Karmic Netbook – 2 weeks in

So I finally got UNR 9.10 installed cleanly on the Mini 9. It runs beautifully, with noticeably faster boot times and a generally smoother experience in the GUI. Also, i notice that the wireless connects much more quickly this time around. I suspect that there has been some improvements to network-manager. Either way, it’s great.

Also, the /home partition is easily encrypted with just a simple checkbox during install. Security & speed. Can’t ask for much more than that

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 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.

Mini 9 Bios A05 now available: Still no official Linux support

Coincidentally with Jaunty right around the corner, Dell has released Bios version A05 for the Mini 9, in a Win32 .exe and a DOS-only version as well. Of course, there is still no officially approved method to update via linux unfortunately. Well, there is, but it’s outdated and reports are that it’s never worked well.
Also, nothing newer than A01 is recommended even though users report that they are getting them shipped with A02 or newer.

In any event, I’ve been running with each successive bios upgrade, from A00 on up til today’s release, A05.

While I agree that there should be a native way to update the bios easily, I’m a bit pragmatic, using the appropriate tool for any given job. For simplicity, I just use a 64mb usb flash drive that’s formatted to be DOS-bootable and run the update in that environment.
With this latest A05 release, th DOS version is a simple executable as well. I just placed it on my DOS flash drive, booted to it, and ran the new exe. The system immediately processed the upgrade and rebooted. Now my Mini 9 is running Bios A05, vanilla Ubuntu 8.10 i386  with the Netbook Remix, and everything is running smoothly.

However, I would like to know what Dell is doing, not providing a way to upgrade the BIOS to their own hardware for Ubuntu…

Garmin Nuvi 205

I received a GPS for Christmas, and finally got some time to play with it a bit.

The Nuvi 205 is pretty slick. I mounted it to the windshield & plugged it in. No reading of the manuals needed here kids.

After agreeing OK to not play with it while driving, I found it very easy to cnfigure and get me where I want to go. As soon as I got home from my 1st trip, I plugged it into my  PC to see about getting it updated.

The good  news ius that Ubuntu recognizes thdevice as a storage drive, so I can add extra voices, cars, etc by simply unzipping them into the appropriate folders.

Wine even allows the installation of the Garmin software updater.

The bad news is that the Garmin software updater does not recognize the device when plugged into Linux, even under Wine 1.1.14

So, I had to plug it into a WIndows box to update the OS and install the 2009 map update, which I got free in my 60 days of free updates.
The map update was 1.2gigs. Sheesh.

Aside from that snafu, I’m now cruising down the road being tracked by “Judy,” the British voice guiding my onscreen Black Pearl.

KDE 4.2 released – netbook workable?

After the release of KDE4-only in Intrepid, I found it unuseable for my tastes, even as 4.1. As a result, I switched to Xubuntu 8.10 on my desktop, with my preferred KDE apps installed in order to feel like home. I’ve never been much fan of gnome, and wanted a pretty lightweight DE to run my KDE apps.  This has all been documented before.

Today however, KDE has released 4.2 to much fanfare, calling it  greatly useable for the masses, apparently.

My 1st thought is, “Is is still so much slower than 3.5x?” My desktop hardware is beginning to age, at an AMD AthlonXP 3200+, 2gigs PC3200 RAM, and a GeForce 6600GT 128mb. I don’t do much gaming on the PC anymore, so I haven’t had a need to upgrade in quite some time. I’ve been happy with it.

I’m considering moving back to KDE to test the waters again, because I reallty do like the functionality that KDE provides (Or should I say provided?). Which got me to thinking:

How will KDE 4.2 run on an Atom-powered netbook? I’ve got my trusty Mini 9 loaded up with vanilla Intrepid and the Netbook Remix, with 2gigs of ram no less. Surely it can run KDE, right? Right?!?

Strangely enough, I may have to be a forerunner and try it myself, much like Xubuntu on the netbook a while back.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

Mini 9 WPA resolved

After a couple days of tweaking, I’ve got the WPA issues resolved. Strangely enough, it sort of did it itself. I’ve got Intrepid installed via usb stick, with the 1 line edit for sound, and the Broadcom STA driver for the wireless. After adjusting the network manager settings repeatedly, I finally stumbled upon and installed the svn version of network manager from the maintainers repository, deleted all wireless AP settings from network manager, and changed my router to WPA2 Personal AES from my original WPA Personal TKIP settings.More details here.

Voila, it started working. This being  on a linksys WRT54G device. Since then, I’ve been surfing happily from my couch rather than my desk, acessing my local network shares with ease. Now if I can remember to change the wifi settings on my PSP the next time I find it…