Posts Tagged ‘Ubuntu’

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Dear ZaReason…

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

It has been about three months since I purchased my BigLap and started a new job that sees me working like a gypsy floating from place to place as long as it has wireless Internet. My laptop goes everywhere slung on my back and has worked perched on a knee at conferences, sticky tables at cafes, late nights in hotel rooms, and at my parent’s dining room table while my daughter tugs at my sleeve. It feels as necessary as my wallet and keys and I feel a little naked if it isn’t on me.

So how has it performed? Unbelievably. I’ve owned a number of laptops from Toshiba, Dell, and Sony and out of all of them this has been the best build quality and features for the price.

  • Battery life is solid
  • Light for being a 17″
  • Screen hinges are stiff
  • Keyboard responsive and quiet
  • Rugged design

Tech support from ZaReason has been equally great with quick response times with a genuinely conversational and friendly tone. They have worked hard to make sure that as much of the hardware is operational with the shipping version of Ubuntu. The built in webcam is the only piece that has given me problems in that the image displayed is upside down and cannot seem to be flipped but that is more a problem with the device and the driver.

segue/

After actually putting five minutes of work into researching the solution it is now fixed…

Gratefully cribbed from 0graham0′s post over at Ubuntu forums…

sudo mkdir /etc/camdriver

Download the driver from Sourceforge extract it and run the following…

sudo make
sudo modprobe videodev
sudo modprobe v4l1-compat
sudo insmod stk11xx.ko vflip=1

Add the following to /etc/modules

videodev
v4l1-compat

and to /etc/rc.local

insmod /etc/camdriver/stk11xx.ko vflip=1

Viola!

Syntek WebCam Fixed!

/segue

The great thing about ZaReason though is that they never dropped the issue and had emailed me possible solutions and are very receptive if you happen to stumble on one of your own and that level of service is what makes the company so great.

Bottom line: I love this laptop and I really love this company.

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Posted in Hardware | 5 Comments »

Bluetooth, Headsets, Ubuntu, and You!

Monday, August 13th, 2007

Tired of having my co-workers laughing at me for not having skype set up (yes, I am still trying to figure out the internal mic) I decided to look into pairing my Samsung WEP170. The solution is pretty quick and dirty.

You’ll need to install several tools, which you can do without I’m not sure but here’s what I have installed so far to pair both my phone and the headset:

bluez-btsco
bluez-pin
bluez-utils
gnome-bluetooth
kdebluetooth
libbluetooth
libbtcl4
libgnomebt0
nautilus-sendto
qobex

For this exercise, though, we’ll be making use of bluez-btsco, bluez-pin, and kdebluetoothd. So after installing the packages modprobe btsco:

$ sudo modprobe snd-bt-sco

Turn on the headset and grab the MAC address:

$ hcitool scan

Copy it and get set up to enter the devices pin number when pairing:

$ passkey-agent –default /usr/bin/bluez-pin

In another terminal type the following with that MAC address you copied:

$ btsco -v BL:UE:TO:OT:HM:AC

Turn on the headset for pairing, in the case of the Samsung it means holding the power down until the light goes solid. If all goes well the passkey-agent should pop looking for the pin of the headset and once that is entered the device should pair and the little KBluetoothD icon should be in your notification area. To use it with Skype I just needed to configure it to use the headset which showed up as a secondary ALSA device with the prefix of BT.

Now, there are two ways to get your headset connected quickly one is to create a little script that issues the btsco command sans the -v and launch it whenever you turn the headset on or you can use the GUI tool found here but that requires you run it as sudo (or gksudo for pure, unadulterated GUI-ness). Other than that this is pretty easy, quick, and dirty. ;-)

Gratefully cribbed from this post and that post on Ubuntu forms as well as the discussion at the tool’s website.

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Posted in Linux | 5 Comments »

ZaReason Made My Day!

Friday, July 20th, 2007

The Unboxing

A thing of beauty

Powered by Ubuntu!

ZaReason says,

How cool is it that they included a screwdriver?

Done!

 

Quick thoughts: the company rules as their personalized service and quirky sense of humor (screwdriver to encourage you to work on your pc!) really make you feel more like a valued individual than just a customer; and this laptop is plain awesome as its super bright screen, quiet keyboard, and thin design is just begging me to stay up late playing. What a damn good day!

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Posted in Hardware | 24 Comments »

Dell vs System76 or The baby is drinking my IT budget.

Monday, June 18th, 2007

So here’s my dilemma: I need a new laptop and I have been drooling over the System76 series laptops for a better part of a year now as they were the first Ubuntu OEM and not to mention an independent retailer which goes a long way to tickle my heartstrings. Recently, Dell entered the market and with their clout are able to offer a whole lot of bang for the buck and while their base product selection is limited the options are excellent so here I find myself torn with regards to the value proposition of the purchase.

Below are the specs from each company for the laptop I am looking to buy:

  • Inspiron E1505–$1,578.00 ($1,672.67 S&H and Tax)
    • Processor–Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T7200 (4MB Cache/2.00GHz/667MHz FSB)
    • OS–Ubuntu Edition version 7.04
    • LCD Panel–15.4 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen SXGA+ Display with TrueLife™ (1400×1050)
    • Memory–2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHZ, 2 DIMM
    • Video Card–256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 7300 TurboCache™
    • Hard Drive–100GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive
    • CD/DVD–8X CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability
    • Sound–Integrated Audio
    • Wireless–IntelPRO/Wireless 3945a/g
    • Battery–85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
    • Warranty–1Yr Ltd Warranty and Mail-In Service
    • Extra Power–90 Watt Spare AC Adapter
    • Bluetooth–No
  • Serval–$1,859.00 (includes S&H)
    • Processor–Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T7200 (4MB Cache/2.00GHz/667MHz FSB)
    • OS–Ubuntu Edition version 7.04
    • LCD Panel–15.4 inch WXGA (1280×800)
    • Memory–2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHZ, 2 DIMM
    • Video Card–256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 7600 VRAM
    • Hard Drive–100GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive
    • CD/DVD–8X CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability
    • Sound–Integrated Audio
    • Wireless–Intel 802.11 abg
    • Battery–6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
    • Warranty–1Yr Ltd Warranty and Mail-In Service
    • Extra Power–90 Watt Spare AC Adapter
    • Bluetooth–Yes

The difference is about $186 in Dell’s favor but with that savings comes a better screen and faster hard drive furthering the technical gap. In System76′s favor is a wealth of positive reviews about their service and support, largely due to the fact that they are a small company which makes every customer count, the inclusion of a Bluetooth adapter as well as a built in webcam. I find myself torn between personal politics and maximizing the value of my purchase.

Here are the things I am keen on:

  • Big bright screen
  • Large and fast SATA hard drive
  • Plenty of fast RAM
  • 100% compatibility

System76 is guaranteed 100% compatibility and supplies many of the drivers themselves to ensure it. Dell on the other hand, I’m not too sure about. Yes, they are selling Ubuntu laptops but are they 100% compatible? I’ve read some articles about early screw ups with grub which doesn’t give me the warm and fuzzies about either their commitment or capabilities but they seem to be making some sort of an effort with their wiki.

Like the camera I’m giving myself 30 days to sort it out and weigh the pros and cons but I want to know what would you buy and why?

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Posted in Hardware | 9 Comments »

Encryption, USB Drive, Ubuntu, Windows, and You!

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

The other day I though I had lost my USB drive, a janky Kingston 1GB stick with no keychain holder that is temporarily replacing my burned out JumpDrive Sport. Deep sets of panic waves overtook me for most of the morning as I wracked my brain and retraced my steps trying to remember where I could have left it or dropped it. The reason that I was panicking was that I carry some quasi-sensitive data on there like the household budget and short stories I’m working on. No bank numbers or SSNs, just stuff that I don’t want people seeing.

Well, I did end up finding the drive wedged in the back seat of Management’s car but I learned an important lesson: if you are going to carry important data with you back it up and encrypt it. I already have the backup part down and have been doing it ever since my first USB drive crapped out on me and I lost piles of data but encryption was something I never got around to until now. The challenge is that I use Ubuntu at home (100% Windows free as of 60 days ago!) and by day I play at being a Windows sysadmin so I need a solution that works cross platform.

My first visit was to the TrueCrypt folks and while they make a fine product that for all intents and purposes worked well on my work box but completely borked the drive for my laptop. So I decided to approach the task from the Linux side looking for native solutions that had counterparts in the Windows world and LUKS plus FreeOTFE did the trick with a minimum of fuss.

On the Ubuntu side:

  • Grab cryptsetup and cryptmount: sudo apt-get install cryptsetup cryptmount
  • Wipe the disk or make some partitions: sudo cfdisk /dev/sdb [NOTE: check your drive's actual path with dmesg as you don't want to be wiping something like your primary drive]
  • Create an encrypted partition: sudo luksformat /dev/sdb [NOTE: pick a passphrase that you can remember because if you forget it kiss your data goodbye]

Now, because I’m plain lazy I rebooted to get the modules running that are related to reading the new encrypted volume but after that when I popped my drive in it asked for my passphrase and then mounted it for me to work on it to my heart’s delight.

On the Windows side:

  • Plug in the USB drive and go to Computer Management >> Disk Management, find the drive, and remove the assigned drive letter, FreeOTFE will assign a free letter to the drive when it mounts it
  • Get a copy of FreeOTFE
  • Unzip it into a directory and start it in Portable Mode
  • File >> Linux Volume >> Mount partition and enter your passphrase
  • Enjoy!

Pretty straight forward.

Gratefully cribbed from carthik’s post at Ubuntu Blog and from FreeOTFE’s solid documentation.

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Posted in Linux | 19 Comments »

Update on Ubuntu 7.04

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

I’ve been working the Feisty Fawn now for a little over two weeks and after my initial trepidation with regards to Beagle being re-installed and Tracker not playing nice with Deskbar as well as Gimmie giving me nothing but crashes things have worked themselves out. Here’s how I’m working my desktop:

Gimmie on Ubuntu 7.04

I’ve replaced the Applications | Places | System menu bar with Gimmie as I like how it aggregates favorite applications and most used documents along with data from Tomboy and Gaim, it makes for a simple and elegant way to look at applications and data beyond hierarchical layouts.  The crashes with Gimmie just after upgrading were a little baffling but fixed by rolling back from 0.2.6 to 0.2.4.

Deskbar and Tracker on Ubuntu 7.04

Deskbar is back and working nicely with Tracker, the catch was that Deskbar would start before Tracker and when it couldn’t see it would try to start it when Trackerd was trying to resulting in Deskbar vapor locking. The fix was simple, uncheck Trackerd in the start up applications under Sessions. Now when Deskbar starts it will fire up Trackerd and everything works just fine.

Now, for the last year or so I have been pounding the ever-loving snot out of the laptop and in the past couple of months have been beating the “I need a new machine” drum so incessantly that Management has been close to terminating my employment. All this time I thought the memory was maxed with a meager 512 MB but the other night I decided to actually pay attention to Top as I watched the laptop crawl through its paces.

The reality? Try 512/2 MB. Yeah. So after I stuck an extra stick in things actually started running better, well enough that I told Management we can push off the new laptop for at least another month.  ;-)

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Posted in Linux | Comments Off

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