OpenSUSE 11.1 on the U810 Revisited

Okay after a bit of time, I've gone back to KDE 3.5X and compiz. It's just a bit less processor intensive and quicker than KDE 4.1 and its native compositing effects. That being said, apparently 4.2 has speed improvements...

The ath5K driver only mostly works and has issues with major speed dropouts which can lead to connection timeouts. Back to madwifi then...

OpenSUSE 11.1 on the U810

Finally, I get round to installing 11.1 on the U810 and it seems to be a bit smoother on the whole...

First of all I tried to run the upgrade process but it's a bit more bloated so my 4GB root partition started to look really tight. I had to move stuff around to make room for some of the bigger updates to install and although they all fit it was rather tight so I repartitioned with 6GB. Feeling brave I went for KDE 4.1 rather than KDE 3.5 and Compiz.

The install was more painless than 11.0 but not without a few caveats...

The Atheros card works fine with the Ath5K driver now - however, we now have the stupidity of the generic 80211 drivers which defaults to the US regulatory domain. I have configured the system with UK English, the firmware on the card says EU regulatory domain - figure it out guys. Ironically, the original madwifi drivers could figure this out. The fix is to create /etc/modprobe.d/cfg80211 which contains:

options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom="EU"

Video configuration was better, 1024x600 could be configured out of the box without problems. The font scaling this time seemed to be a bit small, so I opted to claim that the screen was 13.3-inches 16x9 to get a good font size.

I had to eradicate both beagle (by uninstalling everything in Yast containing "beagle") and nepomuk (from the KDE menu select Personal Settings|Advanced|Nepomuk) to stop the background flash and performance maiming chuntering they generate. I also disabled the Update Applet (just configure not to load on login) and a selection of daemons like NFS and CUPS which I'm not going to use.

Other things, like using tmpfs for /tmp and /var/tmp and noatime on ext2 for stuff on flash are as before.

Subjectively, 11.1 seems to be a bit snappier than 11.0 - taking 30 seconds to reach a login prompt from GRUB and another 20 from login to usable desktop.

KDE 4.1 actually doesn't seem to be too bad. Initially it seemed rather slow but that turned out to be nepomuk messing things up in the background. However, I did revert to the "Classic menu" and "Classic desktop" and removed the vile startup and shutdown sounds

DSL Linux on the Omnibook 800CT - Part 3

Now we have DSL installed and X running properly we can look at customising it for the 800CT and its role as an rsync server.

First of all, the 800CT doesn't have AGP, USB, Firewire or any of that newfangled stuff. As DSL is Knoppix-derived, it does a lot of device detection and configuration on startup but we can disable these using the previously mentioned cheatcodes in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

However, we do want APM enabled and although the HDD supports UDMA this is beyond the 800CT - not surprising since the standard was actually introduced after the 800CT launched.

Finally, I want to mount /dev/hda3 on /srv for rsync to use for file storage. This means I would rather Knoppix didn't recreate /etc/fstab on bootup.

Putting this all together we now have a line in /boot/grub/menu.lst that reads:

 kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=normal nofirewire nousb 
  ... noagp noacpi nodma noscsi nofstab frugal

I know the 800CT does in fact have a built-in SCSI port which was dead cool at the time but I don't see myself using it right now.

I also need to manually mount /dev/hda3 since just putting an entry in /etc/fstab is not enough. Knoppix drive detection means that there's no mount -a in the startup process. A quick look in /etc/rc5.d shows that /opt/bootlocal.sh is where I need to add mount /dev/hda3.

Finally, for now, torsmo is the neat little utility that puts system stats on the desktop in DSL. So I update /root/.torsmorc and /home/dsl/.torsmorc to display drive stats for /srv rather than /home/dsl.

DSL Linux on the Omnibook 800CT - Part 2

OK, here's my annotated minimal XF86Config-4 file - it's quite a bit shorter than your typical sample file but works for me:

# XFree86 has has built-in defaults for font file paths
Section "Files"
 ModulePath    "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"
EndSection

# Desktop rendering isn't quite right without these
# DRI/GLX are way beyond the Neomagic chip!
Section "Module"
 Load    "dbe"
 Load    "extmod"
 Load    "freetype"
 Load    "record"
 Load    "type1"
EndSection

# I have a UK Omnibook
Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier    "Keyboard[0]"
 Driver        "keyboard"
 Option        "XkbRules" "xfree86"
 Option        "XkbModel" "pc102"
 Option        "XkbLayout" "gb"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier    "Mouse[0]"
 Driver        "mouse"
 Option        "Device" "/dev/psaux"
 Option        "Protocol" "PS/2"
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier    "Omnibook"
 Driver        "neomagic"
EndSection

# Auto mode selection doesn't work without sync/refresh rates
Section "Monitor"
 Identifier    "Monitor[0]"
 HorizSync    31.5 - 48.5
 VertRefresh    50.0 - 70.0
EndSection

# I only intend to run 800x600x16
Section "Screen"
 Identifier    "Screen[0]"
 Device        "Omnibook"
 Monitor        "Monitor[0]"
 DefaultDepth    16
 SubSection "Display"
     Depth    16
     Modes    "800x600"
 EndSubSection
EndSection

Excellent Resource - SpareInfo

This chap has been doing some sterling work on getting Linux up on the U810 with some good tablet driver and rotation stuff. Well worth a look.

DSL Linux on the Omnibook 800CT - Part 1

I plan to turn my one of my old Omnibook 800CT's into a "smart" wireless backup drive. It's not a lot bigger than one of the regular smart drives being basically an early netbook but its got enough grunt to act as an rsync server and also, at a push, can actually display most of its content. It's also much more configurable since it will have a local screen, and a proper OS.

Specs as follows:

• CPU: P166 MMX
• RAM: 80MB
• HDD: 160GB IDE (BIOS only sees 8GB but that's not a problem for a sensible OS)
• Display: 800x600 16-bit 10.4" TFT
• Graphics: Neomagic 128ZV
• Dimensions: 28.2 cm x 18.5 cm x 4 cm
• Weight: 1.8kg

I'm trying Damn Small Linux for this purpose - if it goes well then it will go onto my other lower-spec 800CT's which will become basically wireless X terminals.

First off, the Omnibook won't boot from CD. I've lost the SCSI and power cables for the Omnibook's own CD-ROM drive but I have a 10-year-old PCMCIA Freecom Traveller CDRW around (the old drive in it expired long ago but you can drop any slimline ATA optical drive in).

1. Download the DSL iso and burn to CD


2. Download the DSL boot floppy image and rawwrite/dd to a disk (I used rawwrite since to 800CT still has an old Windows 98SE install on it.)
   


3. Download the DSL pcmcia driver floppy image and rawwrite to another disk


4. Boot from the first floppy and enter dsl frompcmcia at the boot prompt


5. Insert pcmcia driver floppy when prompted

At this point we discover that the default Xserver doesn't work (nasty stripes all over the screen). Trying the boot prompt cheatcode xmodule=fbdev fb800x600 gets me a working display but the mouse is all over the place. So CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE out of X at this point and go for a command-line installation:

1. Partition the hard drive using fdisk - I went for 512MB root, 512MB swap at this point
   


2. sudo su gets to a root prompt


3. dslinstall brings up an installation menu


4. Select Install to hard disk

This works fine - swap is picked up automatically if mkswap has been run on the partition. Logging on tries to bring up X automatically but it's easy enough to kill the X server as above provided you selected the fb800x600 GRUB boot option on startup. The DSL Wiki suggests that the answer to the mouse problems is to use XFree86.dsl extension rather than the minimal X servers. To do this I need wireless networking up and running - there's an old NetGear MA401 802.11b PCMCIA card in the Omnibook which the installer picked up (cardctl ident confirms this) so it needs configuring (it appears as eth0 in DSL):

1. iwconfig eth0 essid MYSSID key XXXX...


2. ifconfig eth0 up


3. pump (no, not dhcpclient or anything like that - thankyou, DSL Wiki, I wouldn't have got that one)
   


4. mydsl-wget XFree86.dsl system


5. mydsl-load XFree86.dsl


6. Edit /root/.xserverrc and /home/dsl/.xserverrc to run the XFree86 server which means that the default DSL GRUB boot option will now work:
   exec /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 -nolisten tcp
   
7. chattr +i .xserverrc (sets the file as immutable to stop accidental reversion to Xvesa)

Now the crunch - getting the configuration file /etc/X11/XF86config-4. For this, I started with an empty file and added sections until startx brought up a a reasonable uncorrupted screen. I'll post an annotated version later.

Nokia 5800 16GB

There's been a lot of talk online about problems with 16GB micro SDHC cards in the 5800. Just got a Dane-Elec 16GB Class 4 card from 7dayshop which seems to work fine and was pretty cheap too.

Have put the MTP issue on hold for a bit and just mounted the 5800 as USB Media and copied 8-9GB of MP3 across which took a while. The whole SDHC speed class thing is a bit of a joke - even class 6 isn't exactly speedy (40x in old money). When you see Pretec launching CF cards at 666x...