Linux in Penang

Flashing the N900.

2012-01-27T20:35:00.003+08:00

I have been using the N900 for almost 2 years. I've upgraded from PR1.1 to PR1.2 and PR1.3 and more recently CSSU. I have installed countless things from extras-testing and extras-devel and have never had any serious problems.

Until one fateful day 2 weeks ago when I started to realise the battery life was getting worse by the day. The battery was draining at about 2-3% an hour on standby. A few days before, I had installed speedpatch and batterypatch. I thought that was the cause, so I promptly removed them. But the issue remained. (I suspect that speedpatch permanently broke the kernel setup somehow, from reading the forums I found others who concur.)

I tried running top and powertop and found the CPU was running at C0 constantly, with 12-20% constant CPU load%. I tried everything I could to find the source of the issue. I un-installed things for testing until I practically un-installed everything I used and it was still the same.

So I was left with no choice but to re-flash the firmware. I had never done it before. I read through the wiki. It was quite confusing at first. I didn't have an Ubuntu box around so I had to use my Windows 7 laptop at work. Unfortunately I had the 64bit version and had to jump through additional hoops to make the flasher recognise the N900. I decided to start from scratch. Backed up all my files and save games and flashed both eMMC and FIASCO images.

Afterwards I restored my contact data from backup but not my settings or anything else. I was advised against it, to ensure the problem does not return from a restored backup. I started to put back all my data & re-install everything I needed. Since I use the N900 as my everyday phone, I decided to install Stable CSSU this time instead of testing.

The fresh image really made the phone much faster and much more responsive than ever before. I've now quite glad I did it and I'm enjoying the phone like it was new. The battery now lasts even longer than the first day I got it. It goes down only 2% in 5 hours on standby.

Increasingly more people are finding they have issues after installing speedpatch and batterypatch. I'd advise against installing these patches.

It's a Crap - Developing in Qt

2011-12-05T10:12:00.007+08:00

For a while now I've been tinkering with the Nokia Qt SDK. As a way of learning about Qt, I decided to write my own little soundboard app for my N900.

As an avid listener of Linux Outlaws, I called my app CrapAlert. It started out as just a big red button that played the crap alert when you pressed it. Later I added a selection list & included a bunch of my favorite meme sound clips as well. A month later, I then changed the design from hard coding everything to reading lists from files & that allowed me to add sound clips easily without rebuilding.

Here's a few screenshots of the app:

I tried to upload the app into the Maemo Extras, but the build process kept failing & I got fed-up after 20 tries. So I'm just gonna post the deb and tarball here for anyone who cares.
Deb package for N900: crapalert_0_1_4_armel.deb
Source tarball: crapalert_0.1.4.tar.gz

The Mandriva / Mageia Dilemma

2011-11-13T21:34:00.003+08:00

As with alot of Mandriva users, I have a dilemma. Of course I'm talking about the question of whether to continue with Mandriva or move over to Mageia. I've tried them both out on a spare machine & I have problems with both of them. Lets see if I can list them out here.

My problems with Mandriva 2011:
- I really cannot get myself to like the Rosa launcher and taskbar.
- KnetworkManager intermittently fails to connect to my hidden WPA2 Wifi.
- Abandoning of the tools I've come to love & rely on. (draknetcenter, RPMDrake, etc.)
- I have no confidence in Mandriva (the company). I no longer trust them.

My problems with Mageia 1:
- Is exactly Mandriva 2010.2. (feels very dated)
- Very ugly icons and fonts. (why is the graphics and sound & video icons exactly the same?) UI styling, color scheme is so dated.
- Slow bootup. Still no systemd.

I really don't want to stay with Mandriva anymore & be at the mercy of that company but Mageia at the moment just looks so crap that I'm serious considering going with Mandriva 2011. I managed to stop myself & at least for now I'm keeping Mandriva 2010.2 on my main machine. Until they end security update support for it.

I know most of my complaints of Mageia are superficial and can be improved with some amount of tweaking, I did try doing that on my spare machine but one thing still makes me unhappy, that is getting a consistent look for both Qt and GTK+ applications. Whenever I get a look I like on Qt, it will screw up on the GTK+ side. So right now, I'm stuck on using the oxygen theme & color scheme, it seems to be the only one that looks good. (only due to oxygen-gtk)

I'm still gonna hold out upgrading. I'm hoping that Mageia 2 will bring them up to date and be pretty and innovative again. I can only hope.

CSSU, Nitdroid and Preenv-hd

2011-11-13T20:57:00.004+08:00

I've been running CSSU for a few months & it's been exceptionally stable. There are crashes here there, especially with some application that didn't like to be started in portrait mode. Battery life seems to suffer a bit with all the auto-rotation going on. But overall, the experience has been positive.

I also installed Nitdroid 2 weeks ago. Mainly just to fool around & play some games I'm missing out on. I install the N12 UMay release of Gingerbread onto an Apacer 8GB Class 10 MicroSDHC card. It takes about 3 minutes to boot, in operations it's a little laggy, but bearable. I only play some games, so it's all I need. It's definitely NOT recommended to run the Nitdroid as the main OS, alot of things still don't work. For one, you can't make phone calls, can't take pictures & also the phone doesn't manage power well, it runs really hot when playing games & sucks through the battery in only an hour or 2. The battery meter is screwed too, so you won't know you're dry till it switches off.

Anyway, I got tired of Android & I'm back to running Maemo again. I was searching for games when I stumbled onto preenv-hd. Someone made a patch over Preenv 0.1.7 that allowed HP Touchpad games to be playable through Preenv. This is great since there a few more games for WebOS that are for the Touchpad only. I found a few I really liked:
- DoodlePoolHD
- Slice It! HD
- Quell HD
Not the mention the more updated versions of Angry Birds Rio and Seasons.
So preenv-hd is keeping my inner gamer happy for now.

Maemo 5 Community SSU

2011-07-18T22:11:00.002+08:00

I finally took the plunge & went ahead to install the CSSU. It's currently at v15.

The install process was painfully slow. I'm not sure why, but downloading supposedly 28MB worth of files took well over 6 hours. I had leave it overnight. Fortunately, when it was done in the morning the upgrade went without a hitch.

The resulting desktop was by all accounts completely identical to the one before. I had to do some digging to make sure everything was working as it should. Only a few things were visible:
- an Orientation Lock button appeared in the status menu.
- the application menu rotates to portrait.
- the status menu rotates to portrait.

I immediately installed the CSSU Feature Configuration Editor & switched on the new 2 column task manager.

Have not run into any issues yet, but it's too early to tell, a couple more days & we'll see. So far, so good.

After Nokia Elopcalypse

2011-07-16T22:02:00.002+08:00

Since Nokia became Microsoft's bitch & has screwed their few remaining supporters, there is no more hope for maemo/meego as a mobile platform. Despite the release of the N9 and N950, the platform looks dead from a 3rd party developer's point of view. There will still be some hardcore Nokia/Meego/Qt supporters that will develop for the N9, but ultimately it will just be another nitch. Much as I dislike Android, it seems there is no other good choice available for a Linux geek. I still love my N900 and I will stick with it till it dies. After that I guess Android is the only boat I can jump onto. As with the betamax, the better technology does not always win..

The Fall of Nokia. The Magic of Preenv.

2011-03-20T21:41:00.004+08:00

With the whole Microkia debacle I'm feeling at best very disappointed with Nokia. They had something special in Maemo, but instead of driving it forward, they drove themselves into the ground by doing stupid shit. Meego was unnecessary if they had just focused on Maemo. Symbian was a dead-end they kept wasting money on.

So I feel they really deserve to die. Or get swallowed by Microsoft (according to some conspiracy theorists) So I'm left with the N900 in-hand, a great device with great potential, but largely unrealized due to Nokia's incompetence.

Since my N900 is still under a year old. I will be keeping it for a while. I love the platform & hope to stay with it for as long as I can.
Luckily for me, there is Preenv. This magical little program lets me enjoy many Palm Pre games on my N900. Especially Angry Birds (Who can live without Angry Birds?) Rovio stopped supporting the N900 a while back & we did not get Ham'em High Levels or the Seasons. But thanks to the work done by the Preenv guys I am happily playing all the current games released for the Palm Pre.

Also, recently the community got together & started to develop the Maemo 5 Community SSU. Which aims to develop Maemo 5 further after Nokia dropped the ball. So there is hope in the platform, at least I can put off going to Android. (A platform I never liked, cuz it's just so NOT Linux)

Corrupted Conversations Database

2011-01-15T23:52:00.002+08:00

One bad thing happened to my phone just a few nights ago. Somehow due to receiving a malformed SMS, the conversations and call history database was corrupted. This prevented the Conversations windows from working. I could not access any of my previous messages & new messages were not stored anymore.

It was not pretty, but this is what I had to do to fix it. I first copied the database file out to my PC to back it up, the file is ~/.rtcom-eventlogger/el-v1.db

Then I deleted the file, ran touch to create a new empty one & rebooted.
This fixed the issue, however all the messages & call history was lost.

Fortunately it is possible to access the data inside the el-v1.db from a PC, because it's an SQLite database file. I used SQLite Database Browser to access the file & retrieved the imported stuff. They're all in the Event table.

It was a nightmare, I hope nobody else gets this problem.

Wow 4 months since my last post

2011-01-15T23:48:00.002+08:00

Wow. It's been like 4 months since my last update. A career change in October threw me out of whack & now I'm just starting to get back in gear.

PR1.3 was released on Oct 25. It was a smooth upgrade but did cause some small problems. Several apps had font/color issues. But all were resolved with updates within a few weeks.

Alot happened on the Ovi Store. Many new apps were release & many new comic book apps are now available. Someone figured out how to get WebOS games running in Maemo & created the Preenv app which became quite a phenomenon.

I've discovered & started using a whole lot of new stuff.
Here's just a sampling:

grr - Google Reader App
cuteTube - YouTube App
Ansel-A - A Digital Darkroom
StellariuMobile - Mobile Planetarium
Accelemymote - Play Any Game with the Accelerometer.
swappolube - Tweak the swap & other setting to improve responsiveness
BlessN900 - Enhanced Camera Firmware

N900 - More Apps

2010-09-05T09:18:00.004+08:00

Here are some new apps I've discovered recently:

MediaBox - An excellent All-In-One Media Center. A while back zoutube just stopped working, it's no longer being developed & seems like no one is stepping up to the task. So I started looking for another YouTube client & it seems there's only one left that still works, that's MediaBox.

FCamera - Advanced camera app that shoots RAW and allow full manual control.

Movie Finder - Find theaters, movies and show times on-line. Works very well even in Malaysia.

qTranslate - Translator app that uses Google Translate.

Faster Kinetic Scrolling in Menu & Phone App UI Fix

2010-08-22T11:04:00.004+08:00

If you are like me, you might be slightly annoyed by the much slower scrolling in the main menu on the PR1.2 firmware. Well fortunately there's now an unofficial hildon-desktop update that addresses the issue.

Read more about it here.

This is how to do it:
You'll need to have rootsh installed first.
Download this file to the N900.
In the terminal:
$ sudo gainroot
# dpkg -i /home/user/MyDocs/hildon-desktop_kinetic_2.2.138-1+0m5_armel.deb

That's it. Reboot the N900 & it's done. The kinetic scrolling is now about the same speed as before the firmware update. Also as a bonus, the little UI twitching glitch in the phone app has also been solved on this update.

N900 - Missing GTK icons after upgrade to PR1.2

2010-07-21T22:14:00.001+08:00

I had encountered this anoying little bug after i upgraded the Maemo firmware to PR1.2. It only happens in a few apps so I didn't immediately notice it. The issue is that a few stock GTK icons used in some apps such as cbrpager, abiword, gnumeric and kmplayer were missing. A broken link icon was shown it their place.

Took me quite a long time to look for the solution and I had almost given up. Today by sheer luck I finally came across the solution posted in the maemo.org forums just 3 days ago.
Here's the Link

In short, here's the solution. In the Terminal:
sudo gainroot
mv /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/mimetypes/gtk-* /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/hildon/

That's it. I'm happy now.

N900 - Applets, Widgets, Plugins and Utilities

2010-07-01T22:49:00.004+08:00

My last 2 posts have been about the useful applications and fun games you can expect to find on the Nokia N900. Today I'll be listing some of my favorite little applets/widgets/plugins and utilities.

Status Menu Applets:

Wifi Switcher - Lets you totally switch off the Wifi chip by unloading the kernel module. It will save some power when you don't have wifi.
Flashlight - Turns on the LED Flash permanently for use as a makeshift flashlight.
Simple Brightness Applet - Quick access to the screen brightness controls.
Wi-Fi Signal Applet - A simple 1-10 number beside the Wifi icon to indicate signal strength.

Home Screen Desktop Widgets:

systeminfowidget - CPU & RAM usage percentage.
Desktop Command Execution Widget - Run arbitrary shell commands and output on the desktop.
Personal Dataplan Monitor - Displays mobile data usage stats.
Personal IP Address - Just displays your IP address.

Plug-ins and support add-ons:

MSN (pecan) protocol plug-in - Support for MSN Chat protocol in Conversations and Contacts. Pecan version works better for me than the standard or pidgin versions.
Extra Decoders Support - Support pack for various media formats. Such as ogg, flv, rmvb, mkv and WebM.
Subtitle Support - Adds subtitle support to the media player.

Utilities:

Extended Call Log - A more verbose call log list.
QCPUFreq - Allows CPU frequency scaling adjustments.
Shortcutd - Lets you assign shortcuts to the proximity sensor & camera focus key.
tweakr - Enables some small tweaks, such as desktop align to grid & additional profiles.
maenotify - Displays notifications on the lock screen.

Some Games for the N900

2010-06-20T23:35:00.003+08:00

Following up from the list of the most useful apps I found. This one is dedicated to the games. So lets get right too it. Again in no particular order:

Angry Birds: You shoot angry birds at greedy pigs using a slingshot. Works kinda like worms & although it sounds cruel is actually loads of fun. The first 21 levels are free. Pickup the Level Pack 1 for 42 more levels. Highly recommended.
Color Flood: Gradually fill the screen until it's all 1 color. Sounds mundane but is rather difficult & addictive because you gotta do it in 25 moves.
Crazycat: A real simple Flash game of capture the cat. Takes a surprising amount of strategy to corner a crazy cat.
EightyOne: The best sudoku implementation on maemo. There are at least 4 others that are shit in some way.
Airport: An air traffic control game. See how many planes you can guide to land safely & avoid collisions. So far 35 for me. (I know, I suck!)
Electric Beams: Move beams of electricity to light up all the light bulbs. Simple & fun game. Not much replay-ability though.
Hex-a-hop: Jump around on a puzzle of hexagonal tiles that break-up behind you. You gotta break them all. This game will last a while, it's got a lot of levels & it gets progressively harder and more complex as you go. Highly recommended.
Kobo Deluxe: A top down view, all directional space shooter. Simple premise, destroy enemy ships and bases & stay alive. This game would be shit if you had to use the arrow keys on the keyboard to play it. But it's support for using the accelerometer for direction and the proximity sensor for the trigger makes this games very playable and enjoyable on the N900. Highly recommended.
SolarWolf: A similar game to Kobo Deluxe except you don't shoot anything, instead you just pickup stuff while avoiding getting shot. Plays with the accelerometer & is pretty entertaining.
Wok: Frantically shoveling stuff to the side with a rectangular wok using the touchscreen. Sound bonkers but is actually kinda fun.
VoR: Variation on Rockdodger. Navigate your ship through an asteroid field. But Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1. Plays very nicely with accelerometer. See how long you can survive.

2 months with the N900

2010-06-06T17:43:00.005+08:00

It's been about 2 months since I bought the Nokia N900 Smartphone/Tablet. Just updated to firmware PR1.2 a week ago over wifi & it went smoothly, nothing except for a couple of settings were lost.

The main reason for me getting this device was so that I could remove the need to carry around a Linux netbook wherever I go. In this respect the N900 really exceeded my expectations on what I could do with it. I expected to still need my netbooks in some cases such as when I'm traveling on business. But as it turns out, I've not used my netbooks AT ALL this past 2 months. So it looks like I might be selling them off soon.

Today I'll list some of the apps that I use regularly on my N900. I'll only mentions apps that are not pre-installed on the device. So here it is in no particular order:

Storage Usage: Shows usage of the various storage devices and even lets you deep dive to find out which folder/app is consuming the space.
Panucci: An excellent audiobook/podcast player with great bookmarking features. (Love the pizza icon)
GPSJinni: A app for monitoring GPS signals, it's very useful for getting a lock before starting your map application.
WifiEye: An app to visualize the Wifi signals in an area. It's great as a site survey tool for deciding where to put an access point & which channel to use.
Sygic Mobile Maps: A commercial in-car navigation app. It's car friendly interface makes it miles better than Ovi Maps. It's pricey, but it's quality. Incidentally, the Ovi Maps on the N900 does not support turn-by-turn navigation.
Ncalc: A calculator app with a simple UI that makes more sense to me than the built-in one.
Password Safe: An app for securely storing all your user names & passwords. Indispensable these days.
fMMS: A must have if you want to send/receive MMS. Although I don't use it often, I do want to be able to receive MMS.
MGutenberg: Lets you browse, download & read ebooks from Project Gutenburg. It also works very well generally as an ebook reader.
CBRpager: Comic book reader. Cuz I read alotta comic books.
MussOrgsky: A meta-data editor for your music collection. It lets you edit album/artist/title and even the album art for your music.
zoutube: A pretty sweet YouTube client. Even though you could watch YouTube videos right in the browser, using this app the video is fullscreen, plays very smoothly and even allows you to download the video.

Well, that's enough for today. What I've listed is only a fraction of the apps I have installed, but are the ones I use more regularly. Next time I'll get into the games.

Exploring the Nokia N900

2010-04-06T07:16:00.001+08:00

Haven't been posting lately cuz was bz with work & life. I'd gotten myself a Nokia N900 & just had to try posting to my blog from it. Using an app called MaStory. Looking good so far. I'm starting to get used to the small keyboard, it's actually not as bad as it looks. Well that's it for the first post. Hopefully I'll be blogging more with this baby.

Getting Bluetooth A2DP to work in Mandriva 2010

2009-12-26T16:08:00.001+08:00

One of the grips I've always had with KDE4 is it's rather poor bluetooth integration. For most of 2008 and 09, I've tried in vain to make my really nice bluetooth stereo headphones to work on Linux. I started to see a glimpse of it in 2009.1 where it would work for 2 minutes before crashing pulseaudio.

Now with 2010 out I decided to give it another go. Finding instructions for doing it is not particularly easy. There is no single place that provided something that will just work on Mandriva. So I decided to document my steps here.

Lets start with the require packages you will need to install.
kbluetooth
bluez
bluez-alsa
pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
*There's much more, but they should already be installed.

Start kbluetooth (it's somehow under the Internet category)
Make sure your bluetooth adapter is detected & showing a MAC address. Give it a sensible name.
The kbluetooth device manager gui only works for input devices. So don't bother trying to pair the headphones with it. We'll need to do it from a konsole.

Put you bluetooth headphones into pairing mode. (usually done by holding the power button until it blinks) Then do this:
$ hcitool scan

This should discover your headphones and list it's MAC address. Now connect to the MAC. (seems like only root can do these steps)
# hcitool cc 00:00:00:00:00:00

kbluetooth should now popup and request for the pin. (It's usually 0000)
Now lock down the pairing:
# hcitool auth 00:00:00:00:00:00

That's it for pairing. Now we need to tell alsa about the new audio device. Open up the file .asoundrc in your home directory (create it if it's not there), and put this in it:

pcm.bluetooth {
type bluetooth
device "00:00:00:00:00:00"
}

Replace with the MAC address of your headphones of course.

Now you need to reboot. Next you'll need to tell pulseaudio about your new output device.

$ pactl load-module module-alsa-sink device="bluetooth"

Now open the PulseAudio Volume Control. (pavucontrol) You should see bluetooth listed as another output device. You can now make it the default or you could assign the output device on a per application basis.

Now, the part the sucks. Pulseaudio will not remember these setting across reboots, you will need to rerun the pactl command everytime you want to use the headphones. One easy way to do this is to put an icon on the panel to run the command.

Another thing to be aware of is if you are playing something & you disconnect the headphones somehow, pulseaudio will segfault. So remember to stop playback and switch the default output back to your soundcard before turning off your headphones.

Enjoy. :)

Moving up to Mandriva 2010

2009-11-27T17:16:00.003+08:00

Just upgraded my Dell Mini to Mandriva 2010. Been running it for a few weeks and working through the issues. I must say, although I welcome the improvements that KDE 4.3 brings, this release was nowhere near as solid as 2009.1. It's riddled with many serious bugs and annoyances.

One bug that seems to still be unresolved is the haldaemon bug where the system will sometimes fail to mount external drives, requiring a restart of haldaemon.

A quick rundown of some of the things needed to make this release fully functional on a Dell Vostro A90 (Inspiron Mini 9):
- Audio still didn't work. I still had to add the following line into /etc/modprobe.conf

options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=dell
- I used the same method as before to install aircraft-manager. This worked just fine.
- Disable speedboot by editing /etc/sysconfig/speedboot. Setting "speedboot=no". This stops some weird ACPI bugs.

Some observations:
- The intel driver has stabilized and no longer freezes
- Idle CPU is generally lower & better behaved than KDE 4.2

All the bugs are reported & being worked on, so lets hope that in the following weeks updates will work out all the issues. Overall, I'd say if you are already running 2009.1 and are thinking of upgrading. Wait a month or so, you'll have better experience by then.

Mandriva 2009.1 on Dell Mini 9 - More tweeking required

2009-07-13T20:30:00.003+08:00

Only while trying to play a video did I realise that there was no sound coming from the speakers. So a quick search revealed the solution.
I had to add the following line into /etc/modprobe.conf
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=dell

Reboot, open the mixer and turn up the volume for the channel Speaker. There will be a loud buzzing noise after you do this. To stop it, disable the channel Capture 2 (untick the checkbox).

So far, I've tested the boot speed versus Ubuntu MID, It is actually quite fast to boot & only ends up being < 10 secs slower due KDE4's longer startup time.

Power consumption has also been quite good, averaging about 3 hours. I could get 3.5 hours from Ubuntu MID, so I'll definitely have to see what I can tweek to make this better.

Mandriva 2009.1 on Dell Mini 9

2009-07-12T12:06:00.004+08:00

I got my hands on a Vostro A90 (Black clone of the Dell Inspiron Mini 9) from a friend in the states. It came with Ubuntu MID 8.04.1 preinstalled with the custom Dell launcher. I've been using it for a while now, it works perfectly as expected since the distro was heavily customized.

Lately I decided to try out something else on it. Since I've always loved Mandriva, I decided to give it a go, I knew it wouldn't be so simple.

From the LiveCD boot, it was already clear that WiFi and Bluetooth both did not work. I installed it anyway into an SD card & proceeded to try various things to try to make it work.

But whatever I did, nothing worked. I booted back into Ubuntu MID to check the setting there, nothing much helped. I rebooted into Mandriva again, but this time everything magically worked.

Bluetooth & WiFi was detected & worked nicely. The only thing I couldn't do was use my Bluetooth stereo headset. This is mainly down to kdebluetooth4 being still quite new. It had worked in Ubuntu, but it's no big loss.

Most of the important shortcut keys worked, namely brightness & volume control. Keys that didn't work are, Sleep, Wifi toggle, Battery Status & Toggle VGA. Of these, I only cared for the Wifi toggle.

To make Wifi toggle work, I needed to install aircraft-manager. Unfortunately, this was only available as a deb. I extracted the files out the deb & tried to figure it out.

It was basically written in python, so it wasn't too hard. This is roughly what I needed to do:

1. Extract the data.tar.gz out of the deb

2. Extract the data.tar.gz into /

3. Move portio.so from /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages to /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages

4. Install (through rpmdrake) python-dbus, pygtk2.0-libglade and gksu.

That's it, after that you can simply use KDE's System Settings -> Input Actions to configure a shortcut for running aircraft-manager.

You might see this message when booting the system:

Configuring wireless regulatory domain nl80211 not found. [FAILED]

This can be fixed by commenting out the line CRDA_DOMAIN=XX in /etc/sysconfig/network

The intel driver will exhibit some artifacts especially if you are using kwin effects. This can be solved by adding the line:

Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

to the Device section of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

That's as far as I got for now. I'll update as I go along.

Mandriva 2009.1 - Smoothing things out

2009-06-03T11:51:00.002+08:00

I posted last time that I went back to using Kwin effects with the UXA workaround for xorg. However, I have since switched back to using compiz with EXA instead. Why?

Because Kwin with UXA was causing performance issues. The CPU usage of Kwin will hover at around 30-40% all the time, this was sucking the battery dry & causing my laptop to heat-up. Kwin with EXA is still the same, it will freeze 2-3 times a day. Compiz won't run at all with UXA, so I had to go back to EXA to use compiz.

So far compiz is performing very well. CPU usage is low, video playback is smooth and battery life is acceptable. The IaOra theme is still broken, the titlebar still dissapears, so I'll be using Ozone for while.

Mandriva 2009.1 - Working out the kinks

2009-05-17T22:39:00.005+08:00

I've made some discoveries and found some weird problems here & there with my newly installed Mandriva 2009.1. So I'm documenting my findings and fixes/workarounds as I needed.

1. Kwin effects when enabled will make X freeze up intermittently . There is already a bug report on this issue & it seems to be caused by the intel driver. The workaround is to change the default Render acceleration mode from EXA to UXA. This is done by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and adding the following line into the "Device" section:

Option "AccelMethod" "UXA"

This did solve the freeze problem, but video playback was a little choppy when using some desktop effect. I can live with this since it's about the same on compiz as well.

2. The default IaOra window decoration had a display bug when using compiz on KDE4. Whenever the window was maximised, the titlebar would disappear. (It actually became tranparent). I saw this bug when I used compiz instead of Kwin during the time I was still investigating the Kwin bug. I did not find this bug reported, I asked around, but no one else had this bug. It might be caused by residual config from my old compiz. (I didn't do a clean install) Anyhow, this problems goes way then I use a different window decoration theme. So I've switched to using Ozone.

3. I didn't like any of the plasmoids for system monitoring. I was very used to using superkaramba's cynapsys theme. I found that I can still install & use superkaramba & run my favorite sys_mon theme. This is a pleasant surprise. I also found the yaWP and ktorrent plasmoids to be very useful.

4. Virtually all the hotkeys on my laptop worked out of the box. Volume control, media playback control, LCD brightness control & wireless switch are all working perfectly and with OSD to boot. The only one that didn't work was the 'launch media player' key, which I've never used anyway.

That's all I can remember for now. These are all very minor issues, overall this release has been awesome.

Mandriva One 2009.1 Spring

2009-05-16T20:45:00.006+08:00

Wow. It's be a while since my last blog.

I was holding out upgrading to Mandriva 2009 because I found KDE4 to be not functional enough for my everyday use. But a few weeks ago Mandriva 2009.1 Spring was released & I just had to give it a test drive.

I bit the bullet & immediately upgraded my laptop to 2009.1 from 2008.1. This was skipping a release, so I thought wise not to do an online upgrade, but simply to format the root partition & reinstall fresh, but keeping my old home partition.

This ran into a snag as I was installing from LiveCD & it did not manage to migrate my KDE3 setting & left me with a very messed up desktop. To fix it. I had to logout, delete my old .kde directory in my home & login again.
This fixed everything up but also managed to wipe out all my KDE settings. Which I believe is fine because KDE4 should not be using them anyway.

Overall I found Mandriva 2009.1 to be another solid release. I'll still be holding out for my main desktop cuz I have alot of custom hacks that I need to research b4 bitting the bullet.

Setting up a Linux Practice Lab (Part 4)

2009-02-16T20:47:00.004+08:00

6. Setup PXE boot server
Link the source location to the web server:
# cd /var/www/html
# ln –s /install install

Install & enable tFTP server & DHCP server:
# yum install tftp-server dhcp
# chkconfig tftp on
# chkconfig dhcp on
# service tftp start

Install Kickstart Configurator:
# yum install system-config-kickstart

Download & install system-config-netboot to configure the PXE (This tool is not shipped with RHEL5)
system-config-netboot-0.1.45.1-1.el5.noarch.rpm
system-config-netboot-cmd-0.1.45.1-1.el5.noarch.rpm

Install the packages:
# rpm -Uvh system-config-netboot*.rpm
(If there are any listed dependencies like alchemist or gnome-python2, install them with yum)

Configure Kickstart
# system-config-kickstart
Configure these options:
Basic configuration – Perform Installation in interactive mode
Installation Method – HTTP Server: 192.168.1.100, Directory: install
Display Configuration – 24bit, 1024x768, Start X on boot.
Save as ks.cfg in /var/www/html

Configure the PXE Boot:
# system-config-netboot
(If starting the Network Booting Tool for the first time, select Network Install from the First Time Druid. Otherwise, select Configure => Network Installation from the pull down menu, and then click Add.)

Configure these options:
Operating system identifier: RHEL5.1
Description: Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 U1
Selects protocol for installation: NFS
Kickstart: http://192.168.1.100/ks.cfg
Server: 192.168.1.100
Location: /install

Configure DHCP Server:
# vi /etc/dhcpd.conf

Insert the following contents:
ddns-update-style none;
allow booting;
allow bootp;
default-lease-time 21600;
max-lease-time 43200;

option routers 192.168.1.100;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name "training.com";
option time-offset -18000;
subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.1.7 192.168.1.20;
}

class "pxeclients" {
match if substring(option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9) = "PXEClient";
next-server 192.168.1.100;
filename "linux-install/pxelinux.0";
}

# Repeat the following section as necessary for every student machine used in the class

host machine1 {
hardware ethernet 00:0b:db:e9:77:54;
fixed-address 192.168.1.1;
option host-name "machine1.training.com";
}

Save the file.

Start the service:
# service dhcpd start

That's it for the PXE installation server. I went on to configure more NFS and Samba shares for the students to practice on. It is all very simple, so I'll end this topic here. Cheers.

Setting up a Linux Practice Lab (Part 3)

2009-02-16T20:33:00.003+08:00

4. Creating the Yum Repository
Install the yum repository builder.
# cd /repo/Server
# rpm –ivh createrepo-*.rpm

Create the repository.
# cd /repo
# createrepo -g repodata/comps-rhel5-server-core.xml Server
# cp /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release Server

5. Setup web server to host the repository
Make sure you've installed the web server during installation, then proceed with these.
# cd /var/www/html
# ln –s /repo/Server server
# chkconfig httpd on
# service httpd start

Open the browser & browse to http://localhost/server to check that the web server is running (you should see the rpm files listed)

Now to setup yum to point to the new web repository
# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
# cp rhel-debuginfo.repo trainingserver.repo
# vi trainingserver.repo

Modify the file to look like this:
[trainingserver]
name=Red Hat Enterprise Linux Training Server
baseurl=http://192.168.1.100/server/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://192.168.1.100/server/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release

Save the file. :wq
# yum update

Note: You can get the students to copy the yum setup to their systems with this command:
# scp root@192.168.1.100:/etc/yum.repos.d/trainingserver.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

That's it for making your local yum repository. Next I'll talk about setting up the server for PXE boot installations.

Setting up a Linux Practice Lab (Part 2)

2009-02-12T22:20:00.002+08:00

Installing the Server

This is the main server used throughout the class for remote installation & as a yum repository.

1. Installation
Install using CD boot method. The required setting changes are listed below in order of appearance. All other options are to be left at default.
Skip entering Installation Number
Partitioning: Create custom layout

/boot	ext3	100MB
/	ext3	20480MB
	swap	512MB

Network Devices: Edit - Disable DHCP and IPv6.
IPv4 address: 192.168.1.100. Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Set hostname manually to: server.training.com
Set root password to: redhat
Select to install the Web Server. No need to customize software selection
During first boot setup: Disable Firewall and SELinux
Set Up Software Updates: Select: “No, I prefer to register at a later time” and “No thanks, I’ll connect later”
Create User: user with Password: password

2. Installation source setup
Extract content of all 5 CDs into a single directory called /install

# unalias cp
# cp –r /media/RHEL-5\ i386\ Disc\ X/* /install
(Where X is the number of the disk that you are copying, beginning with 1 for the first disk, and so on)

Copy contents the Server directory on all 5 CDs into the /repo/Server directory. This can be done using either cp or simply drag & drop in Nautilus.

# cp –r /media/RHEL-5\ i386\ Disc\ X/Server/* /repo/Server

3. NFS Setup
# vi /etc/exports

Add the following line:
/install *(ro,no_root_squash)
/repo/Server *(ro,no_root_squash)
Save the file. :wq

Check the syntax:
# exportfs –a
Start-up the NFS Service:
# service nfs start
Set the NFS Service to start-up on boot:
# chkconfig nfs on
Confirm NFS shares are exported:
# showmount -e

In part 3, I'll go into setting up a local yum repository. (Because my lab is in an isolated LAN)

Setting up a Linux Practice Lab (Part 1)

2009-02-12T21:58:00.004+08:00

As part of my job, I needed to setup a lab for teaching RHEL5. After much trial and error, I managed to setup a fairly decent Linux lab. I've decided to post all my notes and self documenting setup guides to this blog, at least so that I have access to it wherever I go. A bonus if it helps someone else. So here goes:

Lab Equipment Notes

Common Requirements for all systems used in this Lab:
* Intel Chipset Motherboard (Avoid ATI/NVIDIA/VIA)
* Intel or Broadcom Gigabit/100/10 Ethernet card
* Integrated Intel Graphics GMA950 or older (avoid GMA 3100)
* If a graphic card is needed, use NVIDIA (avoid ATI)
* PS/2 or USB keyboard and mouse (avoid Wireless or Bluetooth)
* DVD/CD-ROM Drive (IDE, avoid SATA or SCSI)

1 unit Server with the following minimum hardware requirements:
* Intel Pentium 4 with HT/Dual Core running at minimum 2 GHz
* 2GB of Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
* 80GB Hard Disk Drive (SATA or IDE, avoid SCSI or SAS)

A desktop or notebook computer for each student with the following hardware requirements:
* Intel Pentium 4 with HT/Dual Core running at minimum 1.20 GHz
* 512MB of DDR SDRAM
* 20GB Hard Disk Drive (SATA or IDE, avoid SCSI or SAS)

1 unit Gigabit/100Base-T unmanaged switch with enough ports for all the students PCs and the server.

Ethernet cables to connect all the systems to the switch.

Lab Setup Notes

1. Connect all the systems together using the switch into a simple LAN setup
2. Follow the next section on installing the Server
3. Once the Server is properly setup, test all the students systems for hardware compatibility by performing a test installation on all systems.
4. Change out any problem units that fail to install properly.
5. Common issues faced are:
- Incompatible disk drive controller (no disks detected)
- Incompatible BIOS Assisted RAID (disks detected instead of array, disable these in the BIOS)
- Incompatible video card (blank screen or corrupted video)
- Incompatible optical drives (usually SATA)

FLOSS Awareness in Malaysia

2009-02-02T22:45:00.004+08:00

Over 2 years ago when I started this blog I wrote about the state of FLOSS awareness in this country. 2 years on, looking at where we're at now, it's depressing to see not much has changed.

I've been doing what I can, helping out in the local groups & forums. Educating & offering help, especially to newbies and easing them in on the ideals of Free Software. It's an uphill struggle & I'm pretty sure will continue to be so for a long time.

Of course, don't forget to bring a towel.

Mandriva 2009 One KDE 4 Edition

2008-12-16T20:21:00.003+08:00

I installed Mandriva 2009 onto an SD card, booting from an Asus EeePC 701. It takes over 2 minutes to boot to the desktop & is simply unusable on such a small screen. The panel is way too huge & if you try to reduce it, the tray icons get screwed up. The Folder view thing is really stupid & the widgets provided are totally useless. I moved it to full sized 13' laptop & gave it my usual runover.

So basically, KDE 4.1 is still pretty much useless as an everyday desktop. Nice to play with, but not something you want to use daily. I think Mandriva made a bad move moving to KDE4 so soon. Especially when they have not put too much effort into making it work well. OpenSuse at least managed to make KDE4 somewhat usable, so Mandriva has no excuse. They really should have offered KDE3.5 on the One CD. If they wanted people to test out KDE4, then they should have release 3 versions of the One CD.
1. KDE 3.5
2. KDE 4.1
3. Gnome

Removing KDE 3.5 is a very bad move. Even PCLinuxOS 2009 will come with KDE 3.5 as default because it simply works better.
I won't be upgrading to Mandriva 2009 at all. I'd wait for 2009.1 & see how that goes. For now, Mandriva 2008.1 is an extremely good release & I suspect will remain so for some time until KDE4 reaches feature parity with (at least) Gnome.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with Ubuntu Mobile Edition

2008-12-14T13:05:00.002+08:00

I got my hands on a brand new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 a few weeks ago & couldn't wait to test out the pre-loaded Ubuntu on it. What it came with surprised me somewhat & it certainly will surprise anyone expecting it to be the stock Ubuntu with some minor Dell tweaks.

The Ubuntu pre-loaded was very far from the standard Desktop edition. It is actually a heavily customized version of Ubuntu Mobile Edition (ume).

What does that mean exactly? It does not use standard Ubuntu packages, all the packages are compiled for the Low Power Intel Architecture (lpia). This also means that it does not utilize the standard Ubuntu repositories for packages. Dell provides a custom repository for updates & software. This means adding any 3rd party Ubuntu repositories is not possible. This is not a big issue as the Dell repository proved to be quite complete in providing all the packages I usually use.

The advantage you gain from using ume is the incredible speed. From power button press to a fully loaded desktop took just under 40 seconds. The desktop was also very responsive & application performance was great. The battery life is also quite good at about 3 hrs 20 mins. (in comparison, my EeePC 701 running Eeebuntu Netbook Edition took over 70 seconds to boot & only managed 2 hrs 40 mins despite having double the capacity)

Dell has designed a nice looking 'Easy Mode' style interface to run on their desktop. It's surprisingly customizable & looks awesome with it's flowing animated transitions. This is nice, but may annoy those who prefer a more traditional Ubuntu desktop. So they have thoughtfully provided an easy way to switch back to the standard desktop.

There are a few other notes that I'll simply list out:
- It uses a squashed root. Which reduced the footprint to just over 2GB.
- Compiz has been removed completely. It's not even possible to install it. (trust me, this is a good thing)
- Fluendo Codecs & Codeina provides for all your media playback needs. Java & Flash pre-installed.
- Incredibly good Bluetooth support. Even works perfectly with A2DP headsets.
- The 8GB SSD version I got certainly isn't enough for me. Invest in a 16GB Class 6 SDHC card.
- The SSD is pretty slow at 15Mbps write. Checkout RunCore's SSD for an upgrade.

Finally, what do I think about the Dell Inspiron Mini 9? Recommended. But I'd wait for the 32GB version. ;)

CPU Frequency Scaling on the EeePC

2008-09-07T22:25:00.004+08:00

If like me, you are thinking about extending the EeePC's battery life by turning on CPU frequency scaling support, I can tell u now to forget about it. It doesn't work.

After turning it on & testing the temperature & battery life, I am very sure it does absolutely nothing for the EeePC. In fact, the only thing it did was make the system lag every time you click on something, this is because the CPU will scale to max for almost every single task. The system takes a second to scale, this is what causes the lag.

After reading in various forums & opinions on it, it's clear that frequency scaling does not improve the battery life or thermal performance of the EeePC 701 which uses an already sluggish Celeron M. In some tests, it even makes things hotter.

So, I've reverted to running the system at the standard 630Mhz with no scaling. I'm currently averaging about 170 minutes per charge with wireless on, which is not too shabby for an 8 month old battery.

Tweaking eeebuntu

2008-08-25T22:13:00.004+08:00

I've been running eeebuntu on my EeePC for a week now & I've done quite a few things to improve the overall experience.
Here's a quick list of things (that I can remember) in no particular order:
- Disable unused services. User services-admin to weed out all the pointless services such as: anacron, atd, apport, lm-sensors, avahi-daemon & cupsys.

- Disable unused startup items. Under System -> Preferences -> Sessions, turn off, Conduit, Evolution Alarm Notifier, Print Queue Applet, Update Notifier & Visual Assistance.

- Install much needed games. Get yourself zsnes, armagetron, planet-penguin racer, crack-attack, circus, pinball & wormux.

- Run sudo apt-get clean after every update.

- Remove unnecessary panel applets. cpu meter, temp meter & window picker (window list is more practical)

- Install lock-keys-applet to display the status of numlock, capslock & scrolllock.

- Fix the Fn+ key volume control. Goto System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts. Press Backspace to remove the shortcut for Volume up, down & mute. This leaves only asusosd running & supplying only 1 set of controls. The volume being adjusted is Front, so set gnome mixer's primary volume to it.

- Setup some ramdisks to reduce disk writes. Add these entries in /etc/fstab
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=0755 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

- To reduce some more writes. Add in the mount options for / in fstab "noatime, nodiratime, commit=30". Like this:
#/dev/sda1
UUID=xxxxxxx-xxxxx-xxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx / ext3 noatime,nodiratime,commit=30,errors=remount-ro 0 1

You'll need to do the same in /boot/grub/menu.lst.
On the line "defoptions=quiet splash" line add "rootflags=noatime,nodiratime,commit=30" Like this:
defoptions=quiet splash rootflags=noatime,nodiratime,commit=30

Then run $sudo update-grub.

- If you don't mind losing all your browser cache every boot, you can do this put all your disk cache in ramdisk:
Open firefox
Goto about:config
Look for "browser.cache.disk.parent_directory"
If it's not there, create it (type string) & set it to "/tmp"

- Optimize the boot readahead cache by reprofiling. Here's how to do it:
Setup the system in exactly the way you want it before doing this.
Press Esc at grub
Edit the kernel line & insert "profile" at end. (without quotes of course)
Press b to boot
Let the system boot normally to the desktop. (It will take much longer)
Once completely booted, do a reboot. (The next boot will be quicker than ever)

Next I'll be experimenting with cpu frequency scaling to improve battery life. I'm still apprehensive about this since this machine is slow as it is. But I'll test it out & we'll see.

eeebuntu Netbook Remix on the EeePC 701

2008-08-21T21:15:00.005+08:00

A few days ago I decided to install eeebuntu permanently into the SSD of my EeePC, I've been running it live off a USB stick & increasingly found it far superior & far more flexible then the Xandros that came with the system. As u can see, I'm cautious about this step as I want to make sure that eeebuntu could effectively replace the Xandros. In this respect, I think the eeebuntu folks did a really great job.

As I increasingly discovered, Xandros did not afford me much flexibility & was in fact not performing well at all on my modest EeePC 701 4G. In operation, eeebuntu was much more responsive due to (I suspect) it's realtime kernel. The drawback though is obviously the boot speed, which I timed at about 1min 9seconds, this was far longer than the 34 seconds it took Xandros to boot. But compromises had to be made if you wanted a modern OS. eeebuntu is based on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1.

I'm going to try to detail my experience installing eeebuntu 1.0 NBR (Netbook Remix):
(Check out eeebuntu's Homepage)
- Installation went well without a hitch.
- Post Install, run the sndfix701.sh script in /eeesupport/scripts
- Sound should work fine now, but be careful when adjusting the volume with the Fn+hotkeys, for some reason it adjusts both Master & Front volumes. Adjusting it with the normal volume control works fine. For this I found that by setting the master channel to PCM (instead of Master) helped the volume control become smoother (still doesn't help the hotkeys issue though). In the volume options, I recommend to only enable these items: Headphone, PCM, Front, Microphone & Capture. Set Master & Front to the max & control all volume using only PCM.
- Due to a bug in the installer, the custom repositories used are not in the installed system. This is easy to remedy, simply boot the LiveUSB again, copy out the last 3 entries from /etc/apt/sources.list & put them into the installed system.
- The default ume-launcher has some issues of overlapping text on the 701. After updating to the new ume-launcher, the issue is resolved.
- SD cards will not mount because the system thinks they are optical drives. This is solved by commenting out the /dev/cdrom0 line in /etc/fstab
- I use zsnes to get my doses of old console games. zsnes will start with no sound at first, this is resolved by setting the sound sampling rate to 48000Hz & restarting zsnes with the parameters $ zsnes -ad sdl

Next time, I'll talk about optimizing the OS to boot faster, run faster & write less to the SSD.

How's Mandy so far?

2008-06-14T23:46:00.004+08:00

Been running Mandriva 2008.1 Spring Free for well over a month now, there have been many updates coming through rpmdrake. Most of the obvious bugs were ironed out by the 2nd week, so things are looking good. Here are some random observations:
- I figured out how to disable the annoying meta file download in rpmdrake.
- I found out that compiz works much better with EXA rather then XAA on my intel chip.
- I discovered that Flashplayer will crash Firefox every 2nd youtube video I watched. I later found out this is because Flashplayer 9 is not playing nice with PulseAudio. I have since disabled PulseAudio so I can watch youtube. I'm a freedom hater. I know.

I've had very little chance to hack around & get to know this new Mandriva release. This is in part because of my current work schedule, but it's also because Mandriva & Linux in general has matured to a stage where it almost requires no hacking to make everything work well. Linux is getting to a stage where it could almost just get out the way & let you use the computer. I feel as if a tipping point is near & I'm almost afraid to see what's over the horizon...

Finally upgraded to Mandriva 2008.1 Spring Free

2008-05-01T21:21:00.002+08:00

I finally did it today! Got around to backing up all my data & installing a fresh copy of 2008.1 Spring Free.
Just started to play with it a little & already I managed to kill Konqueror once. (by dragging files around)
It's ok, I'm installing Dolphin anyway.

Lets start with some first impressions:
- Multimedia keys on me Tosh are working perfectly, it even has the much needed OSD.
- Rpmdrake has been improved tremendously in speed & reliability, downloading & setting up repos automatically. However, I don't like the behavior of it downloading the info headers every time I click on a package. On my slow line, this takes a good 2 minutes per click.

Haven't had any time to play more with it. So I'll save any more comments till my next post.

OMG! I'm too busy for Mandriva!!

2008-04-27T21:14:00.004+08:00

Mandriva has release 2008.1 Spring, but sadly I've had very little time lately to explore it in any depth. I've just spent the entire March training "How to provide Tech Support for Ubuntu" and the last month attending a course on Solaris 10 Administration. So my head is now full of Ubuntu brown and a lot of old school UNIX unfriendliness.

Well, both Mandriva and Ubuntu have recently released their respective April update. Both releases are significant in their own way. For Ubuntu, it's finally time for their 2nd LTS release. Their last one was 2 years ago.
For Mandriva, this release marks their first Manbo Labs base system release that was developed in collaboration with Turbolinux. I see this as a great move for Mandriva since I personally found Mandriva to have very effective support for eastern languages, their partnership Turbolinux will only strengthen their position in this area.

In the last 2 months haven't spend any time hacking my EeePC, just using it as it was intended & I must say that it's been serving me well. It's been very good to my back & no more aching shoulders lugging a 10 lb laptop.

Well. gotta go back to studying my Solaris books & get ready to deliver training to the support guys. :(

But first, I gotta catch up on my BSG. Season 4 is out man... ;)

Getting hooked on Linux Podcasts

2008-03-16T21:55:00.002+08:00

Been really bz with work lately. March & April are hectic months for me. I've been asked to learn-up and deliver training on a couple of topics that are complete new to me. Out of bunch, 2 of the more interesting topics are Ubuntu Desktop & Solaris 10 on x86.

Apparently the local tech support need to be prepared to provide customers support for these OSs. Due to cost cuts I will not be getting any training on Ubuntu. (They assume that since I know Linux, Ubuntu should be simple) I hope they're right.

As for Solaris 10, I've been given an account to get into their e-learning site & I've been going through all their material for 2 weeks now. Some of this old school Unix stuff is really mind bogglingly boring and unnecessarily complicated. It's surprising for me to see a modern day commercial Unix still looks like something out of the 80s. CDE looks truly horrific, I though I'd traveled back in time to 1985.

To keep myself updated in the world of free software I've been listening to a couple of Podcasts that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in Linux.

My 2 favorites are:
lugradio - It's very European, with plenty of English jokes, biased reviews and profanities galore.
linuxoutlaws - A German accent, modest and lighthearted discussions and light on profanities.

Both are excellent Linux Podcasts. I listen with Amarok and can't get enough.

A decent FPS for the EeePC

2008-02-09T16:50:00.000+08:00

Because of the limited graphical performance of the EeePC, FPS choices are rather limited, the best I've come across so far is AssaultCube. It's a modified version on Cube that runs very well right away on the EeePC. In order to get better frame rates, you do have to tweak down some of the graphics, but overall it played very well. So if you're looking for a decent FPS to play on the EeePC, do give AssaultCube a go.

Tips for playing wormux on the EeePC

2008-02-05T22:47:00.000+08:00

Due the screen resolution limitations of the EeePC, many applications will have windows taller than the screen. This is typically solved by using Alt+Drag to move the window around, typically so you can click the buttons at the bottom.

This resolution also posed some interesting problems for some games, while most games would happily run at 800x480 or 640x480, games such as wormux expects the minimum resolution to be 800x600. So running wormux on the EeePC has a few problems.

Fist off, it's necessary to modify wormux's ~/.wormux/config.xml file to set the desired resolution:
width 800
height 480
full_screen 1

After this you should be able to start the game nicely fullscreen. In the player selection screen you'll see the first problem crop up. Your ok & cancel button are not visible, they are lower down & can't be seen. You can overcome this easily using the keyboard, Enter for OK and Esc for Cancel.

Finally the last obstacle is in actually playing the game. Your right click weapon selection menu is too large & goes beyond the top of the screen. Making it impossible to choose the topmost weapons (such as the Bazooka which incidentally is the most common weapon of choice). Fortunately this last problem is solved using the keyboard shortcuts F1 through F5, these keys will allow you to cycle through and select a weapon/gadget from the 5 categories.

Enjoy blowing up them gimps. :)

Gaming on the Asus EeePC

2008-02-04T20:08:00.000+08:00

I figured out that Asus EeePC worked quite well as a portable game machine. I installed Dgen & Snes9x into it, they work great. Playing Contra on it was excellent. I also installed a host of native linux games that all worked out very well.

Here's a list of em:
- abuse
- armagetron
- neverball
- pinball
- supertux
- wormux

I just can't get enough of wormux, it's excellent.

My new toy - Asus EeePC

2008-01-12T12:20:00.000+08:00

Wow, it's been a while since I last posted. Been bz with work & haven't had much time to hack. Over new year, I decided to get myself an Asus EeePC to use as my blog anywhere machine & Starbuck companion. I already have a Toshiba notebook, but at 14.1" & weighing over 4kg with the adapter, it was just too cumbersome to carry around.

I ordered a 4G 701 Galaxy Black EeePC and it arrived within a week hand delivered to my doorstep. Even YouTube cannot describe how truly small, light & portable this thing is. The first thing that strikes me is how impossibly small the keyboard is. It almost looks impossible to type on, even with my relatively small hands. So I'm typing this post to prove to myself that is does work with a little practice.

Overall the OS works just fine for it's intended market. The PDA like icon interface is fine for everyday use but I find it lacking any depth, so I quickly began hacking it into something more usable. I decided to stick with the Xandros because it's very fast & designed to minimize writes to the SSD. Other distros will no doubt need much tweaking in this area.

So this is what I decided to do for now:
- Activate the icewm start menu.
- Populate it with my preferred menus.
- Added essential firefox add-ons
- Run the system update

Overall I found the EeePC to be excellent for me. I'll definitely recommend it to anyone looking an ultra portable companion to their PC or notebook that has wifi and a decent keyboard. In fact I'm so taken by it that I'm posting my Toshiba up for sale.

Get GNU/Linux

2007-11-11T21:54:00.000+08:00

I came across these interesting sites lately & I had to share:

get GNU/Linux is a site that really help to explain why there's a large community running GNU/Linux & why someone should consider switching to Free Software.

Compare Distros is a site that makes some comparisons between the major distros and helps potential users choose the best fit. I have to agree that there is no perfect distro & there shouldn't be one.

Compiz bug workaround

2007-10-28T21:09:00.000+08:00

Couple of days ago I mentioned a bug in Compiz that made kscreensaver not cover the whole screen as it should. I accidentally discovered the solution to this problem by way of a botched upgrade to Compiz 0.6.2.

Here's the story, I read on a adamw's blog that the backports for the new Compiz and Compiz Fusion releases have hit the 2008 repositories. Of course I immediately jumped in to upgrade. Well, things didn't go too well. After upgrading I found compiz-fusion refused to start. It complained that ccp was still on the old version, I couldn't figure out what happened, so I gave up, uninstalled the new stuff & installed the original back but not before I had a quick look around ccsm to see what's new. This is where I found an entry I didn't notice before, this is where I found my workaround.

OK enough history, this is it; Window Decoration -> Decoration windows: any & !name=kdesktop_lock

Basically, this completely solved the kscreensaver issue. I'm not too upset with the bad upgrade, the only reason I wanted to upgrade was to get rid of bugs.

Tips for running Mandriva 2008 on a Toshiba Satellite M200

2007-10-23T21:44:00.000+08:00

KRandRTray
If you have a Intel Graphics card like mine, you can't miss out trying KRandRTray. You'll have access to all the functions of the video card, like clone / extended desktop and even rotate. It's excellent for working with projectors.

Toshiba Fn Hotkeys
As to be expected, not all the hotkeys would work. Luckily all the important ones did. Already working were the LCD/VGA display switcher, brightness up/down and suspend to ram key. The keys that will not work are the media player, lock pc, backlight off, suspend to disk, wifi scan & touchpad toggle keys. To enable the other hotkeys on this Toshiba, you will need to change the keyboard type, the standard installation set the keyboard to a "Generic 105 key (Intl) PC" keyboard. You will need to change this in Mandriva Control Center (MCC), under Hardware->Set up keyboard layout->Keyboard type-> Select Toshiba Satellite S3000. This will enable the remaining hotkeys, namely Wifi killswitch, Volume dial, browser, play/pause, stop, prev & next keys.

LCD Brightness
In Mandriva 2007.1, the LCD is brightness can't be changed by either the hotkeys or kpowersave. I had to resort to a hack using /proc/acpi and laptop-mode. This time round the LCD brightness worked with the hotkeys & kpowersave but reacted strangely to the brightness slider in kpowersave, as you slid down the bar the brightness would go up & down erratically. Eventually I discovered again through /proc/acpi that only the following percentages worked 10 25 35 50 60 75 100. Using these values in the kpowersave profiles worked very well. Any other value would set the brightness to the lowest.

Chicony 1.3MP Webcam
This webcam works very well in aMSN. It's a little iffy in Kopete with intermittent color. Completely useless in Pidgin.

Some compiz-fusion bugs
There only 3 bugs with compiz-fusion that I've encountered. First is an issue with the kscreensaver whereby the screensaver will come out but not cover the whole screen as it should. This can be solved by using the workaround in CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) called 'Fullscreen Legacy Support'. However locking the screen using the lock button still causes the issue. The second bug is an intermittent issue when I login in & out of a session, sometimes the hot corners / screen edges stop working until I open ccsm & make some changes. The final bug is a intermittent crash of compiz-window-decorator whenever I switch the K Menu button to another style, such as Kickoff or Default KDE. The issue only occurs during the change, once done it does work fine.

That's all I can write about this topic, Mandriva has been working great so far on this laptop & is actually giving me very decent (better than Windows Vista) battery life. I'm lovin' it.

Some screenshots of my Mandriva 2008 box

2007-10-20T22:26:00.000+08:00

Some nice new screenshots of my newly upgraded Satellite M200 to Mandriva 2008.

My new Desktop:

The new Compiz-Fusion Cube: (with a nice reflective base)

The new Compiz-Fusion Expo plugin (shows all 4 desktops at once for managing windows)

Lovely isn't it.

Now here's a picture of the Toshiba Satellite M200 that I'm running this on.

Mandriva 2008 Finally Arrives

2007-10-14T23:52:00.000+08:00

After an irritatingly long wait, Mandriva 2008 finally gets released. I quickly tested out the Mandriva One LiveCD to check how it'll run on my Toshiba notebook, happy to say it runs much better than before.

All the following things are now working without any tweaking:
1. Wireless kill switch works for both Wifi & Bluetooth
2. Hotkeys are now detected without the omnibook module
3. LCD brightness can now be adjusted by both the Fn hotkeys and kpowersave
4. Headphone & mic jacks now work as intended

New features added include:
1. Battery life greatly improved thanks to the new tickless kernel
2. A single, consolidated tool named draknetcenter for network configuration
3. Windows documents and settings migration tool
4. Significant Improvements to rpmdrake
5. NTFS write support built into diskdrake
6. Compiz Fusion replaces Beryl & Compiz

The list goes on, with a long list of improvements in hardware support.

I'm been running it for 3 days on my Toshiba Satallite M200 & it's been working very well. Much of the hardware in this notebook was considered 'too new' for Linux just 4 months ago when I tried, Suse, Ubuntu & Mandriva & they all fell down. It's amazing to see the speed that Linux software has been progressing lately.

I'll post a screenshot once I've got the system setup just the way I want it. Till then I'll be busy trying everything until something breaks... ;)

CentOS 4.5 A Better EL than RHEL

2007-10-05T20:53:00.000+08:00

Recently I've been having the time of my life fooling about with RHEL4, I wanted to discover how one would go about running a RHEL4 server in a small office with mixed Windows & Linux clients.

Although the company gives me access to the RHEL CDs and full documentation, I hit a roadblock very quickly, I couldn't have access to the internet so I can only do my tinkering in an isolated LAN. The lack of yum in RHEL4 also meant installing software would be a pain. After suffering through several rounds of dependency hell, I decided to look for an alternative & I discovered CentOS.

CentOS is a enterprise linux based on RHEL, it is fully code & binary compatible with RHEL. I tried out CentOS 4.5 (clone of RHEL4 U5) & immediately took a liking to it. It's looks & works just like RHEL but came with some important extras, notably yum. Having DVD ISOs really made carrying it around a lot easier than 5 CDs.

If you work with RHEL & find it frustrating to deal with swapping CDs, dependency hell & using RHN. I would highly recommend that you give CentOS a chance.

My Toshiba's spankin new desktop

2007-09-11T23:06:00.000+08:00

I thought I'd share some screenshots of my Satellite's new Desktop.

Here's one with the cube going.

This is running Mandriva Spring 2007.1 with the beautiful Crystal Project icon theme, Plastic window deco and the original Ia Ora style in silver gray.

Ubuntu 7.10 & Mandriva 2008 an unfair comparison

2007-09-06T21:57:00.000+08:00

New features in Ubuntu 7.10
- Graphical configuration tool for X
- Fast User Switching
- Deskbar Applet installed by default
- Desktop Search with Tracker
- Apparmor (configuration through console only)
- New Printing Service (Print to PDF)
- Apt-Enabled Plugin Finder & Extension Manager for Firefox

The list above is simply dwarfed by the massive new features of Mandriva 2008:
- All major Desktop Environments: GNOME 2.20, KDE 3.5.7, KDE 4 preview and XFCE 4.4.1 (all consistently integrated & fully functional)
- "Tickless" laptop kernel (for improved battery performance)
- Built-in support for the Hauppauge WinTV PVR series TV cards
- Live Dynamic resolution scaling (with XrandR 1.2)
- Fully integrated network configuration & management (with support for Enterprise WPA-EAP)
- Hybrid suspend mode (simultaneous suspend to RAM & Disk)
- Apparmor integrated with draksec (for graphical security management)
- New Dynamic Printer package system
- eID smartcard & biometric authentication support
- LUKS encrypted file system support
- Xen, Qemu, virt-manager & drakvirt (for complete vitalization management)

For a period I felt that I couldn't really put my finger on why I never got along with Ubuntu even though it appears to be so popular. This small comparison reminded me of what a child Ubuntu is, a fast growing child but a child nonetheless. I start to understand why I've always preferred Mandriva, Red Hat & even Suse more than Ubuntu. Simple because they are more grown up compared to the overeager child. For me, using Ubuntu is like playing with a cute puppy, it's fun once in a while but you won't take it home because it'll make a mess & u already have a loyal & faithful retriever.

Mandriva 2008 RC1 released

2007-09-06T15:50:00.000+08:00

Finally Mandriva is about to release what I consider to be the most important release since Mandrake 10.1. Finally they are really engaging the community, listening to their users and actually making crucial changes for the future.

With the release of RC1, we got to glimpse at the shiny new features that will make many users very happy. Here are some samples:

- draknetcenter: A brand new network configuration center consolidating all network configuration into 1 application (This used to be a collection of some 10 separate application that I often gripped about.)

- Sensible new menu structure: The old menu had way too many nested levels that bothered many users.

- New kernel spec file: Using the tmb spec file means we now have a choice of desktop, laptop, server & legacy kernels to choose from, the laptop kernel would be a great battery life booster.

-rpmdrake: Now handles updates properly, only marking updates from repositories with the update flags instead of just updating everything. Great for people like me who use plf.

- CompizFusion: Of course the ever pretty CompizFusion will be fully integrated with drak3d to provide all the 3D goodness. (Old Compiz & Beryl will be dropped in it's favor)

The list goes on & on.

With the final release of Mandriva 2008 scheduled for the end of September, I wait with bated breath to see if they can pull out all the stops & make this the best release ever. Judging be the direction of the RC1, my hopes are high, don't disappoint me Mandriva...

A walk down memory lane.

2007-09-05T23:27:00.000+08:00

For the past few days I've been attending a Basic Linux training session, not to learn Linux but to learn the course material, delivery & lab setup. This is because my new job is training facilitator. Later I'll be taking turns in the actual delivery.

This training really brought back some fond memories of the good old days of Red Hat 5 - 9. The training was based on RHEL4 which in turn is actually a cleaned-up Fedora Core 3. I remember the tingling sensation whenever I knew a new Red Hat was gonna be launched. I remember the great disappointment I felt when Red Hat announced that they will stop producing the Free Red Hat Linux, instead pushing it out into the community based Fedora Project. In hindsight, I believe they made the right choice. But this was also the turning point in my Linux journey. With Red Hat no longer releasing a free Linux & the Fedora Project slow to deliver, I reached out in search of my next distro. I sampled all the big names, Slackware, Suse & Debian, but they all left me confused & disdained. This was when I (re)discovered Mandrake Linux (10.1 if I remember correctly).

I have used Mandrake Linux since 6 but I always fell back to Red Hat for any serious tinkering because back then I found the original favorable to the rougher edged clone. Mandrake 10.1 change my perspective quite permanently. I found great power in urpmi & experienced the liberation of administering Linux without the need for a console.

Now, things have advanced so much. Thing that were incredible years ago are now commonplace. Mandrake has evolved too, it had fallen to near bankruptcy & risen again as Mandriva. That's why I always have a special place in my heart for Mandriva & the Red Hats of old.

Ubuntu: Broken Packages

2007-09-02T20:31:00.000+08:00

I was helping a friend, trying to enable Compiz/Beryl in his Ubuntu box (Ubuntu Ultimate 1.4). He'd previously used an ATI X1300 card with the fglrx module that did not support texture_from_pixmap. This prevented him from using any kind of compositing window manager like Compiz/Beryl. So he removed the ATI card & was hoping to use the on-board Intel 965.

This afternoon I logged into his system through ssh. According to Ubuntu, the fglrx module has to be removed, so I removed it with #apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx. Still nothing worked after that. I had to install libgl1-mesa-glx. I tried this but kept getting the same error, something about unable to create symbolic link. Later in Synaptics I found out that removing the xorg-driver-fglrx had broken some 48 packages. fixing it involved installing libgl1-mesa-glx, but it's exactly libgl1-mesa-glx that refused to install. Now the system is in a state of dead lock. I can't install libgl1-mesa-glx, it will always give the same error & I can't reinstall xorg-driver-fglrx because it also needed libgl1-mesa-glx. So the system is now royally screwed, It's stuck forever with no hardware acceleration & the only choice left is to reinstall Ubuntu.

I can't understand how the "oh so much better than rpm" apt-get can allow me to screw-up the system so badly. 4 years of using urpmi, I've never seen anything this bad happen. The only time I had an issue was 2 years ago after upgrading my distro from Mandrake 10.1 to Mandriva 2006. Even this was easily fixed with #rpm --rebuilddb

Ubuntu: On the right path to becoming a decent distro

2007-08-31T12:56:00.000+08:00

One of my oft quoted grips with Ubuntu is it's apparent lack of decent configuration tools. The most glaring omission is a proper X configuration tool. But finally Ubuntu is planning to fix that with the next release of Gutsy Gibbons (7.10).

Ubuntu 7.10 will feature a new X configuration tool called gtk-displayconfig and a script to manage X startup recovery called bulletproof-X. It's about time, since distros like Suse, Fedora & Mandriva has had this feature for the last 3 years.

Next on their list should be a proper Grub configuration tool & a decent Grub theme. Followed by a properly working Device Manager.

Maybe it won't be long now. I'm looking forward to Hardy Heron. Maybe that will be the first decent Ubuntu...

Ready / Capable / Powered by...

2007-08-31T00:11:00.001+08:00

Have u always wanted a have a nice Linux Logo on you laptop instead of the usually affixed Windows Ready Logo. Well here are some great ideas from the people at kde-look.org:

Now all I have to do is find some way to print them onto stickers & I'm set.

Off-Topic

2007-08-30T23:57:00.000+08:00

Taking a rest from the ordeal of making the Toshiba work. Here's something off-topic. Found these rather interesting small pictures from somewhere & I thought I'd share them.

Return of that blasted Toshiba

2007-08-28T22:28:00.000+08:00

After wasting several hours of tearing apart the notebook and putting it back together to no avail. It just doesn't feel right for this damn thing to just work again the next morning. What is wrong with this lemon that Toshiba has given me?

Since it's working again. I'm back to tinkering with the acpi to get the LCD brightness working. I figured out that if you write 2 different values into the 2 /proc entries you'll get the that "TBX error" issue when you reboot.

Here's the output of that file:
[terrorsomemore@Terrors-PC ~]$ cat /proc/acpi/video/GFX0_PCI0/LCD/brightness
levels: 75 35 10 25 35 50 60 75 90 100
current: 0

The levels are the different setting available. Don't understand why the numbers are jumbled up. Tested the setting, the numbers between 10 -> 90 worked. The 0 & 100 did not work.

So here's my solution:
I wrote a script lcd-dim.sh with the contents:
#!/bin/bash
# Minimum Brightness
echo 10 > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0_PCI0/LCD/brightness
echo 10 > /proc/acpi/video/VGA_PEGP/LCD/brightness

Another script lcd-bright.sh
#!/bin/bash
# Nice Brightness
echo 50 > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0_PCI0/LCD/brightness
echo 50 > /proc/acpi/video/VGA_PEGP/LCD/brightness

Gave them execute permission: chmod 755 *.sh

To make the LCD dim when using battery.
I copied lcd-dim.sh into /etc/laptop-mode/batt-start/

To make the LCD bright when plugging in AC.
I copied lcd-bright.sh into /etc/laptop-mode/batt-stop/

To make the LCD bright at the desired level on power-up with AC.
I copied lcd-bright.sh into /etc/laptop-mode/nolm-ac-start/

If you wanna go further, you could add 2 icons into your panel & link that to your scripts so you get buttons for changing the brightness. I didn't bother because these needed root privileges that meant u had to type the root password every time you click the icon.

So all in all, I needed 3 hacks to make this laptop work decently.
1. The script I just explained above.

2. To make the Bluetooth & Wifi on/off switch work. I compiled & installed the latest omnibook module. Forcing module load using option ectype=12. Every other features of the omnibook module didn't work, only the switch worked.

3. To make Mandriva's KDE utilize the Media playback & volume control buttons, I installed lineak. Klineakconfig just segfaulted, so I had to configure it by hand. This was done basically using 'xev' to capture the keycode & writing my own custom keyboard type, then mapping these to the necessary plug-ins or DCOP commands. I managed to configure the Play, Stop, Next, Prev and VolumeUpDown buttons all this way.

I contrast, I recently installed Mandriva & Ubuntu into a Dell Inspiron 1520 notebook which has pretty much the same specs as this Toshiba. The Inspiron did not require any hacks whatsoever, it just worked. That's because Dell properly builds all the Fn+ hotkeys into the BIOS the way they should be.

That blasted Toshiba

2007-08-28T10:57:00.000+08:00

Last night the Toshiba decided to go ape shit on me. After I messed around with the acpi setting in /proc I've discovered that I can control the brightness of the LCD through:
/proc/acpi/video/VGA_EGEP/LCD/brightness
and also
/proc/acpi/video/GFX0_PCI0/LCD/brightness

Somehow, these 2 settings both work for setting the brightness, but changing 1 file doesn't reflect in the other. I changed 1 file & rebooted.

On reboot, the system froze at the BIOS with a helpful error on the top left that says "TBX error".

For the next 2 hours I couldn't revive the system. I almost disassembled the machine.
After leaving it alone for a while. I tried again. This time, it booted up & I was able to get into the BIOS. But the HDD was not detected, I reseated the HDD & tried again, "TBX error" again.

I removed the HDD & tried, still "TBX error". Some research revealed that TBX error comes from the TPM system that checks the Hardware Integrity. But whatever I tried, I can either bootup with the HDD not detected or it will freeze at BIOS with "TBX error". I thought it was royally screwed. I was getting ready to call Toshiba & make up a story about what happened.

The next morning, suddenly the system worked fine again. Like last night never happened. WTF!!!

Toshiba Satellite M200 Notebook

2007-08-25T23:47:00.000+08:00

I recently got a new notebook, a free gift that came with the car i bought. It's just a cheap local car, so I was rather surprised to a get a RM3K free gift. I was delivered 6 weeks after the car, was supposed to be an M100, but was upgraded to M200 because the M100 is obsolete.

Here's the spec sheet:
Intel Centrino Duo (1.86Ghz)
Intel GMA950 Video
512MB DDR2-667 RAM (Upgraded to 1536MB for RM150)
80GB SATA Hard Drive
Intel Pro Wireless 3945a/b/g
Bluetooth 2.0
1.3 MP webcam

Not exactly high-end, but pretty decent notebook.

I quickly tested both Ubuntu and Mandriva on it. Both worked well. Ubuntu even picked up & setup all the hotkeys. Mandriva needed lineak to make use of the hotkeys.

A couple of things expectedly did not work out.
- The webcam worked but has poor color correction. (It was gray most of the time & tweaking had no effect)
- Some of the hotkeys are not working. Most notably, Brightness control, Touchpad toggle, Lock System, Hibernate, Media & Wireless radio on/off button.
- The ones that did work are: Mute, Volume, Wireless device on/off switch, Web, Play/pause/stop/prev/next, Suspend and Toggle Display. (These all worked out of box in Ubuntu & Mandriva's GNOME, but required tweaking lineak in KDE + the omnibook module)
- The most pressing issue with the notebook is that it's LCD is stuck at the highest brightness all the time, with the controls not working + unplugging the adapter does not dim the LCD.

Toshiba is really relying too heavily on software utilities to supply all the functionality instead of building all these things into the BIOS like they should be, heck the BIOS is just a very simplistic and completely useless Phoenix BIOS.

In the supplied Windows Vista Basic nothing worked until the ToshUtil program fully loaded-up, and that took some time as it is a seriously bloated application. I tried loading it up with WinXP SP2, then found out there were no drivers for it at all, this system ONLY works with Vista. Through some research I discovered this is one of those non-toshiba toshibas that were probably made by Compal or Quanta, one of these Taiwan Notebook ODMs.

My advice, if you're looking for a notebook to run Linux on, buy a Dell Inspiron/Latitude. Forget Toshibas, they're not worth it.

Turn your Linux box into a Media Center with Freevo

2007-08-10T22:39:00.000+08:00

I've been playing with the notion of turning my PC into a PVR for some time now, but I never got around to it. About a month ago I got my hands on some cheap kit for this purpose & got the setup working. Just a few days later my TV blew up, it was a spooky coincidence. Fate would have it that my PC will have to be the TV until I get a new TV.

This is the kit:
- Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 TV-Card (PCI)
- Phillips RC6 Windows MCE IR Remote Control with USB Receiver

With the hardware installed, the next step was to make sure it all worked in my Mandriva 2007 box. The PCI card was detected but the required firmware & configuration tools were missing. This was easily solved by grabbing these packages from RpmDrake:
- ivtv
- ivtv-firmware-audio
- ivtv-firmware-enc
- perl-Video-ivtv

Next the MCE Remote was detected as well, but again the required tools needed to be installed. These were:
- lirc
- lirc-remotes
- python-lirc

Now comes the crucial part, the Media Center software itself.

I looked around quite alot for what would be the best software to use. Everything seems to point me to MythTV, which I couldn't get my head around because it was a feature monster, far beyond my needs and terribly complicated.
I also tried out Elisa, which was nice but didn't work well with IR remotes (yet).
I finally settled on Freevo, a small, compact & surprisingly featureful Media Center that provided all the functionality I needed in a small footprint with good support for IR Remotes.
Freevo is installed from RpmDrake using just 1 package: Freevo

Next challenge was tying it all into a cohesive fluent interface that just works.
The Freevo wiki helped alot.

I first configured the PVR card using ivtv to tune-in to the correct frequency for my favourite TV channels TV3, NTV7 & 8TV. (This is harder than usual because NO online XML TV listings existed for Malaysian TV)

Once the TV was sorted. I worked on getting the remote configured.
I configured the remote using a downloaded copy of the lircrc.mceusb config file that had the basic bindings for working with Mplayer, Xine & even MythTV. To this I added support for Amarok through DCOP commands & used IRExec to launch Freevo when I pressed the big green MCE button.
Freevo has it's own set of lirc bindings which take effect only when Freevo is running. These can be customised to give full access to every freevo feature. (If anyone is interested in any of these config files, please let me know)

So I had my Freevo setup with these functions:
- Watch TV (Obviously)
- Play Media on the Hard Drive (or any removable drives)
- Autoplay CD/VCD/DVDs using Xine (with DVD Menu)
- Favourite RSS News Feeds

Disabled the following unused features:
- TV recording
- Radio
- CD ripping, burning & encoding
- Web Browser

As you can see Freevo is pretty damn feature rich for it's size. I might get around to setting up the other features like the web browser, but for now it's serving it's purpose as a replacement for my TV. Good thing I got myself that 22' Wide LCD monitor. ;)

Ubuntu: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

2007-07-25T22:41:00.000+08:00

The Good: Ubuntu certainly has alot going for it. It's backed by a zealous billionaire, it's got a strong community backing with that great tag line "Linux for Human Beings". It's even got Michael Dell in a buzz declaring how great it is. It's got apt-get/Synaptic, Debian at it's core & it's brown. What chance does anyone else have against that?

The Bad: If you examine & really start to use Ubuntu proper. You will start to find alot of gaps in the product itself. Many things that should be easy to do, well.. just isn't. (Read: Alot of googling required) I guess they go for the Gnome ideology which is: If it can't be done simply & intuitively, it shouldn't be done at all.

The Ugly: The worse thing Ubuntu did was to segregate the community by which desktop environment you prefered. The stupidity of separating, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu & Edubuntu into distinct & often incompatible distros is really beyond retarded. Why shouldn't I have KDE, Gnome & Xfce all installed easily in the same box while looking & working consistently across all desktops I use?

Enough ranting now. Will Ubuntu continue to dominate? It probably will. Will PCLinuxOS really upstage Ubuntu? Not by long shot.

If you want Gnome & an intuitive but not too flexible OS, go Ubuntu. If you want KDE with pretty themes and hassle free multimedia, go PCLinuxOS. If like me, you like having the choice of KDE, Gnome, Xfce, a whole lot of flexibility, don't mind a little hassle, Mandriva is still the best choice.

PCLinuxOS #1

2007-07-25T21:50:00.000+08:00

PCLinuxOS shot up to #1 in Distrowatch in the past 3 months. This certainly must have Mark Shuttleworth a little worried. (Mark is the Ubuntu's Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life, in case you didn't know)

Will dreams come true? Will an RPM distro finally be at the top of Distrowatch again? It seems like only yesterday when Mandrake was leading the pact. Now it's only fitting that a derivative of Mandrake should regain the throne. I can only dream.

But look closely & you will see that Ubuntu is fighting back. It's inched in way up again in the last 7 days & continues to climb while PCLinuxOS has begun it's descend.

PCLinuxOS vs Mandriva? Or more like =

2007-07-05T22:11:00.000+08:00

There's been some heated discussions going on in the PCLOS forums recently about the topic of PCLinuxOS being a glorified clone of Mandriva. This was sparked off by a sudden rise of PCLinuxOS to the #2 spot on Distrowatch. I read through it all & found the entire thread rather amusing. I was thinking: "What are these fracking sotongs talking about?"

Personally, you all know I prefer Mandriva. But I think PCLinuxOS is very good as well, just not all that different. Having used both before & comparing them side by side, Mandriva 2007 and PCLinuxOS 2007 is really very much the same. There is only 1 clear defining difference, PCLinuxOS uses apt-rpm which makes the software grabbing part more similar to Ubuntu than Mandriva. There's also the pre-configuration of Multimedia codecs and the prettier theme set, but these aren't all the special. With the right packages installed from contrib & plf, you can essentially get the same results with Mandriva.

I think of PCLinuxOS as a newbie friendlier Mandriva. One of the points brought up is that a large number of packages for PCLinuxOS 2007 are direct copies from Mandriva 2007's cooker (development tree). The author was pointing out that Texstar (Creator of PCLinuxOS) boldly states in their website that PCLinuxOS forked from Mandrake 9.x and is now a complete distinct distro. This is a very bold statement; If Mandrake was to say this back around version 7.x when they were based largely on Redhat it would have been a very big joke. They just didn't have the resources to do it. (Texstar making this claim is quite a fair bit premature)

PCLinuxOS supporters do have to face the reality that their favorite distro is still quite heavily dependent on the development of Mandriva. Just like Mandrake was dependent on Redhat many years ago. It will take time & a lot of momentum to pull PCLinuxOS away from this dependence.

Right now, I personally found only a few barriers that prevents me from using PCLinuxOS: (Like everyone, I do prefer Synaptics over RPMDrake)
1. Packages updates are taking some time to come downstream. (Mandriva gets the patches first.)
2. Available packages in the repos are still not nearly as comprehensive. (A lot of stuff is missing, it definitely doesn't cover all the bases)
3. The name 'PCLinuxOS' is a real turn off, it's soooo un-sexy. (Come on ppl, is that the best name you can come up with? Which genius picked that name? I'm ashamed to show it to my friends.)

I'll be a convert and switch over if these things above are fixed. That means, get that momentum and shake that dependence on Mandriva development. Find em bugs & fix em as fast or faster than Mandriva. Build a comprehensive repository with everything everyone will ever need. Finally, do something about that awful name.

Will I be a convert? Look like only time will tell...

Ubuntu. Really for Human Beings?

2007-07-03T23:41:00.000+08:00

I've never been much of a fan of Ubuntu, my several encounters with it's various incarnations have shown it to be inconsistant, unweildy and much over hyped. It seems to be lacking the most basic of tools for easy graphical configuration and administration of a Linux box. Tools that I've come to expect, having used Mandriva (formally known as Mandrake) for many years. Even Suse with it's Yast monstrosity still manages to provide a decent graphical system administration tool.

Recently I realised that my understanding of Ubuntu barely scratched the surface of what really using it will be like on a day to day basis. So I decided to commit a partition to it on me lappy & actually try using it for daily activities. It's been about a week now, here are some of my findings:
- It 's quite alien to me. Its inerds work completely differently from the typical Redhat based systems that I'm used to.
- Synaptics is shitloads faster than urpmi. (At least 30% faster)
- Boot speed is just a tad slower than Mandriva.
- GNOME has got a stupidly huge RAM footprint compared to KDE.
- I had to visit the Ubuntu Help wiki ALOT. The documentation is very nice, acurate & accessible.
- I had to visit the Ubuntu Help wiki ALOT MORE. For things I can easily do with a few clicks in Mandriva & Suse.
- Laptop power management support was poor. Suspend & Hibernate will lockup on resume. (both Mandriva & Suse could at least hibernate & resume properly)

Once up & running, thing are peachy for a while. But after a week & after installing > 30 apps (My usual suspects) from Synaptics, things don't look so pretty anymore. The menus are overcrowded and excessively long. Reminds me of the Windows Start Menu. (Takes a bloody long time for the menu icons to load up too)

The repositories are not as comprehensive as I was led to believe. After turning on all the repos, (including the commercial & 3rd-party ones) I still couldn't find some key pieces of software. (Freevo my prefered media center was nowhere to be found)

& finally GNOME.. Oh GNOME GNOME, what can I say about it.. well.. I still don't like it. GNOME is like soup from the soup nazi. It's good really, but can you deal with not having any real say in what u get with the soup? I can't, so I guess it's no soup for me & I recommend 'No soup for You!!' too. Viva la KDE!!

Porn is safer with Linux

2007-05-18T23:02:00.000+08:00

Here's a tip for all you Porn lovers out there (that's practically everyone)
Surf porn in complete comfort and safety with Linux.

Linux will help you to surf your Porn in the absolute safest way possible. Here's why: Porn site out there littered with all the worst forms of malware that you can imagine. Vulnerability hacks, arbitrary code execution, malicious scripts, Pop up Ads, Phishing attacks, it's not safe to surf for porn these days. Practically all these malware are written for Windows.

These days just using firefox or opera instead of IE is not enough. All these apps are already under attack from malware writers. There is now malware to attack practically any browser you can use in Windows. The only way left to avoid them all is to NOT use Windows.

So, use Linux. It will make surfing the net carefree and enjoyable again like that good old days. The other alternative, if you have the cash but lack the braincells, is to buy an Apple.

Linux like Porn?

2007-05-18T21:57:00.000+08:00

I recently read an article on osnews where someone mentioned that in his country anyone running Linux was considered a criminal automatically. They are labeled as 'hackers' and must have something to hide in their PCs, otherwise they'd be running Windows. It's akin to a guy having porn on his PC instantly considered a rapist / pedophile / child molester.

I have been giving this some thought, are there people out there who think this way? Does such total ignorance exist in this day & age? Well, unfortunately it's quite true that most people are still completely ignorant about Linux.

I fool around with all forms of Linux & OSS software everywhere I go, more so at work since I have access to more hardware to test them on. I couldn't even count how many times some Sotong came up to me & said:
Sotong: Wow, what is that software you using, it looks cool.. is it some free/shareware?
Me: Look closer, this is NOT running Windows.
Sotong: Ya hor!! What is it then?
Me: It's Linux.
Sotong: Ohh yah.. What version is it? I did try version 8 before.. very hard to use leh.
Me: This is a distribution called Knoppix. The version 8 you tried, was it Red Hat 8?
Sotong: Ohh I can't remember lar, long time ago. Can I install Office 2007 into this?
Me: No. It's NOT Windows.
Sotong: Like that I dowan to use la, not user friendly at all. Cannot run any software.
Me: Well, that's ok. I find it very suitable for me. It's not for everybody.
Sotong: Why you use arr? You must be a hacker right? Do you write virus arr?
Me: (Giving up) Yah.. but only on weekends...

Some grips about Mandriva

2007-05-05T23:07:00.000+08:00

There are some things about Mandriva that has bothered me for a long time & I just had to vent about them.

1. Logout Options
Whenever you logout of KDE, you will get the standard 3 options, end session, turn off & restart. For some reason, this simple screen does not always appear as u expect it to. There are several situations that will cause the 2nd & 3rd options to simply disappear, leaving only the 'end session' option. I have not been able to find a solution to this problem & I'm generally pissed that they haven't fixed this yet. (This has been there since Mandrake 10.1 possibly earlier) These are the scenarios that will produce this behavior:
A: Enabling 'Automatic Login' upon bootup.
B: Enabling 'Metisse' 3D Desktop.
C: Enabling 'Compiz/Beryl' using 'XGL' NOT with 'AIGLX/Native'
With any of the 3 items above enable, you will see this behavior in KDE when you logout. Wish somebody would fix this up. It's just damn annoying.

2. Repository hdlist.cz download
Adding a repository means downloading the hdlist.cz header file for that source. This file is often HUGE & takes ages to download. Mandriva typically takes over 30 minutes (Including official & plf). In comparison, Ubuntu's synaptics takes about 5 minutes to grab repository headers. (Including for universe & multiverse) Granted that Mandriva's repo headers contain a little more data & info about the packages, this may seem to be an unfair comparison. But even when using the so called 'compressed' index, which contains absolutely no package information, this process still takes a good 15 - 20 minutes. This has not really improved much in Mandriva Spring, however what has improved is the time taken to process and integrate added repos into the urpmi database. This shaves a few second off the post processing, but doesn't help the download speed/size. Rpmdrake still has a long way to go & many usability issues to address before it's even in the same league as Synaptics.

3. Mandriva Control Center
Integration is the problem. There are alot of icons in MCC that are just stupidly redundant with stupidly long & patronising names. There is absolutely NO reason why they can't just be 1 option or 1 application. Here are some examples:
Software Management: Icons for 'Install', 'Remove', 'Update' and 'Sources'. They are all the same application. Why can't we have just 1 icon that says "Software Management"?
Hardware: 'Monitor', 'Graphical Server' and 'Resolution". They all have to do with the display & the monitor. Why do we need 3 icons & 3 separate applications? Why not just have 1 that says "Configure your display"?
Networking: 'Setup', 'Reconfigure', 'Delete', 'Share', 'Misc Settings' & 'Monitor'. They are all about setting up your network. Again why so many separate applications? Can't we have 1 that says 'Configure Network'?
The list goes on unfortunately, over time I've learned to live with it & have grown quite used to it by now. I've always attributed these oddities to the fact that those guys are French, they probably have their brains wired quite differently from mine. I deduced this after trying Suse's Yast & found it to have similar oddities.

That's all for my rants about Mandriva, please don't feel discouraged by my rants, Mandriva is still one of the best distros available today. If I had talked about Ubuntu today, this list would be at least 3 times longer, so don't get me started.

Dell offerring PCs with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed

2007-05-05T21:39:00.000+08:00

It's all over the news these days, u can't read any linux blog or news without seeing this piece of news plastered everywhere. Here in Malaysia, no one's really jumping with excitement about this news, not really because nobody's interested in Linux, more of the fact that all us Linux users know pretty much for sure that this won't ever reach our shores.

As expected, just a few days after the announcement, they added that this will only be offered in the states, much to the dismay of many users in the UK. Dell's official position now is that they will offer it in the US first, then will look into the markets for UK & Asia.

This is not the first time Dell has dabbled in Linux, a few years ago Dell did offer preinstalled Redhat 9 on some models of Optiplex desktops and Latitude notebooks. This was also offered only in the US and it did not last long, very soon they were quietly removed from the websites.

Whether this time will be any different depends on many factors & I really can't speculate too much on it. Success will depend primarily on 4 main factors.
1:Hardware - Will they get it right? Will everything work out of the box?
2:Volume - Can they sell enough to justify the cost?
3:Marketing - Will the right people be buying these PCs? (You don't want to be selling them to n00bs)
4:Support - Will the support provided (Online/Phone) by Canonical be up to the expected standards?

I do hope that Dell gets it right & delivers on their promise. This is a win for Linux no matter what the outcome. Ubuntu was an obvious choice for Dell considering the target market, as I'm sure u know by now I'm not much a fan of Ubuntu (I think it's overrated), this is just my personal, everybody has their preference when it comes to distros.

If they start selling them here in this region, this is what will happen (I've seen it with my own eyes). People will buy the PCs pre-installed with Ubuntu (to save a few bucks), they will run down to the nearest shopping mall & grab a lanun* copy of Windows Vista & install it. Dell will think they sold a lot of Linux boxes, but it fact they will be promoting more software piracy. *(lanun = pirated)

Well, this is how it's gonna be for a long long time somemore....

Mandriva 2007.1 Spring Released

2007-05-03T21:58:00.000+08:00

Couple of week ago, Mandriva release the latest midyear update to their Mandriva Linux. Mandriva has decided finaly to return to a 6 months release cycle. This release marks the first of these.

I'm going to run through my upgrade experience on my old notebook, a Dell Inspiron 2100. (PIII 700Mhz, 256MB RAM & 20GB HDD). It's ancient, but Mandriva has always worked reasonably well on it running XFCE of course instead of the heavyweight KDE. I'm using this notebook to test it out to see if it's worthwhile upgrading my main PC. So here we go:

Installation
Hasn't changed much, just looks better. Been the same installer since 5 years ago. This is not a bad thing at all. Mandriva's installer is the best installer in my opinion, it combines simplicity with just the right amount of control to satisfy anyone from a newbie to a poweruser.

For my installation, I decided not to upgrade the system, instead I opted for a semi-clean installation that is to format the root partition and leave my /home untouched. This is easily done with the 'Use Existing Partitions" option. What this essentially gives you is a clean OS installation with all your user account customizations still intact. This saves you from having to change your wallpaper, panel options, etc. (The reason I chose NOT to upgrade is 1: to save time, 2: To clean up all the scattered hacks I've supplanted my system with.)
The installation went smoothly. Not a single error crept up.

POST Install
Post install config was as normal, I setup a user account with exactly the same name as my old system, It found my existing /home folder & used it. Nothing new here. So far same old options.

Repository setup & online updates
Rpmdrake has been updated with some niceties like a proper 'Select All' option. (You used to have to tick every box yourself) Also added is a new user friendly update screen that reminds me of the one in Ubuntu.(I didn't care much for this one) I setup my favorite repositories using easyurpmi.zarb.org as always. I later discovered that this was no longer necessary as the first time you start rpmdrake it will prompt you to add repositories & will do it for you automatically. (This is the proper way to do it & should have been there a standard feature since years ago) Finally the online update notification icon now actually works, without having to register an account with Mandriva.

I did find a strange bug in rpmdrake which I'm not sure if it's specific to my installation. When choosing a package to install, a window will popup to ask if you wish to install the required dependencies, it will list the dependencies on this window. But on my PC, the popup list is empty, if I said yes, it will still install the dependencies. I'm not sure if this is a bug or just something caused by my upgrade method since I can't find any mention of this in any forums or erratas.

Getting & Running XFCE
XFCE 4.4 was already available in the contrib source. I installed it by choosing the xfce4-common metapackage. XFCE 4.4 is a great leap from 4.2, it's so much better looking and works much more fluidly than 4.2 ever did. I loved it. The new Thuner file manager was so usable that I couldn't imagine how I managed to bare with xftree for so long.

Here's a FAQ tip for XFCE users. To make XFCE enable the Shutdown & Reboot option on the Exit menu, you need to add yourself into the sudoer file. like this (do this as root):
# visudo
(add this line in under user aliases)
ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/lib/xfsm-shutdown-helper
where is the user that you want to allow to shutdown from XFCE.
Eg: (My username is jobe)
jobe ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/lib/xfsm-shutdown-helper

This will enable the greyed-out Shutdown & Reboot options in the Exit menu. This little hack is necessary only if you are running XFCE.

Well this is as far as I got before I dosed off. Till next time.. .ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Dell E207WFP 20' Widescreen Flat Panel Display

2007-03-01T23:17:00.000+08:00

Just picked up my 20' Wide Dell monitor last night. It looks absolutely stunning. I also pickup up the Radeon X700 I was waiting for, so I could play games properly (I was using the Geforce FX 5600). Installed the X700, plugged in the new flat panel, booted straight into Mandriva. As expected:

X failed to start. I was droped to a text login. Here's what I did:
Logged in as root. Ran # drakxconf, selected my new card as Radeon (fglrx). The system automatically started to download & install the ati & dkms-ati packages.
Once done, rebooted the system & I was back in X again. Again back to MCC to select my new monitor & resolution. The Dell E207WFP was not listed, so I went for the Generic Flat Panel 1680x1050. Restarted X & i was finally back in high resolution (after surviving 2 torturous weeks of 14' 800x600).

I had to give up using Beryl(it was getting distracting anyway), the ATI modules don't support the X composite extension required by Beryl and Compiz. I could use the open source Radeon module, but it lacked proper 3D performance. So I decided to use the evil propriatary closed source module from ATI.

Performance wise, the ATI card certainly beats the pants off NVIDIA. I can't easily compare the performance with something like glxgears (the NVIDIA was getting >4000 FPS, while the ATI was doing just >500) This is due to the way the evil ATI driver works. In actual game play (UT2004), the performance increase is very clear, I maxed out the graphics options, ran the game at native 1680x1050 resolution, not even the slightest hint of lagging. Awesome!

Finally Something Broke

2007-02-22T21:44:00.000+08:00

Finally! I managed to break something. I got gatal yesterday & upgraded to Java SE 1.6. I read up somewhere that it's incredibly fast. I could use a boost to my Azureus I tot. So I went ahead & updated to 1.6 from the mcnl repo. Azureus started back up & took less than half the time to start & the overall responsiveness was much better. I tot all was well.. until I tried to surf a few sites today & discovered that Java applets won't load. I checked in FF, everything looked ok. Checked out about:plugins, looks alright, it's enabled & detected. Trying to run java in the shell worked. Tried in Konquorer, works fine. Then found out the Java control center failed to load with FF due to some odd libc++ crash. Chialat. It's broken. I tried to uninstall but it wanted to remove a bunch of other programs along with it. 'Dependents'. Refused to downgrade without first uninstalling the newer version. So I decided to screw Java applets(at least in FF), I can live without em as long as my Azureus is always this fast. :)

Next up I tried Kerry, (the KDE front end to Beagle{a type of dog that sniffs around your /home to build a metadata search index}) Worked perfectly, now I can find all my stuff in a flash.

Finally I installed Apollon, (the GUI frontend to GiFT, which connects you to Kaaza & Gnutella networks) Worked perfectly again. Just have to tweak the router to forward ports.

Perfect. till next time...

Getting SCIM, AIGLX & Beryl in Mandriva

2007-02-14T21:36:00.000+08:00

Few days ago, I finally got a chance to stretch abit & test some bits of Mandriva that I did not have the spare equipment to do so. Many thanks to THEwe for selling me cheap a slightly gawky looking clone PC. (As I thought, I couldn't get used to the glowy blue LEDs in the transparent side cover :p)

Anyhow I'm typing this now using my new 'to me' pc, attached to a horrible looking 14' CRT monitor. While still waiting for my 20' flat panel. As you'd expect, I have it running Mandriva Free 2007.
A few days ago I got adventurous & decided to try out some things I've not tested before & also try some stuff in the backports repositories. (just to see what I could break)

But to my suprise, I didn't manage to break anything.. yet.
1. I installed SCIM & SKIM. to get Chinese input support. The installation went well, but I couldn't figure out what to do afterwards. I couldn't find a whole lot of help either. Some fonts were showing up as little square boxes. I figured out later that I needed to install locale-zh & font-ttf-chinese. After that, It all seemed to only work in GNOME apps & not in KDE. I later figured out that I needed to change my input method by running 'draklocale'. Finally it all worked & suprisingly well.

2. Next up I upgraded to the latest 9xxx series NVIDIA modules. I decided to play it safe & used the updated ones in plf. (Added the repositories plf-free_updates & plf-nonfree_updates) Did it, restarted & I could now use AIGLX instead of XGL for compiz, no hacks, just using drak3d.

3. Finally I got really excited & decided to go for Beryl. I added the main_backports & contrib_backports repositories. Searched for beryl, install beryl-core, beryl-manager & emerald. Disabled 3D Desktop in MCC, restarted X & ran 'beryl-manager'. It just worked immediately.. & it looked absolutely stunning. to make beryl start everytime, do '$ cd ~/.kde/Autostart' then '$ ln -s /usr/bin/beryl-manager beryl-start'. That's it.

I've been using the system like this for a few days & so far it has survived every situation I threw at it. Someone told me that Beryl is highly experimental & incredibly buggy & unstable. Well not in my experience. I found that Beryl IS ACTUALLY STABLE & fully usable for the everyday desktop. I won't bother posting any video of Beryl on my desktop, there are already tons of these on YouTube. Go have a look if you don't know what I'm talking about.

1 last thing. I forget to mention flash-player in my previous post about setting up a Mandriva box. Well, if you haven't figured it out: Goto 'http://sdc.shockwave.com/go/gntray_dl_getflashplayer' download the RPM version. install with '# urpmi flash-plugin*.rpm'

Till next time..

A typical desktop setup using Mandriva Linux Free 2007

2007-01-07T22:23:00.000+08:00

I'm going to detail here the typical configuration I go through to setup a Mandriva desktop box.

1. Install Mandriva Free 2007 (Obviously, It's so easy, I don't have to explain it)
2. Remove Installation Media Source. '# urpmi.removemedia Installation Free CD'
3. Run over to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
4. Enable sources main, contrib, main_updates, contrib_updates, plf-free & plf-nonfree. (I'd advise against the 'backports' sources, they are fairly unstable)
I'd usually select the France Paris FTP servers as they tend to be faster. If you don't wanna wait too long, check on the "Use compressed index" checkbox to get minimal information headers, however if you are new to Mandriva, I'd suggest getting the full header since it comes with nice long descriptions for each package. 'proceed to Step 3' will generate a list of urpmi commands for you to enter in a console as root. To avoid errors, I'd suggest doing it one-by-one in this order: main, contrib, main_updates, contrib_updates, plf-free, plf-nonfree.
Be prepared to wait for the sourcelist update. 20 minutes on my 1MB broadband. 5 minutes if you used the compressed index.
5. Once all that is done. Open up MCC (Mandriva Control Center) 'Kmenu-> System-> Configuration-> Configure Your Computer'. Click on the Update icon. It's labeled the very lenghty "Look at available updates and apply any fixes or upgrades to installed package". Say yes all the way, select all presented packages & click Install. You can do this in the console simply with '# urpmi --auto-select'.
6. Next, I'd go install the essential packages. Once again open MCC & click on the Install icon labeled "Look at installable software and install software packages". Here are the essentials:
- Kernel Source Stripped ('$ uname -r' to find out your kernel version & install the same version kernel-source-stripped package)
- Hardware Accelerated Video Drivers: nvidia, ati, 915Resolution (for Intel widescreen). Depending on which graphic card you have. Say 'OK' to the dependency question.
- Some misc necessities - nano, yakuake, thunderbird, flash-player-plugin, kaffeine, mplayer-plugins, helixplayer, win32-codec.
- If you need to be able to play Region coded DVDs & some other proprietary formats like MOV & WMV, you'll need to replace your mplayer & xine with the plf version. Search for & install xine-faad, xine-win32, mplayer???-plf & libdvdcss2. The dependency should work out all the required packages.
7. Finally, you may want to get some proprietary software installed, like J2RE(Java Runtime), Acrobat Reader, Azureus, Rar & Skype. You can get J2RE & Azureus & Rar from the MandrivaClub.nl repository. Add in the repository with the command:
'# urpmi.addmedia ftp://ftp.belnet.be/packages/mandrakeclub.nl/2007/i586/ with hdlist.cz'. Then look for & add these packages: j2re, azureus, rar & rargui. For Acrobat Reader & Skype follow these instructions:
Run over to www.adobe.com & select your way to download Acrobat Reader 7 (choose the .rpm version) then install it with this command:
# urpmi AdobeReader_enu-*.rpm
# kwrite /usr/share/applications/AdobeReader.desktop
* Find this line
Categories=Application;Office;Viewer;X-Red-Hat-Base;
* Replace it with this line
Categories=X-Mandrakelinux-Office-Publishing;
For Skpe:
# wget http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-mdk
# urpmi skype-1.3.0.53-1mdk.i586.rpm

Well this was a much longer post than I anticipated. Until next time...

Which Distro?

2006-12-24T23:13:00.000+08:00

The first question every linux user asks is "Which distro do I use?". This topic usually generates much debate with everyone recommending their favorite distro.
I normally try to be distro agnostic when discussing Linux, so how do I handle this question? Well, I would first ask them "What's the Linux box gonna do for ya?"

Here are my recommendations (In order of personal preference):
Desktop - Mandriva / Ubuntu / OpenSUSE / PCLinuxOS
Server - Fedora Core / OpenSUSE
Old PC (PII, 128MB) - Zenwalk / Vectorlinux / Slackware
Very Old PC (486, 32MB) - DSL(Damn Small Linux) / DELi / Puppy

To set it straight, I have a soft spot for Mandriva (Formally known as Mandrake). For no particular reason other than I'm comfortable & very familiar with it, I've been running it since 1998 & it makes a damn good desktop in my opinion.
I've also tried out Slackware, Fedora Core, Debian, Gentoo & many derivatives like Ubuntu, SimplyMepis, Zenwalk & PCLinuxOS.
After evaluating all the choices I settled myself on Mandriva & Ubuntu for modern desktops, while Zenwalk & Vectorlinux helps me breath life into my aging PCs.

Of course everything above is my own personal opinion. If you won't take my word for it, here's a website where you can answer some questions & it will recommend the most suitable distro for you.
Linux Distribution Chooser

Essential Linux News

2006-12-24T22:49:00.000+08:00

These are some essential Linux news sites.
linuxtoday.com
osnews.com
tuxmachines.org
lxer.com
newsforge.com
slashdot.org

Why would Linux want you?

2006-12-24T22:19:00.000+08:00

Here's a great article explaining why Linux is NOT Windows.
While this one explains What's really wrong with Microsoft.
The article on Linux may be very enlightening for many of you that may have tried linux but gave it up.
WARNING! If you consider yourself a knowledgable Windows users, you probably won't wanna read the 2nd article.

The state of FLOSS in Malaysia

2006-12-24T13:24:00.000+08:00

If you're Malaysian you already know what I mean. In case your not, let me give you a little background. Malaysia is nice peaceful multicultural developing country situated below Thailand & above Singapore. As with many countries in South Asia, the growth of computing in this country is largely fueled by software piracy. Malaysian youths are able to get their hands on any piece of software for as little as RM5 (roughly USD1.30) nicely printed & packaged in CDs or DVDs. OSs, software, games, Audio CDs, Movie DVDs & anything else you can imagine.
As you can imagine, promoting FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) in this kind of environment is not only challenging, but damn near impossible. Outside of academic circles, Linux never really took off. Recent market surveys show 5% adoption in the enterprise markets. While virtually non-existent in the desktop market. This is really sad since in the past 10 years I've seen Desktop Linux grow from strength to strength matching & exceeding the capabilities of all other platforms.