Karmic Netbook

I installed the UNR 9.10 the other day, as an in-place upgrade, as 9.10 didn’t want to get to a full desktop on my Mini 9. It does boot up with acpi off and a couple of other incantations, however.

It’s snazzy, but I’ll hold off on opinions until after I’ve done a clean install this week. Stay tuned.

Netbook Remix:Smooth Sailing

I haven’t updated in a while. Mostly, this has been due to some real-world activities unrelated to this blog’s topics of linux/gamig/other general geekery.

However, I’ve hit a drought in terms of content, primarily because I haven’t run into any issues. My Mini 9 has been running beautifully with UNR 9.04 on EXT4. flawlessly, in fact.

That being said, I’m hoping that 9.10 brings some exciting features. I hear that boot times are greatly improved, although it’s pretty fast on my SSD already. I hear that Pidgin is being dropped for Empathy. we’ll see how that goes…

I have ubuntuone installed,  but I haven’t tried it ouch much. I’ll try to take it for a spin repoirt back.

In other news, I’ve digging into my backlog of 360 games.

Baby 2.0, Warcraft III & other adventures

So I haven’t been as active as I’ve historically been. My Ubuntu systems have been running flawlessly, and Baby 2.0 has arrived, albeit with a rocky start.

As I’ve been in a new job, I didn’t plan on taking much time off for the baby, just the day itself followed by the weekend, actually. However, she arrived with lung problems that required an extended stay in the NICU, including a transfer to another hospital for advanced care.

Without going to further detail, after a week, Baby 2.0 arrived home safe, sound and fully healthy. All is well, so what follows is the official record:

After 39 weeks of compiling, Baby 2.0 was RTMed. However, there was an egregious read error while untarring the archive. After forcible extraction, a cycle of dependency hell ensued, with core components of the binaries refusing to unzip due to unmet depencies, ehich could not be met without the aforementioned components unzipping. Argh.

Eventually, new apt updates resolved the dependency issues, and all processes resumed normal functions. However, this scenario was the source of much woe and gnashing of teeth. Hope I never see these errors again.

Once this was resolved, I set out to try Warcraft III, including the Frozen Throne expansion, running under Wine, including the single-player campaign movies. After a bit of research I found the solution, and the games appears to run very well under wine. Next, I’m going to try to replicate it on th Mini 9.

Firewalls & Proxies

I started a new job a month ago, doing security operations on firewalls for a Fortune 100 company. It’s appears to be a good place to work, and as I start getting the hang of things I think I’ll enjoy it. The new responsibilities have slowed my free time quite a bit as I ramp up, so my online presence has tapered off a bit the last few weeks or so.

The nice part is I get to spend part of my day SSH’ed into Unix systems, forcing my command-fu to improve, which I’ve always wanted to sharpen.  Firewalls: another great addition to my repertoire!

Moto4lin and Motorola Rival

So, I used to use moto4lin with motorola phones a couple years back with great success. I just got a new Motorola Rival A455 after a year with an HTC running Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro.

Unfortunately, it appears enough has changed in Motorola’s operating system in 2 years that my configuration settings don’t work. Moto4lin sees th phone, but can’t connect in P2K mode, so I cannot see the file structure on the phone. I’ll keep plugging away and provide an update if I stumble on th correct settings. It’s a great little phone, but I’d prefer to jail break it if possible

wireless surgery completed: Mini with 3945 Intel

Alright, the broadcom started acting up again 2 days in a row, so I wasted no more time fighting it.
Within a few minutes, I had the bottom panel of the Mini 9 opened, and the wireless cards swapped with the lid replaced. Once I added the new MAC to my router’s approved list, the Mini is back in business, just the way I like it.

wireless card arrived, still in wrapper

Just an update.

Got the new Intel wireless card today from UPS. However, I haven’t installed it yet. The MIni is working perfectly right now, and I don’t want to do anything to break things again.

Love having my little war driver again.

Intel 3945 en route

Well, after tiring of trying to get the standard Broadcom 4312bcm wireless card to work again in the Mini, I’ve gone ahead and ordered an Intel 3945ABG mini pci wireless card from Amazon. I believe it’s the same as in my Inspiron 1420, and should work flawlessly.

Shipping was free, but it could more than a week to arrive. We’ll see if $30 will fix my Mini’s woes.

Broadcom 4312 dying? AKA No buffer space available

My Mini 9 appears to have suffered a grievous internal wound; perhaps requiring surgery. A few weeks ago, the wireless started acting up. It seems to connect to my router fine, and signal strength is solid.

However, after about 5-10 minutes, sometimes quicker, all traffic dies. Network Manager reports that i”m still connected, with great signal strength, but all ping attempts to my router result in:
ping: sendmsg: No buffer space available

At first, I suspected it was overheating, as the mini has no fan or other moving parts, so I left it on a cold stone floor. No real change. I did some searching, and found that in previous releases this was discovered and fixed with a kernel update in backports. However, I’m running the Jaunty 9.04 UNR release, and the Broadcom wireless has been working fine since I’ve had the machine in December. This has me truly stumped, and  I”ve submitted my own bug report on Launchpad. Hopefully someone smarter than I will come to my rescue.

If not, then I may just have to buy an intel 3945 Mini PCI wireless card to replace it. It appears they are not too expensive, and my Inspiron 1420 runs flawlessly.

Until then, my Mini is stranded

Jaunty Netbook Remix: Improved battery life?

OK,

It’s been approxmately a week since  I’ve installed the 9.04 UNR on the Mini 9. I did a completely clean install, backing up my longtime /home partition and formatting both / and /home as Ext4, just so I can see what all the fuss is about.

I got the 9.04 .img file and installed the Ubuntu Image Writer, put it on my trusty 4gig USB flashdrive and booted up.

The install went smoothly, as usual. A little snazzier menus, but generally the same, except for picking Ext4.

After install,  I re-applied  my /home files, disabled Maximus (I hate the auto-maximizing of everything) made a few tweaks and rebooted.
At first, it seemed like I was getting much poorer battery life than under 8.10, to the tune of at least an hour. Previously, I was getting about 3:15. Now with this new release, it was reporting exactly 2:00 exactly for battery life.

Not good. At all.

However, after reading up a bit, I let the netbook drain completely, to the point the system does it’s own graceful shutdown as the battery shuts down. That’s a neat feature, by the way. With only a minute or to, and a warning as well, Ubuntu will do a full shutdown process, so you’re not stuck with an abruptly-dead machine and potentially corrupt files. After it was dead, I plugged it back in and let it charge overnight.

This morning I powered it back on and set it to running a few typical tasks, to prevent th machine from going to sleep and let it drain again from a full charge. While the power manager is not accurate for duration ( it initially reported 2:30 this time around) just before  going dead again i ran ‘uptime’ and was informed the system has been powered on for nearly 3:30 on its own battery.
Very impressive for my needs, and on a 4 cell battery.

In other news, 9.04 boots *very* fast. Haven’t timed it, but much quicker than 8.10.