Exploring the Nokia N900

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.