Ubuntu 10.04 and the Dell D600

I have written here in this blog of my brother and his conversion years ago from Windows to Linux and Apple. He has four computers, two of which have Linux, and two of which a have PowerPC based OS.X. One of the Linux computers recently suffered a motherboard failure, so he was down one.

While it would not be quite true to say he was in the market for a new computer, since he does not spend much money annually on computers, he was looking for another computer opportunity. He was given a Dell D600 laptop by another relative, fulfilling that need.

The new-to-him computer had Windows XP, and ran....

...... very .....

.... slowly.

He asked me if Linux could be installed on it. I was pretty sure it could be, since I have it running extremely well on my D620.

The heritage of the D600 is unknown. It has a big orange sticker on the bottom saying it was reconditioned, but not by whom, or how. It ran hot as well as slow, and the battery was not a Dell part, and did not hold a charge. With a single core Pentium-M 1.4 Ghz processor ( because back then everything was single core ) , and 512 MB of RAM, it was not bleeding edge, but I thought Ubuntu 10.04, with all of it's optimizations and speedups would work well on it. The screen was big and bright and still a modernish 1400x1050 (SXGA+). It's 4x3 but other than that it looks as good as most any other modern laptop.

They wanted to keep XP on the hard drive as a just-in-case, which was a slight problem because the hard drive was a very un-modern 30 GB. Windows was consuming 14.5 GB.

I have seen MS WinXP installed on lessor hardware run better, so I am pretty sure that there is something wrong with the WinXP installed on the system, but I did not look into it. I booted Live version of Ubuntu 10.04 beta 1 from a USB fob, and checked for hardware compatibility. The only problem was the Wifi. It was a Broadcom part, but Linux would not enable it, and Ubuntu would not install non-standard hardware drivers on it either. I decided that I would just go the NDISWrapper route, and so told Ubuntu to install.

I do not know how long it took to resize the hard drive. I re-laid out the disk from 1 big to 4 various sized partitions. Post layout there was a 15 GB Windows partition at sda1, a 5 GB partition for sda2, a 2 GB partition for sda3 and a 7+GB partition for sda4. This was for /windows, /, swap, and /home respectively. I walked away and let the disk be worked over by the installer. The disk partitioning program that the installer uses gives no status as to progress as it resized, so I had no idea how long to wait. I went to lunch instead. That no-progress-status bug has been there for a while, but it does not affect the ability of the program to resize a disk, so I guess it is not high priority to get it fixed.

It was done shrinking heads when I got back, so I installed Ubuntu, and rebooted.

Everything was perfect except no WIfi. The Broadcom part (probably a Dell TrueMobile 1450 by brand) was not going to co-operate. I plugged in an Atheros based USB external 802.11 unit, and wifi popped right up, so I loaded up all the service, and rebooted. Still no Wifi. If Ubuntu does not support it out of the box these days, I usually don't mess with it. There may have been a way using fwcutter to get it going natively, but instead I just plugged in the Atheros, and loaded NDISWrapper and Ndisgtk, which is a GUI for managing NDISWrapper. I pointed Ndisgtk at an .inf file I also got from the Internet, and the card flew up and gave no further problems. Everything was configured correctly to survive reboots as well.

I had not seen the wireless issue when I installed Ubuntu on the D620 because it was Centrino branded, meaning it had Intel wireless, and that works natively in Linux these days due to Intel supplying support to the Linux community for their hardware. When I have a choice I use Intel or Atheros chipped Wifi for Linux laptops.

It would be nice if every single card out there just worked, and I almost bet that when the Mint version of Ubuntu 10.04 is out in a month or two that it will just work there, but I did not want to wait. While I did not mention my worry to my brother, I was concerned that the computer when running XP might be infected with something that would be working to steal his identity or similar. I did not want to take a chance. I wanted Linux up as fast as possible.

10.04 booted quickly, and ran quietly. No CPU fan most of the time. The D600 did not heat up. I loaded up Google Chrome for additional speediness, and surfed the web for a few hours. I tried a few games and OpenOffice 3.2 and a couple other things just to be sure that everything was running as it should be. It was just like any other Ubuntu 10.04 install I have done. Fast and quiet and everything working.

It was interesting to see when OpenOffice starts that the Sun branding is already replaced with Oracle branding. It was also nice to see all the work done on Oo 3.2 had really helped it's load times. It starts very quickly: a matter of seconds. Since this was going to be in part a school laptop, having a working OpenOffice was key.

I delivered the laptop, and my brother fired it up and played with it for a while. At first he said "Wow". Then, after a bit "This is much better". Then after another bit "I can't believe how much better this is".

To be fair, the MS Windows that was installed was probably infected with malware or something. It should have run better than it was. I did not try and figure out what was wrong. I just shrunk it down to make room for Linux.

My brother will probably upgrade to 1 GB, and replace the battery at some point. And when 10.04 goes GA tomorrow, I'll have him do a quick upgrade to get totally current, but other than that he is good to go.

So, for that matter, is Ubuntu 10.04. Another strong release.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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....

Your Problems Are Fixed in the Next Release: Mint 7

Back in January I posted about installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my dad's HP DV9000 laptop. There was also a followup to that post about DOSBOX .

At the end of the Ubuntu Install, and after using it for a few weeks, there were three issues:

1. Wifi: it worked, but with a work-around
2. DOSBOX was slower than DOSEMU, but DOSEMU required manual setup: Another workaround
3. On reboot, Dad had to hit enter about 30 times to get past various hangs being caused by the oddball ACPI on the DV9000. If I understood this correctly, it only showed up as a problem when the AMD CPU's were being used in the DV9000. Those are what Dad had of course...

I had tested the first two points at length with my research into Ubuntu 9.04: I knew that once I upgraded Dad's computer that those two issues would be resolved. I do not have an HP DV9000 though, so I had no way of verifying that the third point would be taken care of as well.

If you noticed the infrequency of my recent posting (both here and at BMC), you might have guessed I had been kidnapped by space aliens, but the truth is I was just working 70-90 hour weeks getting ready and implementing a data center migration. With that in the past, it was time to rest, and then to catch back up on all the other things I had been letting fall to the side.

In the mean time, not only had Ubuntu 9.04 GA'ed, but Mint 7 after that. I took both on USB fobs to Dad's house, and test booted both. Both worked fine: no ACPI hangs at all.

I talked about it with Dad, and we decided to put in Mint 7: Same as my brothers Linux system will be getting soon.

The install was straightforward, other than the install complaining about not having a swap partition. with 4GB of RAM, I just did not want to have to add an LVM to the boot disk in order to get the 5th partition on it. Dads disk already had 4 partitions: 2 NTFS (Vista and the recover partition) and 2 Linux: '/' and '/home'.

I set '/' to format, '/windows' as ntfs, and '/home' as ext3, and both to mount at boot. Once the gparted was done, it took about 4 or 5 minutes to install Mint 7.

Once up, we updated the packages, and installed DOSEMU.

DOSEMU, as delivered, configured the 'D' drive as /home/dad already, and the vbdos programs were already installed there, so it was a simple matter to cd to D, then to the programs, and then to run his NASA stuff.

What DOSBOX takes 30 seconds to run, DOSEMU takes 3. And it is graphical data, so Dad was interested in how to print it and screen capture it so it could be emailed. It turns out that this is easy under DOSEMU as well: Just full screen by clicking the center box on the upper right hand corner, and then fn-prtscrn, and Gnome pops up the screen, all captured and ready to save. A quick trip through GIMP to crop out the tool bars and the graphical display on the DOSEMU screen is ready to email or print to be added to a report.

One interesting thing: If we full screened the DOEMU window *before* we ran the program, then it would run more slowly: Maybe 20 seconds rather than 3. Faster than DOSBOX still, but much slower than EMU was normally. Dad made the easy decision to always run the programs first, then to full-screen them.

Everything works:

Display: Mint prompted for the install of the NVidia drivers, and we told it to go do it.

The Wireless stuff just works now.

We plugged in the HP printer, and Mint saw and configured it instantly. We also tried a Lexmark multifunction (resold by Dell), but that did not. I did not expect it to, since Lexmark printers are one of the few anymore that ship without Linux capabilities from the vendor.

Sound: The Altec Lansing speaker make all the right sounds: I am not sure that Altec Lansing should be claiming these speakers as theirs, but that is another story. They sound equally tinny on Vista. I fired up Rhythmbox and we listened to some Internet Radio for a bit.

Boot Speed: Fedora 11 is making a lot of noise about their new 20 second boot speed. I tested it, and on my desktop Dell 945, it is 30 seconds: Same as Mint 7 on Dad's DV9000.

Battery: This dv9000 is only 9 months old now, but Linux reported that its battery was only able to charge up to 80% of its design capacity: Something Vista was reporting as 100%.

And so forth: What a difference 6 months makes in Linux land. Dad was thrilled with the computer, and said that, other than to play a RealArcade game called WordSlinger, he did not see ever having to go back to Vista. I tried briefly to get that going under WINE, but it was acting very weird: Another thing to research!

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.

Dosbox followup

A quick followup to my last post.

Dosbox has not been a 100% troublefree for my dad. The main problem was that the cursor would go away, never to return, after a screenshot. This did not happen on my Acer, so I could not recreate the issue.

Before I made an on-site visit we tried one thing: installing ksnapshot. That fixed it.

I don't know what the problem was, but ksnapshot is better in any case, because it allows just the window under the cursor to be captured, and without the window borders. No editing required.

It is funny in a way that the KDE screen capture works better on Gnome than the Gnome one does, but that is the beauty of interoperable open standards: best of both can be used.

The other problem is that a new mouse he bought is not working. A Microsoft wireless mouse.

I don't have one of those at home to test either, but I do at the office, and that one works OK. I am thinking bad hardware here, but if he trades it out I hope he gets something I have: Kingston or Logitech. Easier to do remote support when I can replicate the environment. That's why our labs at the office are so big!

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Mint 5 / Ubuntu 8.10 / IBM X30 dump and stir

Mint 5 and 6 have failed me on two different system installs. Very un-Linux-like these days. The first time is my office Dell 745: Neither Mint 5 or Mint 6 will install there. The second time was just Mint 6 and my former IBM X30 laptop: Again, will not install. In both cases it appears that the default graphics mode, as well as the safe mode, just will not work on the computers graphics hardware. Mint is fully spun down to the hard drive, but X just won't work.

In the case of the Dell 745, Ubuntu 8.04 (The basis of Mint 5) and Ubuntu 8.10 (Mint 6's underpinnings) both installed just fine on the 745. That Ubuntu would install and Mint would not is proof that even though Mint is based on Ubuntu, it is *not* Ubuntu. Normally this is not a problem: I have generally preferred Mints defaults for theme and default application selection, and use of whichever driver is needed to make the hardware work. Since Mint 5, I have been running Ubuntu on the office Dell 745. Oddly, Mint 6 works just fine... and in fact, spectacularly well on my Dell D620 laptop.

Ubuntu 8.10 would not install on my IBM X30. Same symptoms. Looks like it is installed, just X will not work.

Backing up a second: I was running Mint 5 on the IBM X30. I decided to give the X30 to my brother for Xmas, and that meant a complete rebuild. Mint 6 would not install: Same behavior as Mint 6 on the Dell 745. It boots, I pick to run the Live CD and then it spins for a bit, and never displays another thing. Same thing in safe graphics mode. Ubuntu 8.10 does the same thing on the X30 though. Ubuntu has a mode Mint deletes where I can just install rather than running the LiveCD. I did this, but the same blank screen appears after the install. The graphics mode is shot. I boot to single user and look, and the xorg.conf file is essentially blank. Just a few empty stanzas.

If this were going to stay my computer, I would have hacked the file and seen if I could get it to work, My brother is not a computer guy: I need to give him a computer that just works. He has a Mint 5 desktop system I built for him a while back, and that has just worked. The laptop needs to be the same.

I decided to try something, and jumping ahead, it worked. I re-installed Mint 5 (more or less Ubuntu 8.04) and got that running easily on the X30. Then, using Synaptic I installed the Ubuntu software updater. Mint has a nifty software updater, designed to create stable systems by only recommending for install software packages that the Mint community has tested. I was going way off that farm. The Ubuntu software updater has a distro update mode.

My working theory was that if I updated to Ubuntu 8.10 on an already configured system that it would use the previous settings and all would be well. Firing up the Ubuntu software update, it did in fact offer to take the system from what it thought was 8.04 to 8.10. I accepted, and it downloaded and installed 1800 software packages. I now had the look and feel and apps of Mint 5, laid over the top of Ubuntu 8.10, not its "native" 8.04.

The system booted and went into X without issue. I updated and installed various software packages like HFS and Macutils so that his laptop would be compatible with his wife's iBook. Used to be a joint laptop, but with the X30, she gets full ownership of the iBook I think. That was part of the idea of the gift: have then be able to both use a laptop at the same time.

I rebooted the X30 a few more times, just to be sure everything stayed put. The boot sequence is unlike Mint or Ubuntu: Looks like part of the bootsplashes are mixed up. I actually like the it better this way, as it gives some details about what it is doing without being too verbose.

There is some very very slight weirdness in the way that the screen is drawn. Maybe a compositing thing with Compiz. Sometimes it appears the X server forgets to turn on or off certain pixels in text. It is not horrible. Just slightly annoying. I am actiually kind of amazed that the Compiz stuff works, and rather quickly, on hardware this old. Vista would be frozen solid trying to use such an "ancient" (in computer years) video system. I thought about just taking it back to Mint 5 and being done with it, but I really wanted everything as updated as I can get it. It will be a long time before this computer gets another update. I decided to leave it as it was.

We had an early Xmas with that corner of the clan. He seemed thrilled with the new toy: It met the definition of a good gift I think: Unlike me, who buys computers all the time, computers are just not something he would buy, even though he uses every one I ever built for him. I included in the X30 package not just the X30 but an extended battery, an Atheros 802.11G PCMCIA card, a dual USB 2.0 port PCMCIA card, since the default USB ports are 1.1, and the 'blade' so that he can have a CDROM should he need it.

The USB 2.0 card came in especially handy, and Linux immediately knew what to do with the card. No driver muss or fuss.

Turns out my brother got a digital camera for Xmas too. An electronic Xmas! First challenge of the Mintish X30 was transferring pictures from the camera to the laptop via the USB 2.0 card. I had not anticipated that camera (but I guess I should have: Who uses film anymore?) but it was easy to have Synaptic grab F-Spot, and then pictures were then transferred easily. It appeared there was a bug in F-Spot: It was set to put the photos in a directory called "Pictures" but it kept putting then in the home directory. I did not have a chance to look into this one yet. I did verify it does the same thing on my Acer Aspire One running Mint 6 though.

Tags: Linux, Linux Laptop, Mint, Mint 5, Mint 6, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu 8.10, IBM X30.

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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.

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.

More iPhone Support Center, plus World Domination

Akshun J , well known Internet Apple non-fan, humorist, Blogger, and generally good person (if for no other reason than he likes my stuff.... :) ) posted a comment on my last post about the experience I had with the Apple support center, and it went this way:

"It's all a secret plot. A Romulan conspiracy to overthrow the Federation.

Although the best cosmetic surgeons have made him look human, Steve Jobs is clearly a Romulan. Who could doubt this? "

And here I thought he was a deity (humorous first minute of this video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2gO8blNd4A

Actually, I can not complain. Turned out the second iPhone return box was because someone at Apple had read my comments in the first attempt to get the iPhone fixed via the Apple web site, realized I needed to send in the iPhone, and sent the box. Another call to 1-800-my-iphone got everything cleared up.

More importantly: I talked to two very nice people at the support center. Bridgette and Jamey. They were helpful, knowledgeable, and also clearly both native speakers of my language (which is a Polyglot of AmerEnglish and Geekish). They both realized right away they did not need to run a script with me on how to do things to diagnose my problem, and jumped right in to actually solving my problem. Add to that the whoever read my web submission at the support center realized that the "headphones" (that ended up being a docking station for some reason) being sent were not going to fix the problem, and sent the return box.

I did get an email noting that the dock had been returned and that there was no charge. Nice.

In this day and age, getting to talk to competent people in a support center was a pure joy.

I use Linux all day long every day, and I love it dearly. The new Ubuntu 8.04 is looking very spiff. I can't wait for the Mint 5.0 version of it! The people I have dealt with for support on Linux have all been very good as well. But that is a different deal. This was a good support center experience from a commercial vendor, and that is rare. Good on you, Apple. Keep up the good work.

Honesty also forces me to admit one last thing. When my little Internet tablet was gone, even for only two days, I felt amazingly bereft. My backup phone is a Motorola C168. Nice sound quality, and loud enough ringers. Light weight. Impressive talk time. But it was just a phone. I am used to being able to look things up on the Internet no matter where or when. At dinner the other day my daughter was telling me about "Red Pandas", which I had never heard of, and right there in Taco Palace I was able to get a quick look at one, and see what they were related to, and know that there are only 2500 of them left. The ability to do this was so very cool. Made the time I was spending with my daughter that much better because I was able to get up to speed fast.

I borrowed a Blackberry Curve the other day to see what its Internet access looked like. Yuch. I welcome the day the iPhone has competition, but as of right now, it does not.

I totally get Akshun J's dislike and distrust of Apple. It is not very far away from how I feel about Microsoft and the things they did to stomp out anyone and anything in their way to world desktop domination. Apple could very easily (now that they have something like 14% of the laptop market) be positioned in the near future to begin to do and act the same way as MS. In fact, in an odd turn of events, they might even force MS to become more open as they continue to watch their market share eroded from the bottom by Linux and from the top by Apple. The way MS rigged the OOXML fight shows us that that day is not yet here though.

Similarly Apple has proven that they will deal roughly with small companies and developers, although in the case of the iPhone SDK there is at least some concession that Apple is not able to fully control the iPhone platform, as much as they dearly want to. Apple needs the developer community to support them. Unto itself the iPhone is a blank slate waiting to be written upon. Example at lunch today:

We were waiting for the veggie dumplings to steam over at Lai Lai's, and my daughter asked me if she could borrow my iPhone. She looked at it, then at me and said is disgust as she handed it back "You haven't hacked this yet." I admitted that I had not. She wanted to know what was taking me so long. I had had the phone for over a day at that point.

Without all the extra things I put on the phone when it is hacked, she did not think it was any better than her RAZR. Of course she was not looking to Netsurf. She wanted to play games.

I am trying to decide if I will hack it at all, or if I will wait to see what the App Store looks like. The guys from iPhone DevCamp think that their way is better of course, but I have to admit that the idea of being able to get stuff for the phone in a vendor supported way is tempting after this little experience.

Or, I may put Linux on it. They say the new PWNED way of getting into the iPhone is going to let them be able to put whatever they want on the iPhone. I won't for now because the experience at the support center is going to keep me on the Apple side of things (even if I decide to hack it in the near future). It is not blind, unthinking loyalty though. Quite the opposite. I am always watching to see what the vendor is going to do next.

Beside, if I go too darkside, Akshun J will reach through the Internet (being a series of tubes) and poke me.

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.