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Ubuntu Linux on ASUS M2NPV-VM
I've recently bought myself a desktop computer and wanted something super cheap with low power usage. A laptop would have been a better choice power wise but certainly no where near as cheap. The ASUS M2NPV-VM is an all-in-one motherboard supporting AMD processors and includes on-board video (GeForce 6150), and here's the diff between most of these types of motherboards, including DVI out! In addition it's got the usual USB, Firewire, GigE networking, and up to 8GB of RAM. I bought the lower power 65W AMD x2 4800 (2.5Ghz) CPU although I run it at 1GHz since everything seems pretty much just as responsive, including the odd game of quake3 (on linux).
I don't have a power meter to measure actual power draw but when I get one I'll post up the results.
The great thing with this new system is that Ubuntu Feisty just works straight out of the box. No messing around at all except to switch to the binary NVidia drivers.
Suspend to RAM even works and I can resume OK. This is a little flakey though, but probably due to the NVidia binary drivers. Sometimes the screen will be messed up and switching to VT and back won't help.
If you take a look at the manual it doesn't explicitly say up to what resolution the DVI out supports (it only mentions 1920x1200 for VGA). I can happily say it does support 1920x1200 on DVI too which is a big relief otherwise I'd need another vid card (and extra power draw).
Update 2007-08-16: looks like there are some other issues with suspend to RAM. On resuming one CPU core is no longer responsive to powernow, i.e. it's set to maximum speed and you can't change it. I use the system all day and just power down at night so not a big issue for me for the moment anyway.
Computer Trouble
I woke up last Tuesday and sat down at my computer only to find it unresponsive. Actually, I could ping and managed to SSH in, but couldn't really execute anything, not even the reboot command. So something odd was going on. I reset the computer and during the POST as one of the hard disks was spinning up I heard some awful sounds - the sounds of a dead or dying hard disk. It was dead :(
I have 3 disks in the system and it turned out to be the boot/OS disk, i.e. my data was safe! Thankfully because I used to keep my desktop/laptop in sync which would act as a nice backup mechanism, however I recently wiped my laptop and set it up purely for work.
In the end I've only lost a few scripts and things I had in /root/ and the only real problem was losing my MySQL databases. Lucky I had an old backup of some important ones, and I could easily re-create the others.
Oh, I also took the opportunity of going with Ubuntu Dapper (Beta 2) vs Debian (unstable). I must say I'm very impressed - I like the polish.
Switching between wired and wireless on Netgear MR814v2
My Netgear MR814v2 wireless router provides a way to reserve IPs for
hosts based on MAC address. Unfortunately it doesn't allow multiple MACs to be
associated with the same IP. This is a little annoying because I like to
switch between wired and wireless and keep the same IP. Well thanks to good
old linux I can 
!. A little bit of "ifconfig eth1 hw ether
new_mac_address" to match my eth0 address (where eth0=wired,
eth1=wireless) and then it works fine. Remember to take down one interface
before bringing up the other! I can keep working on anything I was previously
too, like IM, file dl's etc...
Hardware Issues
The hard drive on the Mac started making some awful sounds accompanied with IO errors in the system logs and general non-workiness. It didn't die immediately which gave me hope that I could salvage Ruwani's stuff on there but that didn't happen :(
While trying to get the Mac going again I had to burn a CD, so I go to turn on my old desktop and the power light blinks then goes off. Then nothing more from that point. PSU decided to go. It's been iffy for a long time so not too surprising.
The bad news is I wasn't expecting to have to deal with this, the good news is I managed to pick up a 160GB Seagate 7200RPM 8MB drive for ~$50 (after rebate if I manage to get it), and a 400W PSU for $29. Nice and cheap!
Nokia 6820 GPRS & Palm Tungsten T2
Instructions for configuring a network connection on a Palm Tungsten T2 to connect over bluetooth to a Nokia 6820 phone. This allows you to use any of the Internet apps available for the Palm such as VersaMail, WebPro, PalmVNC, pssh, etc...
Welcome Palm Tungsten T2
I've wanted a PDA for quite a while but wasn't too interested in the
cost . However, recently there have been some older Palm PDAs
going pretty cheap on Craigslist so I
decided it was time. The main attractions to me are really just the calendar
(syncing to my work calendar via Evolution+Exchange connector on Linux) and a
todo list. These capabilities are there in even the most basic Palm models.
Of course I got a little greedy and ended up buying a used Tungsten T2. It has been kept in great condition and includes a 128MB SD card so I can store photos, and MP3s. Yes, this plays MP3s!! Actually, I'm quite impressed with the capabilities. In the screenshot below it's running an SSH client connected to a work computer running "top". Internet access is via a bluetooth connection to my laptop!
Having the Palm sync to Evolution, sync to the standard Palm Desktop running on Windows XP inside of VMware, and configuring bluetooth for network access wasn't so easy so I plan on putting together a little guide.
The only downside is Solitaire .
Goodbye 560x
Goodbye to the old IBM ThinkPad 560x. After serving me well since January 1999 I have finally sold it. Maxed out at 96MB of RAM and with only 233Mhz of POWAH it was a tad slow but still worked pretty well and I had been using it on and off up until today. I think I'm going to miss it.
US Robotics Courier V.Everything
Now this is an ugly modem, I like the look of the old Netcom Smartmodem better but apparently this is the hardcore modem to have. I don't really need a modem though, but decided to pick up this piece of history on Ebay for $17. A new one goes for $289.95!
2.6.1 on the T40 Updates
Looks like I was wrong about the AGPGART thing. 2.6.1 splits the driver portion into a separate module and I wasn't loading it. For the Thinkpad T40 it's called intel-agp.
I'm not sure what I changed, but I unpacked the same VMware any-any patch the other day and it compiled and inserted the kernel modules OK. VMware is working again although there seems to be some networking issues to the host OS. I haven't had time to look into it yet.
An additional problem surfaced, for some reason my USB mouse stopped working
in Quake3!!! Yes disaster . It was working after moving to 2.6.1
then the other day it suddenly broke when I was playing around with the
psmouse_proto=imps kernel option. The cursor is 'stuck' in the
top left-hand corner and won't move. Clicking the right mouse button seemed to
register but that was it. A bit of searching on the 'Net suggested upgrading
to the 1.32b point release. That fixed it.
2.6.1 on the T40
I've been sticking to 2.4.22-ac4 for a while for lack of anything better with adequate support for my laptop. With the release of 2.6.0, and shortly after that 2.6.1, I decided to give 2.6 a go.
I love the new make config stuff, it seemed to guess most of the options I wanted. I started off using ACPI instead of APM as I had been doing with 2.4 but decided to switch back to APM cause I couldn't be bothered configuring scripts to handle all the power events. I liked the no mess Fn+F3 to toggle the screen and just closing the lid to suspend-to-RAM etc...
Unfortunately APM led to the first problem, resuming was causing a kernel Oops with something to do with the psmouse. It was also causing my USB mouse to die. Trying to restart the USB subsystem after resuming would hang and the mod utils would become unusable (e.g. lsmod would hang). The only way I could get it to be friendly was to unload the psmouse module and turn off USB before suspending. Kinda crappy IMO :( I might try out ACPI again and see whether I can get that to suspend and resume OK.
Problem number two. I can't get VMware to build it's kernel modules, even with the any-any patch that I found out about when googling.
Problem number three. After recompiling the fglrx kernel module it still didn't want to play with the standard agpgart for some reason. I ended up unloading agpgart and using the internal fglrx agpgart method:
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "yes"
The good is my laptop feels a lot more responsive!
T40 BIOS Update
I upgraded the BIOS in my T40 today thanks to some instructions on Alexander Clouter's T40 page. I'm now using BIOS revision 2.11 and Embedded Controller revision 2.04.
Update the Embedded Controller first, and then the BIOS as outlined in the README files. Alexander mentioned doing it the other way round.
The cool thing is Fn+F3 (toggle screen on/off) works! In the console (no framebuffer) or in X.
ATI fglrx drivers for Radeon 9000 Mobility
I'd been using XFree86 4.3.0 and the built-in, open source, radeon driver. 2D support seemed fine and 3D support was definitely there although I wasn't getting the performance I had expected. This was based on doing timedemos in Quake III, my old Matrox G400 on my desktop system was able to get better scores than the Radeon!
So I decided to try out the ATI proprietary drivers for my vid card. The web site says there aren't any for the mobility chipsets but the standard driver works fine. I downloaded fglrx-glc22-4.2.0-3.2.8.i586.rpm and used alien to convert it into a .deb. Yes I was using XFree86 4.3.0 before but went back to the standard 4.2.0 release for Debian unstable for the purposes of testing out the ATI drivers.
Component: ATI Radeon 9000 Mobility Distro: Debian unstable (2.4.22-ac4) Hardware: IBM T40 (2373-96U) Driver: ATI flgrx with XFree86 4.2.0 (deb: 4.2.1-15)
- convert the RPM: alien fglrx-glc22-4.2.0-3.2.8.i586.rpm
- install the DEB: dpkg -i fglrx-glc22_4.2.0-4.2_i386.deb
- build the fglrx kernel module. In my case I am using both the standard
agpgart module and fglrx. I had been using the radeon DRI module and
needed to unload it before the fglrx module would load. These
instructions are in the readme file provided by ATI:
- cd /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod
- ./make.sh
- cd ..
- ./make_install.sh
- You should be able to "modprobe fglrx" now. I added it to /etc/modules.
- Run fglrxconfig to generate an XFree86 config file. NOTE: it seems to want to create one from scratch which is pretty annoying. I made a copy of my original file, used the config program to create a new one then only copied over the video card "Device" section.
- startx
Issues:
- laptop will freeze/hang/lock-up if I suspend while in X and try to
resume. The work-around is to switch to a text console before suspending
and it seems to resume OK.
[UPDATE 2004-01-03] It looks like the glx XFree86 module must not be loaded for the laptop to suspend correctly. i.e. have 3D support disabled. If it is loaded then the text console and X become corrupted on resume and a reboot is required. - mplayer vidix output doesn't work correctly, I get a window or screen of garbage. I never tested this out with the XFree86 driver though, so I can't say whether it has anything to do with the fglrx driver. XV output is fine though.
3D is much faster and 2D seems to be snappier. Overall I'm pleased and I'm sticking with it.
Belkin Wireless USB Adapter and Linux
I bought a wireless USB adapter for my desktop PC. USB because it's more flexible, i.e. easily unplug and plug into some other PC or laptop.
This is what I did to get it working:
Component: Belkin F5D6050 (version 1101) Distro: Debian unstable (2.4.22-ac4) Hardware: VIA KT400
- using atmel drivers from: http://at76c503a.berlios.de/. I downloaded the latest CVS version (2003-10-05) although v0.10 would probably be fine too.
- (for VIA users) you may need to patch drivers/usb/hub.c in your kernel:
--- orig/hub.c Sat Feb 22 19:07:23 2003 +++ new/hub.c Sat Feb 22 23:01:14 2003 @@ -690,7 +690,9 @@ usb_disconnect(&hub->children[port]); /* Return now if nothing is connected */ - if (!(portstatus & USB_PORT_STAT_CONNECTION)) { + /* jal, added STAT_RESET, because the VIA KT133A root hub does + reset _CONNECTION while resetting the port */ + if (!(portstatus & (USB_PORT_STAT_RESET|USB_PORT_STAT_CONNECTION))) { if (portstatus & USB_PORT_STAT_ENABLE) usb_hub_port_disable(hub, port); - uncompress the atmel tar ball and compile (make) then install (make install).
- $ modprobe at76c503-rfmd
- plug in the wireless USB adapter, it should be detected and you'll be left
with a new network device. For me (Transmit bit snipped off for readability):
$ cat /proc/net/dev Inter-| Receive face |bytes packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast lo: 2136 28 0 0 0 0 0 0 eth0: 45368 462 0 0 0 0 0 0 wlan0: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 - in order to get WEP working I had to:
$ iwpriv wlan0 auth_mode 1
because "iwconfig key restricted" didn't seem to work.
TV out on my laptop
My laptop (IBM T40 with Radeon 9000 Mobility) has an S-video connector which I managed to get working thanks to atitvout ('atitvout -f t'). There were some problems under X using the radeon driver with the colours going out of whack, as if the brightness was turned way up. Others have experienced the same thing and suggested the vesa X driver. That worked OK except playback was unacceptably slow. In the end I didn't bother with X since mplayer can play videos from the command line using the vesa output driver.
The first day of my last semester at Uni started yesterday! I went in earlier this evening for a DB362 2hr lecture but it turns out the TFCS352 moved from Wednesday to be straight after DB362. Next up I was getting rather hungry and hadn't packed anything to eat/drink. So I tried to get a hot chocolate only to find the machine took my money and dispensed the drink without a cup. You don't know how frustrating this is because the vending machines at Uni almost always screw me over. Last of all it was freezing riding home on my bike at 9:30pm!
I bought myself a Silicon Graphics Indy. It's a fairly old computer but
top of the line when it was out at the time. I've been meaning to get my hands
on some non-intel hardware for quite a while. Originally I was going to buy an
old Power Mac but the Indy was just too cool to pass up .
Unfortunately it didn't come with the monitor, IndyCam (video camera), or
floptical drive. I'm pretty sure I can get a cable together to drive a
standard SVGA monitor and get it up and running one day!
Scanner
My scanner arrived today (wow, that was quick) so first thing was first and I scanned in my stress banana. Checkout the year 1999 diary entries to see the scan.
