coast twice, Far West Texas (Home), and right now for the last two weeks, San Francisco. To write about home use of Linux or Open Source, I would have to actually have been home! I did use my iPhone a great deal to stay hooked in, but I have already posted a fair amount about that. The only new thing there is that I finally downgraded from 1.0.2 of the firmware to 1.1.1, and re-installed all the hacks and everything to re-enable all the cool things Apple left out. I finally have Solitaire on the iPhone! Thank you Chris Miles!

Ubuntu 7.10 and Mint 4.0 on the Acer 5610

In my most recent post over at talk.bmc, I mention using Ubuntu 7.10 and then Mint 4.0 on my office desktop system, a Dell D620. What I did not mention there was that tested each of those release first on my personal Acer 5610.

The very most interesting thing that is different for me between Ubuntu 7.10 and Mint 4.0 did not show up on the Dell at all. On the Acer, the SD flash card reader that is built in to the left hand side of the unit has never worked under any previous version of Linux. It was present in the hardware inventory, but nothing ever mounted when the chip was inserted. Research said that support was coming for the specific chipset from ENE Technologies, and should arrive along about 2.6.22 or so. Ubuntu 7.10 did not appear to see the reader any better than 7.04, or Mint 3.1. But Mint 4.0 had the reader, and the chip in it (I left it there for testing long ago) mounted and ready for use!

Mint 4.0 has many other nifty features over Ubuntu 7.10. As Ubuntu has matured and picked up some of the functionality of Mint, I was wondering what the Mint folks were going to do to stay ahead of the curve. The answer is, they continue to innovate.

The major new nifty thing I have found is the new updater. At first I was very skeptical about whether Linux really needs YAUT (Yet Another Update Tool). I mean really: Adept, Apt, Synaptic, Yum, Yumex, YAST, UP2DATE, ... to name but a few. But the new MintUpdate does a risk classification for each patch on how likely the patch is going to be to cause your system to have problems. The update screen is clean, easy to read. I like it.

One problem I had was that I wanted a very specific feature of the new Compiz Fustion enabled: The one where the cursor hovered over the task bar reveals a small composited screen of the application. I find this very handy for checking on things I started running and then left to go do other things. I use this almost in preference to putting application screens on multiple workspaces. I could not find in Mint how to turn that back on, and said so in my talk.bmc post. The answer came in at once via a comment from "67GTA":

You have to install "compizconfig-settings-manager". It was left out of Mint by default. There you can tweak the effects. It was Advanced Desktop Effects Settings in Ubuntu 7.10.

Sure enough, with this installed, I could turn on the window preview, and I was good to go.

Linux has been good enough for a long while to be a complete enterprise desktop, although it helps if the place you work is smart about the infrastructure they deploy. The more attention to open standards they have paid, the easier it is. The more they have deployed closed stuff like MS Exchange, the more coping skills required.

Oddly, most home usage has been ahead of the corporate environment in this regard. Webmail, POP, IMAP, SMTP, AJAX web applications, and so forth have been staples of most ISP's / Broadband carriers for years. You only get into trouble when you want to do things like play MS Windows specific games, and Linux is even starting to be able to do that. Mint's broad hardware support and easy installability make it hard to ignore as a viable home OS. Between Linx and the Mac, I have not used MS Windows at the house (other than to experiment with Vista) for years.

Hard Drives Not Included

My brother has been running Ubuntu 7.04 on a hand built computer for a while now. I have never had to do anything to support him (unlike MS WIndows days) till now.

Linux is pretty good. Probably better than pretty good. But no OS can withstand having its hard drive fall apart. FSCK's show low level corruption that just can not be repaired.

My first house call ever on his Linux box will be to rebuild it on a fresh hard drive. Ubuntu 7.04 will become Mint 4.0 in the process. Hopefully we'll be able to get something off his old harddrive... but I am not holding my breath. This thing was *toast*.

On Being Open

In my most recent post over at TalkBMC, "The Secret Linux Agenda", I spent a fair amount of time trying to think out loud about some of the disconnects in the world of Open Source. I am given a pretty hard time at BMC about the fact that I write long posts, so I worked hard to keep the "Agenda" post as short as I could, but still touch on at least a few examples of some of the disconnects people have when they talk about being open. Or Open. Or open source. or Open Source. I also mentioned the negative image some of this "open" stuff has because of the behaviors of some people in the various communities.

I wrote that post before I went to my first ever Austin Social Media Club meeting. Whurley was the speaker at the event, and he made a metric ton of terrific points about this during his talk.

Open Confusion

There was one particularly ticklish question from the room at the Austin Social Media Club meeting (Anne Gentle and I there) that I think really boiled all of this down. That comment / question was:

If people are doing "Open Source", why aren't they more Open?

It was a great question and really underlined the confusion about what the term "Open" means. Given the amount of audible agreement in the room with that question, for many in a social media club, "Open" in "Open Source" had connotations of "Accessible", "Easy to get along with", and "Willing to have civil conversations".

The Rainbow of Open Source

Spend any time in an Open Source product forum, and you can easily see what the folks in the social media club were talking about. Someone asks a question. Usually it is an innocent question being made by someone that does not know anything about the product. They, for their part, feel that they are doing the right thing. They are showing interest, and willingness to learn. They are being "open".

You know what happens next: In an un-moderated forum, some will actually try to help, and answer the question. At the very least, they will tell them where the first-timer documents are located, and some might even point out how to use the search facility to find every other time that question was asked, and the answers that they got then. All of those things are classifies as what we call "signal". Useful information.

The middle ground response happens when a response is given, but the person who asked the question has no way to parse the answer. That breaks down further as:

• The answer was given in a way that assumed the person to have knowledge they did not.
  
• The answer was given in such a way as to question whether the person is actually responding in the same language as the questioner.

Either of these examples are about communications styles, and whether or not the person who is doing the technical work can enter the requisite frame of mind (empathy, if you will) to have conversations with those less technical than themselves.

I had this experience growing up when I was talking to my Dad about math. He is a EE at NASA. A real rocket scientist. They exist! He knows so much math (some of it pretty esoteric and useful largely in his speciality of antenna design), and has for so long, that my simple frustrations with things like Freshman Algebra were in some ways a mystery to him. In one particularly memorable conversation, I asked why something worked in a particular way, and after a bit of time he said that once I knew a certain higher level of math this would become obvious. I was temporarily stuck: I would never *see* the next level of math till I grokked this one!

And Then Came Maude....

Sooner or later, intolerance strikes. Someone will post a response to the new person that contains anything from mild abuse to questioning their patriotism in a time of war. Something like:

"Are you NUTS!!! Why the H*LL are you posting such stupid dumb*** question. Why do you hate our troops? Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries (From the Monty Python Phrasebook: "Useful things to tell customers when they are calling and bothering you")".

It may be more ... err... sophisticated:

"We do not tolerate fools lightly in this forum. Please remove yourself to other places, so that you do not annoy us in the future, and so that we may concentrate on real issues."

This new, trying to do the right thing, be "open" person is now deeply confused and hurt. Is this not Open source. Is this not a public forum? Even if they don't know anything about this tool or product, they still need help on it.

In a forum for a paid product, no support professional would post such a response. If they did, their career would be at an end in short order. A company would not tolerate paying customers being abused by people from their company.

There are a lot of reasons why the maladaptive response to the newbie question is occurring in the Open Source forum:

• I am doing this "for free"
• This is not my day job
• I answered that same question endlessly already
• I only have so many hours in the day. I can spent them repeating myself, or being productive
• PUUUULEASE!!!! They asked me why this didn't work the same as Windows!!!! AS-IF!!!!!
  
• I am out of caffeine, and I have no money to get fresh. I hate being poor and brilliant
• I have not been on a date in a decade
• Combinations of several or all of the above

The reason does not matter. In a customer support situation, if someone was thinking about trying the new "Open" thing, and gets that response, the damage is done.

Smug and Arrogant?

A post came out recently about Apple users being "Smug and Arrogant", and when I looked at it there was a poll. 2/3's or those who had read the post agreed that Applen were guilty as charged. You could take that post and change all the Apple references to Linux or other Open Source projects, and I think the poll would be about the same. And it is because of the same reasons. Well... maybe not the Apple advertising campaign part. But as smug as those ads may be, I like 'em. I think they kind of actually miss a point criticising the ads saying that John Hodgeman plays "PC" as bumbling. John Hodgeman gets all the good lines! In many ways, he is the more likable of the two. I have in fact often viewed the ads as being sort of a misstep for Apple because "PC" is more endearing in his own, can't stop blue-screening, kind of way. Maybe it's just me though...

Fedora and Ubuntu

Now I want to circle around to part of what I was trying to get at with my recent posts both here and at TalkBMC about Fedora and Ubuntu. Another aspect of "open", "closed", and the new users experience.

Fedora is a great Distro, if you already know what you are doing. Fedora, like OpenSUSE, lives in the middle of the road. It is not as challenging to install as MS Vista or rolling your own Linux distro starting with a download from Kernel.org. Fedora is easier and faster than installing GenToo. It is not as easy as Ubuntu or Linspire or Xandros. Yes: I know Xandros is in bed with Microsoft these days. See the bit above about arrogant and smug though: I know why the Xandros/MS deal is not optimal, but does the average person that just wants this stuff to work?

Fedora has an admirable stance on why they do not include any software in the Distro that is not really Open Source. My example in the other posts was Wifi cards like Intel and Atheros where even though the vendor has supplied driver code, they hold back the code to the cards driver loadable firmware and only provide a binary. With Fedora, you will have to work hard to get that card going, and their point in acting closed to closed source is to incent card manufacturers to be more open.

I love it. I think card manufacturers are wrong to think their microcode is all that splendidly different in a commodity market like Wifi, and that being more open and easier to install would be an advantage in the marketplace!

However....

Being hard to install for the right reasons means by default you are NOT after the casual installer. The person just trying to use the computer as a tool to get something or the other done. The person who heard that Linux was really cool and was willing to try it to see what it is all about.

The Spectrum

On one end we have the Xandros / Microsoft lashup. Xandros is licensing closed protocols from Microsoft that will allow them among other things to create programs to access content on MS Exchange. They call this mash "Mixed Source". If I sound a bit leery, it is because I used to run BMC's email system, back when we used HP's OpenMail, and I watched HP make a similar deal, and then not to long after that, see OpenMail sold to Samsung, where it later died. The problem from my point of view was that having the protocols was only half the battle. Someone still had to write all the programs to use them. MS has spent years layering all this stuff together, RPC's and Protocols like MAPI and CIFS so that it is no trivial thing to create programs that use them. Ask the folks at Samba.org. There is a reason MS Vista took seven years and billions of dollars in R&D, and came out looking like a gussied up version of XP with compatibility issues.

Middle ground is Ubuntu/Mint. Closed source, binary only bits are not only allowed but supplied. A message is sent to the person at boot that "Restricted Source" is in use, and if you click on it, a display of all the restricted source bits that the OS had to load to run on this hardware is displayed. You know who is playing nice, and who still keeps their cards close to their chest, source code wise.

Then there is the completely open. And Open. Supporting only that which is fully Open, and fully unencumbered, projects like Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE reward openness by inclusion. Open is a wide world of things, where you can build whatever you need, as long as you know what you are doing and have the time.

Support

Stretched across the span of closed to open is another dimension. Support. Whurley likes to say that "people" (and these people include companies) have one of two things: Time or Money. I would add to that "Expertise", which came at least in part with time, and now costs money.

If you are paying for support, you probably have money, and you also expect that you will *never* have the conversation I outlined in the "Maude" section above. You are paying for the right to have a throat to choke. You can also spend money on a person who is your local expert, and whose throat you'll being squeezing. Or both.

Novell,RedHat and Ubuntu walks between all these worlds with their commercial Linuxii. Novell, like Xandros, has some sort of deal in place with Microsoft although I am not sure it is quite as "deep" as Xandros's. You can buy a Dell with Ubuntu on it, and it will be supported by Canonical. Etc. Etc.

But Its My First Time

I have been saying for a long while now that Linux is ready to take on the personal and corporate desktop. I base that on personal experience, not only of being a user personally and professionally, but in helping others to do the same thing. I watched my brother (who is not a computer person) look at an Ubuntu PC for the first time and say in some wonder "This is Linux?", clearly thinking it was going to be something much more mysterious than what it was.

If you are Open Source / Computer savvy, I'll wager someone someplace has asked you at least once: "What is the best version of Linux for me to run?". As technical people, we as a group like to answer such questions correctly, even if two minutes later their eyes are glazing over, and, like one of my blog posts, we are just warming up.

These days I just answer that question with "Mint" or "Ubuntu". If they asked me that question, they are not ready to hack device support in Fedora just yet. They may never want to. As good as Fedoras reasons are for being Open, and only Open, this rules them out for a beginner at least in my estimation.

As I was lamenting in "Agenda", that is too bad. Fedora has a ton of great stuff in it. By ceding the entry level Linux to Ubuntu, they are also ceding mind and market share. Since under the covers, Linux is Linux, Ubuntu can grow with the user. When it comes time to install their first Linux server, Ubuntu has one of those now too.

At the end of the day, it looks like to me that the way one goes about being open (or Open) is to be inclusive.