500 gram GNU+Linux netbook - £70

Disgo Net Browser 3000 is sells in China for £70 with Windows CE 5.0. With its 7 inch display (800 x 480) it would make an excellent GNU+Linux netbook coupled with Firefox. Buying whole sale would be even cheaper. When the average *new* netbook price is £200, this is an absolute bargain.

So why has no one done it already?

• Needs an ARM distro (OpenZaurus, Maemo, openmoko or other embedded disro might make more sense than a regular Ubuntu distro).
• Only 64MB RAM, bloated firefox would consume that immediately, so Fennec is probably the way to go.
• Only 2GB NAND Flash, distro can fit in that, presumably it is also writable so can be partitioned for a HOME partition.

Ubuntu Netbook Fixes for 2010

I've been runing a recent Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my HP Compaq Mini-Note 10" laptop. A very good user experience.

What I'd like to see improved in 2010 is:

• "Desktop" still exists as a folder, however, it isn't the Desktop! Replace the "Favourites" with the existing "Desktop". Favourite apps can still be copied into the Desktop.
• Fix "Update Manager" display of "Reading package information" which comes up so often; even when it says before and after "Your system is up to date".
• Fix "Update Manager", it often appears in the notification panel, open it up and there are no updates to install. Download and check for updates and there are still no updates to install!
  

That's all for now; will these issues be fixed in 2010?

Laptop power button press again to cancel shutdown?

We've all done it, you come back to your laptop and press the power button.. forgetting it was already on! So then it shutsdown, and there is no way to correct the mistake.

It would be pretty easy for Ubuntu to connect the button as a toggler, so if pressing again while in the shutdown runlevel, it toggles and goes back into multi-user and X login (level 5 as I recall)

Keyboards identifying their keymap

Every time I buy a Dell laptop, or run an Ubuntu live CD I find I am running with the wrong keyboard map file, which means it defaults to US layout typically (why do we all have different locations for punctuation keys anyway!?)

So my USB keyboard is detected I can see form /var/log/messages:

input: Dell Dell USB Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb2/2-2/2-2.1/2-2.1:1.0/input/input14
kernel: [ 9575.364318] input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Keyboard [Dell Dell USB Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2.1
kernel: [ 9575.375861] input: Dell Dell USB Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb2/2-2/2-2.1/2-2.1:1.1/input/input15
ubuntu kernel: [ 9575.404288] input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.10 Device [Dell Dell USB Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2.1

(Seems to detect it twice, USB1.1 and USB2.0)

So as it already has the name string "Dell Dell USB Keyboard", would it be any harder to also encode "en" in that? (or "en_US" etc)

Now we all just need to unify on one standard keyboard layout, probably adopting the international US one with some adaptation to add Alt+Number for every currency (rather than having £, $, 円, €. Also with good sized Enter and Space keys, and my small keyboard layout if on a portable.

Ubuntu gnome memory wastage

While looking into other Ubuntu performance issues and Compiz crash I noticed just how many wasteful processes are running by default. Feels like I'm back on a Windows machine!

gnome-settings
python (system-config-printer/applet.py)
update-notifier
trashapplet
seahorse-agent (can't get rid due to ubuntu-desktop dep)
evolution-alarm (succeeded in removing!)
evolution-exchange
gnome-power-management
evolution-data-
gnome-screensav
gvfsd-smb-browse (can't get rid due to ubuntu-desktop dep)
gvsfd-smb-network
gvsdf-dnssd
gvfsd-computer
gnome-vfs-daemon
bluetooth-applet (succeeded in removing!)
bluetoothd-service-audio
bluetoothd-service-input
compiz-decorator (succeeded in removing!)
gtk-window-decorator
b43 (runs regardless of if the Wireless is enabled, so enable/disable must be a software switch)
bonobo-activation-server (can't get rid due to ubuntu-desktop dep)
samba

I wish I could remove samba, I don't have any Windows machines on my network I need to transfer files to, but ubuntu-desktop has a dep on it.

Even with my internal wireless disabled (Fn+F2) I still see the b43 driver task running and taking up memory.

It's no wonder with all this running it takes 4 secs to load Firefox3 on a 1.6Ghz CPU with 1.5GB ram. It should be up in less than a second. OpenOffice Writer is even worse, around 8 seconds.

Remove Evolution:
# apt-get --purge remove evolution

^ It isn't mentioned, but the tasks are all still running, so another reboot is necessary (another Windows reminder..)

# apt-get --purge remove gnome-screensaver

Why is a screensaver running all the time anyway? The system could run the process from a gnome timer when it needs to start.

Let's see how it goes with this lot removed, I'll be tempted to install Xubuntu (XFCE desktop) if performance is still hogged!

Remove Compiz from Ubuntu

If like me you're running one of the recent Ubuntu releases (8.04 LTS) you'll still be experiencing the unfixed bugs in Compiz Desktop Effects, for me this results in Totem and Xine crashes, taking out the whole machine (power switch restart).

So as no official fixes have been made (even though its LTS!), disable and removing compiz is the workaround:

Right click on the desktop, select "Change Desktop Background".
Click "Visual Effects", click the "none" option.

Then issue these commands to remove the Compiz packages:

# apt-get --purge remove compiz compiz-core

^ It doesn't tell you, but compiz is actually still running, so you will need to reboot to benefit.

Tip: Want to track down that rogue process in the "top" or "ps aux" output? Track it back to the package it came from, so you can unisntall it:

# dpkg -S /usr/bin/compiz-decorator

Laptop is quicker, and no more video playback crashes (yet!) ;).

Remove Bluetooth from Ubuntu

If like me you are running on a laptop or desktop without Bluetooth, you'll notice that Ubuntu is still running around 1.5MB of Bluetooth packages, wasting drive space and memory at run time.

We could could ignore the disk space loss, but the fact that it stays resident after it sees no bluetooth hardware connected is far from ideal. It would have been trivial for them to exit the daemon when it found no hardware connected, so its probably just sloppy QA (or lack of any QA again..) that let this one slip into a release. Should anyone plug in a USB bluetooth adapter, HAL should then swawn the daemon etc.

So simply disable and uninstall/remove bluetooth from Ubuntu.

# apt-get --purge remove bluez-utils bluez-gnome

The --purge removes the installer files from your drive, recovering the space again ;)

Ubuntu USB NTFS filesystem bugs

Seeing as I need to transfer >4GB files between computers running GNU+Linux as well as Mac and Windows I'm stuck with the only option of NTFS filesystem on that USB stick. The problem is how poor Ubuntu support is (well it even has support now, so things have moved on a lot in the last few years).

Windows causes a lot of problems, because it does not unmount filesystems which are not in use, so if a friend pulls out hte USB stick without going through the "Safely Remove" (or the duplicate "Edject" menu item on Vista) Ubuntu will refuse to mount it. With an error as follows:





















How Ubuntu developers expect average users to achieve this I have no idea. Ubuntu should fix the process to be simple and clear as follows:

1. External drive icons are visible on Desktop.
2. If one fails to mount due to this NTFS flag, the user should be prompted to check it and then mount.
3. Context menu on each drive icon should offer "Safely remove" as well as "Scan for errors" and "Format".

So let's get Ubuntu right, and fix the "unfriendlyness" it suffers :)

p.s. Also Ubuntu shouldn't copy files and directories with excluded Windows characters, like ":", because the user will only arrive at their friend's house and find that their friend who is stuck using Windows can't access the files.

p.p.s. Windows no-longer unmounts drives when shutting down, so if you take out your USB stick formatted NTFS from a machine that is off you will find it also won't mount on Ubuntu.

Redhat ditch RPM for DEB apt-get in 2009?

One of the common problems installing software on GNU-Linux machines is the variety of different packaging systems. Redhat is still persevering with its own RPM packing system, when others have already adopted the standard DEB package format.. how long till they make the switch to DEB and apt-get online repositories?

RPM is notorious for dependency problems, I've suffered with Mandriva and Fedora in the past when trying to get extra software packages working. It's now time for consolidation Redhat! They're losing out to Ubuntu.. so this might even tempt some users back ;)

Dropping RPM would save Redhat development costs, and make it easier for customers to move to Redhat from all the DEB based distributions of GNU-Linux (Ubuntu etc). SuSE should also migrate their YUM front end to DEB!

Ubuntu fixes for 2009

Here's my list of fixes I'd like to see made in Ubuntu during 2009:

1. Resize icon fix, a proper sized icon (not single pixel anymore) on all windows, including Thunderbird.
2. Font fixes, OpenOffice should be able to save documents with fonts like "DejaVu Sans", and have them appear correctly on a Windows machine as Ariel, at present they come out in random like Webdings. OO could even show "Ariel" in its list, even if it is rendered as DejaVu.
3. Stablity, if compiz or other drivers are flakey, they need to be fixed. Ship the distro with debug symbols and generate proper backtraces for us to submit bugs too.
4. Respond to bug reports, and don't just close them after not dealing with them because they are now out of date.
5. Fix the clipboard, still after closing an application window the clipboard contents has disapeared.
6. Install the clipboard history by default.
   

Let's hope Ubuntu QA improves too, I'll pay too if there is a plan to sort out the QA testing :)

Ubuntu HP Deskjet 930C printer fix

Ubuntu isn't ready for the lime light yet, it's still detecting my printer and setting up with a broken driver! The dodgy driver is "Foomantic/hpjis".

If you leave it like this, your logs will be full of:

Dec 24 13:56:24 laptop DeskJet_930C?serial=HU0B21G0G9JJ: prnt/backend/hp.c 496: unable to connect hpssd socket 2207: Connection refused
CUPS will display: DESKJET_930C (Default Printer) "/usr/lib/cups/filter/foomatic-rip failed"

The workaround, after Ubuntu detects the printer (after you plugged it in via USB) is to delete the printer and create the working setup:

1. Go into System->Administration->Printing
2. Select "Deskjet_930C" and click Delete.
3. Then click "New Printer", select the "HP Deskjet 930C USB ...".
4. Don't accept the [recommended] "Foomantic/hpijs", click the "Foomantic/cjd550".

I'd happily pay for a company to sort out the QA problems in Ubuntu releases, if 1,000 others would as well :) While Mark Shuttleworth is still sponsoring the Ubuntu project.. I'd hope he would come up with some funds too!

Other system lockups I've had this week are from some Compiz dodgyness:

Dec 20 20:47:12 laptop kernel: [ 1585.909259] compiz.real[6722]: segfault at 00004972 eip 08055a6d esp bfcdabb0 error 4

Xorg.0.log seems to have captured the flaw:
tossed event which came in late
mieqEnequeue: out-of-order valuator event; dropping.

Totem dodgyness is a whole system lock-up when playing a video file in Firefox, (totem-pl)ugin-viewer 2.22.1 or GStreamer 0.10.18 dodgyness?)

It's issues like these that will really put people off switching to Ubuntu, QA definitely needs to improve, and bug reports responded too when filed, not closed after six months (which I had recently on a crash I reported on launchpad -- why should we bother reporting..?).

Ubuntu Mic still broken

Over six months after I had to fix my Mic configuration so it even works in Ubuntu I see the latest Ubuntu release still ships with it broken. Poor QA is the only reason holding Ubuntu back!

Ubuntu ships with the Mic disabled, so you need to manually fix it. The default Mixer configuration has Mic Capture disabled. So you need to go into the Terminal and make these changes to fix it:

$ alsamixer

You will see the [Playback] sliders. Use the arrow key to move right to the column named as "capture", at the top left of the screen it will now say Capture Mux. Set it to "25==25" which should be 1/4 white bar.

Next press Tab key, press arrow key to move to the first "capture" column, at the top it shows "Capture", set it to "7==7". Press Space bar to enable it and show "CAPTUR" in red.

Press right arrow key to move to the next "Capture", at the top left it shows "Capture Mux", set it to "25==25".

Next press right arrow key to move to "input", press up/down arrow key so this shows "Mic" and not "Front Mic" or "Line".

.. and we're done :)

Ubuntu Firefox + Thunderbird integration

Just switched to my Kubuntu 7.10 laptop for mobile working.. found that KDE has a bug which means it does not pass on the mailto: clicks via the Default Applications option in System Settings.

Workaround is to create a Firefox user.js with this code in it:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.mailto", "true");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto", "/usr/bin/thunderbird");

This gets it working, although I wish KDE functionality would keep working between releases!

Ubuntu AMR 3GP playback fix

If you're running Ubuntu like me you may have found that videos you've taken on your mobile don't play with audio when you've copied them to your PC. This is because AMR audio codec support isn't included in Ubuntu, or part of their universe and multiverse extension repositories. However, AMR is in debian-multimedia.org, so follow the guide on adding it to your sources.lst, and then install "ffmpeg". you can then play your videos by:

ffplay video.3gp

It's not great, but it does work.

Installing libavcodec* from debian-multimedia doesn't get it working in VLC or the updated mplayer though (I presume mplayer wasn't compiled with external AMR codec support enabled).

It's common multimedia support which is really needed in Ubuntu, this is the sort of thing everyone wants working out of the box! The alteriative is to follow one of the compile guides.

GNU+Linux rtsp and mms support

There are a lot of rtsp:// and mms:// served streams online, and GNU+Linux distros like Ubuntu are not yet being released with native support for playing them or saving them to a file. Mplayer, Kaffine and Xine are all unable to play the stream URLs. Mplayer seems to be able to play the audio, but it is all crackly and breaks up.

If we use the workaround of converting the RealPlayer RPM, installing libstdc++5 and then pasting that into RealPlayer we can play rtsp:// streams ;) but we can't save them :(

It's a shame, as there are a lot of sites like youTube Mobile. Which don't rely on Adobe Flash, so we would have otherwise been able to watch the streams. mms:// is common as WMV and WMA files are served that way often. To be a multimedia distribution GNU+Linux needs to support these protocols out of the box from Firefox ideally. The current workaround is to install the DownloadHelper extension in Firefox (unfortunately Firefox still needs a restart.. reminds me of MS-Windows restart issues still!).

Ubuntu FLV video seeking not working

After the problems with Flash in Ubuntu I thought I would try play the Flash Video (FLV) file I downloaded.

Unfortunately, while VLC and Mplayer can play it.. they can't seek.. so we either have to watch the entire clip or not bother at all..

Xine at first appears like it is going to work, seeking at the beginning of the clip works, but go beyond half-way and it locks, and sometimes needs to be killed as it is unresponsive :( Other FLV clips have all the same problems with VLC, Mplayer and Xine.

GNU+Linux is going to find adoption hard going when it can't play "de facto format" Video files out of the box. FLV is only a custom H.263 format after all..

Jobs commented on Flash not being supported by the iPhone, which is a bit odd considering it can play H.264 and MPEG4. Not getting Adobe's Flash may be a blessing in disguise for the platform though! Also.. at least Apple have not made the mistake of adopting Silverlight yet (like Nokia appear to have, after their good decision of purchasing Qt!).

Ubuntu not ready masses?

When I plug in my USB WD "MyBook" it pops up in Kubuntu desktop automatically, and when I want to remove it, it sometimes doesn't have the "Safely Remove" option, so I have to go to root to unmount it (as users are bizarrely not allowed to unmount removable USB drives!?).. anyway, after it's unmounted by root the system locks up when I unplug it.. so much for USB being plug and play with the Linux kernel.

Of cause if it had downloaded the symbols, generated a back-trace from the core-file it could have automatically offered to submit that for further analysis and a fix.. sadly it doesn't support that still. Also it didn't seem to do a recover of the filesystem (i'm using ext3 with all its journalness), when I restarted the computer, so maybe it's just ext3 with its journal recovers automatically? I'd file a bug report, but without the QA staff to follow it up on Launchpad I can't see it being tackled.

I wish there was a pay model so we could contribute to cover QA staff salaries.

The final oldness is that as I don't want to keep my WD drive in Microsoft's FAT32 format I've got to go through quite a manual process to reformat it as Linux's ext3 format. (Why can't I just right click on the FAT32 icon on my desktop and select format and be prompted for the root password etc?)

I need to revert to the command line, repartition with fdisk, format with mke2fs (remembering to set a label with -L and -j for the journal). Then when it mounts I'm left with only a "lost+found" directory, and I can't create files in the root of the drive as a user... so go back to root, create a folder, change the permissions on the folder to 700, change owner and group to user. Rather a faff to use a removable drive in the standard partition format, eh!? I'm not sure how well my non-expert friends would have managed.

Dell Inspiron 1300 Ubuntu Mic not working

The latest Kubuntu is still shipping with no working Mic input, no problem though as the fix is simple, we just need to pass the right model code to snd-hda-intel kernel module. I'm using a Dell Inspiron 1300, but other laptops also use STAC9200, such as the Dell Inspiron 6400.

Normally we would cat cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 and use the SigmaTel chip id: "STAC9200", but in the case of my chip using a name is not supported, so we must use "ref". If you look at the alsa kernel code alsa-kernel/pci/hda/patch_realtek.c you can see it is "ref":

static const char *stac9200_models[STAC_9200_MODELS] =
{
[STAC_REF] = "ref",
};

We can specify the options in either /etc/modules or /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

options snd-hda-intel model=ref

Alsa wiki page for more info. One thing I wonder is that why is it called "snd-hda-intel" in the kernel tree and options, but in the output of lsmod it shows up as "snd_hda_intel" why the underscore difference!?

vCard Firefox integration missing from Kubuntu

vCard (.vcf, text/x-vcard) has been around for a long time. However, Kubuntu isn't setup with Firefox to load the vCard from web pages. We need to set firefox to use /usr/bin/kaddressbook, or manually save the file and then open it. The browser needs tight integration with the rest of the GNU+Linux distro!

Flakey ubuntu second mouse support

Many of us now use laptop instead of desktops, like us using mobiles instead of land-line phones! So I use the latest Kubuntu on my Dell laptop, the problem is it doesn't' correctly configure my touch-pad and USB mouse that I use... it enables both! The workaround I use is to delve into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and comment out InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad" while I am using the USB mouse... and then when I am on the move I have to go back in and uncomment that line.. ugly but Ubuntu doesn't support detection & configuration like MS-Windows and probably Apple's Mac OS does.

Although, even commenting out the Synaptics doesn't solve it all though, as /dev/input/mice actually is a mixed device node, including the data from all mice! cat /dev/input/mice and see! in my case /dev/input/mouse0 seems to be dead, mouse1 is my USB mouse, and mouse2 is the Synaptics pad. So I also needed to change the /dev/input/mice line to be /dev/input/mouse1 to get it to only respond to the external mouse.

When I'm on the move without an external mouse I'll just have to keep editing xorg.conf for the moment then.. :(

ubuntu should really detect an external mouse and disable the internal touchpad, as it stands I would be left accidentally touching the internal pad and all those touches keep highlighting my text etc while typing! Until it's fixed I'll have to stick to editing files as root then.. Shame the KDE System Settings Mouse section can't control this as a workaround for having to edit the xorg file!

Kubuntu 7.10 Japanese environment disappointment

Just installed Kubuntu 7.10 on a 16GB Corsair I bought. A few problems came up in the boot after install, notably although I'd got it to manually install GRUB on my /dev/sdb drive (which GRUB c confusingly calls hd1), when Kubuntu booted it could not find the partition mapped as the root (hd1,0).. this it turns out is because the numbering changes depending on what was booted.. and as I selected USB boot from BIOS menu.. my /dev/sdb translated into being hd0. I change the root line in GRUB's edit mode to be hd(0,1) and it successfully booted though!

When I logged in, I noticed that although I had done a Japanese install (completely translated as Japanese during the install etc too), KDE was still in US English, and Japanese input did not even work! (Shift+Space is the usual combo to change into Japanese input). Alas, I've not figured out what is wrong with the install, and when I tried to get help online with Konversation that actually crashed:

#6 0xb71f09a3 in QGArray::duplicate () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#7 0xb6e28a33 in QMemArray::duplicate () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#8 0xb6e28a70 in QCString::operator= () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#9 0xb72070ea in QLocalePrivate::systemLocaleName ()
from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#10 0xb72071a2 in QLocale::system () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3

the rest of the back-trace was missing.. as Ubuntu still doesn't ship or automatically download symbols when it gets crashes..

Performance is a bit sluggish off this USBstick unfortunately, so I'm going to give try a differnet approach of just having the /boot on the USB stick, and then use an external drive for /, /home and swap!!