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

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!

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 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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Now in the Handy Hospital Size

This last week has been a very special week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mint 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.

XO coming soon... sort of.

With apologies to Richard....

I just received an email from the OLPC Foundation. Key part:

Our production schedule is still on track and we expect to deliver your laptop by the middle part to end of March. Your donation is in queue and ready for shipment as soon as we receive additional laptops.

I am looking forward to getting my unit, and knowing that someone someplace will soon be getting the one I donated.

I have read that they are making them at a clip of over 100,000 a month right now, and over half a million have already been made. That is both impressive and a drop in a bucket. The impressive part is to think that this innovative learning device is already out there, with Linux at its core, at a pace where several million new Linux users will join the ranks this year.

The problem is that there are seven billion plus people on the planet, so the XO is still far too rare. At its current production level, the temptation will be to have these units showing up on eBay or other unintended uses than in the hands of the children that need them. That is not good.

To really succeed the XO need to reach a ubiquity that makes it so commonplace that the idea of buying on on eBay approaches the idea of buying air there. That means billions of them. SO common that no one is taking them from the children as unique, interesting, or valuable, but rather giving them each one as intended so that they can use it as a learning tool. As long as it is cool and new, there will be problems.

I think this was probably part of the problem that Negroponte was addressing in his Wired interview, when he said:

Over the next few weeks… there'll be partnerships and changes with companies that can start rolling this out. What becomes pretty clear pretty quickly, you need people to copy it and do it at a larger scale. No matter what we do as OLPC or laptop.org, you're not going to be able to do the whole world. You want to be able to influence efficiently enough to have other people do it.

No wonder MS is sweating bullets and trying to get XP going ASAP on this gear. They are looking at billions of people not using their stuff.

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.

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*.

The Other Side of the World is Amazing

In my last blog here, I mentioned the "Stand Up, Speak Out" web campaign. i did so knowing I was getting ready to come to India, where I was going to see first hand what this campaign is really all about.
You can not travel here and not be changed by the experience. This ranges from serious insights to silly observations. In no particular order, here are some of them:

1. I talked about using Linux on the road over at Talk.bmc in my last post there. Nothing really specific to India here other than the plug shape is different here than at home and I had to get an adapter. Both the Apple and the Dell D620 have auto-sensing power supplies, so all that needs adapting is the power.
2. So. Many. People. If *just* the people of this country were to consume resources at the rate they do in the States (and I am here in India at the moment, so I get to phrase it that way), then all the resources of the planet Earth would be consumed. But instead in India resources are consumed at .4 of a planet. The difference is mind boggling. All lights are power saving. Very few lights. When you leave the hotel room, the entire room is powered down while you are gone. Everything. Not even the wall plugs to run the battery charger work.
3. So many people, part II: Streets are built by people, not for the most part machines. People carrying concrete bags and manual tools.
4. So many people, Part III. With over 1.13 Billion people in a land area 1/3 that of the US, not only are people very close, they are very close. By that I mean they are both physically and emotionally close. Family is everything, followed by community. Visitors are taken care of every waking moment.
   
5. Being taken care of: This really is hard to deal with if you are used to doing for yourself. I carry my bags in airports. Not because I am afraid they'll get stolen but because I dislike the idea that I am somehow not capable of doing so. I have probably been very rude by local standards.
6. Where in the US one person does many different things, here with so many people available to do things, there are specialties. At the knick knack store yesterday one person wrote up the bill, another packaged them in a box, Another stood by to see if any other things need to be bough, while another opened and closed the door to the store, and another took care of storing and returning bags that you werr carrying when you came into the store. Yet another (the owner or manager) watch over it all, and talked on two phones at once. In the Sari shop (in a shopping district for just clothing that stretched to the limits of vision in all directions) one showed me Saris, thre of four others retrieved Saris or acted as Sari holders. Another slotted the ones I was interested in away for later final decisions. Four or five people sat behind the counter to take money. One for Cash, One for Credit cards, one for bill writing, and another to run the card. This may all seem silly to a western mind, but it makes total sense. People have to be employed.
7. About the Cell phone thing. They are everywhere. No one uses land lines. Cell towers line the roofs of buildings and the sides of roads. People drive one handed on motorcycles because the other hand is holding the cell phone to their head. Given traffic density and the utterly lack of street line, this is an order of magnitude scarier than it is the us, yet at the same time I have not witnessed a single accident while here. Not one.
8. Signs are everyplace. They are about everything. Many mention classes in data structures or C++. technology is everywhere. Linux is everywhere. Roughly speaking, half of the R&D Support team here knows Linux. MS Windows sits on the desktop systems, but it takes not effort to find Linux.
9. iPhones may be dead useful in San Francisco, but here it is mostly a world clock and to-do list organizer. I am really glad mine is hacked, because Web 2.0 only works if you turn on the Edge service. I have a services app hack that lets me keep everything off but Wifi. So far, that has been borderline useful but WAP's are not prevalent. If I had no hacks, I could not do in-phone to-do lists and other text editing. Still, there will be an iPhone SDK out early next year, so I imagine I'll get to unhack my iPhone in a few months. Since I am locked to AT&T, and roaming charges here are over the moon, it will only ever be a useful PDA when I am here. I have seen iPhones here, so I assume they went for the full meal deal and unlocked them too.

Next week I change countries again, this time to Canada and BMC Userworld. The Adventure continues.

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.

Fedora 7 on the IBM X30 versus Mint on the Dell C400

In my last post over at TalkBMC, called "Minty Dell(icious)", I talked about a new Linux Mint 3.0 install on an old Dell C400 I had in the trashpile. At the end of it all I wondered just how long Dell had been getting ready for Linux, since the C400 is, like the D620 of my previous TalkBMC post, positively Linux compatible to the point of seeming like it was designed for it.

The trades have also recently noted that Lenovo, the owner of the laptops that used to be called "IBM Thinkpads" has started shipping Novell Linux pre-installed on some models. I decided it was probably worth noting again here my IBM X30 Thinkpad running Fedora 7. I posted about this unit a few back here in "On Being Open", so I won't re-cover that ground.

What I found interesting this time around was the similarities between the Dell C400 and the IBM X30. Both were meant as expensive, lightweight, extremely portable laptops (actually, I think the category was called the "Sub-Notebook"). My two copies were both circa 2002. They both have nice bright 1024x768 panels, and cramped keyboards. Both have 1GB of RAM, and 1.2 Ghz Pentium Mobile processors. Both spec out at the same 2393 bogomips. Of course, they both run Linux extremely well. Both enable and run Beryl for 3D desktop without issue. Both laptops even have cracked cases, although the X30's is cracked on the lower left where the plastic is extremely thin due to the way the PCMCIA card slot, firewire, and IRDA module intersects that corner, and the stress that the feet that lift the back of the unit focuses into that area. In fact, when I was building the X30 with parts off ebay, all the X30's I bought were cracked in this location. Clearly a design flaw. The Dell C400 looks like its cracks, near the inverted T of the cursor keys, may be impact damage from being dropped.

Each unit has things about it I really like, and things that make me wish of the other unit. The Dell has the lovely TrueMobile 1150 Wifi card inside, in the MiniPCI slot. It's embedded-in-the-case antenna pulls in WiFi points from across the city! Easily the best laptop I have in this regard, and I include the Apples in this. The chipset on the TrueMobile is Orinoco, which Linux supports extremely well. This would be a good Fedora system, because unlike most Wifi cards, Fedora deals correctly with the Orinoco chipset "out of the box".

The X30 has the fabulous Thinkpad keyboard. The best laptop keyboard I know of short of the Apple MacBook Pro. Even downsized to sub-notebook size, it is pretty usable, and it far more usable than the Dell C400's. There is also a keyboard light, an LED at the top of the screen that shines down on the keyboard, making it usable in totally dark rooms. My copy of the X30 does not have a MiniPCI Wifi card though. And here is where IBM really gets up my nose: they will not accept any Wifi cards other than those they have sourced (short of some major hacking). I may get around to doing this someday because I am getting tired of the Atheros based PCMCIA card hanging out of the side of the X30. There is an in-case antenna in there: I looked. I just have to burn one of my BroadCom cards that came out of my old eMachines 5312's to have a device ID that IBM will accept with their stupid BIOS whitelist.

A moment to rail about BIOS Whitelists

I have complained at length over at TalkBMC about the laptop BIOS whitelists of IBM and HP. I mentioned the issue in my current article about picking Linux Laptops in the 3/2007 issue of Linux+ Magazine. For all that, this is an easy issue to miss, and it is somewhat subtle.

Short version: IBM and HP place into their BIOS a list of device ids that they will accept in the Mini-PCI slot. If you put something they did not re-label (and internally re-address. Neither of them really make Wifi cards) the laptop will not boot. Finito. End of story. Dead solid stopped till you take it out. Really annoying since I have four Broadcom, supported by Linux, B/G Wifi cards that fit perfectly.

There are two ways to deal with this other than giving in and buying a card the vendor supplies at their price (or getting it off eBay):

1. Flash the cards device ID to something that the laptop has on the whitelist.


2. Hack the BIOS Whitelist to have the cards deviceID
   

Option two above opens the chance that a typo will brick the whole laptop. I love that term: Brick. So descriptive.

This is another point in the Dells favor by the way: I have never read of Dell having a BIOS whitelist. Humm... you know... I may try on of those Broadcom cards and see if that is true! I'll get back on that....

Other experiments...

What is clear from messing around with these two systems is that, from a personal-use-of-Linux point of view, Mint 3.0 is a far better option than Fedora 7. This last weekend I decided I wanted to update Fedora 7. Fastest way to turn a weekend to a Geekend. In Mint that is almost always painless: Click update manager, load updates. Done. In Fedora it was hours of pain and hacking, and again, almost all of it revolved around the Atheros chipped Wifi card. I do hope next time it will not hurt this bad though. Here is why.

A while back on TalkBMC I was chattering about Fedora 7 as an office Linux, and I mentioned there some of the issues I was having with the Atheros card and Fedora. Fred Finster wrote in to that post with a nice, complete tutorial about getting Atheros cards going under Fedora, and I was flipping through some of his links and I came across a reference to something in the Livna tutorial. It said I should only ever use Livna, and not mix the repositories, or my mileage would vary, or words to that effect.

I pondered that for a bit, and lights started to go on. I had ATrpms, FreshRPMS, and Livna all enabled in Yum. The problems I was having all looked exactly like pre-req and co-reqs of things I have on not being correctly processed: it would try to put on a new Kernel, then cough up a hairball because that would wreck some package or another, including MadWifi and Ndiswrapper. I very carefully unwound the config and used RPM -e to do point-assassinations on various package sets. I pulled out the Atheros chipped Dlink and inserted the Orinoco chipped Linksys V3. Updates and deletions continued until everyone cheered up, including one point where I had deleted *all* the Linux kernels installed so I could load up a different one from Livna that matched their MadWifi package set. After that, a reboot, and I was up on the new 2.6.22 kernel with MadWifi and the Atheros Dlink!

Now I have a new problem. my IBM BIOS stuff is broken. IBM-ACPI is included in the kernel, and drives things like access by LM-Sensors to temperature and fan speed info. That was all working pre-upgrade, but is now broke. Even the Gnome panel brightness applet quit working. But I am not sure I will chase this further because...

It is clear that the Dell C400 has more Fedora-compatible hardware, if for no other reason than having the TrueMobile 1150 Wifi card in it. Mint works on both, but I want to have at least one Fedora system around for other reasons. I may switch the hard drives between the C400 and the X30. That would make the X30 Mint 3.0, and the C400 would become Fedora 7. I think they would both benefit. Or ... at the very least, break like crazy and give me new things to think about. :)

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Linux on a Laptop, Twitter, and writing open source code on a Mac

Linux on a Laptop

I just received notice today that an article I wrote back in March of this year is now being published. Its in the new LiNUX+ Magazine, and is about choosing a laptop for Linux. It is kind of funny in a way: I am so used to the immediacy of weblogs and tweets that publishing in a real paper magazine just seemed to take forever.

I kind of knew that when I was writing the article in an intellectual way, and so made an effort to keep the article not specifically tied to any particular version of Linux, knowing that they would have all revved versions since I wrote it. Example: Mint 2.2 was current at that time I think, and of course I'm on 3.0 now. Emotions clearly did not know how long it was going to take. It feels like forever ago.

The topic seemed pretty germane to what I have been up to lately, what with messing with Fedora 7 on the IBM X30 laptop. My most recent post of at TalkBMC (going up later today actually) counterpoints the Fedora 7 post I did here last week, and notes a new trial I had with that.

Tweets

Anne Gentle, former colleague from TalkBMC and now Blogmaster of her new blog "just write click" has been talking about using twitter as a form of micro-blogging. I never really gave it much thought, even though whurley and Y also talk about social networking and twitter and stuff all the time.

Three things then happened:

1. I got an iPhone
2. It had an app called "Pockettweets" that let me update a twitter wherever I am and whatever I may doing
3. I found David Hewlitt (Dr. McKay) from Stargate: Atlantis is a religious twitter'er.

OK. Fine. I'm trying it out to see what it all does. http://twitter.com/stevecarl
I'll be honest: So far this seems more like a 'dear diary' thing than a micro-blog. But the iPhone makes doing it dead easy, so we'll see where it goes. It was kind of fun to look back and see the progression of events as posted that led up to this and my last TalkBMC entry. Seeing the entry about getting my new comics reminds that...

MySQL and CocoaMySQL

My wife has given up on eBay applications Over and over and over she has tried to make them do what she wants them to do, only to find the software she has paid for to be unstable, slow, behind the times, etc. She has tried and tried to get out of programming, but she finally decided that the time has come to just solve the problem by writing her own application. She is also work on an inventory management tool for some friends of ours that run "Comic Book Orphanage".

This is a brave new world for her. She has written tons of applications over the years for the MS Office suite. One tool she wrote in MS Access saved a hospital in Galveston literally millions of dollars. She knows how to code.

She has sworn off MS as anything other than a target platform. I talked to whurley a bit as he is a well known Apple hacker, and so now she is off learning how to use MySQL and CocoaMySQL. Later she'll add in Apple's Xcode, and she hopes to be able to write applications on her beloved Macbook, and just cross-compile them to MS Win. It should be very interesting. Apple does it with iTunes and Safari, so it can be done... More on that as it progresses, but it is very cool having another Open Sourcer in the house.