Hugo Jonker

Since 2 days (guess why) I’m the proud owner of a very shiny external monitor. Took a bit of effort to set up under Ubuntu (tip: don’t set the display to “not cloned”, and then try to run the external monitor at a different, high resolution than the local one — just keep cloning or shut off the local one and things’ll be fine :).

Anyway, I was running non-cloned, and it was nice, shiny and awesome-y resolution-y! But: if I closed the laptop, bam. Screen gone. It’s a power management thing. So we go to preferences > power management. Well guess what we can choose: shutdown, hibernate, sleep or blank screen. That’s right, no option to do nothing.

Luckily, there’s a hidden config option (see above link for explanation):
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-power-manager/buttons/lid_ac "nothing".

Yet another problem solved :)

Funny thing, have been fighting with calendars recently at two fronts: google calendar and ubuntu. For Ubuntu, I’d like the week to start on Monday. Weeks start on Monday, you know? They just do. It is not called “weekend” for nothing…
Anyway, see here on instructions how to fix. Short short version: change your locale files (/usr/share/i18n/locale/$LOCALE) to say first_weekday 2, rebuild the locales (sudo locale-gen) and restart gnome-panel (killall gnome-panel).

The google thing was slightly different. We have a calendar for seminars at work. We do not have seminars in the weekend, but we do have them on Monday. Mornings. So in the weekend, it’d be nice if our embedded Google Calendar would show the next week’s calendar. Gives you a head start. Well, so far it seems the easiest way to do that is to tell Google it’s next week :s.

Will think about this one more too.

It’s Sunday, I am terribly lazy and not in the mood to do anything. So, naturally, I booted into windows, installed the necessary BIOS update from Samsung, rebooted, crossed my fingers and hit the update button.

Reason for being a bit worried and holding off? Well, early reports on 9.10 sounded as if there were some chinks to be worked out. Plus, I am not exactly running a standard PC… I love my little cutsey netbook, but move outside the pre-installed established OS at your own risk. Main worry for me was my USB modem. It took some tweaking to get it running. No clue if that would hold up under the shiny new Ubuntu… and I don’t exactly have a spare net connection to fix things if it breaks down.

As you can guess from this post, that part worked out… more or less. It seemed to work out of the box, but then it recognised the USB modem as a USB stick, and while the network manager managed to connect, I couldn’t get on the Net. Unplugging and replugging solved that. Kind of curious if I have to do that every time now :)

Other than that: first impressions are good! The menu bars’ autohide feature is improved, providing me with more screen real estate (important on small screens). I still need to check some things:

• Does the printer still work?
• Does the automatic resolution adaption for beamer/tv still work?
• Do the Fn-keys work (quick test: seems as good as before)

But overall, first impressions are positive.

Spent a bit more time with Ubuntu 8.04 on the Eee [UPDATE: running that for ages. Updated this post now that I have re-installed the thing with Ubuntu 9.04]. The thing seems fully functioning now, hooray! So how do you get there?

1. In the BIOS, set the hard-disk order to prioritise the USB drive (not under “boot”, but under disk order (iirc)
2. boot from a ubuntu Live USB, install to the big harddisk (this’ll leave you Xandros on the small disk)
3. Restart, install the eeepc kernel from http://www.array.org/ubuntu/index.html
4. Tweak, twist turn and floptimise: follow the instructions at www.array.org or http://wiki.eeeuser.com/getting_ubuntu_8.04_to_work_perfectly?s=hardy
5. Just in case your microphone is not working, check http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=33794
6. Comment out the cdrom entry in /etc/fstab — it gets in the way of automounting USB disks in Ubuntu
7. Get all of your packages in full on there:
   • Shell: zsh
   • Editor: vim (instead of vim-tiny)
   • Text-writing / work: LaTeX (texlive package)
   • Conversion tools: psutils (psnup/psselect/…)
   • Version control / work: Subversion
   • Online movie playback: totem, totem-mozilla, totem-xine (ignore totem-gstreamer, it plays WMV’s frame by frame) [update: not needed any more? works out of the box in 9.04]
   • Music: XMMS (the old package!)
   • offline movie playback: mplayer
   • VoIP: Skype.
8. Software config tweaks:
   • Put a launcher on the desktop for gnome-terminal with zoom=.7
   • Change all font settings (right-click on desktop, properties-> fonts) from 10 to 8 points
   • Add ServerAliveInterval 240 to $HOME/.ssh/config (to prevent idling out)
   • Fix zsh keybindings:
     • bindkey “\e[A” up-line-or-history
     • bindkey “\e[B” down-line-or-history
     • bindkey “^A” beginning-of-line
     • bindkey “^E” end-of-line
     • bindkey “^?” backward-delete-char
   • fix Firefox backspace button behaviour:
     • surf to about:config
     • change “browser.backspace_action” to 0
   • Skype: fix the sound settings (the defaults are broken since 8.10 apparently) [update: this is still crappy in 9.04, but in a different way. Hope Skype will come out soon with a new version with better sound support]:
     • Incoming Sound: HDA Intel (hw:intel,0)
     • Outgoing Sound: pulse
     • Calling: pulse

Quirks noticed so far:

• The “mute sound” key sometimes does not mute sound, but it will show the muting/unmuting picture
  [Edit: posted a help-request here]
  [edit2: found out that if you change the sound device to the realtek, the mute will work — until you press another key. Apparently, after that, the sound device setting is forgotten. No workaround yet.]
  [Update: this works in Ubuntu 9.04 out of the box (with Adamm’s kernel)]
• Received video in skype sometimes stalls a bit (that happens on other systems too) and then suddenly defaults to a tiny window. Doubling the size of this doesn’t matter. Have noticed once that after another stall, the effect disappeared again. Could be related to the feeding webcam “hickuping” the feed, wouldn’t know why though.
• BIOS update warnings:
  Some of the default settings in the BIOS might get in the way. Example: boot order (not in the BIOS “boot order” menu by the way), webcam (turned off by default. :S).
  Solution: upon upgrading BIOS, check for quirks!
• Fn-keys: the Fn-F5 also doesn’t work out of the box (it duplicates the effect of the mute key actually, while it ought to be switching displays).
  [Edit: workaround: use xrandr –auto]
• Non-Eeeebuntu, but still weird:
  The time in Xandros (original OS) is off by 2 hours. Setting time so far did not get me a permanent solution. Changing time in the BIOS did not help (although that used to be off by 2hrs too).
  [Edit: probably caused by the interaction between 2 os’es and the BIOS on my machine. Every time I set time on the one os, it is off on the other os.]

Yep, this is getting lame… it seems half this blog is becoming a collection of quick links and tips on surviving Ubuntu. Well anyway: the lame I found in the package manager did not work. Downloading & compiling the source myself worked without a hitch (it does need some build-tools, but apparently I had them floating around — probably after the xmms install…).

And, speaking of handy links and also to add some news for you, my trustworthy readers: This link may actually help me getting my USBAP Dongle working under Unix (still need to follow that up, unfortunately my dongle is from Bigben, and not from Datel; fortunately, the whole world seems to be using roughly the same chipset, so it might work in the end(tm)). Ow, and I am the proud owner of eee PC:P It rocks :)

Update: found some images of the driver disc on the web that have the “Datel” logo there… so this might be a quite viable option :) :)

Xmms don’t no longer no packagy downloady instally in Ubunty.

Err, I mean: Ubuntu 8.04 does not have a package for xmms. As everyone knows, xmms is the single most perfect music player on the face of this planet or any other non-gasgiant planet, and happens to do your laundry at the same time as clean your appartment. So obviously, we need it. All of us. And now, we have some guidelines! (Yes, I could probably have figured that out myself, but I am a lazy bastard). Will get back to you to see if this works :)

Update:  Not only does it work, I also learned in due course that the Ubuntu equivalent of Windows-key+R (run) is Alt+F2. Might try to find out more aboutsimilar keyboard shortcuts now :)

I’ve been running the newest Ubuntu for a couple of days now. Major +: screen resolution is ok immediately (without shooting down X). Biggest -: fonts in FF3b5 have changed in slight but annoying ways; XMMS is no longer available under Ubuntu++ :( :( :( (need to find the package for Ubuntu 7 somewhere).