N900 - More Apps

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

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 - Applets, Widgets, Plugins and Utilities

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

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

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.

Mandriva 2009.1 - Working out the kinks

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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

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. ;)

Tweaking eeebuntu

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.

How's Mandy so far?

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

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.

Getting hooked on Linux Podcasts

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

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

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. :)