A bit of penguin humour for you this evening...

Right. Jaunty is out there, and I've installed it on the tiny little speck of a laptop that my company bought me last month. It's a thing of beauty this little HP 2230s, like a netbook that's been hitting the gym and the Mega Muscle shakes hard for a few months. And Ubuntu runs quite nicely on it, the various odd buttons and quirky hardware bits that laptops are notorious for all work (well, mostly), and it's nice and responsive.

The rest of this post is mostly a rant about a particular thing that annoys me colossally. The key points you should take away from the previous sentence are "a particular thing", and "me". Ubuntu 9.04 is a good step forward for the distro, and despite how my comments might come across I heartily recommend it.

Now I'm sorry, but seriously people, how hard is it, I mean, really, to get screen-switching on laptops working properly? We're three years and six releases downwind of when I first noticed this issue, which is just one of those absolutely totally critical things that anyone doing presentations (read: a huge fraction of your potential market) needs every day. I'm not a business person, but I am a researcher, and the thing about research is that you have to present it. You have to get up in front of a large group of people and show them your work on a regular basis. When you do this, and have to sit around for five minutes on the lectern in front of an increasingly tough crowd dicking with the broken screen-switching config in a desperate attempt to get a mirror of your screen to show on the projector, two very important things happen.

It throws you off your stride. And it wrecks your credibility in the eyes of the audience.

When you are standing up in front of people, the last thing you want is the equipment you're using to let you down by behaving unpredictably. Plugging an external projector into a laptop should work like this, every single time: display nothing on the external output until you tell the computer to do so, and then display a mirror of the laptop screen immediately and correctly as soon as you tell it to.

The Ubuntu screen manager fails miserably at this supposedly simple task which Those Other OSes seem to be able to get right pretty consistently. Plugging a projector into my laptop while it's running either mirrors the screen immediately, or displays nothing, or tries to fuse the two screens together into some horrifying abomination of an extended desktop. It's a total crapshoot as to which happens. If it does nothing (best case scenario), starting up the screen manager shows two screens, the laptop's LCD (active), and the projector (inactive). All good so far, but unfortunately activating the projector in the screen manager causes another roll of the dice. Either the resolutions of both screens are reset to match and the screen is mirrored to the projector (hooray!), or it isn't, or you get the weird mangled extended desktop again. If it's done something you didn't like, clicking the "mirror screens" checkbox either fixes it, or causes the system to throw an error and crash the screen manager. In addition to this mess, during your wrangling of the screen manager it will simply shut down at random points, displaying a message asking you to log out and back in again to confirm the screen settings. I've learned from bitter experience never to do this, unless you want to start all over again from scratch. By now, sweat is streaming down your face and you can feel the audience warming up their throwing arms and reaching into their conference packs for the complimentary bag of rotten tomatoes.

An additional annoyance is waiting to plague you after you've finished your presentation and mercifully retreated to the isolation of your hotel room or office. Ubuntu is now thoroughly confused as to whether or not you have an external monitor connected. Every few startups subsequently, it will suddenly pick up some combination of the settings you button-mashed while trying to get your presentation running and attempt to apply them. This has resulted in at least the following happening (by no means an exhaustive list):

• The laptop starting up in mirrored mode with only the external screen activated (i.e. a blank LCD).
• The laptop starting up locked in mirrored mode, meaning I'm unable to set the LCD resolution above 1024x768.
• The laptop starting up thinking it has an extended desktop, causing me to lose windows off the side of the screen until I realise what's happening.

Further soul-destroying fighting with the screen manager is required to revert the laptop to realising that no, actually, there is no external projector or screen plugged in, and yes, the LCD is all it has to worry about.

It amazes me that something this fundamental (and this long-standing) is still so broken in Ubuntu. It's a real deal breaker for me, since it means that I have to maintain a dual boot setup for doing presentations, at least on my laptop.

Something that I have been meaning to blog about for a while, but stupid university assignments kept getting in the way.  I have a Nokia N73 with 3G and bluetooth.  With my new Eee901 it seemed the perfect opportunity to attempt to get wireless internet access.  After a lot of fiddling and failing, and very simple and very easy solution presented itself.  I'll try to keep this as generic as possible, because it should work with most phones that have the capability. 

I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 on an Asus Eee 901 as the starting point.

The first magic step required is to install blueman.  It's a GTK+ bluetooth manager with many bells and whistles.  I'm using version 0.6, which is a beta, from the launchpad ppa found here : https://edge.launchpad.net/~blueman/+archive/ppa.  Before I go any further, PPA repositories are normally pretty bleeding edge and not fully supported by Canonical, so use with caution.  I'm using the beta because it features brilliant integration with network manager - you will see why later.

Once installed, you may need to reboot. then run blueman (should be under accessories). With the bluetooth switched on on your mobile phone, run an inquiry, and your phone should show up in the list.  You'll want to bond it, to make future connections quicker and easier.

Select your phone and click properties.  This will give you a run down of what bluetooth communications your phone is able to do.  The one you will be looking for is "Dialup Networking" and the channel number.  If you have this, you're one step closer to wireless internet heaven. 

We now need to get blueman, dialup networking and network manager talking - sounds impossible, actually really easy.  Hit Edit > Services and turn on "Serial" and go to the configuration settings.  Select "add new serial port", select your phone, and under the service, choose dialup networking.  you may need to add the channel number under advanced, but think that it will do this automatically anyway.  once you have added the port, highlight it and tick the box, "This is a GSM/GPRS etc" box.  It's this little option that makes the magic happen in network manager.

Save all of that, and hopefully network manager has given you a notification that you have a connection available.  If not, click once on the network manager icon and choose configure under "mobile broadband" and follow the instructions and select your internet provider.

That's it, it should now be as easy to turn bluetooth on, open blueman, and select the connection on network manager!

Good Luck, any issues, comment or email and I'd be willing to help as much as I can!

There seems to be a number of people that do not like Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth.  I'm not going to express my opinions just yet, but thought that it may be interesting to present two stories I read over the weekend.

Adam Williamson's "Why I don't like Canonical" and the response from Canonical's Community Manager, Jono Bacon.

Have a read, and comment with your thoughts, I'd be interested to hear opinions.

Alright, so I've had the 901 now for a week and I thought it would be a good time to put up a post giving my thoughts on actually running it.  (also, I started preparing this blog entry whilst sitting on the tube at 7am on a Sunday morning - how cool is that)

Firstly, and probably most importantly was the email I received from Sam on Tuesday regarding a fantastic package called eee-control.  I think this is a little bit like the ubuntu eee holy grail.  It requires that you are running adamm's customised kernel, and one or two extra python packages, but nothing too stressful due to the joy of deb's dependency solving.  Once installed and rebooted I can now turn on/off my wifi, bluetooth, camera and sdcard reader (all good when maximising battery potential).  I can also reconfigure the 4 hotkeys to do whatever I want them to... brilliant.  Very chuffed with this, and the system-tray icon is a very snazy Eee.

One of the things that I forgot to mention about the Eee 901 previously is the amazing touchpad.  I think that it is a really good size for this machine, but the coolest thing is that it is multi-touch.  Using 2 fingers on the touchpad means that you can scroll up and down, you can 'pinch and pull' images to zoom in and out.  What I also discovered this week was that you can use three fingers on the pad as well, and this relates to a right click.  It takes a bit of getting used to, but all in all fabulous.

I'm still getting used to the keyboard, but it really is not all that terrible.  I wouldn't like to try and type up a thesis on it, but for emails and and perhaps a couple of hours typing,  It's not all that bad.

Now for the issue - and only one so far which I believe might be a small manufacturing defect on my physical machine.  For whatever reason, randomly, the OS gets the signal that the lid has been closed, and opened.  I initially had the Eee set to go into standby when shutting the lid.  As you can imagine, this started causing serious havoc.  I would be working away and suddenly the machine would go into standby.  I've disabled all power management features with regards to the lid, so for now, it doesn't appear to be an issue, although every now and then the screen flickers on and off.  Below you can see an image of what my power history looks like.  Note all the lid open and lid closed notifications.  Although at this time the lid was fully up. 

The question I'm struggling with, is do I send the machine back to Asus for a repair - I have a year manufacturers warranty, or do I just live with it... I'm not sure about it because I have put ubuntu on...  plus it has a few stickers on it as well.

Finally, I have bitten the bullet and decided to buy myself an Eee PC. Those that know me personally, will know that I have been harping on about getting one for quite some time now. A couple of weeks ago I walked into my local PCWorld to discover that they had the 904HD. This started to get me very excited, although it left me with a dilemma... do I go for the 901, the 904HD or the 1000 version (link to see the differences). 

In the end I decided on the 901 and here where my reasons. 20GB of SSD hard drive space is more than enough for what an Eee PC is for and a 10" screen I think is the upper limit for a netbook and possibly even too big (plus I couldn't really justify the extra £100). The next question was black or white... no really, did I go for the 'Fine Ebony' or 'Pearl White'. The decision was black, because as much as I initially wanted a white one, the black one is so much sexier (yes, I used the s-word).

After unpacking it, adorning it with selected Ubuntu stickers. It went on charge for about 3hrs. Then it was play time!

Ubuntu Installation

I decided that I wanted to run a 'normal' Ubuntu OS. There are some good Eee derivatives (such as Ubuntu-Eee or eeebuntu), but I felt more comfortable using a normal Ubuntu install. Luckily for me, Intrepid has a funky 'create a USB start disk' application for just this sort of occasion. Pretty easy, put USB stick into my desktop, downloaded the newest ISO, point click, point click and I theoretically I had a bootable USB live CD.
(As an aside, it appears that you can also set aside an amount of space on the USB stick for settings and documents. I think this means that you can effectively have Linux on a stick that will work on a USB bootable PC and then have your personal settings and applications already installed?? I will research this further.)

Plug into the Eee, startup, hit F2 for BIOS. Here I had a few issues. The boot selection had 'removable media' as an option. This did not work. I fiddled a little bit more and in the boot -> hard drive disk section, an option for USB drive (make sure that your USB stick is plugged in when doing this). Turned this on, reset the boot order, saved BIOS and restarted. Weehee! Ubuntu install started! 

If I were to do this again, I would do it differently. I opted for the normal graphical install - be warned, not all the installation option windows fit on the small resolution screen. I had to be careful and use the TAB and ENTER keys selectively to hope that I was on the 'next' button. This model has 2 SSD drives, one 4GB and one 16GB. They have been formatted EXT2 with the 4GB mounting as / and the 16GB mounting as /home. Wasn't too bad in the end, and a cuppa tea later I was installed and ready to go! 

Wifi

Yip, that old chestnut! Didn't work out the box, then again, who ever expects that it will, but UbuntuForums are your friend. After a little research, it seemed that one of the best solutions to all things Ubuntu and Eee was to use a customised kernel provided by array.org. I added the repositories (plugged into the router via an ethernet cable), added the medibuntu repositories, selected a number of packages to install, hit apply and made the second cup of tea! Rebooted to the new kernel, and Bob's your Uncle and Sarah's your Aunt, everything worked. Wifi, webcam, sound, bluetooth, shortcut keys. You name it, it worked! (just a point here, the webcam, wifi and bluetooth were disabled in bios, apparently the default xandros ignores this and still works, I had to enable them). 

Overall thoughts

I LOVE THIS MACHINE! It is everything that a netbook should be, small, light, fast (the atom processor has so far seriously impressed me). I can scale the CPU, choosing between 800MHz, 1.00GHz, 1.2GHz or the full 1.6GHz. Also has the on demand setting so that the CPU will scale as required. So far, and this is only on the second charge cycle, I'm getting about 5hrs of normal usage (with the wifi turned on and being used). Suspend and resume works, very cool. Now for a bit more usage. I had it up a the University library today and it was stellar, it fulfilled it's purpose, 110%. I could even connect to the Uni's wifi network!

I am a very very happy Eee owner!
 

So, 8.10 has arrived. I'm not likely to be giving it a go on anything but my testbed desktop at home, but I'm curious to hear what you early adopter whippersnappers have to say about it. Voice your opinions via the comments!

One thing that caught my eye reading one of the reviews was a bit alarming: "Incidentally, 8.10 does away entirely with the X.org configuration file, long the bane of newbies but also the savior of more experienced users. The idea is that the graphical subsystem "just works", and if it doesn't you're supposed to file a bug report."

X has come a hell of a long way since my earliest experiences with it (which frequently included blacking out in a terrible rage and waking up in a room full of inexplicably murdered computer parts) but I'd still question this move. I've had display issues necessitating xorg.conf hacking as recently as 8.04, so I hope they've done their homework.

Phoronix thinks so. It's Wirth's Law in action, of course... Ubuntu isn't immune just because it's open source, unfortunately.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_bench_2008&num=1

If you are a Virtualbox user (the commercial one from Sun), and recently had Ubuntu upgrade the kernel from 2.6.24-19 to 2.6.24-21.  You may have your virtual box freeze on you with a small window stating: spawning session.

You need to rebuild the kernel module for vbox, this achieved by running the following command:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Should work after that :-)

Nice... should be interesting to see what this does to their market share.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081009-wikipedia-adopts-ubuntu-fo...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/05/ibm_ubuntu/

Good news for us laptop folks.

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Software/4473.html

Only 8 years later since I first started delving into Linux, and I have finally realised that I need to do give something back to the community that I am so fond of.  Sure, I have advocated and told as many people as I possibly could tell, but I need to do something a little more serious.

So, I am now officially a member of the Ubuntu Documentation Student Team and am being mentored through my first Document Revision. YAY

I will fill you in on the progress as things progress, but here we go :-)

Remember, if you too want to contribute to Ubuntu then visit the Community website and find an area that interests you.  Or join a LUG/Mailing List in your area.

Feeling inspired by Quinn's post below, I thought I would pick up where he left off and attempt some of my own tests with wine. 

System information is as follows:

• Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)
• Kernel 2.6.22-15-generic
• Memory 1.5GB
• AMD Athlon XP 2400+
• Nvidia Geforce 6600GS (XFX)
• wine v1.0.0

I was able to install steam with no troubles, except that when it wanted to update itself after the install it continually crashed at the 26% mark.  This, luckily, is not uncommon, and can be solved by running wine at a different priority by using the following command:

$nice -n 19 wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steam.exe

It's been recommended that running steam with the following command line code produces the best results:

$WINEDEBUG=-all wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steam.exe

I have an account with steam, and have a Half-Life 1 product code.  Using this I was offered a range of games in the "My Games" section. I then installed Counter Strike through steam, hit the launch button and away I went.  It runs brilliantly! I dialled up the AA and AF to 4x using nvidia-settings and it was still pumping out over 40fps at 1280x1024. I would assume that it can be just as easy to run all the other HL1 spin-off games via this method (the original HL runs fine as well).  Of course if you have bandwidth restrictions, it may be an issue.

I then tried the Half-Life 2 demo also downloaded and installed via steam.  Installation was no issue, but when launching the game I got nothing but black screen and a message that said the monitor mode was not supported - some dodgy default settings causing problems.  So did a bit of reading, and if you right-click on the game and select properties you can set the launch options.  I used the following:

-width 1280 -height 1024 -refresh 60 -novid -console

This worked and we had action! The game performance is far from superior, but dialling everything back, I get between 15fps and 40fps depending on the environment.  The demo was playable and good God, I had forgotten just how fun it is to play around with the physics!

If valve do eventually port the source engine to linux, I will be the first to buy the Orange Box :-)

Gaming in Linux, oh boy. A controversial topic at best, an invitation to an insane flamefest at worst. Still, one that should be talked about, as it remains for many folks the last big stumbling block when converting from Windows. They can put up with a surprising amount of crap, but you'd be surprised how often their favourite games not working is cited as a reason for people sticking with That Other OS, especially among the more clued-up technorati.

I have to be honest here - a few years ago this was a huge issue for me. I owned PCs primarily to play games, and if they also let me do some work and general personal stuff on the side, well, that was nice but certainly not a deal-breaker. In those days the idea of buying a game and having it not run properly on my machine was unthinkable, and not having the latest bleeding edge video cards and hardware drivers was the sort of thing that kept me up at night. Windows got clean-installed at least once a month, and I lived, breathed and dreamed FPS.

If this is you now, I can save you a long and depressing read through the rest of this guide - install Windows and Linux dual boot, and boot to Windows to play your games. Simple as that. Linux has improved enormously, but it isn't quite there yet.

If however you're more like I am nowadays, you try to take a more balanced approach to life, and the computer is a general purpose hub of various activities of which gaming is just one. In such a milieu, Linux as the sole OS is much more feasible. It's very capable of doing everything Windows does in the way of software development, web browsing, email, office apps, photos, music, video, etc etc etc, and it additionally is able to run a fair share of games if you're willing to be persistent and tolerate the occasional failure.

Here follows a bullet list of what I've tried, mostly just noted down as I was doing it, so apologies if it comes over a bit terse. I started with an unremarkable clean install of Hardy Heron on my desktop PC at home, which is now getting quite long in the tooth for gaming - shame :P. It's a Shuttle XPC with an AMD Athlon64 3200+ (the 2GHz 1024k cache version) on an nForce 150 platform, an Nvidia GeForce 6800 128MB with some, er, "hacks" (less said about that the better ;-), and various other hardware bits that no one cares about and aren't germane to the discussion below. I'll also warn you now of some bias: I enjoy first person shooters. I know other kinds of games exist, but (a) I suck at them, and (b) I really suck at them, both of which result in me usually not enjoying them very much. There are exceptions of course, but that's a fair comment on the general state of my gaming predilections. This list is also not entirely complete, as I haven't tested either Diablo 2 or StarCraft, both of which are currently sitting at work. I can tell you that Blizzard's never made native installers for those games, so you'll be stuck using wine which I don't like much anyway (more on this later).

Right, let's get started...

Drivers:
Video - Installed NVidia GF drivers from Ubuntu restricted drivers manager. I don't even know what version they are (eish Reynolds - how far the mighty have fallen), but I assume they're reasonably current, and this way Ubuntu looks after updating them for me.
Sound - Whatever default OSS drivers installed with Ubuntu for the onboard sound. I only use stereo speakers anyway, so fine for my purposes.

Nexuiz:
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (bots or multiplayer)
- mode: native, written for Linux
- Install from Ubuntu repositories
- Game runs well

Alien Arena:
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (bots or multiplayer)
- mode: native, written for Linux
- Install from Ubuntu repositories
- Game runs well

Tremulous:
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (multiplayer only)
- mode: native, written for Linux
- Install from Ubuntu repositories
- Game runs well

Quake 3:
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (bots or multiplayer)
- mode: native
- Downloaded id Software installer from http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/q3a/
- Ran installer w/sudo
- Copied pk3 file(s) from Windows install CD to <q3installdir>/baseq3
- Game runs well

Doom 3:
- gametype: FPS single player and deathmatch (multiplayer only)
- mode: native
- Downloaded id Software installer from http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/doom/
- Ran installer w/sudo
- Copied pk4 file(s) 0 thru 5 from Windows install CD(s) to <d3installdir>/base
- Game runs well

Quake 4:
- gametype: FPS single player and deathmatch (multiplayer only)
- mode: native
- Downloaded id Software installer from http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/quake4/ (note: large file, ~275MB)
- Created /usr/local/games/quake4/q4base and copied all pk4 file(s) from Windows install CD(s) to it
- Ran installer w/sudo (do it this way around because installer includes patches which overwrite some of the original pk4's)
- Language defaults to spanish! Search for "seta sys_lang" line in ~/.quake4/q4base/Quake4Config.cfg and change to english :)
- Game runs well

Unreal Tournament 1999 (non-GOTY edition):
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (bots or multiplayer)
- mode: native
- Loki games maintains a Linux installer - downloaded and tested, repeatedly gave "bad checksum" error however.
- Turns out Loki installer is broken on Ubuntu 8.04 and a number of modern distros.
- Downloaded the modified installer from http://www.liflg.org/?catid=6&gameid=51
- Ran modified installer w/sudo (requests Windows install CDs as per Windows installer)
- Installed fine, however, run script created in /usr/local/bin has broken paths ("bad substitution" error)
- Created a two-line bash script to cd to the UT install directory and run the executable from there, i.e.
    <code>
    cd /usr/local/games/ut
    ./ut
    </code>
- Game runs, but game speed is too fast and quite erratic (either set game speed to 30-50% when starting new game, or futz with CPU frequency to get it working ok, still erratic though - this appears to be an issue related to modern CPUs, video cards, and vidcard drivers and is not unique to Linux - may need vsync or other hacks to get it working).

Unreal Tournament 2003:
- gametype: FPS deathmatch (bots or multiplayer)
- mode: native
- Tried installer on 3rd disk, gives similar checksum error as the installer for UT1999 did.
- Fixing "tail -266" bug in a local copy of linux-installer.sh and running as sudo works to get the install going
- Had to ctrl-c out of the CD key check, which it warns you not to do :), but apparently CD key can be manually entered into <ut2k3installdir>/System/cdkey
- Running from command line starts splash screen, blanks screen for a second or so, and then crashes back to the desktop with lots of "Locking assertion failure" errors - seems like a vidcard driver/opengl error.

Serious Sam - The Second Encounter:
- gametype: FPS single player and deathmatch (multiplayer only)
- mode: native (beta)
- Downloaded Loki installer from http://www.liflg.org/?catid=6&gameid=71
- Ran installer w/sudo (needs Windows install CD)
- Game script crashed "ssamtse: line 123:  7198 Aborted" when I ran it.
- Applied the fix here: http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-173418.html
- Game runs, a bit too fast (bad for an already fast-paced game!) and occasionally with graphical bugs

HERE BE DRAGONS - A friendly note to readers. I don't much like wine. It's a hacky, messy, best-effort-and-poor-performance way of doing things, especially games, and games (particularly modern ones) that will only run under wine speak to me of developers who aren't interested in giving open source platforms the time of day. As a result I didn't try nearly as hard to get any wine-emulated games working as I did with those that have native versions, so YMMV.

Half-life 1:
- gametype: FPS single player (multiplayer with CounterStrike and other mods)
- mode: wine
- Failed completely (installer crash)

Half-Life 2:
- gametype: FPS single player (multiplayer with CounterStrike and other mods)
- mode: wine
- Installed Steam relatively painlessly using the instructions here
- Steam runs fine, if a bit slow and clunky (that's emulation for ya). I can login and check my account etc as per windows.
- Tried installing Half-Life 2. I have the CD version (5 discs). The instructions at the link above simply initiate a new install of Steam - useless.
- Tried running the hl2.exe install on the first disc via wine. This works and starts the install, unfortunately wine locks the CD mount point so install fails at "insert CD 2".
- Tried copying all CDs to hdd and running install from there. Fails halfway through with an archive extract error.
- Tried the CD install + force-unmount method detailed at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2484355. Install fails, repeatedly asking for CD 2 even when it is inserted and mounted.

Sacrifice:
- gametype: RTS single player
- mode: wine
- Ran install from CD, worked fine and installed the game to ~/.wine/drive_c.
- Game runs, but with major rendering and display errors - tried all three rendering options (wine D3D HAL T&L, wine D3D HAL, and wine D3D RGB), all gave the same result. Also unable to change the resolution from 640x480x16 which annoyingly resets the desktop resolution in the process.

Dungeon Siege 1:
- gametype: RPG single player
- mode: wine
- Failed completely (installer crash)

Dungeon Siege 2:
- gametype: RPG single player
- mode: wine
- Failed completely (installer crash)

System Shock 2:
- gametype: FPS/RPG single player
- mode: wine
- Failed completely (installer crash)

Heretic 2:
- gametype: 3PS single player
- mode: wine
- Failed completely (installer crash)

So there you are. A bit of a hit and miss affair, but if you enjoy id Software's games (and most other games based on their engines) you're golden. Epic aren't quite at the polished point of Linux support id are at, but they're catching up fast, and with rumours that even Valve are at the preliminary stages of beginning to consider the possibility of forming a committee to evaluate the consideration that they might one day make native Linux versions of Steam and the Source engine, things are definitely moving in the right direction.

I'd love to chat more, but I'm off to blast some Strogg now. Have a good one :-)