Neil's Tech Docs

Rebuilding my VirtualBox Server

2011-10-31T14:48:00.000Z

My Tyan Tiger K8WE expired a little while ago so my home server environment was being hosted on an MSI K8N Master2 - which is OK but it doesn't support 2GB DIMMS very well so I was running with 6GB RAM rather than 12.

Tigers are a bit thin on the ground on UK eBay but I did score an Asus K8N-DL that allows me to use my 2GB DIMMS again. So I go to install OpenSUSE 11.4 and VirtualBox 4.1 which proves to be a slightly interesting experience. When running hosted virtaul machine environments I like window managers like compiz or the KDE wm which give have a desktop grid view. Then I can have one VM per desktop and zoom out to get a view of the whole VM constellation. Here are my findings:

The K8N-DL boots into OpenSUSE without any problem from a cold, power-on state. However, warm boots and even cold boots without power cycling lock up hard during kernel startup. This is with BIOS 1010 which is the latest.
If you only have one CPU present then the booting problem disappears.
While swapping out CPU's, I tried mixing single and dual-core E-stepping Opterons. This works completely fine (provide you cold boot) if CPU 0 is the dual-core. Linux seems happy and the NUMA tables look sensible. There is even a certain logic since the board only has 2 DIMM slots for the second CPU.
I use Conky as a system monitor and had problems with it stopping updates after a while. I discovered that if, I have apcupsd monitoring entries and the daemon isn't running because I haven't plugged the UPS serial cable in, then it works for a bit displaying "N/A" but then seizes up after a while. Commenting out the entries fixed this.
Linux orders the drives on the NV sata controller in the opposite order to the BIOS just to mess with your mind while configuring things. OpenSUSE's installer gets GRUB and the MBR in the right places though.

DSL to SliTaz

2011-08-18T10:53:00.000+01:00

Having got my Omnibook firewall up and running rather sweetly it was time to return to my Omnibook NAS project...

Returning to my DSL install on another OB800, I fired up Samba for a few tests and discovered that the venerable code that is DSL has a 2GB file limit. Since I store a collection of Linux install DVD images this is rather a limitation. As DSL seems to have stalled I went looking for a successor and found one of its offspring, SliTaz.

I started up DSL and pulled down the SliTaz ISO file. With great presence of mind I had configured DSL with root and swap partitions the same size (at 512MB). This gave me somewhere to put SliTaz without blowing away DSL. I could thus shut down the swap partition, replacing it with a swapfile, and then mark it as Linux and format with ext2.

There is a manual install for SliTaz here. One problem...there is no lzma or xz for DSL so I can't unpack the root filesystem (which has a .gz extension but won't, of course, unpack with gzip). No matter, I ftp'ed the file to another machine, uncompressed the rootfs cpio archive and then pulled it back. Finally, I mount the DSL partition and add Slitaz to the Grub menu there since DSL installed Grub already.

Reboot...and Grub hangs trying to load the SliTaz kernel. Hmmmm. Grub 0.91 from DSL is rather ancient and does have a few known problems - maybe I need a newer one. The obvious thing to do is to boot SliTaz from floppies and then use the SliTaz version of Grub. Kernel loads fine from floppies and starts to boot and then panics.That might be a duff floppy image so try a new set but get the same results. Might be lack of RAM, try the low ram images but get the same results.

Ok, scratch SliTaz for this project. Pity.

IPCop Tweaking

2011-08-12T11:42:00.001+01:00

Doing a few throughput tests on IPCop on the OB800 I noticed it was working very hard. A bit of poking around revealed that tweaking could the hard drive settings made a lot of difference. Switching on 32-bit access and unmasking interrupts during operation improved network throughput and dropped CPU load at the same time. I guess logging onto CF was taking long enough to affect the network.

Anyway, the net result is to add the following to /etc/rc.d/rc.local

/sbin/hdparm -u1 -c1 /dev/hda

This also works for DSL, though the file to modify is /opt/bootlocal.sh

IPCop on the Omnibook 800CT

2011-07-27T10:11:00.002+01:00

I had planned to convert a couple of my Omnibook 800's into a firewall and a NAS respectively since they are low power and built like brick-privys. Herewith are my firewall experiences...

I've been using IPCop for a while although activity and progress towards V2.0 has kind of dropped off, it still works for me though the loss of Snort support is a little annoying. It is the rear facing side of a dual-bastion configuration so the forward 'wall takes most of the crud.

In any case, something a little more elderly might help since it only has 32MB RAM and a P133 to run on.

First off, unlike Damn Small Linux the IPCop boot floppy can't see my PCMCIA CDROM drive so it's back to my Omnibook CDROM drive. Unfortunately I don't have a power cable so I have to feed it AA batteries which it consumes at a prodigious rate - hooray for rechargeables.

I have scored a couple of Xircom 10/100 Ethernet/56K modem PCMCIA (not Cardbus) cards off eBay which seem to supported by IPCop so we are good to go. In order to fit both cards in, I need dongled ethernet cards rather than the fat cards that seem prevalent today.

Boot from floppy (get an image from the IPCop CD) proceeds until it tries to load the additional drivers from floppy. It appears that the IPCop 1.4.20 CD has a corrupt drivers floppy image so I backtrack to 1.4.10 for no particular reason.

Boot from floppy and loading the drivers floppy then works...until it discovers the 128MB CF (in a CF/2.5-inch hdd adapter) for /dev/harddisk1 which is apparently too small. A quick raid on my digital camera scores a Kingston 1GB CF which solves the problem. Other than that the install goes smoothly.

...Until I bring IPCop up - when I discover that the GREEN network is fine but the RED does not function. The dongle lights up to indicate a 100MB connection and flashes to show traffic but I can't ping the front firewall or, indeed, reach it in any way. Hmmm.

After a bit of digging around gets me to /proc/interrupts which indicates that the RED PCMCIA card is sharing an interrupt , IRQ 9, with something else whereas the GREEN is not. It all comes back now, back in the days before ACPI and all that fancy stuff when we had to worry about IRQ's.

A reboot and F2 press later, I have disabled the serial port on the Omnibook thereby freeing up IRQ 4. This now needs to be pressed into service for the RED Xircom instead of IRQ 9. A quick visit to /etc/pcmcia/config.opts allows me to disable IRQ 9 and enable IRQ 4 for PCMCIA and a further reboot later (this is getting like a Windows install!) all is well and I have an operational firewall. A flurry of patches later, I now have a reasonably up-to-date firewall.

One other thing, I note that the screen blanker on IPCop does not power down the backlight. Fortunately, pressing the on/off button on the Omnibook with the power plugged in powers down the screen, keyboard and mouse but leaves everything else running...perfect!

Toshiba NB100 upgrade from OpenSuSE 11.2 to 11.4

2011-07-27T04:25:00.000+01:00

Ok, I have a bit of spare time in between DMSTech and LibDevConX^2 so I decided to upgrade my NB100 to OpenSuSE 11.4 using the downloaded iso image on my Zalman ZM-VE200. Having copied the important data onto the Zalman, I select the OpenSuSE image and reboot.

The laptop boots from the image perfectly, possibly slight faster than from actual DVD drive and I select the Update option when it is presented. The I go with defaults except that I don't let it delete all my added package repositories like Packman and VideoLAN since it's easier to go in afterwards and simply change 11.2 in the path to 11.4 instead of adding them anew. There is one dependency issue which I resolve by not installing the offending item and then it's time to go and get a coffee while installation proceeds.

And that's pretty much it - the install went through without a hitch and it seems pretty much all my settings etc. have transferred correctly.

Omnibook 300 revisited

2011-07-26T10:17:00.000+01:00

After a little while gathering dust, I managed to score a 1.1 BIOS card for the Omnibook 300 off eBay. This means that the beast can finally use Compact Flash cards, and provides great resting place for some of the pile of CF cards under 1G that I have accumulated. The machine actually pre-dated the PCMCIA ATA specification so, on release, it could only use linear flash cards or one specific WD drive with a somewhat home-grown ATA-over-PCMCIA spec.

If you insert a blank (FAT, not FAT 32) formatted CF and boot up, the ROM DOS will ask you if you want to format it. This puts Doublespace on the drive which just takes up processing power and RAM. This made sense when all you could get was a 10MB flash card or a little 40MB WD hard drive but not with 256MB of CF goodness. So, politely decline and all the necessary boot-up files will be copied to the uncompressed drive.

I have been experimenting with alternative shells to Win 3.1 Program Manager since it's a bit painful. Back in the day I was fond of the IBM Workplace Shell for Windows which gave Win 3.1 an OS2 like look-and-feel with things like right-click context menus. However, it doesn't perform very well on the Omnibook and the OS/2 grey dialogues don't render very nicely on the unlit mono display. The next thing to try was Calmira II which attempts to replicate the Win95 shell and performs rather better.

I also rediscovered and joined the Omnibook mailing list - targetted at the classic OB's it hasn't got a lot of traffic now but if you post it lights up with activity as OB fans come out of the woodwork. The archives are a mine of information.

Zalman ZM-VE200

2011-03-14T23:16:00.000Z

Just got hold of a Zalman ZM-VE200 hard drive USB enclsoure which is pretty standard except for one thing - it can emulate an optical drive. As someone who builds and upgrades systems on a regular basis at work and home this is phenomenally useful.

I ordered the drive from LinItx in the UK - it comes in black or silver, along with a Samsung M7 320GB laptop drive (since the enclosure takes 2.5-inch drives). The drive is nicely packaged and even includes a tiny screwdriver to fit the drive. Unfortunately, the device comes with practically no documentation so herewith are my discoveries.

The drive can be partitioned but the first partition must be NTFS for optical emulation to work (you can use FAT32 but then you are limited to 4GB files which means you can't do many DVD images). I tried ext2 but it didn't work.
The NTFS partition should have a folder called _iso - case is important. This is where you put the .iso images of the disks you want emulated.
Image files must be unfragmented, so best to copy one-at-time or defrag after loading up. This is not documented but if you select a fragemented image the message DEFRAG appears on the LCD.
Image filenames should only have a single dot in them - otherwise they are not recognised, since filenames are parsed to the first dot to determine extension. As I know Windows sometimes have this stupidity I can't compain,
You use the jog-wheel on the side to scroll through the images (which are displayed on a small LCD on the drive) and press it to select which one you want to mount. Subfolders are supported, selecting one opens it. There is a ".." entry to go up again.
There is only a single USB connector on the drive cable - this means that some USB ports have trouble powering up the drive (the display flashes or you experience read-errors during optical drive emulation). However, I've not had a problem with laptop ports or ones on motherboard backplates.
The drive is write-protectable, useful for using it for virus removal.
Optical drive emulation works perfectly - it can be booted from to install machines from CD or DVD images. Allegedly, it can even emulate Blueray BD-ROM drives but I don't have such an image to hand.

All-in-all a very useful device and it means I can dispense with optical drives in my servers and (mostly) my laptops. It's smaller then the smallest slimline external optical drive too.

Lifebook U810 and OpenSuse 11.2

2010-05-21T12:09:00.000+01:00

OK, heartened by my OpenSuse 11.2 experience on the NB100 - where pretty much everything worked out of the box (webcam, hibernation, most of special keys), I thought it was time to try it on the U810.

The install went OK, didn't need the acpi/pnp boot hacks to get wired ethernet working, the ath5K drivers worked reasonably well (if still a bit slow). Startup and shutdown were snappier than before and the KDE 4.3 3D desktop effects work fast enough (and are better integrated than compiz+KDE 3).

However, there are a couple of show stoppers:

Suspend and hibernate crash hard (power cycle hard) when there are SD/CF cards inserted. This appears (after a bit of digging) to be the eject action during shutdown. The only fix is to not do this which makes me uneasy about filesystem integrity and breaks automatic remounting on awakening.
Webcam driver has been dropped as a separate driver pending inclusion in the uvcvideo core drivers - unfortunately this doesn't work yet.

Fair enough - back to OpenSuse 11.0 but I miss KDE 4.3. The version of KDE 4 that came with 11.0 was the .0 or .1 release which was frankly slow and nasty - so I have been using KDE 3+compiz. Upgrading KDE was not altogether trivial...

Toshiba NB100

2010-05-01T11:36:00.000+01:00

I've just acquired a Toshiba NB100 - it was cheap. OpenSuse 11.2 went on quite easily and seems to work quite well though I have not tested it thoroughly yet. I took the plunge with KDE 4.4 and it seems to be quite nice now - the whole things starts up quickly and 3D effects work well (better integrated than KDE 3.5 + Compiz) though wobbly windows aren't quite as nifty as compiz. I find the desktop plane/expo features invaluable working on a small screen.

Good Points:

Upgradable to 2GB RAM
Network and VGA ports on the back of the unit
Opens flat
Dismantled it to put in a bigger HDD - it seems well built
- Big plate dissipates heat across the back of the keyboard keeping it cool and thus quiet
Three full size USB ports

Not so good points:

Case has to be opened to get at anything other than the RAM - and it's a fairly major operation
...in particular, swapping hard drives is a big dismantling job
No obvious spare ports/pads inside for easy modding
Battery sticks out at the back - but that does stop it tipping when the screen's right back

MSI K8N Master2

2010-01-12T16:25:00.000Z

Are there any 2GB DIMMS that work in all 6 slots of the MSI K8N Master2?

The spec says it supports up to 12GB of RAM but all the QVL docs only rate it for 4 2GB DIMMS. I can put in 6 (decent, HP server pulls) and it counts up to 12Gb but keels over when it tries to boot. Clocking down to DDR 333 or even 266 makes no difference. All the DIMMS memtest86 fine in other motherbords.

I suspect the DIMM VRM's don't have the grunt to power a full complement of 2GB sticks.

Opteron BIOS Support

2010-01-12T15:30:00.000Z

My home servers are primarily Opteron 2XX-based.

It seems that support for the OEM Opterons (OSP2xx, OST2xx) in BIOSes is somewhat patchy. Based on the boards I've seen Tyan and MSI don't support them in their public BIOSes (Tiger K8WE, K8N Master2, K8T Master2) but SuperMicro does (H8DAE). These CPU's will work but the ACPI P-States aren't published by the BIOS so Cool'n'Quiet/Powernow doesn't work. The SuperMicro will even take two Opterons with different power profiles - say an OSP275 and an OSA275 and correctly handle their different P-state voltages.

Since these CPU's are turning up cheaply on eBay this is worth remembering. I have a couple of OSP's in my Iwill DK8N since it doesn't do Cool'n'Quiet so the reduced 68W power envelope matters.

BTW If your K8N Master2 conks out when you enable Cool'n'Quiet you need to do this mod.

Joy of ESX

2009-11-17T12:07:00.000Z

On to bigger things for a bit - I've been setting up virtual machine servers for work and, in parallel, something similar on a home build.

I run VMWare Workstation 6.X on the U810 and have run Workstation and/or VMWare Server 1.X on various home machines for some time (since Workstation V2.X in fact). In general, VMWare has performed well for me both for hosting dev environments but also a multi-server home environment. As a result, it was a no brainer to go for it for the work build - to replace an ageing GSX Server of some antiquity.

The work server came pre-built with VMWare ESX 3.X as requested but had sat around for a bit before we got it installed so by then we had our 4.0 upgrade keys. 3.X had an annoying dependence a Windows box with Active Directory on to do basic VM maintenence but 4.X has an improved web interface that meant we could ditch the Windows (we don't need HA/clustering the way VMWare does it).

OK, so we install 4.X and discover that EMC has thoughfully removed the raw disk access feature - which is a bit of a pain as I have a 48-disk array that I wanted to mount as raw-disks and use ZFS on a VM rather than a RAID controller. The functionality is still there but it requires manual hackery of disks which is not what I want in a production system. Nuts - time to buy a storage controller.

Since the Web interface on 4.X looked reasonable, I thought it made sense to upgrade my home system to VMWare Server 2.X which is free but sports the same Web interface - and it does raw drives! I built it on a new install on OpenSuse 11.0 - with a pair of 4GB CF cards as the boot drive (mirrored using linux md) - which made for useful re-use of the flash optimisations I did on the U810. For personal use, I rather like hosted virtual environments on Linux - I can use Compiz/Expo configured with a to view all my VM's consoles, live - zooming in to any one to work. Great when you're working on multi-server apps.

Unfortunately, I could not get the Web interface to run reliably - it would lock up on Windows or Linux clients, sometimes not come up at all, the server process would die unexpectedly - looking at the VMWare forums it appears that this is an unfixed "feature". Server 1.X with it's native client worked fine but was getting long in the tooth. Time to look elsewhere.

Enter Virtualbox - which is missing several features of VMWare (64-bit VM's on non-VT/AMD-V processors, Windows 98 guest support, Web interface) but, to compensate has a few other nice features - RDP access to VM's, working admin console and, most recently, live migration and HA features in the free version. It also takes up around 100MB of space rather than 300+MB which makes things less tight on the CF cards.

So, nothing is perfect - it's just which annoyances you have to put up with.

U810 Gripe

2009-10-17T12:10:00.000+01:00

One thing that really annoys me about the U810 keyboard is the arrow key mapping. Normally, I have no problem with it but it really spoils Nethack - I could reverse the mappings but then the original assignments are pretty useful key as well. Bah!

Rendang

2009-08-20T21:46:00.002+01:00

This is a dry beef curry from Malaysia that packs a bit of a punch. Best with a lot of rice! Also great hot or cold as part of Nasi Lemak for breakfast - ideally eaten outside overlooking the Indian Ocean or South China Sea!

500g cubed beef (this is not a long slow cook so better, leaner cuts work best)
500ml thin coconut milk

1 medium onion finely chopped
8 tbsp tamarind water (or lemon juice at a pinch)
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt

2 tsp finely chopped fresh galangal (or 1 level tsp dried)
2 tsp finely chopped fresh ginger (or 1 level tsp dried)
4 cloves finely chopped garlic
15-20 dried red chillies (or 4 tbsp crushed red chillies)
1 tbsp coriander powder
½ tsp ground cumin
1 lemon grass stem

Blend together the second set of ingredients into a smooth paste - adding a little of the coconut milk if necessary
Combine all the ingredients in a heat proof casserole and boil until half the liquid has evaporated
Reduce heat and simmer (or place in a low/medium oven) for 30 minutes until the meat is tender
Consume with caution

Adapted somewhat from the original Mrs Lee's Cookbook - there is a new revised version out that may be worth a look.

Bearnaise Variations

2009-07-28T10:34:00.000+01:00

Bearnaise sauce is great, but it really does have to be freshly made even though it's a bit awkward. Stuff from jars/packets etc. is a long way from reality, the amount of chemicals/additional ingredients required to stabilise the sauce for storage is quite scary.

Anyway, I like intense flavours so here is a variation with a little more "poke" that goes well with fish, rare steak and asparagus. It's also a deep orange colour that is visually quite striking.

2 tsp crushed red chillies - or two whole chillies, bruised (dried or fresh)
10 bruised peppercorns
2 tbsp finely chopped shallots
4 tbsp red wine vinegar
8 tbsp red wine
3 egg yolks
8oz (225g) butter in small cubes (salted is OK, or you can use unsalted and adjust later)
Salt
Lemon juice

Place chillies, peppercorns, shallots, vinegar and red wine in a pan
Bring to boil and reduce to approx one third volume
Start to heat the water in a double boiler until just below boiling - do not allow the water to boil in the double boiler or the sauce will curdle
Strain through a fine mesh into the top pan of a double boiler but DO NOT put the pan in the double boiler yet, the reduction must cool off a bit first
With a wire whisk, whip the egg yolks into the reduction until fluffy (the colour will lighten as this happens)
Now place the pan into the double boiler and add the cubes of butter gradually continuing to whisk them in as they melt. The sauce will thicken and become velvety as the butter emulsifies
Adjust to taste with salt and lemon juice
The sauce can be kept warm for serving with a little melted butter on to to stop it skinning - mix the butter in just before serving

The sauce is fine as it is but you can add some finely chopped chives or a little smoked paprika as variations.

Drop Scones

2009-07-27T23:57:00.000+01:00

Basically, these are like scotch pancakes but are technically scones because the butter is rubbed into the flour to begin with - though I use a lazy method. This recipe I inherited from my mum with some minor variations. There is also an obvious geekiness to the recipe (at least in imperial units)...

4 oz self raising flour
2 oz sugar
1 egg
½ oz butter
¼ cup milk
1/8 cup water
splash of vanilla or lemon zest

Melt butter in microwave (10 secs on max. ought to do it)
Stir in flour till it resembles fine breadcrumbs
Stir in sugar
Add egg and water and stir to a stiff paste (doing this properly gets the lumps out quite effectively)
Add milk and vanilla/lemon zest and blend to a smooth batter
Drop dessertspoonfuls (2 tsp) onto a hot lightly greased pan/griddle preheated on medium heat
Flip after a couple of minutes when the bubbles begin to appear on the surface
These are sweet enough to eat as is - otherwise butter and/or syrup is OK too.
Recipe makes 12-14 scones, but it's easy to double :-)

Use dark brown sugar for a more treacly finish (better with vanilla than lemon).

Kingspec SSD and back to OpenSuSE 11.0

2009-07-22T15:37:00.000+01:00

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:

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

2009-07-20T21:05:00.000+01:00

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.

Poppadoms

2009-07-17T16:06:00.000+01:00

Ordinary poppadoms can be cooked in a microwave quite successfully. Just brush either side sparingly with a little vegetable oil and pop them in for 20-30 seconds on maximum power.

OpenSUSE 11.1 on the U810 Revisited

2009-06-08T22:17:00.000+01:00

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

2009-06-06T21:01:00.001+01:00

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

Potato Skins

2009-05-14T14:51:00.001+01:00

Potatoes now seem to come lovingly washed and polished from the supermarket and selected for relatively blemish free skins. As a result, I tend to leave the skin on for things like roast potatoes (Maris Piper's of course) and even chips. However, you really do need to peel them when making mash as stray bits of skin really do make for a rather interesting texture.

It does seem a shame to waste a pile of otherwise clean potato skins since they are rather tasty. However, as they're really leftovers I don't want to spend a lot of effort. This is what I've come up with...

A pile of potato peelings (from enough potatoes for four people)
1 tsp olive oil
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
Squirt of lemon juice
Microwave bacon crisper

Let the peelings dry a little
Toss them with the other ingredients, making sure they are well mixed
Lay the peelings evenly on the crisper in a single layer so they rest on the ridges
Microwave for approx 6 minutes on maximum power (800W). Ovens vary widely so try for 5 minutes and then add 30 second increments until the skins are browned.
The skins will come out soft and turn crisp as they cool.
You can use an ordinary plate but you will probably need to more oil to prevent sticking and you will need to turn the skins half way through.

Fat

2009-05-06T21:49:00.000+01:00

Fat and cholesterol are the big bogeymen of the dietary world but eliminating them from your diet entirely is not a good idea unless you wish to have a really miserable existence. As with many things, however, moderation is good.

A number of essential vitamins are fat-soluble (A, D, E and K). Your body can only absorb them when there is some fat in the diet to act as transportation as food passes through the alimentary tract. The body also uses fatty material in the liver to store reserves of these vitamins. Taking these vitamins as supplements, however, can be dangerous as fat soluble vitamins are not washed out of the body in the urine as water-soluble vitamins are. As a result, levels can build up until toxicity effects occur.
Cholesterol is part of the steroid chemistry of the body - note the "sterol" part of it's name. Other quite important steroids are testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone - you'll want the biochemistry involving these to work properly.
Many flavourings are fat-soluble too - the essential oils of many herbs and spices are prime examples. One important part of the cooking process if drawing these oils and fat-soluble flavourings out of the seasonings and dispersing them into the other components of the dish. Neglecting this fact explains why some diet recipies taste a little flat - often a very small amount of oil can improve the flavour markedly. Oils also tend to cling to food rather than seeping away or evaporating as water does, binding the flavours to the solid components of the food. An oil spray is a very good way of dispersing a small amount of oil throughout a dish during preparation.
Fats/oils also have one other important property in terms of cooking - they have a much higher boiling point than water. This allows food to reach much higher temperatures and a variety of chemical changes such as caramelisation or browning can occur, giving food that cooked flavour. Again, many overzealously fat-reduced recipies exhibit a "raw" or "boiled" flavour as a result of neglecting this point. Often this can be worked around by judicous application of "dry" heat - for example, roasting spices before incorporation or flashing food under the grill for a bit. Again a little oil spray can also work wonders.

Coriander

2009-05-05T21:01:00.000+01:00

I am one of those people who hate the flavour of coriander leaves (or cilantro as it is known in the America's). It is, apparently, a genetic thing. However, the fact that this herb has become "trendy" and now seems to be sprinkled in or on everything without regard its culinary utility is rather annoying.

I don't have a problem with the seeds or root and enjoy curry as much as the next person (or possibly rather more). It's interesting to note that growing up in SE Asia in the seventies or living in the UK in the eighties, curries didn't seem to come smothered in the vile green stuff but come the mid-to-late nineties it's everywhere. I also have a number of Indian and SE Asian cookery books from earlier times and the ingredient is suspiciously absent from the majority of recipes. I think the very idea of a green garnish on curries is a Western affectation which should be eradicated as soon as possible - but maybe I am biased.

Here are some haiku...

Pineapple

2009-05-05T20:39:00.000+01:00

I really don't like these idiot pineapple devices (I don't have anything against Lakeland - they do do a lot of really good stuff too!) but they don't really save that much time compared to just using a good knife and waste a lot of pineapple. For starters, on a good ripe pineapple - the core is actually really nice and sweet without a lot of the acidity that the rest of the flesh does. Maybe this device is for those people who buy cheap crud - in which case they might as well buy a tin and stop pretending. If it's unripe, sit it on a windowsill with some bananas for a couple of days.

The way to peel a pineapple is quite simple - starting with a good, long sharp knife - I like the large Kitchen Devil Roast Meat and Bread Knife.

Top and tail the pineapple. If you sit the top in some moist compost it will root quite readily but you'll be lucky to get fruit in the UK climate.
Stand the pineapple on one of its (now) flat ends and shave strips of skin off the sides. YOu want the outer skin off but don't worry about the regular rows of "spines". These are actually the floral remanants on the fruit and have little sesame sized seeds at the bottom.
Pick up the bald pineapple in one hand and remove the spines by cutting diagonal shallow V's abut 5mm deep around the fruit. Follow the natural lines of the spines and keep going in the same direction. Not only do you get an atttractive finish to the fruit but the most flavoursome flesh is between the spines. Sometimes you see little dark seeds in the flesh which you can flick out with the end of the knife.
Finally, take 1/4-1/2 a teaspoon of salt and rub it into the pineapple - the enhances the flavour no end and takes a little of the acid edge off. Wait a few minutes before eating the let the salt dissolve and penetrate.

DSL Linux on the Omnibook 800CT - Part 3

2009-04-18T15:24:00.001+01:00

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

2009-04-18T11:45:00.000+01:00

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

2009-04-16T09:30:00.000+01:00

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

2009-04-14T10:59:00.000+01:00

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).

Download the DSL iso and burn to CD

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.)

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

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

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:

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

sudo su gets to a root prompt

dslinstall brings up an installation menu

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):

iwconfig eth0 essid MYSSID key XXXX...

ifconfig eth0 up

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

mydsl-wget XFree86.dsl system

mydsl-load XFree86.dsl

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
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

2009-04-07T15:30:00.000+01:00

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...

Joys of Atheros

2009-04-06T12:57:00.000+01:00

Have been playing with the Nokia 5800 and Joikuspot which turns the 5800 into an ad hoc wireless 3/3.5G router which is nice, very, very nice.

Except that ad hoc on the U810's Atheros is distinctly non-trivial. With the madwifi (now moved to http://madwifi-project.org) drivers, the athX devices are VAP's (virtual access points) created from the root device, wifi0 using wlanconfig . The important thing to realise is that the athX device only supports a particular wireless mode. By default (in OpenSuSE 11.0, anyway) this is sta which is workstation infrastructure mode and requires an access point. The Joikuspot network shows up in KNetworkManager but you can't connect.

Fair enough, you can create another VAP to support adhoc mode as madwifi allows you to have multiple VAP's which allows you to neat things like use your U810 as a wireless repeater or gateway. Except there's a bug - the one sort of VAP you that doesn't play nicely in multiple VAP configurations is adhoc. And judging from project discussions fixing adhoc is not exactly top of the priority list since it's not "enterprise" and anyway we're meant to be moving to the fully open ath5k driver anyway.

The alternative then, is to destroy the default sta mode VAP and create the adhoc one so it is the only one. To their credit, the madwifi website does document this all quite clearly although it does confuse KnetworkManager a little. Then all is good except, of course, I can't roam and connect to the vast majority of infrastructure mode access points out there until I reverse the process. I did start setting up a couple of scripts to switch between the two modes when I encountered another issue with adhoc VAP's which is that every so often I was getting a hard lockup and I mean power-cycle hard.

So it's off to Bluetooth DUN profile tethering for me for a bit (shame the 5800 doesn't have a PAN profile...). Which might turn out for the best, since Bluetooth power consumption on both the 5800 and U810 is much lower than for wifi. Not as elegant though IMHO :(.

P.S. ath5k doesn't even recognise the card.

P.P.S. I tried swapping the Atheros for an Intel Wireless PCI-E card in the U810. No dice - the BIOS looks for the Atheros and doesn't seem to enable the PCI-E slot if it's not there.

Linux Kernel Parameters

2009-03-25T14:38:00.000Z

More a reminder to myself. ..

Installing OpenSUSE 11.0 on a SuperMicro H8DAE seems to hang loading amd_pata (or just after) but this is fixed with a boot parameter insmod=amd74xx which loads the correct driver in advance.

Nokia 5800 - MTP

2009-03-24T11:45:00.000Z

OK, I've got a 5800 as a new phone - hopefully so I can use it a bluetooth 3G modem for the U810. Now to get it running with Linux. The question is where to start as there are so many bits to get working - Bluetooth, MTP, SymcML, 3G Modem...

Since it's the XPressMusic let's start with media synchronisation. Plug in the USB cable and select Media Transfer mode which should bring it up in MTP mode. I've had Amarok working with a Creative Zen in MTP mode so this should work - create an MTP device in the Amarok Configuration and click Connect. No such luck, hmmm.

The Packman repository has a new libmtp which is worth a try. Uninstall the old libmtp, Amarok and all the dependencies so we start clean. Then select libmtp8 and Amarok - things are looking better but a couple of things to note...

The 5800 takes an age to respond to MTP connection setup so be patient. Running mtp-detect will appear to hang for 10-20 seconds before dumping out device capability info. Amarok does the same.
If you change the 5800 USB connection mode (say from PC Suite to Media Transfer) while it is connected then libmtp/udev get very confused. Best to disconnect/reconnect to do this.
PC Suite mode seems to be an MTP mode as well, though with a different device ID (0421:0154) than Media Transfer (0421:0155)
My 5800 came with a load of guff on the Micro SDHC card which you probably want to clean off (dump a copy somewhere just in case...)
Selecting ring tones seems to want to list every MP3 on the phone as an option which is very tiresome when you've got 1000+ songs on the thing. Best to configure your profiles with the SDHC card unplugged or before you've loaded up.

All not not perfect though. Amarok fails to transfer files to the 5800 for no obvious reason. I can connect, list the files on the device, copy and remove them but not transfer to new files. I can however, use mtp-connect to transfer a file and it works fine. Mysterious. FWIW libmtp is 0.3.3 and Amarok is 1.4.10.

I have just put the new V20 firmware on the 5800 - many irritiations are fixed/improved and perhaps MTP is slightly less glacial.

Another Thing...

2008-12-12T11:36:00.000Z

Beagle also bit the dust - it's not the performance maiming monster that Windows' background indexing is but I still don't need something chuntering away using power and generating extra flash writes in the background. It is noticeable on a 6-800MHz - grep does the trick for me when I need it.

U810 Flash

2008-12-10T21:21:00.000Z

I now have the Transcend 32GB CF card as the main storage with OpenSuSE 11.0 on it - partitioned as 4GB root, 25GB /srv and 1GB swap (to allow suspend-to-disk). Install was relatively painless with the caveats already mentioned. Some things to note...

I plan to use an internal sacrificial USB flash disk (with any luck!) ultimately for swap and tmp space to keep the write load on the CF card down.
To simplify this I have created a tempfs for /tmp so temporary files are written to RAM and then swap - thus I only have to deal with moving swap to USB. To do this, add the following to /etc/fstab:

none /tmp tmpfs size=1G,noatime 0 0
Symlink /var/tmp and /usr/tmp to /tmp (technically this might be a little suspect in terms of security but this is a personal laptop, not a server)
/var and /home might need some consideration as a whole but not right now
Partitions are ext2 with noatime and noacl to help keep flash activity low
As mentioned before, Transcend 133x CF seems to write at about the same speed as the Toshiba HDD and read around twice as fast. Certainly booting and return from hibernation are noticebly faster.
Power consumption drops quite usefully with the CF card - with the HDD I never saw less than 7000mW (based on KPowersave readins). Now I've seen under 6000mW (with WiFi off) and nearly 6 hours runtime.

I've been rooting round under the bottom panel with a view to fixing an internal USB connector for my sacrificial scratch flash. armed with a multimeter it appears that the second PCI-E connector is not powered up - some fuses are missing but the adjacent power planes are also unpowered. There is, no doubt, something like a regulator that requires a pull up/down to get the power planes energised.

Anyway, looking around elsewhere doesn't turn up a lot of options for voltage sources (I am restricting myself to what I can reach under the bottom panel without further dismantling). I am considering using the SD card power supply voltage since the contacts are easy to reach and Fujitsu has opted for the uppoer end of the SD voltage spec and given it 3.5V.

3.5V should power 3.3V nominal electronics just fine. Many USB devices take the 5V supply and regulate it down to 3.3V immediately. I can either bypass the regulator and run the devices slightly over nominal or hope the regulator can cope with a voltage differential that small (possibly undervolting slightly). Now I just need some nice fine wire...

Mini PCI-E Disappointment

2008-11-26T22:18:00.001Z

Looking at this thread it appears that the second set of mini-pci-e pads are only actually active in USB mode. Looks like the USB connector is sensible the way to go.

The Omnibook 300

2008-11-13T13:15:00.000Z

In 1993 HP produced what can arguably be considered the grandfather of the modern netbook, the Omnibook 300. Also voted one of PC Worlds greatest PC's ever - not that I endorse their opinions in any way shape or form!

For the day, this packed a lot of technology into a small form factor: 16.3 x 28.2 x 3.6 cm, 1310g. Compare this with the EEE PC at 16.5 x 22.5 x 3.5cm, 900g.

386SXLV 20MHz Ultra low Voltage processor
2-6MB RAM
10MB Flash disk (12V Linear flash to begin with, CF/PCMCIA compatibility later) but it could hold 3 such cards
OS/Apps in ROM (DOS 6.2/Windows 3.1/Word/Excel)
640 x 480 16 Level grayscale 9-inch un-backlit display
Built in fax-modem
Serial, parallel, IR ports
Real instant on - static processor architecture could be stopped mid-clock-cycle and the RAM self-refreshed

...and the HP "paw" mouse which I rather like. To the extent that I have had the Omnibook 600's and 800's that succeeded it, too.

But the killer - 9 hours battery life from a 1600MaH 4.8v NiMH battery pack. At a pinch you could also drop in 4 AA alkalines too (or modern NiMH AA's for nearer 15 hours!)

A bit of calculation shows that this thing draws less than a watt. I have a portable book-sized solar panel that is rated for 2.2W. Hmmmm.

BTW, the 3 linear flash cards (Sundisk SDP10's) I have - which have no wear levelling or error correction - still work fine, 15 years on. Admittedly, they require a PCMCIA 12V supply which tends to cause modern Cardbus slots a bit of apoplexy but probably indicates that the bits are fairly soldily written. ROM-based DOS/Win 3.1 doesn't exactly pummel the drives with writes either.

Transcend 32GB 133x

2008-11-07T13:54:00.000Z

Preliminary tests with the card shows that Transcend have been very conservative with the speed rating of this card. The WRITE speed is 133x but the read speed is more like 300x. This works out at about twice the read speed of the Toshiba drive in the U810 - this is going to get interesting...

More on Compact Flash and the U810

2008-10-31T13:54:00.000Z

OK, it seems that the ATA LIF connector on Toshiba drives (like the U810 has) are not entirely compatible with ATA ZIF connectors (like some iPods have). No idea why - but it makes a difference when looking for CF-ATA adapters.

The one I had before was ZIF and wouldn't work. I thought it was the CF Fixed/Removable problem but I was wrong. I saw other people with the U1010 - which, for whatever reason, uses a pin-style connector (very like compact flash) for at least some of its drives - have no problems with CF cards with Removable mode.

So, it must be the adapter and I need to find one that is Toshiba LIF rather than iPod ZIF. Another trawl around ebay nets me an alternative mode, the MW-CF18ZIFADP which is orange and only seems to come from Taiwan. I know it has ZIF in the name and says iPOD compatible but in very small letters it also says "compatible with Toshiba". I now have one and it works - with the additional benefit that it has a metal shell that make it exactly the same size as a Tosh drive and thus fits snugly in the U810 without rattling about.

The ZIF/LIF difference is subtle though - both work fine in my ICY-DOCK USB caddy for 1.8" drives, just not with the U810 ribbon cable - go figure!

Now, it's great to hear about all these 64GB and 100GB CF cards but, quite frankly, I'm not seeing any. Looks like the 133x Transcend is the one I can get. It's good for around 20 MB/s read/write which is not bad in comparision with the Tosh drives which are faster at peak but way slower when you get to the inner tracks. There are cheaper Adata and Peak 32Gb cards but these have a write spead of around 3 MB/s and read at 10 MB/s which is pretty glacial. Pretec have announced 266x and faster cards at this size but I've yet to see many for sale. I guess when you can charge 2-3 times as much for the same stuff in SSD format it's pretty obvious where the effort goes.

Non-Portable Computers

2008-10-20T12:56:00.000+01:00

May day job is working on Digital Archives and Libraries - when I say non-portable this is what I mean.

..though that's a bit old-hat - now working on the next generation.

Will be scooting over to the USA at the end of November for PASIG so may do a bit of shopping then - depends on whose currency sinks lower though!

U810 and Zaurus

2008-10-20T12:38:00.001+01:00

It's been quiet for a while - RS still don't have the PCI-E connectors - they have the 3.9mm high ones but not the 5.9mm ones I require. And I have to buy 5-off which is a tad expensive. If I do go this route I would like to try one of the EEE PC SSD cards in the slot - conics.net have some interesting possibilities but i know enough EEE owners to borrow a stock one for testing.

I am in two minds, however, so I have also bought some surface mount USB connectors from Maplin since the BIOS supports boot-from-USB. Now just need to get some time.

I have a Zaurus (Akita) as well and I've now moved all my stuff off onto the U810 so I can play with it a bit more - I'm currently using Cacko but feel the urge for a full X distro - I curently use pdaxQTrom (thanks Meanie!) but the X->QT hack is a little tardy and my Z doesn't overclock well.

I've not got a CF card working in the U810 yet but haven't really been trying - Toshiba have now released a 120GB 5mm drive which is now tempting me even more - if I can find one! Couple that with a 32GB USB or PCI-E SSD and things start to get interesting.

Elisa revisted

2008-08-14T09:31:00.000+01:00

It appears that upgrading Elisa from the Packman packages is a little hit-and-miss. The best thing to do is:

Uninstall Elisa and Pigment (use Yast Search and uninstall everything with "elisa" or "pigment" in the name!)
Erase contents of /usr/lib/python/site-packages/elisa
Install the new Elisa (and Elisa-with-plugins) packages which should pull everything else through via dependencies
Also a good idea to erase elisa.db and .thumbnails from your .elisa-xxx configuration directory

Then wait a while after starting as the media scanner goes off and indexes/thumbnails everything - this makes the old U810 grind a bit.

More U810 thoughts

2008-08-08T11:21:00.000+01:00

The U810/U1010 has pads for two Mini PCI-e slots underneath the bottom cover but most only have one in place. Looking at the dissection photos on the Internet it seems that there are no chips or support components missing - just the socket - so it should be feasible to solder a new one in - the pads are easy to reach and the pitch isn't too small.

Getting said socket isn't too easy though - RS Components has them scheduled for October. It looks like the exploding demand for eee PC's and the like has drained the world's supply of Mini PCI-e sonnectors - later eee's also come with only one of two possible sockets in place.

The other alternative, in the same vein as many eee PC mods, is to tack a USB socket in place of the PCI-e connector (using the USB lines that are available on the PCI-e pads). That would be a nice place to put a USB key as an SSD or maybe a TV tuner... Now I just need to find a nice point I can source 5V from - with all the eee PC hacking out there I'm surprised there hasn't been a bit of U810 activity in this area.

I have also got a Compact Flash to 1.8" ZIF convertor (off ebay) to try out using CF as an SSD alternative - slower but actually designed for low power consumption so may well benefit run-time. The first couple of CF cards I tried weren't recognised by the BIOS. To test that it wasn't the convertor I got hold of an Icy Dock USB caddy from Scan - obviously designed for displaced iPod drives! The cards worked fine in this mode - I suspect it is because most CF cards claim to be removable ATA devices and some BIOS's will only accept fixed devices. Transcend is one of the few manufacturers whose CF cards switch to "Fixed" mode when operating in IDE, rather than CF, mode so I'll get hold of one and try it. Sandisk, Kingston and Intuix are brands which do not - from experience. Under Linux you can use hdparm -i on a CF card to find out if it is Fixed or Removable mode.

Elisa 5.3 seems to be an awkward release to get up and running - I had to edit the source code (to bypass a "not implemented yet" error) to even get the main screen up so I'll park that for now until a later release.

Elisa, OpenSuSE fun

2008-07-23T15:05:00.000+01:00

Not really U810 specific but there are a few wrinkles to getting elisa working on OpenSuSE 11.0 with the packman packages. The elisa chaps seem to have got the bit between their teeth so this is for 0.5.2 - which may well be superceded and fixed by the time you read this. Anyway, installing the packages with yast results in a non-working situation so the following needs to be done...

Install IPython - not vital, but helpful for debugging since you can bring up a python shell inside elisa and poke around a bit
Install python-cssutils since it seems to have dropped out of the dependencies
You can purge twisted and go back to the yast-installed version since it now seems to be happy with latest version
Insert a __init__.py file into /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/elisa and /use/lib/python2.5/site-packages/elisa/plugins. This file can be hauled out of the source code in the tar file on the elisa download page.

Once this is done all works OK though it does seem to struggle on the U810 and will lock up some times on heavy activity. In these respects the 0.3.5 release was better - but there is a lot of work under way so we shall see.

Update

2008-07-14T10:15:00.000+01:00

No, I haven't gone away - it's just that I'm actually using the U810 for real work rather than messing about with it. It works well enough to be very effective - I now have to stop pressing the Super (Windows to the plebs out there) key when using cursor keys on conventional keyboards.

Lots of things to do...

Compile the keyboard lights driver
Elisa 0.5.1 is out
VMWare server - yes it works OK and the efficient memory page recovery means 1GB is not too onerous
Patch mesa with the xrandr rotation fix
Look at coordinate rotation for the mouse - I think this is something xrandr should do too but doesn't seem to

U810 Elisa and another resource

2008-07-02T10:00:00.001+01:00

This chap has cooked up a tablet mouse driver and a patch for the keyboard lights - nice work - though I disagree about what to do with the Ctrl-Alt-Del button!

Elisa now works - it doesn't like python-twisted 8.10 which is what comes out-of-the-box with OpenSuSE 11.0. Simply go into Yast|Software Management and remove all the twisted-* packages (tell it to ignore all the dependency warnings, we're going to put it back!). Then download the 2.50 version from the twisted site into a directory of your choice.

Unzip it, then go into the top level directory and do a make build followed by a make install and there you are.

~/.elisa/elisa.conf even has a touchscreen setting which lets you whizz through lists depending on the speed you stroke the screen - though the poor U810 struggles a bit when you go too fast.

Beware that elisa defaults to having it's caches/databases in ~/.elisa so if you want to share it between user accounts you'll want to adjust that to avoid duplication. The Album cover retrieval from Amazon is a bit hit and miss too.

OpenSuSE 11.0

2008-06-29T08:33:00.000+01:00

OK, I was going to wait for OpenSuSE 11.1 but I weakened and am putting 11.0 on now. :)

First surprise - the touchscreen works during install - albeit with a slight scaling issue, possibly because the install runs in 800x600 stretched mode but very promising.

11.0 will help as the code I found for the keyboard lights is for a later kernel than 10.3 stock. If I'm going have to do a kernel recompile (which I haven't needed to do since 1998 with Slackware!) I might as well go for a new OS install (which will almost certainly take less time than a kernel rebuild on the U810). It will also clean up the cruft from various experiments...

Banshee - whose existence in a market with Amarok et al already there seems a bit of a mystery. Plus it requires an unbelievable amount of Gnome bits to work.
The gstreamer dependency mess between OpenOffice and Elisa

Now the fun and games begin...

Wired networking fails to work unless you add the following boot parameters to /boot/grub/menu.lst

pnpbios=off pnpacpi=off

The autodetected touchscreen settings seem to be uncalibrate-able so the evtouch installation needs to be done. However, the build for OpenSuSE 11.0 has the calibration parameters in out.txt mixed up - they should be renamed as follows: x0/y0 -> x6/y6, 1 -> 7, 2-> 8, 6 -> 0, 7 -> 1, 8 -> 2
Display brightness works out of the box although the keyboard buttons only move it up/down one notch (other programmatic changes work fine)
Suspend to/from disk works fine
Package management is a LOT faster which makes fiddling a whole lot more fun.
Installation detects the Atheros wireless and inserts the ath5k module but it doesn't appear to work. The madwifi repsoitory doesn't contain a correct package for the kernel I'm running (latest patch) so I need to compile it. Ho hum, now the download link for source doesn't work from the OpenSuSE Atheros page - what I want is the latest trunk version and all is well.
Elisa is now upset by the new version of python and/or it's libraries (damn!)

U810 Elisa

2008-06-26T10:39:00.000+01:00

I am giving up on MythTV for now - although the core works quite well, the plug-ins are too inconsistent in terms of input handling at the moment. For example, some keys are inherited from the core and others not - and the input mapping plug-in seems to only cover some of the aspects. Mouse/touchscreen behaviour also seems to vary with plug-in so the whole affair, while usable, is rather unsatisfying. I think more time is needed for some of the core features to make it to the plug-ins so will revisit it later.

As another aside - I don't understand why Gallery, Video and Music all have different navigational interfaces when they all provide the same basic functionality. Oh well.

Looking around I found elisa which looks promising if a little ..erm.. pre-release at the moment but often OSS projects are quite usable pre-release and there has been some good press. Sooooo - how to install...

The PackMan repository has a package but before we go ahead, it has a dependency on a more recent version of gstreamer than is shipped with openSuSE 10.3 which is in the PackMan rather than the OpenSuSE repository. So go into Yast and remove the old gstreamer010-* packages. There will be dependency squeals for OpenOffice and Amarok but ignore them - we're going to put it back! Now we can install elisa which should also pull down all the updated gstreamer packages too. One bug - the elisa packages dependencies will only pull down the elisa-plugins-good - it also needs elisa-plugins-bad (naughty!) but you'll have to add that manually.

OK, elisa fires up fine and looks nice but it doesn't yet have configuration within the app itself so it's off the edit files with a text editor...

...but it does seems to play nice with the touchscreen.

U810 MythTV

2008-06-23T01:17:00.000+01:00

I have just found mxk which should allow me to use the mouse-stick as a cursor pad for MythTV in tablet mode. This makes things a whole lot easier!

U810 Tablet Buttons

2008-06-21T23:14:00.000+01:00

I've settled on some keyboard events for the tablet buttons (Fn is Sticky):

Down/Left: KEY_PAGEDOWN (rewind in MythTV)
Fn-Down/Left: KEY_HOME (previous track in MythTV)
Up/Right: KEY_PAGEUP (ffwd in MythTV)
Fn-Up/Right: KEY_END (next track in MythTV)

C-Alt-D: KEY_ESC (previous screen in MythTV)
Fn-C-Alt-D: ?? Hibernate

/: ??
Fn-/: ?? Keyboard LED toggle
//: KEY_MEDIA (play/pause in MythTV?)
Fn-//: ?? (Menu in MuyhTV?)
Screen: ??
Fn-Screen: ?? Invert Screen toggle (since XRandR-Intel-compiz combo fails on rotate +/- 90)

There are a number of KEY_* events in the linux source but not all of them seem to make it though to keyboard mappings in console or X mode - some experimentation required, obviously.

U810 MythTV

2008-06-21T21:59:00.000+01:00

The U810 is just asking to be used as a media player in the Archos vein and MythTV looks like a good way to go. I don't want to lose OpenSuSE but fortunately the MythTV guys have a good page on getting it working over OpenSuSE that's a good start. Here's what I did...

Skip partitioning/configuration and go to section 3.2 and do the 1-click KDE install
Add the mythtv user (3.3)
Skip all the hardware we don't have and go the section 4 and configure the backend (well sections 4.1-4.3 anyway - and I didn't do detailed setup as that's for PVR/TV functions)
Skip mtoto section 5 and install MythVideo, MythGallery, MythMusic and MythWeather (why not?)
Skip the rest

However, there are a few wrinkles with MythTV for this particular application...

It's basically a MediaPC model so TV and PVR functions dominate - fortunately it installs fine without a TV tuner. Then I went into /usr/share/mythtv and there I found the menu layouts: library.xml contains the button definitions for starting MythVideo, MythImage and MythMusic. I edited mainmenu.xml, commented out the TV functions (Watch TV, Watch Recordings and Manage Recordings) and replaced them with the button definitions from library.xml, removing the, now redundant, button link to the media library too.
I found that images in MythImage were't displaying with the correct aspect ratio - turns out I had the DisplaySize in the Monitor section of /usr/X11/xorg.conf set to default values which assume a 4:3 15-inch screen. However. if you change them to the actual values (124 72), all the fonts become huge as X attempts to display them at the correct size. Doubling up the figures (248 144) gives a more reasonable look and ensures the aspect ratio comes out right for photos.
I found the volume toggle produced a nice display on screen but did nothing. In Setup, set the Mixer Device to ALSA:default and Mixer Controls to Master.
Don't try using OpenGL as a drawing engine - it is truly glacial.
In the default, window-manager-less version, playing video (which launches mplayer behind the scenes) results in a loss of input focus so keypresses/mouse clicks have no effect. This means I need a non-intrusive window manager to sit behind it - TWM is too basic and I may be lazy and just use a pruned KDE as I have other things to hack now.
It's really designed for remote controls rather than touchscreens/mice so tends to expect button/keypress navigation. This is fine but in tablet mode we have only got 7 buttons and one of them is a shift-key so 12 functions tops. Pen gestures springs to mind as a way round that one.
It doesn't know about laptop to tablet switching. hibernation and powersaving.

This means I need to sort out the tablet mode buttons, XRandR screen switching and probably some sort on-screen keyboard facility before this will really fly.

U810 Touchscreen

2008-06-20T09:04:00.000+01:00

As martschie on the UMPC portal Forums has pointed out, the Touchscreen only misbehaves when AC power is plugged in. In battery mode it works fine - guess that means it's meant to be mobile.

Now a dilemma - do I carry on hacking away at OpenSuSE 10.3 or risk going to 11.0? Having had some issues with the *.0 releases for 8,9 and 10, I think I'll wait for 11.1. It sounds like some of the Lifebook U drivers may well be merged into mainline by then.

U810 Buttons and Touchscreen Part 3

2008-06-17T10:54:00.001+01:00

Now for the touchscreen.

Go into the BIOS and set the Touchscreen mode to TouchPanel rather than Tablet. This messes up Vista until you switch it back.
Install the x11-input-evtouch drivers from the OpenSuSE Tablet Page
Log into a text console as root and do init 3 to drop out of X
Create the following symlink in / (yes! silly bug in evtouch software!)
```
ln -s /usr/share/xf86-input-evtouch/empty_cursor.xbm .
```

Add the following to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:


Section "InputDevice"
Driver     "evtouch"
Identifier "TouchScreen[1]"
Option     "Device" "/dev/input/by-id/usb-Fujitsu_Component_USB_Touch_Panel-event-joystick"
Option     "SendCoreEvents" "On"
Option     "Calibrate" "1"
End Section

Add the following to the ServerLayout section in xorg.conf:
```
InputDevice "TouchScreen[1]" "SendCoreEvents"
```

Run the calibration procedure:


cd /usr/lib/xf86-input-evtouch
./calibrate.sh

On the first screen (white with 9 little crosses) move the pointer around the edges of the screen so that the readout gives good maximum/minimum values for the screen limits (in my case the coordinates went from around 500-15000). You'll notice that resposne is really rotten towards the top right - can't seem to fix that without resorting to hacking code.
Hit enter to go to the next phase which is calibrating for digitser unevenness. the top-left cross will turn red. Tap on it and the next cross should turn red - and so on. Due to the responsiveness prblem you probably can't tap on some X's. Left click on the mouse to go to the next one (right click to go back). After the last one you are unceremoniously dumped back at the command prompt.
You will find a text file called out.txt generated by the calibration software. We need to remove the bogus entries caused by the untappable points so open it up in an editor. The calibration offsets are the x0,y0-x8,y8 pairs (in the same order as the calibration X's, I believe) and should be around +/-20. If there are any out-of-range numbers try and interpolate between adjacent sensible values.
Open up xorg.conf and paste in the contents of the modified out.txt into the InputDevice section just after the Calibrate line. Then place a # before the Calibrate line to comment it out.
init 5 to restart X and enjoy (except for the top right insensitive spot).
If you're happy with the calibration delete the symlink in /

U810 Audio

2008-06-12T23:56:00.000+01:00

Two steps are required to get audio working nicely on the U810. Firstly, you need to drop out of X so you are at the login prompt and then switch to a console window.

Edit /etc/modprobe.d/sound so that the first line reads...


options snd-hda-intel model=fujitsu enable=1 index=0

Then restart the sound system (as root):


rcalsasound restart

Now switch back to the gui and login, then fire up KDE Control Centre ("Personal Settings" on my menu) and go to "Regional & Acessibility", then "Keyboard Layout". On the right of the panel you can choose the keyboard model - select a multimedia one (I chose Microsoft Wireless Multimedia). This tells KDE to expect multimedia key events.

Now the mixer works and the volume rocker takes it up/down and mutes with a press.

U810 Buttons and Touchscreen Part 2

2008-06-12T22:52:00.000+01:00

Have done some hacking to the fsc_btns code and now it can detect a U-series system using DMI and locate the button controller which gives me access to the three buttons at the bottom of the screen, the dedicated Ctrl-Alt-Del button and the Up-Fn-Down triplet by the mouse nub. Now I just need to decide which keycodes to assign to them and work out how to make the Fn button a sticky modifier key. Then I'll feed the code back to the sourceforge project.

While testing for scancodes and events to work out which key is which, I've verified that the volume control rocker generates the correct scancodes but the Fn-A/S/D screen controls generate nothing (so more work required then).

As audio volume doesn't work, the Intel audio config is obviously stuffed. There's a longish page in the OpenSuSE support database on this subject to be worked through

Editing code on the U810 has been quite a good exercise in getting used to the keyboard - to the extent that I find myself reaching for Alt-Space on a regular keyboard instead of Tab and trying to use shifted cursor keys. I do think the A-row could be moved over a few mm though (make the :; skinny and you have room for a slightly displaced skinny Tab too). Yes, I have seen the U2010 keyboard.

U810 Buttons and Touchscreen Part 1

2008-06-10T09:55:00.000+01:00

The Fujitsu touchscreen Lifebooks are Novell/SuSE certified so where are the drivers? They're not in the released mainstream OpenSuSE distro (10.3) but they have to be somewhere. A bit of digging gets me to the OpenSuSE Tablet PC pages which look rather promising - there's an evtouch package for the touchscreen and a Fujitsu button driver too. The T/P series tablets are mentioned but I'm hoping the U series will be covered too as I doubt Fujitsu would re-engineer a different mechanism unless they really had to. These drivers are currently listed as unsupported but I hope they make it into the mainstream 11.0 release or soon after.

Adding the OpenSuSE Tablet PC Repository to YAST allows us to pull down fsc_btns which looks like a good shot for a button driver (there's also a fair bit of Fujitsu-related activity in the Linux ACPI Project itself so this may be a stopgap). So I attempt to download it and discover it has a dependency on an earlier kernel than the one I have.

Okay, install the basic development packages and kernel source from the main repository and get the fsc_btns source from the SRPMS. Then proceed as follows...

cd /usr/src/linux
make cloneconfig
make modules prepare
make coffee, eat lunch :)
cd /usr/src/packages/SOURCES/fsc_btns
make
make install
modprobe fsc_btns
"No such device" :(

Okay, time to look at the source code then...

U810 Xorg Munging Part 2

2008-06-09T16:24:00.000+01:00

XRandR is a valuable feature for laptop and especially tablet users. It handles on-the-fly reconfiguration of Xorg including multiple screens, resolution and orientation changes. This, then is how we get internal/external monitor switching and screen rotation in response to system events (screen swivel etc.) and button presses (Fn A on the U810). Quite how we acquire these non-standard events and presses I will leave till later (if ever!) as these can always be invoked by more conventional methods.

The first thing to do is ensure that the Xorg driver allocates enough screen real-estate to handle multiple monitors. Apparently, the Intel embedded graphics can only handle 2048x2048 pixels with 3D accleration enabled so that's what I'll use - I like my compiz toys!

Open up /etc/X11/xorg.conf in your favourite editor and add the following to each SubSection "Display" within the Section "Screen".

Virtual 2048 2048

Actually, only the 24-bit depth really matters since I'm not likely to use the lower bit depths.

Now, dropping to a shell we can run xrandr and see what it thinks we have...


Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 600, maximum 2048 x 2048
VGA disconnected 1024x600+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 0mm x 0mm
1024x600       57.7*
LVDS connected 1024x600+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 0mm x 0mm
1024x600       57.7*+   60.0     60.0     60.0     60.0
800x600        60.3     60.0     56.2
768x576        60.0
640x480        59.9     60.0
VGA-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right)
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right)

Looks like the VGA output is tied to the screen (which is the LVDS one) and we don't have TV out so let's disable these in xorg.conf. Add the following sections...


Section "Monitor"
   Identifier      "VGA"
   Option          "Ignore" "True"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
   Identifier      "TV"
   Option          "Ignore" "True"
EndSection

Once we've plugged in an external monitor using the dock or the dongle we can run xrandr and see that the spurious VGA and TV settings have gone. Now we can do things like...


xrandr --output VGA-1 --mode 800x600 --right-of LVDS
xrandr --output VGA-1 --mode 1024x768 --same-as LVDS
xrandr --output VGA-1 --mode 1024x768 --below LVDS

Which gives us, respectively, a long desktop 1824x600 across the two monitors, mirrored outputs (though the U810 screen only shows the top 600 pixels), and a tall desktop 1024x1368. And we can also turn the LVDS off (--output LVDS --off, strangely enough!) and use just the external monitor which gives us the basic mechanism for laptop display switching.

It turns out the LVDS output on Intel graphics is actually the secondary screen so when you plug in an external monitor it becomes the primary screen so KDE puts the toolbar there and OpenOffice Impress needs to be used carefully in dual monitor mode.

Now logically, we should look at the --left, --right and --invert options which allow screen rotation on a tablet PC but unfortunately there is a bug in the current xorg Intel driver that causes screen updates to stop after changing orientation. There is a patch available so hopefully it will make it to the OpenSuSE repositories soon.

The HP 100LX

2008-06-06T14:58:00.000+01:00

Back in the early 90's, when HP was still an innovative company with decent US R&D and manufacturing operations, they produced several machines that effectively anticipated the whole UMPC thing years in advance. Through the luck of my job at the time, I got hands-on experience with them all and my involvement with lightweight computing began.

The first of these devices was the 100LX - there was an earlier 95LX but the 100 was a lot better. This packed an MS-DOS 3.3 machine with PIM apps, Lotus 1-2-3 and a basic database into a pocketable clamshell form factor (6¼ x 3½ x 1 inches) which ran off 2 AA batteries. It had a PCMCIA slot that could take flash and SRAM cards and a serial port for mobile phone/modem connectivity on the road (the later 700LX even had a cradle for a Nokia phone built into the lid). The approx. 5-inch monochrome (4 greys) LCD was 640x200 and supported CGA graphics.

The processor ran at 7.5 MHz but a sizable modding community built up - processor overclocking, processor replacement and upgrading the soldered-on memory were all possibilities. The base model had 1MB of RAM but up to 96MB was possible (OK, on the slightly later 200LX anyway).

Such was the power of these machines that they still command good prices and support for such elderly tech.

Random Installation Thought

2008-06-05T15:59:00.000+01:00

It occurs to me that the OpenSuSE Windows-based installer would probably have let me install from SD or CF if I had just copied all the files fro the ISO image on the card ... and I had a card big enough. Something to try for later....

U810 Xorg Munging Part 1

2008-06-04T23:00:00.000+01:00

Xorg is going to need quite a bit of work so first of all lets just get it working at the right resolution with compiz-fusion (I'm assuming you know what this is and want it!). The installer does a reasonable job of autodetecting except that it gets hung up on 1024x768 instead of 1024x600 - you can set it right with SaX2 but there are another couple of places that need prodding to get the resolution to stick for good without resorting to 915resolution.

boot/grub/menu.lst - ensure that the boot parameters say vga=normal so we don't get the framebuffer in a silly mode
/etc/sysconfig/displaymanager - change the line at the end of the file to DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_auto=
"1024x600 48.96 1024 1064 1168 1312 600 601 604 622 -HSync -VSync"

Now for compiz-fusion, first of all we need to get the Intel Xorg driver into AIGLX mode, then install compiz-fusion. Sathya Says has an explanation that pretty much matches what I did although I didn't have to do the one-click-install of compiz-manager - that seemed to come with the compiz-fusion install anyway.

The final bit is to start compiz-manager automatically - for some reason, Settings|KDE Components|Session Manager won't let me change the preferred windows manager from kwin. For each user you thus need to:

cd ~/.kde/Autostart
ln -s /usr/bin/compiz-manager

Now go and play!

A couple of gotchas...

Updating the system has once resulted in the reversion of the displaymanager edit above.
Running SaX2 seems to nobble the AIGLX setting in xorg.conf
In /usr/bin/compiz-manager my COMPIZ_OPTIONS were prepended by -- rather than - so I went along with that.

Atheros hacking

2008-06-04T13:31:00.000+01:00

Now I have Linux on, I will be downloading stuff and patching stuff so I want some connectivity. Wired ethernet works OK on my U810 with OpenSuSE 10.3 - some people have reported acpi issues but I have it enabled with no problems. However, this is a mobile device so I want to get wireless working.

I got the U810 in the USA and the Atheros WiFi chipset therefore has brain damaged firmware that restricts you to channels 1-11 for 802.11b/g. This is, of course, completely stupid for a device designed for mobility so it needs to be fixed but it appears that firmware updates are not exactly thick on the ground.

A bit of trawl takes me to Tamosoft who have something called CommView for WiFi which, if I was using Windows, seems to be quite a nice WiFi monitoring/analysing app. along with some other network tools. However, there is also an Atheros firmware adjuster mentioned on this page. You'll need to download the CommView for WFi trial to run it but it works. So now I have channels 1-13 (or 14 if you select a Japanese locale).

So there was a reason I kept that Vista partition about...

Now to get the Linux Atheros drivers, which aren't included in OpenSuSE because of licence conflict issues with Atheros' binary-only HAL. The madwifi guys are working on the problem but in the meantime, the OpenSuSE site has these instructions which do the trick.

The madwifi one-click-install also adds the OpenSuSE online repository to the software repository list. This contains all the stuff on the DVD and more so, now I have it in, I go into Yast and disable the DVD as a software source - that way, if I download anything that needs the DVD it will go to the online repository instead which is fine now I have WiFi working.

Getting OpenSuSE on the U810

2008-06-04T11:49:00.000+01:00

First things first, we have to clear some space on the HDD. I'm not ready to kill Vista entirely yet since I might need to use the Device Manager to look at settings etc. So I fire up the Disk Management module and delete the redundant 1GB D: partition which exists for no obvious reason. I'm leaving the 1.5GB hidden "EISA Configuration" partition for now (what a quaint anachronism!) as they often contain useful "recovery-type-stuff" but I can't be bothered to look at the moment.

I resize the Vista partition to give us some space...and it won't shrink smaller than 24GB even though there's "only" 10GB of stuff on it (for a "basic" Vista Business install!). Hmm, WTF - okay let's do a disk cleanup and a defrag and see if that improves anything...nope! OK, what else have we got that clogs up the filesystem?

Shadow copies & Restore points, that's what. Switch them off and I can resize away to give me 18GB for Vista, 18GB for OpenSuse and 1.5GB for EISA which makes 40 HDD-sales-GB. So three basically tiny restore points (I hadn't messed with Vista much) clogged 14GB of filesystem - nice.

The U810 doesn't come with an optical drive but I have a rather useful USB to IDE cable from Maplin which did the trick (not an enclosure which you have to mess about with, just a cable with a Molex) along with a random spare DVD drive I had lying around.

Drop in the OpenSuSE 10.3 DVD (32-bit for the A110 processor) and fire up the installer from inside Vista. This patches the MBR on the disk and starts the installer on reboot after which it's the standard OpenSuSE install. Next time you reboot into Windows it tries to uninstall itself (how very tidy and polite!) but Windows blocks it since I'm in "Protected Admin" mode which offers no real protection and a whole lot of irritation so I have to run it manually.

I've installed the standard desktop configuration...now the fun begins.

New Lifebook U810

2008-06-04T10:04:00.000+01:00

Okay, I have my Lifebook U810 and very nice it is too except that...

Vista takes an age to start with a lot of screen flickering and drive churning
...which means you use hibernate/standby a lot
...which means being nagged constantly as it seems to need a lot of patching
...and Explorer and Media player both crashed within the first 12 hours of use
...it's just plain annoying to use with too many clicks to do anything useful

So, it's time to put Linux on and since it's Novell certified (yeah, right) that means I'll try and use OpenSuse and will doc the process here - for my benefit when I rebuild on an SSD more than anything.