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.

The Omnibook 300

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

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.

Non-Portable Computers

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

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

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

1. Uninstall Elisa and Pigment (use Yast Search and uninstall everything with "elisa" or "pigment" in the name!)
   
2. Erase contents of /usr/lib/python/site-packages/elisa
3. Install the new Elisa (and Elisa-with-plugins) packages which should pull everything else through via dependencies
4. 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

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

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

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

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 /
    

U810 Audio

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

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

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...

1. cd /usr/src/linux
2. make cloneconfig
3. make modules prepare
4. make coffee, eat lunch :)
   
5. cd /usr/src/packages/SOURCES/fsc_btns
6. make
7. make install
8. modprobe fsc_btns
9. "No such device" :(

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

U810 Xorg Munging Part 2

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

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

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

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.

1. boot/grub/menu.lst - ensure that the boot parameters say vga=normal so we don't get the framebuffer in a silly mode
   
2. /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:

1. cd ~/.kde/Autostart
2. 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

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

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

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.