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

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.

Joys of Atheros

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.

Another Thing...

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

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...

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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)
4. /var and /home might need some consideration as a whole but not right now
5. Partitions are ext2 with noatime and noacl to help keep flash activity low
6. 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.
7. 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

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.

Transcend 32GB 133x

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

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.

U810 and Zaurus

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.

More U810 thoughts

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.

U810 Elisa and another resource

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

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

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

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

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

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...

1. Skip partitioning/configuration and go to section 3.2 and do the 1-click KDE install
2. Add the mythtv user (3.3)
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)
   
4. Skip mtoto section 5 and install MythVideo, MythGallery, MythMusic and MythWeather (why not?)
   
5. Skip the rest

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Don't try using OpenGL as a drawing engine - it is truly glacial.
5. 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.
   
6. 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.
   
7. 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

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

Now for the touchscreen.

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

   
   ln -s /usr/share/xf86-input-evtouch/empty_cursor.xbm .

5. 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
   

6. Add the following to the ServerLayout section in xorg.conf:

   
   InputDevice "TouchScreen[1]" "SendCoreEvents"

7. Run the calibration procedure:

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

8. 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.
   
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. init 5 to restart X and enjoy (except for the top right insensitive spot).
13. If you're happy with the calibration delete the symlink in /