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.

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.

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…

Kubuntu 9.04 Beta working on Mini 9

So after grabbing the latest Jaunty Beta of Kubuntu, I loaded it onto my usb flash and booted my mini 9. To my pleasure and slight surprise, both the login screen & desktop were perfectly scaled to the 1024×600 resolution. Did I say perfectly? Yes I did.

Playing with it more, I found the built-in desktop effects of Plasma working well, too. The Cube & wobbly windows performed with no lag, and the system was snappy, even via a flash drive.

The one thing that didn’t fly was the wireless connecting to my WPA2/AES-enabled router. The KNetwork Manager didn’t even have an option for WPA2, just WEP & WPA, basically. No love.

If the final release in a few weeks  corrects this and improves a few other things, I may just bump the 8.10 Netbook Remix to the curb and return the the KDE fold, despite my loathing of KDE4.0 & 4.1.

Jaunty with 4.2 seems very nice.

Jaunty Netbook < 1 month away

With the release of Jaunty on April 23rd, I’m looking forward to what new goodness is in store for netbooks, as I’m still thrilled with my Mini 9. Kubuntu 8.10 is a disaster (IMO) on a netbook, so I’m hoping there are improvements in store.

I’m not so concerned about what 9.04 will do for my desktop workhorse. With an old Athlon XP3200+, 2gigs of ram and a GeForce 6600GT, it suits my needs fine, serving up Compiz, Firefox, Wine-based apps, and Acidrip just fine, along with copius amounts of hard drive space to serve as a media center.

On the contrary, its what Canonical can do on the netbook front that interests me now. Installing a new OS via usb flash is a breeze since I even keep a separate /home on the internal 32gig SSD. In fact, I do it on a whim these days just to see what’s happening with the various DEs at the moment.

To that end, I’ve just downloaded the latest Kubuntu  Jaunty beta to take for a spin via live USB. We’ll see how it does on both desktop and netbook, just for grins.