A quick search found this superuser suggestion to install the Synaptics touchpad driver from the Ubuntu repository. Searching in the package manager turned up libsynaptics and gsynaptics so I installed them both.

Before this would work, I needed to create a file according to the instructions found Kogan Agora Netbook blog:

sudo vim /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi

Once opened, it needed to have the following as its contents:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
      <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

I have no idea of that version number is correct, but this allowed me to move on. Additionally, in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I added the section (via sudo vim):

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "SHMConfig"             "true"
EndSection

after rebooting (or logging out, or restarting X), you can then run gsynaptics from gmrun or the terminal. Even better, assign a new entry to the OpenBox menu to execute gsynaptics from a System menu item labeled Touchpad. Once you have that, you can decrease the sensitivity of the touchpad, add and tweak acceleration values and modify tapping behavior. It works really well and has radically reduced the number of accidental mouse actions. This tweak alone has made the Crunchbang netbook experience much much better.

Out of the box, Cunchbang is a fairly minimalist desktop environment, using Openbox and Tint as the desktop and window manager.  A bit of tweaking to get menu sizes reduced and it takes up even less space on your desktop. Since vertical space is at a serious premium on this thing, the biggest challenges were getting Firefox and Thunderbird configured to make the most of the tiny screen.

On Firefox, I’m using Full Screen (not necessary in Firefox 3.6, of course), Tree Style Tabs and a combined menu and toolbar to clear up some pixels. Reduced font-sizes from the default make browsing more manageable even when I’m not in full screen mode.

Thunderbird 3.0 was a bit trickier. In the advanced preferences pane, under the config editor, set mail.tabs.autoHide to True to get rid of the tabstrip if there’s only one tab showing. I also found the header area in the message pane was taking up a lot of room, so I installed the Compact Headers extension to take care of those. You will need to disable compatibility checking through Nightly Tester Tools or the config editor to get it to work with Tbird 3. (Thanks to wswmk in irc for the tips!)

Whether I could live with this as my main portable is another matter. The trackpad on the thing is pretty poor, requiring a really light touch to tap-to-click. There are no real buttons on it, but the two bottom corners act as left and right mouse clicks if you press the trackpad down — it clicks. Because the pad itself is so sensitive, this invariably moves the pointer off of your target and you’ll get a misclick. Even more amusing is the right-side scroll wheel. If you’re on the desktop in Crunchbang, this is interpreted as a “jump to workspace” action, randomly skipping you through your desktops. It took me awhile to realize I was doing this accidentally and that it was a feature.

Other interactions between OS and hardware are pretty good. With the exception of networking. Connecting to a wireless network is a bit of a crapshoot. I can connect at home on a wirless G network with WPA2 passphrase, but it takes too long to negotiate initially. I could not connect to my parents’ network after multiple attempts and they have a basic WEP passkey. I installed wicd as my default network manager after failing with Network Manager and it seems a little better, but still slow.

In short, networking in Linux still kind of sucks.

But sound works! And the included A/V apps in Crunchbang are decent if not awesome. VLC works really well and after struggling with SMB to get network shares working, I can even stream stuff off of my fileserver. Also includes Rhythmbox and Audacity among other open source audio-video apps. No Songbird though?

Overall, it’s a fun little machine to hack around on. Screen’s probably too small to do any development, but works just fine as a little internet toy or writing machine. That it’s entirely an opensource software stack helps too. I wrote this post on it, and genuinely like the keyboard (after flipping the Caps Lock and CTRL keys). It sure is portable.

As many of you know, Apple recently decided to take the incredibly unpleasant action of bricking* users’ unlocked iPhones. “What’s that, boolean? People are in trouble?” you are probably asking yourself. Yes, people, it’s true. People are in trouble. People who love Freedom!

Now sure, anyone who’s taken the time to go through the docs and unlock their iPhone to, say, install nifty softwares on it and detach it from the monstrously evil AT&T cellular network are probably not all stupid enough to just blindly install an update without first checking to see if it would disable their (i)phone. Well, it turns out some people were. And it did. They probably didn’t think Apple would be mean enough to disable their devices on them.

Why not? Because it’s fairly unprecedented. Apple’s long had a fairly relaxed attitude towards people using their hardware in unusual ways. They were, after-all, born out of the Homebrew Computer Club back in the seventies. Remember the Newton? People are still hacking those things. The iPod? Yeah, they (used to be able to) run Linux, not to mention allow people to transfer music to and from the devices without having to use iTunes. Why would people want to do this? Well, iTunes isn’t available for Linux last time I checked.

So what gives? This is not the first onerous and somewhat insulting thing Apple’s done to its faithful. It’s not often you’ll hear me complain about a price drop, but when some people paid $499 for their brand new iPhone and then saw the price dip by $200 the next day, well, that smacks of gouging. Steve followed that with a sort-of explanation saying that as an early adopter, you take your chances. And that’s fairly true. But then they added insult to injury and offered a $100 rebate for certain buyers. Ouch.

Oh, and about the new iPods. They’re not all fun and delicious; the reviews are mostly positive, and they look great. Ars Technica claimed that the menus were a bit slow (yay, coverflow). One intrepid individual went a bit deeper though and measured the audio performance of the new devices. Turns out, they replaced the much-lauded Wolfson digital audio decoders (or DACs if you’re into the audio-jargon) with (presumably) cheaper and poorer-sounding Cirrus Logic units.

But maybe that annoying 22khz phasing can be buffed right out with a firmware update. At least they look pretty!

Got a bunch of iPod accessories? Maybe a dock and a video cable from a previous version? Well throw ‘em away and buy brand new ones with Apple logos on them, because only branded accessories with the right-encoded CHIP will work with these new players. Why? I can only imagine that this is some perverse form of AACS technology to appease the media gods and allow them to continue to use Apple as a media vendor. Or maybe in an Apple world, all devices should be Apple for a proper Apple experience and any deviation from Apple will result in a swift, yet careful bricking#.

But what about Steve’s anti-DRM rant? He’s all cool and the media companies are all evil! Aren’t they?

(I’m not sure when this became a dialog between my inner child and this grown-up-like character writing these things on his keyboard, but… I’ve got a thing going)

No, little boy, Steve is evil. Apple is a media company. Apple sits on the Blu-Ray consortium board along with Sony and a bunch of other evil people. They’re busily bundling DRM deep into OS X to allow for HD playback from supported devices. Note that this means you can’t play back HD content on UNsupported devices. Like iPods without an Apple branded cable. Or non AACS capable monitors.

Why is this a problem?

Oh, I dunno. I’m tired. Just go to sleep, damnit.^

1. Bricking – In this case, the term means, reset to “locked” state, usable only on the AT&T network and use of third party applications disabled. Not to say that the device is a completely worthless smoking pile of glass, metal and plastic.
2. Bricking – be sure to keep your thumbs to either side of the bricks when performing this maneuver because it is quite painful to get them caught in between.
3. If I were Stephen Colbert, and I’m not, I’d probably find a way to cleverly insert the term “Goldbricking” in here somewhere. But I’m not. /wørd.

Microsoft released Virtual PC 2004 for free today. I figured this would be a fun opportunity to try out Fedora Core 5. The last time I tried it on my somewhat tired old P4 (Ayane), it was still in Test 1 and didn’t exactly make it off the ground. The machine has sat dormant since then with a half-assed attempt at installing OpenDarwin on it. I should have checked the hardware compatibility first.

First I checked to see if I had any Windows updates available. Microsoft informed me that I first needed to update the updater to Windows Genuine Advantage. I vaguely remembered hearing that it liked to phone home and check that my software was all to their liking. Not wanting to really do that, I opted out of the install, leaving my computer somewhere around an SP2 state. I remember the last time I had to call India to get my computer authorized and it wasn’t pretty.

so, I setup VPC and had my ISO image ready to go, told VPC to mount it and got an error message. Apparently it doesn’t like DVD-sized ISO images. OK, that’s easy enough. I happened to burn it first anyway. I put in the disc and reset the virtual machine. It booted and I was presented with the FC5 boot screen. I hit enter to begin the install and this is what I got:

BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0!

time for a Stella…

The place: My lab.

The setup: One faulty linux box (installed with Fedora Core 2), one or more failed drives and NO INTERNET!

On-hand for the competition were, Gentoo 2004.2, Knoppix and Gnoppix (Ubuntu). The Fedora Core 3 DVD ISO was also on-hand.

This was unfortunately, not a drill. During my internet outage of last week, I decided to try and upgrade my linux box (ayane) to the more recent Fedora Core 3. Better hardware support were my main motivations for doing this, but mostly, it was just boredom and looking for something to kill time. I had no complaints with FC2 and it was getting the job done for me. My machine had an uptime of somewhere around 30 days when I decided to do this.

The first indication that something was going horribly wrong was Anaconda, the Fedora installer kit threw-up an exception during the install process. Not good. It was also right after Anaconda asked me if I would like to “automagically” convert my EXT2 disks to the newer, journalled EXT3 filesystem. Very not good.

An attempt to reboot ayane only proved more disturbing. She would not boot cleanly. One of the drives was failing an fsck. At this point, I could have done a few things. I could have changed my fstab/mtab to not automount all my drives and try rebooting. I think the drive containing the root filesystem was mostly alright as it did manage to load the kernel at least. Nevertheless, I was most concerned about getting my NeverWinterNights saved games off the disk so I proceeded to go all CSI on the machine and get down with a LiveCD distro.

And that’s where this completely unscientific shootout comes in. I had downloaded and burned these distros with the intention of using them as diagnostic tools if I ever needed one. Fedora Core is bulky if you don’t have a DVD drive and the ability to boot of an optical disk into a running OS is pretty useful compared to the klunky but powerful command-line diagnostics of FC. Especially if you’re a permanoob like myself and don’t know “stuff” about “things”.

So, down to work. First up is Gentoo. Voted the most-rapidly-adopted distro of 2004, Gentoo is not your typical LiveCD distribution. On load, Gentoo drops you into a colourful command-line interface and a bash prompt. After blinking along with the flashing cursor for a second, trying a few tentative mount commands and the command-line plea: “Please get my files back, gentoo,” I rebooted.

Yes, I’ve heard good things about Gentoo, but without an internet connection to point me to where the docs live, that just wasn’t going to cut it.

Next is Gnoppix. I like Gnome stuff. Their desktop looks nice and the version wrapped up by RedHat is, in my opinion, one of the nice features of Fedora Core. The Ubuntu version has a nice boot screen and a cute desktop. At this point, I was having a hard time mounting drives and getting a root terminal. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere, but for some reason, it didn’t seem obvious to me. Also, Gnoppix did not recognize my gigabit ethernet card and the network did not want to come up. This was a bummer and I decided to give my third disc a try before changing hardware configurations.

Knoppix, also booted cleanly but had a lot more interesting stuff on the terminal while it did. It looked to me like this was built by PC hackers and I appreciated that as this was what I was attempting to do. The Knoppix desktop was clean and sported all of the usual KDE apps. Getting a root terminal open and very importantly, mounting my disks was easy to do. Still no network though, but I was encouraged enough by my successes to swap ethernet cards and try Knoppix again.

About an hour and a half later, I had a successful tarball of my user directory copied over to my Mac.

So, maybe it’s due to ignorance. Maybe it’s due to bad first impressions, but I’m declaring Knoppix the klear winner in this shootout. It’s the one I’ll be carrying in my bag with me.