Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Joy of ESX

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.

Saturday, 17 October 2009

U810 Gripe

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 keys as well. Bah!

Thursday, 20 August 2009

Rendang

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
    1. Blend together the second set of ingredients into a smooth paste - adding a little of the coconut milk if necessary
    2. Combine all the ingredients in a heat proof casserole and boil until half the liquid has evaporated
    3. Reduce heat and simmer (or place in a low/medium oven) for 30 minutes until the meat is tender
    4. 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.

    Tuesday, 28 July 2009

    Bearnaise Variations

    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
    1. Place chillies, peppercorns, shallots, vinegar and red wine in a pan
    2. Bring to boil and reduce to approx one third volume
    3. 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
    4. 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
    5. With a wire whisk, whip the egg yolks into the reduction until fluffy (the colour will lighten as this happens)
    6. 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
    7. Adjust to taste with salt and lemon juice
    8. 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.

    Monday, 27 July 2009

    Drop Scones

    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

    1. Melt butter in microwave (10 secs on max. ought to do it)
    2. Stir in flour till it resembles fine breadcrumbs
    3. Stir in sugar
    4. Add egg and water and stir to a stiff paste (doing this properly gets the lumps out quite effectively)
    5. Add milk and vanilla/lemon zest and blend to a smooth batter
    6. Drop dessertspoonfuls (2 tsp) onto a hot lightly greased pan/griddle preheated on medium heat
    7. Flip after a couple of minutes when the bubbles begin to appear on the surface
    8. These are sweet enough to eat as is - otherwise butter and/or syrup is OK too.
    9. 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).

    Wednesday, 22 July 2009

    Kingspec SSD and back to OpenSuSE 11.0

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

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

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

    Monday, 20 July 2009

    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.

    Friday, 17 July 2009

    Poppadoms

    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.

    Monday, 8 June 2009

    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...

    Saturday, 6 June 2009

    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

    Thursday, 14 May 2009

    Potato Skins

    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
    1. Let the peelings dry a little
    2. Toss them with the other ingredients, making sure they are well mixed
    3. Lay the peelings evenly on the crisper in a single layer so they rest on the ridges
    4. 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.
    5. The skins will come out soft and turn crisp as they cool.
    6. 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.

    Wednesday, 6 May 2009

    Fat

    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.

    Tuesday, 5 May 2009

    Coriander

    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

    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.
    1. 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.
    2. 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 remnants on the fruit and have little sesame sized seeds at the bottom.
    3. 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 attractive 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.
    4. 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.

    Saturday, 18 April 2009

    DSL Linux on the Omnibook 800CT - Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    DSL Linux on the Omnibook 800CT - Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Thursday, 16 April 2009

    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.

    Tuesday, 14 April 2009

    DSL Linux on the Omnibook 800CT - Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    5. Insert pcmcia driver floppy when prompted
    At this point we discover that the default Xserver doesn't work (nasty stripes all over the screen). Trying the boot prompt cheatcode xmodule=fbdev fb800x600 gets me a working display but the mouse is all over the place. So CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE out of X at this point and go for a command-line installation:
    1. Partition the hard drive using fdisk - I went for 512MB root, 512MB swap at this point

    2. sudo su gets to a root prompt

    3. dslinstall brings up an installation menu

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

    2. ifconfig eth0 up

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

    4. mydsl-wget XFree86.dsl system

    5. mydsl-load XFree86.dsl

    6. Edit /root/.xserverrc and /home/dsl/.xserverrc to run the XFree86 server which means that the default DSL GRUB boot option will now work:
      exec /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 -nolisten tcp
    7. chattr +i .xserverrc (sets the file as immutable to stop accidental reversion to Xvesa)
    Now the crunch - getting the configuration file /etc/X11/XF86config-4. For this, I started with an empty file and added sections until startx brought up a a reasonable uncorrupted screen. I'll post an annotated version later.

    Tuesday, 7 April 2009

    Nokia 5800 16GB

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

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

    Monday, 6 April 2009

    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.

    Wednesday, 25 March 2009

    Linux Kernel Parameters

    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.

    Tuesday, 24 March 2009

    Nokia 5800 - MTP

    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.