Acer Aspire One (ZG5) and Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 UMPC

Ok, got fed up with the Xubuntu installation and thought there’s time for something new. Atleast clean re-installation was needed.

After short tinkering, I remembered that I had stumbled upon Ubuntu UMPC image at some point, which of course had to be checked. The image had Intrepid Ibex, so I thought that it should be given a chance.

Downloaded the latest image from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-umpc/intrepid/current/ and had a quick look at the instruction page, as the image is in .img format. From the page you can download Ubuntu Imagewriter for easy GUI based install media creation.

Easiest way is to create the installation media by downloading the image, installing the Ubuntu Imagewriter and then using 1GB USB-stick as media. This image is intended to be “burned” to USB-stick.

Image creation is pretty easy. After you’ve installed the Imagewriter, insert a USB-stick to USB port and launch Imagewriter from terminal: $ sudo imagewriter

Browse the downloaded image, select the correct USB-stick and click “Write to device”. Then wait. After the writing is done, you can close the program and remove the stick.

Now you can test the USB-stick on a computer which can boot from USB device. Do note that this will not work on every computer having USB boot possibility and all wireless cards are not supported out of the box, like the Atheros card in Acer Aspire one. Don’t worry though, it works after installation and working out the driver files for it.

This image is quite stripped due to the limitations of the image size. You’ll get midbrowser, mozilla based internet browser (which I don’t like..), Openoffice.org, Media player etc. Few things probably will be on you installation list as additions I’d assume and apt-get works fine. Overall feeling is happy. I’ve been on the impression that this is slightly faster than my Xubuntu 8.04 installation, but that’s just me Quite impressive, I’d say.

Installation works like normal Ubuntu LiveCD installation, so no differences there. After the installation is done, you might want to get rid of the automatic window maximize feature. Open terminal and: $ pkill devilspie

Now opening a program won’t maximize it straight away. To enable the feature, open terminal and:  $ devilspie -a /etc/devilspie.cfg

This will enable the window maximization to all open programs/windows.

To get the Wireless work on Acer Aspire one, have a look at my earlier post here. I’d recommend installing nano and mc while you’re on the roll, just to have a fast terminal based text editor which does not require inhuman capabilities and neat terminal based file explorer etc. Firefox might be good to install also, or some other internet browser of you liking.

That’s basically it. Installation is very easy, tweaks for the UMPC world seem fit and thought over.

Third party toner cartridges and the reason why I’m against buying them

For F**K’S sake with these third party toner cartridges.

I’ve always been completely against them, they just happen to work as they please or mess up the printer otherwise.

This time the latter, “otherwise” happened. And oh boy was this a “fun” case.

Pictures below tell more.

At this stage, I was irritated. To say it gently. Not even a slight chance that the company that sold the cartridge would fix the printer and replace the cartridge. Or that the catridge manufacturer would stand up and do what sould be done. Not that I would even considered to contact them, or that I would like more of their products.

As from this day onwards, our company is not buying third party toner cartridges anymore. Only genuine vendor toners.

Xubuntu Hardy 8.04.1, Fuj:tech DVB-T USB-stick and how to install drivers

Ha!

Some gizmos acquired as birthday presents and one of them happens to be a Fuj:tech DTV PRO DVB-T USB stick.

Obviously, as with oh so many devices, the driver side was worrying me. Surprisingly I happened to be clever and checked before purchase that it would hopefully work with Linux. One witty Finnish guy has apparently been working on a driver with his friends for this particular DVB-T USB stick, which is using af9015 chip.

Getting the driver and compiling it was not too hard, even though you have to install mercurial. Mercurial in fact is a source control management system. Don’t bother your head too much with that, just keep reading to get the driver package to your pc..

Now, for the actual driver acquiring and compiling part.

Make sure you have build-essential, linux-headers and mercurial installed:
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) mercurial

Then, get the driver (Note that the following command will create af9015 folder to the current folder where you are!):
$ hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/~anttip/af9015

Change directory to the af9015 folder:
$ cd af9015

And start compiling the driver, typing:
$ make

If all goes seemingly well, in other words no errors:
$ sudo make install

Then, you need to get firmware and place it to the /lib/firmware/$(uname -r) folder for the stick so that it can be detected and initialized correctly. First cd to the correct folder:
$ cd /lib/firmware/$(uname -r)

Then get the actual firmware:
$ sudo wget http://www.otit.fi/~crope/v4l-dvb/af9015/af9015_firmware

Note that you need to issue that wget command with sudo, as your normal account (hopefully) doesn’t have privileges to write files to the folder in question.

Now, put the stick to free USB socket and wait a bit. Then check that the driver is loaded:
$ lsmod | grep 9015

Output should show dvb_usb_af9015 at few different lines.

And just to be sure, check that there’s some content in /dev/dvb folder:
$ ls /dev/dvb

If the output of ls command is adapter0, your stick is correctly detected. If not, then you might have the usbhid module interfering the detection. Remove DVB stick from USB socket and unload usbhid module:
$ sudo rmmod usbhid

Now place the DVB stick again to one free USB socket and check again that do you have the dvb_usb_af9015 module loaded and some content in /dev/dvb/ folder.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the IR remote to work “out of the box” and didn’t have enough time or motivation to fiddle around with it. At the end, I’m using the stick with Acer Aspire One (ZG5) or with some other laptop and I think I can switch channel and volume by hand..

After this, you need to work out channel configuration file or just start using the stick. depends on what program you are going to use.

I’ll work out the details of how to actually watch and record (read: use the stick) programs on a separate post. Just to annoy/simplify people/things.

I came across one page telling that when you compile the driver/module for af901x based dvb-t tuners you also break your uvcvideo device, for example usb webcam or Acer Aspire One (ZG5) builtin webcam. At first, this didn’t happen to my setup, but after having to compile the dvb-t stick driver/module again, it happened. When I figure this out, I’ll post a separate post of it with instructions how to get it fixed.

Xubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 and moving files between mobile phone using bluetooth

Ever had problems trying to get a file from mobile phone to your laptop via bluetooth, or vice versa? Me too. Annoying? Oh yes indeed.

This started to bug me, well, too much so I decided to grab the issue by it’s horns and see who’s who.

First of all, the bluetooth-applet that you probably have already, has that nice little “send files” and “browse device” as you’ve noticed. You’ve also noticed that in Xubuntu, the “browse device” selection is ‘grayed out’ or not working. This, I assume, is because Xubuntu by default lacks gvfs-fuse.

Having the “send files” as an available option, you’ve of course tried it. No luck? Same here. Next, you’d prolly tried command line tool called bluetooth-sendto. No luck either? Same here. Starting to get frustrated? Me too.

Short browsing in the wonderful world of internet and using aptitude search command, I found obexftp and obextool, which is a frontend for obexftp.

To install obexftp and obextool:
$ sudo aptitude install obexftp obextool

To use obexftp, you need to use command line. No panic, command and it’s options are pretty easy. First you just need to find out your phone’s mac address (or you can just use the name you have set to the phone). To find it out:
$ hcitool scan

then copy the xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx part and type:
$ obexftp -b xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx -l

Output should list the drive/folder/etc info from the phone’s root level. Next you need to cd to the correct folder and just in case lisst the content of it to be sure you are where you should be:
$ obexftp -b xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx -c C: -l

That command lists the content of drive C:, so sending a file to, for example, the root of C:\ named test.txt, the command would be:
$ obexftp -b xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx -c C: -p /path/to/local/test.txt

And to get the file:
$ obexftp -b xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx -g C:/test.txt

To delete the file from your mobile phone:
$ obexftp -b xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx -k C:/test.txt

If you want to use obextool, simply open terminal and type obextool. If, however, there are other bluetooth devices around at the same time, you need to place environment variable to tell which phone to use. Here’s the command (substitute yourphonesname with the name of the phone, or with the mac address of the phone):
$ export OBEXCMD="obexftp -b yourphonesname"

Now launch obextool again.

If you want the environment variable OBEXCMD to be permanent, you need to place it to the .profile file in your home folder (if it does not exist, create it):
$ mcedit .profile

Add following at the end of the file:
# Environment variable to tell obextool to use MYPHONEMAC as device to connect
export OBEXCMD="obexftp -b MYPHONEMAC"

The reason why I'm telling you to use your phone's mac address in the permanent environment variable is that when you hide your phone from bluetooth scans (hide bluetooth visibility to other devices), you are still able to connect to your phone with obextool as the environment variable has the mac address, not the name.

Ah, the joy of overpacking.

Today we got a shipment from Dell Sweden. Two keyboards for Latitude D620 and Latitude D630 laptops. Sometimes you just can’t think of anything else that “wft?” with these large companies and their packaging methods.

Pictures below tell the story, no point for me to start ranting more.

Up in the air!

this post is being written at 2500ft. Hah!

EDIT: Seriously, it was. That altitude was the cloud level at that day/time. I was on a hot air balloon trip that my wife arranged to me as a surprise. I’m turning 30 on sunday. I’ll post few pics and possibly some short video clip also. Stay tuned.

Xfce-panel, Xubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 and small problems

Some of you might have noticed that creating launchers to xfce-panel in Xubuntu Hardy is not as easy as in Gnome and Gnome-panel.

For example terminal server client and it’s panel-applet, woop-de-doo.

Another problem that popped in front of me was opening programs with a launcher from the panel. The command was luit -encoding ISO-8859-1 ssh hostname because the ssh server I’m using quite actively does not have UTF8 configured. However, my Xubuntu Hardy installation happens to come with UTF8 as default and I’ve intended to keep it as default.

I tried to put the command where it was supposed to bein the panel launcher properties, no luck. Tried to use xfce4-terminal shell-script-name to launch the command from panel launcher, no luck.

Finally, with help from few of my friends, I found out that I can use xterm -e luit -encoding ISO-8859-1 ssh hostname which solved the problem. -e tells that xterm should run the preceeding command IN the opened xterm window. But this created another. The font size was ridiculously small. After few moments of discussion, it was clear that one option for xterm execution was needed. The final execution command line is below:
xterm -fn 9x15 -e luit -encoding ISO-8859-1 ssh hostname

EDIT: or you can use xterm -fn 9x15 -en iso-8859-1 -e ssh hostname as xterm can use luit when you tell xterm to use desired encoding with option -en iso-8859-1

To check which font options you have available, check /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/fonts.alias file. 8×13, 9×15 and 10×20 should be there atleast. 8×13 is ridiculously small, 9×15 was my choice, 10×20 was too large for this Acer Aspire One screen.

EDIT: Also noticed that copying text or http links is not as easy as right clicking to get a menu and choosing copy. After consulting friends again, found out that when you press ctrl-left/right/middle mouse button you get xterm menus where you can set font size and other settings. Copying text to other window is done by selecting text with mouse (use left-click-hold normally or left click on beginning and right click at end) then paste text by middle click.

EDIT: Oh, and. If you need to use alt-number combination, it won’t work. Use esc+number instead.

Acer Aspire One (ZG5) Hands on experiences, part #2

Hey everyone,

I’ve been using this little bugger now for few days with Xubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 and thought that a part #2 post would be good. Otherwise the Edits to older posts will be unnoticed and important notes might “fade to the noise”.

So, those few things I’ve promised to try out:

Movie playback
Playing movie that has been ripped to .iso file from external usb hard drive works fine
Playing movie that has been ripped to .iso file from 8Gb SDHC card placed to Storage Expansion slot (formatted as ext2) works fine
Playing actual DVD from DVD-drive connected to usb – You need to install xubuntu-restricted-extras ($ sudo apt-get install xubuntu-restricted-extras – works fine

At this point some of you are asking “why/how is he using DVD movies ripped into .iso files?”. Quick and dirty answer is that I have most of movies backed up as .iso files, and I don’t have to carry an external DVD drive with me to watch movies.
To get the movies to .iso, I use dvd95 program to “compress” the original DVD to fit to DVD5 disc in case I need to burn the movies back to disk. Kids are quite efficient in destroying DVD’s.. and no, I’m not concerned about the quality. If I want top quality, I’ll go and buy full HD TV or projector and BluRay-player.
When I’ve moved the .iso file to the PC I want to watch it, I’ll mount it as loop device with command $ sudo mount -o loop /path/to/the/isofile /path/for/desired/mountpoint. remember to have the mountpoint folder created. Then open vlc and point it to open the DVD from the mountpoint you used.

Heat dissipation
Ok, this one I noticed yesterday late at night. I was sitting in bed with a small pillow under the laptop for some time. The laptop started to really heat up and the reason seems to be that almost all of the ventilation grille is pointing down and only small part of the grille is facing to the side from the case. As the pillow was blocking the grille facing down, the heat could not dissipate well enough. Not a big deal, but still something to bare in mind.

Touchpad
I’m not a fan of this kind of pointer device. Stick is much more user friendly, though it costs much more and replacement part price for keyboard with stick is ridiculous. First few days went on finding the correct setting to disable Touchpad tapping and scrolling. To disable tapping and scrolling, you need to modify xorg.conf file. Open terminal of your favor and..

$ sudo mcedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
now find the part that says
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"

Add the following line to the end of this section, above the EndSection
Option "TouchpadOff" "2"

Now log out and back in, result should be that touchpad is not scrolling anymore, and tapping is disabled.

External display settings
This I’m still working on.. I’ll edit this post as soon as I’ve got some solid settings/info gathered.

EDIT:
Screensaver and lock screen
As I use this computer at work, it’s vital for me to be able to lock the screen when I leave my desk. By default, Xubuntu seems to have a bug that prevents screensaver and thus screen locking to execute. To fix it, you need to add gnome-screensaver to autostarted apps under Settings – Settings Manager.
Click + Add then enter a preferred name, for example Gnome-Screensaver, description can be for example Gnome Screensaver Daemon and command is /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver and hit Ok. Log out and back in, modify screensaver settings to your desired choice, then right click the little icon for Quit-button in panel and click on properties and select action type as Quit + Lock screen.

Tsclient and tsclient panel applet
Again an work-required program/tool issue. As I work also with several Windows servers, I need to have terminal server client (RDP client) installed, with panel-applet so it’s fast and easy to open connections to remote servers.
Install tsclient package ($ sudo apt-get install tsclient) and try that it works. Create one quick connect entry as saving connection details for testing purposes. Now install xfce4-xfapplet-plugin ($ sudo apt-get install xfce4-xfapplet-plugin) and right click on panel – add new item. Browse to end of the list, click on Xfapplet, then Add, and then choose Terminal Server Client Applet. Terminal server panel applet should now show up on your panel.

Acer Aspire One (ZG5), Xubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 and Atheros WLAN

Short info how to get the Wireless card working in Xubuntu.

EDIT:Make sure you have build-essential installed! (Pointed out by friendly reader, thank you very much! My mistake that this was forgotten from the original post! Sorry for the possible trouble!)
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

Get the latest madwifi pack http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz and save it to your home folder for example.

Disable current Atheros Hardware Access Layer (HAL) and Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless lan cards from Applications – System – Hardware Drivers and then reboot as requested

Make sure that ath_hal module is not loaded in the future:

$ sudo mcedit /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common

Add ath_hal between the quotation marks, for example DISABLED_MODULES=”ath_hal”

Unpack the downloaded tar.gz

$ tar xzvf madwifi-hal-yaddayadda.tar.gz

Cd into the new folder scripts under the new unpacked madwifi folder

Execute madwifi-unload and find-madwifi-modules.sh scripts
$ sudo ./madwifi-unload
$ sudo ./find-madwifi-modules.sh $(uname -r)

Drop one level back,
$ cd ..

and just to be sure, execute make clean to get rid of old crap
$ make clean

Then we check just to be sure that the Hardware Drivers does not show any drivers for Atheros wlan or HAL. If the window is clean, proceed to building the modules.

$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo modprobe ath_pci

Then, check that you have ath0 and wifi0 network adapters created, ath0 should be the first, wifi0 last. You might need to scroll back a bit
$ ifconfig

Now you should be able to see AP’s via panel’s network applet. You can also scan for wlan’s with command
$ sudo wlanconfig ath0 list scan

That’s it, happy networking!

When you get updates/upgrades that change kernel in any way, your wireless card drivers won’t work anymore. Just do the whole thing all over again and you’re wireless again.

EDIT: If the driver is not loaded automatically, you can add ath_pci to /etc/modules
Here’s the commands:

$ sudo mcedit /etc/modules
add ath_pci into a new LAST line of the document, save the document and reboot.
If you don’t want to reboot right away, you can type

$ sudo modprobe ath_pci

This loads the module(driver) and you should have wlan up and running then. Just remember when you reboot the next time that you added the module to “loaded at startup” configuration.

Found m.wordpress.com

Hah!

Took a while to find a feasible way to blog with a mobile device. Got Nokia 9300i phone to play with for awhile and thought that I will try to blog with it, as ssh with putty and web experience with opera mini was such an easy tasks.

The normal, “full” wordpress page does not work with the shipped browser and while opera mini solves that, the pages are way too heavy for this kind of crippled mobile device.

I really should have relied on my gut feeling and check this issue with google before start finding out on my own, as the answer of course was the mobile device fitted pages for wordpress at http://m.wordpress.com

So, this entry was made with Nokia 9300i via the mobile wordpress pages.

Oh, and. those few posts about acer aspire one will be posted in 16 hours. I need some sleep now.