Free Like GNU

Some folks can plop down many hundreds of dollars on iPhones, the latest console game machines (and their pricey games) and Uber desktops. Once in a great while I get to spend a little money to geek out on some kind of technology too, though I have to be a bit more frugal. Usually it’s something old that is cheap on eBay. I’ll look for something that will run Linux and has some novel quirk. One of these was an old Itronix 250 military laptop. The device was waterproof, drop-onto-concrete-proof and weighed more that my 2 other laptop machines combined. I upgraded the processor, hacked in a wifi card and antenna, installed a few various versions of Ubuntu and tried with success to get all the features like touchscreen and graphics drivers working nice. Even though it wasn’t the latest gadget, it was cheap for thrills and exercising the Linux skills. When I sold it (for a bit less than all the time and money I put in) I felt I’d had a good deal of fun with it, like working on an old VW bug. One thing I wish I had tried on it was TinyCore Linux founded by one of the lead developers of the famous DSL project, Robert Shingledecker.  TinyCore takes the idea of a compact yet extensible graphical Linux desktop to the extreme at 10MB!  I think it would also work on an Alix3d3 machine I’m experimenting with.  Currently Voyage is running on the  Alix and humming along quite nicely as a “bulletproof” looping video display device running mplayer with a DVD iso file.  The Alix now looks a bit dated in the graphics compared to the new Ion based tiny PCs out there, but it is still more flexible in some ways and durable.  These little machines are cheap and fun to hack not unlike various wireless routers such as the venerable Linksys wrt54g of old (2.2 and earlier) and the Asus wl500w.  The latter I bought because it had a minipci slot instead of the radio being part of the main board and its usb ports to support the TB drive shared on my little network.  It was a great candidate for the OpenWRT firmware and I found others who had made it work well.  All these things are cheap and distracting, some have proven quite useful.  One thing that really makes it fun is the community.  Because others have written blogs, posted in forums, mailing lists or chatted in IRC, I never feel alone in the dark.   I think this is where the real entertainment value is, especially when we contribute to these conversations with our own experiences, questions, reviews, how-to’s etc.

I wanted to add a kernel module for my Alix 3d3 but I figured I would just build a more current kernel for the Voyage Linux 6 installation instead.  Because I am a total weenie, I got excited about a cool program called KernelCheck.  It’s basically a GUI for building configuring and packaging (yes Debian packaging!) the latest greatest kernel from kernel.org.  I built the kernel from my Ubuntu machine using the latest config file from the Voyage kernel, enabled the joystick module and installed the resultant .deb in Voyage.  w00t!
linux-image-2.6.28.8-ultimate_2.6.28.8-ultimate-10.00.Custom_i386.deb

headers if you need ‘em :

linux-headers-2.6.28.8-ultimate_2.6.28.8-ultimate-10.00.Custom_i386.deb

enjoy!

I must say that Ubuntu 8.10 is really shining on my tablet.  I made a live USB stick of 8.10 with the slick usb-creator app (works from 8.04 too) and booted up with correct resolution (1280×800), perfectly working wireless (intel4965agn adapter) that could connect with my university TTLS/PAP wifi network.  Even the SDHC card reaader is working with my 16GB card! Suspend also worked flawlessly and faster as well (2 or 3 seconds instead of 4 or 5).  Wireless comes back quickly too.  In Hardy I had to wait about 10 seconds before wireless came back online, now it reconnects almost instantly.

The only major snag was having to manually futz with the xorg.conf to get my tablet to work.  Once configured, I played with GIMP, recently updated to 2.6!  GIMP is much improved for tablet support and has some nice options for changing brushstokes with not only pen pressure, but also velocity!  This is as close to painting on a real surface that I’ve seen in any non-custom paint program.

GNOME desktop configuration is much tighter with the Appearance preferences.  The new, darker, human theme is great for those who work in the late hours with lights low or in dimly lit cafes.  I eventually switched back to XFCE for desktop, because of fast rock solid panels (GNOME panels are still relatively sluggish, even with animation turned off and low delay settings).  GNOME does have a very nice way of altering the display settings though.

The main reason for trying 8.10 was the new kernel and wireless stack, and I must say that the increased hardware compatability is well worth it!

Wow, what a nice surprise! (This has actually been in development since December of last year ) The OLPC Sugar desktop environment is available in the Ubuntu Hardy repository! You can use the emulator to run it in a window or login as a full blown desktop through GDM (the default login screen for (X)Ubuntu users)! I had trouble with connecting to my WPA network, but I think if I stop Network-Manager before loging in with Sugar, it will work.  The turtle-art application worked very nicely and it was fun to browse networks.  I would love to have Sugars network browser in a little box, or as a desktop background in XFCE.  Now I have to find a way to make Sugar happy on a 800×600 screen so my kids can use it on their machines.

Available activities (in Hardy Universe) are:

• sugar-calculate-activity
• sugar-chat-activity
• sugar-connect-activity
• sugar-logviewer-activity
• sugar-memorize-activity
• sugar-pippy-activity
• sugar-terminal-activity
• sugar-turtleart-activity
• sugar-web-activity

Many of the missing applications (measure, newsreader,analyze) can be found by adding the Sugar PPA repository! It looks as though Paint and Record may be available before long as well. You may also be able to run the Gutsy versions from the debs in Jani’s PPA archive. SimCity/Micropolis is in there too!

Visit Jani Monoses blog for other related developments.

(I just could not resist changing the title)

Recently, I bought a nearly new HP 2710p.  I immediately formatted the HD and installed Ubuntu Hardy!  I am very pleased that nearly everything works! Suspend and resume with accelerated graphics and rotation was something I really wanted with my TC1100. I was lucky that this machine was configured with and Intel 4965 AGN card and a WWAN card (which I have not yet activated).  The 2710p is very much like a super-charged TC1100 with dual-cores and other modern conveniences like a fingerprint scanner and a smart-card reader.  Mine did not come with the webcam though I don’t think I’ll miss the feature much. Battery life is very good and the design is very clean. Removing the annoying palmrest stickers required Goo-Gone, but the finish was unharmed. Here are some notes about getting this bad-boy configured in Ubuntu:

Some things that seem to be missing are:

• Wacom support, which I found HERE (gentoo hardware wiki)
• Screen Rotation: Make a script called rotate.sh

$ nano ~/rotate.sh
with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
#script by Francisco Athens modified from Gentoo Wiki Intructions:
#http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_HP_Compaq_2710p#Brightness_and_Rotation
#get current setting
testrot=`xrandr -q |grep LVDS | awk '{print $3}'`
#test if screen is rotated in protrait mode
if [ "$testrot" = "800x1280+0+0" ];then
#optional kill any old xvkbd instances so that
# fresh one can load in the correct place in the screen
#killall xvkbd
xrandr -o normal
xsetwacom set stylus rotate 0
xsetwacom set eraser rotate 0
else
#killall xvkbd
xrandr --output LVDS --rotate right
xsetwacom set stylus Rotate CW
xsetwacom set eraser Rotate CW
#optional: put xvkbd on the bottom of the screen
#xvkbd -always-on-top -geometry 800x150+0-0
fi

chmod +x ~/rotate.sh

• Kernel Panic on lid close! This is a big issue, but I found the solutution HERE (Ubuntu Forums)

I edited my /etc/rc.local:
first make sure the path is correct
$ ls /proc/acpi/video/
there should be only one folder, so in my case for “C09A” add this line to /etc/rc.local:

echo "1" > /proc/acpi/video/C09A/DOS

before the “exit 0″ line

• Fingerprint Reader Support can be found HERE
• Current Ubuntu Hardy 2.6.24 iwl4965 driver appears to have problems connecting to TTLS/PAP 802.1x networks (sigh) as reported HERE (intel linux wireless forums).