Linux Phones

I gave up on trying to shoehorn Linux into a diddly laptop. There were too many issues. I didn’t have the time to solve them all…

Funny that now Linux is mostly the domain of diddly laptops and even diddly-er phones (oh, and massive enterprise servers).

But the middle ground—not a big domain for Linux.

But here’s the funny thing: the middle ground is giving way. Apple is moving away from ‘desktops’. Portable devices are replacing them.

I have a Google’ised phone (HTC Desire). It’s Linux underneath.

Lucky I don’t have to configure it.

Nice drop-shadows etc. in Ubuntu

I tried turning on ‘Nice Effects’ in Ubuntu’s Appearance preferences, but received an unhelpful ‘did not work’ error. I think that the next version of Gnome should have a random witticism generator instead. At least then it may disarm the urge to shout at the screen, fist clenched.

It turns out that ‘Nice Effects’ depends on Compiz, and my diddly laptop cannot handle that (at least Compiz won’t build). Bah!

The ‘Didn’t Work’ dialog, and the ‘Because of a Problem’ dialogs in Gnome remind me of a recalcitrant teen serving in a shop, who has been forced to do the job by his parents as they refused to continue supplementing his Mobile Phone account unless he got up and squeezed every ounce of oomph from his meagre motivational reservoir, and did something a little more productive than sitting in his darkened room listening to Emo Classics, Vol 3: The Best Depressing Music In the World, Ever…

Me in shop, to a young person of the above cast: “Excuse me, have you got this in blue?”
Teen: “Dunno…No.”,
Me: “Um, have you looked in the stock room?”,
Teen: “No”…

Have you noticed no matter how much weariness, sadness, irritation (or combination thereof) which you attempt to convey in your expression or voice at that point really doesn’t make any impression whatsoever? Then it dawns on you that this fragment of all of our futures truly does not see any issue, or reason to take further action. You’re an ex-problem.

Back to the Gnome example: the correct error message would be helpful and empathetic. In this case, it (the error message) would tell me—probably addressing me as ‘Sir’–how terribly sorry it was, but it could not fulfil my request as it was missing a vital component, and that unfortunately, to it’s eternal sadness, it cannot use that component on Sir’s behalf, as Sir’s hardware is shall we say, not quite the latest model (the error would pause to convey a potentially distressing fact, and to emphasise its regret). On the other hand, the error might continue, if Sir was in need of a lesser, but still most gratifying enhancement of Sir’s visual and graphical spectacle, then Sir might consider the package just down the road on the left, by the name of ‘xcompmgr’. The error would finish by saying, if Sir was to take possession of suitable hardware in the future, then Sir would of course be most welcome to return to this dialogue, whereupon the manager, Mr Gnome, would personally attend to his needs. Good day.

There you are, teen-boy-in-shop, that’s customer service!

xcompmgr

Some nice settings:

xcompmgr -cCfF -r4 -o.65 -l2 -t2 -D2

The incantations to make it work…

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
	Option	"Composite"	"Enable"
EndSection
...
Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Silicon Motion, Inc. SM720 Lynx3DM"
	Driver		"siliconmotion"
	Option		"UseBIOS"	"off"
	Option		"pci_burst"	"on"
	Option		"fifo_aggressive"	"on"
	Option		"RenderAccel"	"true"
	Option		"AllowGLXWithComposite"	"true"
	BusID		"PCI:0:9:0"
	VideoRam	16384
EndSection

The only thing in the Driver section that is (or may be) necessary is AllowGLXWithComposite. The rest are aggressive acceleration options for SiliconMotion, which do actually seem to speed things up.

I’m not sure about the VideoRam argument. This is stating that the siliconmotion driver should treat the inbuilt graphics card as though it has 16M of Video RAM, when in fact all of the specs show that the Lynx 3DM chip only has 8M of Video RAM. So what’s the point?

Like a lot of this, I don’t have the time to discover the reason, and so it remains a magical incantation that makes me feel better, and is gentler on the skin than repetitive hand-washing.

BTW. I don’t have anything against teens. I was one once.

WordPress XMLRPC

In Drivel, select MovableType, and enter the following URL: ‘http://<journalName&gt;.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

Ubuntu Hardy Heron on MM10

Vanilla install of Ubuntu 8.xx on MM10, with Ubuntu Desktop (gnome) and encrypted LVM…

1. Didn’t auto-detect monitor. Need to go in and edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf manually

2. longrun not installed by default

3. Authentication seems flaky. Sometimes I am asked several times for my password.

4. To get to a root prompt:

$ sudo su

Optionally, can use ‘passwd’ then to set a root password, which is undefined by default on Ubuntu

5. Suspend doesn’t work.

6. Need to resize fonts a bit — too large for DiddlySharp

7. Otherwise, looking good!

Linux and Sado-Masochism

I’ve been dabbling with Linux now for a couple of months.

When I started, I was sure that I wouldn’t be doing anything new compared to others who ‘went before’ — I would just be covering ground worn bare by the sneaker tracks of other, more experienced geeks. My task was to avoid the traps, and the dead-ends, marked by the forum posts that trail off into nothing, or with a plaintive ‘Haven’t heard anything for two months now. Please help!’ posting.

As everyone knows the Geek’s last cry is a terrible sound to hear — somewhere between the call of a dying elephant and that of a distressed hamster. Shiver.

I discovered quickly that Linux is on two tracks:

1. The academic-driven track, where new concepts and technologies are developed and implemented, often in C/C++ with a low-level non-gui interface
2. Those who believe that, with a bit of effort, and if everyone just ‘pulls together’, Linux will become the desktop-environment-to-end-all-desktop-environments

Lurking in the sidelines are the big companies who wait for something worth cherry-picking to turn up, and then they cherry-pick the products of the first of the Linux types, add their own spin, and make lots of money. Cough, cough Asus-tishoo..

The second Linux type is full of missionary zeal, and often youthful energy. They respond almost immediately to people posting questions on the forums they own.

In between all of the honest, wonderfully generous hard-graft, there is also time to have the Linux version of the sneering conviction that no-one else can do anything half as ‘cool’ as we can attitude that infects open source.

That is the problem.

They want to make their component the best it can be, and will soon become irritated by the lack of facilities that dependent other components offer up to their component. So what do they do? They ask for patches in the other components to give them the functionality they require.

That is why most forum postings end in: “You should be using Patch xyz of <dependent component>”, and the forum poster replies “That fixed it! Thanks!” If you are like me, you feel sudden elation, followed by a brooding depression: now I’ll have to patch, recompile, and try again. And then, I’ll find the patched component doesn’t quite work with <other component>, and so on.

From having this occur repeatedly to me, I began to believe that I was simply ‘on the bleeding edge’ of Linux, and suddenly I began to become infected by the same revolutionary zeal of the component writers. I thought “Maybe I can make a difference! Maybe, if I pull all of the right levers, twiddle all of the correct knobs I can create the most perfect installation of Linux ever!”

And so began the ‘tail chasing’ of someone who believed he was only ever an hour away from Linux Nirvana.

1. Install latest ‘testing’ version of NetworkManager (say)
2. Install latest ‘testing’ version of WPA Supplicant (say)
3. It kinda works, but not automatically when I wake the laptop up from sleep.
4. Install cutting edge version of NetworkManager, compile from code if necessary
5. Try again. Now all of my network APs look like gibberish.
6. Forum search
7. Install cutting edge version of WPA Supplicant
8. My networks are fixed!
9. Buy new network card
10. My networks are broken!
11. Install patches for NetworkManager
12. Grow several grey hairs
13. etc.

In fact, it really is best to get off the bleeding edge, or you’ll get hurt. Not to realise this is to indulge in masochistic fantasy.

I also believe that the very enthusiasm which makes Linux so dynamic is also its weakness.

I want to develop the theory here that the GUI component writers are closet sadists, releasing patches to dependent components in an uncontrolled way, thereby potentially breaking everything, and requiring the masochistic masses to follow the path of pain.

In other words, I want to propose the theory of Sado-Masochistic Software Development which will always stay one-step behind capitalist companies paying non-masochistic employees to develop to a vision…because if it ever led the world, it wouldn’t have anything to beat itself up about, and then it would be as bad as ‘The Man’. In the end, being a leader is too scary.

Most people will look at what I have written in the previous paragraph, and snort, laugh, or just get angry. Or ignore it.

I am suggesting no less than a massive collusion between developers to believe in ‘them and us’ so that they can always define themselves as ‘us’: the Honest Geek Syndrome.

The very ‘freedom’ that allows anyone to release a component which claims to work well with the rest of the environment, and which is ‘a lot better than the old <component>’ is what creates the world of pain we inhabit; one in which the dependencies between patch-levels can grow exponentially.

The only answer is more control, and a reigning in of creative impulses without responsibility.

Yes, our betters have said it for years: without discipline, we’ll never amount to much.

Longrun on MM10

Installed ‘longrun’ package to control Centrino power saving,


longrun -p

cack’d out with ‘cannot read blah blah’. A bit of Googling said sometimes (whether using udev or not), the correct query nodes are not created automatically.

This needs to be done on each boot.

An answer is to add the following to your /etc/rc.local:

# Create nodes for querying CPU performance (longrun)
for i in 0 1 2 3; do
	mkdir -p /dev/cpu/$i
	mknod -m 444 /dev/cpu/$i/msr c 202 $i
	mknod -m 444 /dev/cpu/$i/cpuid c 203 $i
done

# Default to highest performance
longrun -f performance

Note, the final line. I found out that by default, my MM10 was running in ‘economy’. Now I have a massive battery attached, I think I can afford a little careless power.

Excuse me, I have a man with an axe from the Green Party at the door. I’ll be back in a mo…

Great Suspend / Hibernate Overview

Here

MM10 Debian Power Management Continued

After getting suspend2 and hibernate working from the command line, the way to integrate these sleep/hibernate methods into gnome-power-manager world is to change the underlying HAL query scripts that gnome-power-manager uses.HAL abstracts hardware details from upper layers. That means:

1. It allows querying of a ‘virtual hardware’ machine so that upper-layers don’t need to worry so much about adapting to each and every hardware variation
2. it provides ‘actions’ on the ‘virtual hardware’ via scripts in /usr/lib/hal/scripts

gnome-power-manager uses these HAL scripts to poke your machine into doing the right thing.HAL is SOOOOOO concerned with abstraction, that it also seems designed to abstract away the fact we’re using linux…so it has sub-directories in /usr/lib/hal/scripts for each OS.Here, we’re interested in /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux.And, we’re particularly interested in the HAL actions for power management:hal-system-power-hibernate-linuxhal-system-power-suspend-linuxetc…For whatever reason, my default scripts only support actually doing the power management (in a concrete sense) via pm-tools…an alternative to hibernate. So, I added a few bits to support hibernate as well.Note, the scripts as they are are mostly about setting up params to pass to pm-tools to handle ‘quirks’ of hardware. Hibernate handles quirks itself, so we don’t need to use all of the quirk code here. Just call hibernate-ram or hibernate-disk or whatever…E.g., hal-system-power-suspend-linux will end up with a section as so:

...  # We support hibernate-ram and pm-utils

if [ -x "/usr/local/sbin/hibernate-ram" ] ; then

# All Quirk handling delegated to hibernate script

/usr/local/sbin/hibernate-ram

RET=$?

elif [ -x "/usr/sbin/pm-suspend" ] ; then

/usr/sbin/pm-suspend $QUIRKS

RET=$?

else

# TODO: add support

unsupported

fi ... 

 

Getting LongRun to work on MM10

The following is ripped directly from here: http://web.mit.edu/jjl/www/mm10/

It worked as described.

Transmeta LongRun

The Crusoe can adjust its own clock speed to save power when processor load gets low. There are 2 modes for this: performance and economy. Using the economy mode will save battery life, but it takes longer to speed the processor up when under load. I will soon be testing just how much this helps, though it really depends on how you use it.

In the kernel config, enable /dev/cpu/*/cpuid and /dev/cpu/*/msr support. If /dev/cpu does not exist, you will need to do:

mkdir -m 0755 -p /dev/cpu/0

and then create the msr and cpuid devices. Do that with the following:

mknod /dev/cpu/0/msr -m 0444 c 202 0

mknod /dev/cpu/0/cpuid -m 0600 c 203 0

You will need to install the longrun package (in Gentoo, just emerge longrun). Type longrun -p to show the status. To switch to economy mode, type longrun -f economy. For performance mode, use longrun -f performance. You can also set performance windows (i.e. if you want the Crusoe to never run at 100% speed so you can save battery power, type longrun -s 0 50 to set the window to 0 (low) to 50 (high)). By default the window is 0-100. Here is a table showing what the performance levels are (you can get this info from longrun -l):

# % MHz Volts usage

0 300 0.800 0.114

19 433 0.875 0.196

33 533 0.950 0.285

52 667 1.050 0.435

71 800 1.150 0.626

85 900 1.250 0.832

100 1000 1.300 1.000

Throwing Linux Salt over your shoulder

If you install anything that mentions ‘kernel patch’, running

update-initramfs -u all

means you won’t suffer seven years of bad luck.