Kingspec SSD and back to OpenSuSE 11.0

OK, I can report that the Kingspec works just fine in the U810 although it does drain a lot more power than the CF card - more like the old Toshiba Mk4009GAL drive. However, it is a LOT faster than the CF and the Tosh - to the extent that most of the stuff I am doing seems to be CPU- rather than I/O-bound. More to the point, suspend-to-disk takes 14 seconds and resume takes 16, of which 6 is the BIOS check. Boot to kdm login prompt is 28s.

So now I'm back to OpenSuSE 11.0 since too many things were bust in 11.1. I do actually use the U810 for work and I need certain things like Bluetooth and external monitors - I know there are fixes but they are liable to be blown away by a kernel update which is not what I want when I need to give a presentation.

However, times have moved on so here is the revised, SSD-friendly install process:

1. Install OpenSuSE, include kernel dev packages and removing all "beagle" related packages
   
2. Set up a 1GB tmpfs at /tmp with /var/tmp and /usr/tmp soft-linked to /tmp
3. Disable CUPS, sshd, postfix, portmap, auditd, java_binfmt in YAST
   
4. Add "pnpbios=off pnpacpi=off" to get wired ethernet working
5. Do a full update - can now set display to 1024x600 in SaX properly, screen size of 12-inches gives a good font size
   
6. Add MadWifi repository and install madwifi to get wireless working, add ath_pci to /etc/pm/config.d/config SUSPEND_MODULES
   
7. Add OpenOffice repository and upgrade to OO 3.1
8. Add Webcam drivers repository and install r5u870 drivers and firmware (image is upside down, problem for later), add r5u870 and uvcvideo to /etc/pm/config.d/config SUSPEND_MODULES
9. Disable Firefox disk and offline caches (in about:config look for browser.cache.xxx.enable and change to false)
10. Enable compiz but go into Workarounds and disable Legacy Fullscreen (stops Firefox and YAST losing window decorations when fullscreen).
    
11. Add S2RAM_OPTS="-f" to /etc/pm/config.d/config so that Suspend to RAM works

...there are some more things to do, which I'll add in due course

Kingspec ZIF SSD

Just ordered a 64GB Kingspec ZIF SSD - we shall see how it performs. I am tempted to go back to OpenSuSE 11.0 when I get it - having discovered that Bluetooth and the external monitor handling are not working in 11.1.

With the SSD in I'll use the 32GB CF card in the slot as additional backup store. I used to use it for mounting CF cards from my camera but in-camera formatted cards don't mount properly (it's a Fuji S9500 with the mysterious V1.3 firmware) so I'm using a USB cable instead. As the CF slot on the U810 is so slow, it's arguably quicker downloading this way anyway.

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.