Low-budget system. ECS H61H2-M2 mobo w/hdmi output newegg.com  was blowing them out for like $30 bucks after a rebate. Got a cheapie intel cpu (G530?) from MacMall of all places, via Ebay for $45.

I tried it on both windows and ubuntu and it was fine.

HDMI worked as expected on my television (but was weird on Dave’s?). One thing to note is when the audio line out is plugged in, the sound doesn’t come out the hdmi.

The system uses about 38W sitting on the windows 7 desktop idling according to my Kill-a-watt. This is with an inefficient-looking 400W power supply (it uses 3W even when off, or on standby). That’s inlcuding one 3.5″ 7200 rpm hard disk drive spinning.

Win 7

Fresh Win 7 Pro SP1 installed from bootable USB key. Installed fine but not even the lan worked right out of the chute. Installed mobo drivers, but just the following:  chipset D:\ECSh61h2-m2\Chipset\INF ; lan  D:\ECSh61h2-m2\Lan\Atheros\AR813x  ; video D:\ECSh61h2-m2\VGA\H6x\W7Vista64.

Got xbmc Version 11.0 ‘Eden’. Installed and ran okay. very snazzy. The remote control for andoid works fine EXCEPT that by default, it’s not turned on — to enable it you have to go to system settings and enable the http web server in xbmc.

XBMCbuntu / Linux

Also got 11.0 ‘Eden’ which is distributed as a live CD; based on Ubuntu 11.10 (I think). The live cd booted up and seems to just work. Then I installed it onto the hard drive. It booted up and ran just great. If you exit (click on the virtual “power button”); you will go to a login screen where you can log into a normal ubuntu (select XBMCubuntu) desktop. There is a third choice from the login screen called “openbox” i tried it but it just went to a blank graphics screen.

openssh-server is installed and running by default, so you can/should just let it do its XBMCunbutu full-screen thing and log in via ssh.

Tried some content on a usb hard drive, as well as a windows smb share and both worked fine. didn’t mess with any sort of wireless network traffic. Xbmc has plug in apps for things like Youtube, PBS, Fox News, Al Jezerra, etc; they all work pretty well but the content is somewhat disorganized.

I almost always have trouble with grub/grub2. The basic jist is that you’re supposed to be editing the file /etc/default/grub (e.g. to change the default boot setting) and then you run a job called update-grub. This generates/updates a file called /boot/grub/grub.cnf which you’re not supposed to edit, but you can as long as you’re aware it might get overwritten by various scripts. I never have much luck doing the grub-install, which actually diddles with your hard disk’s MBR. here is the full doc: help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2 There is a gui app (apt-get install startupmanager) but I sometimes have trouble with it; like this time i used synaptic to install it just fine but it actually put in the wrong default (it put in a 6 instead of a 5 into grub.cfg!).

If it get really stuck, i just use some windows admistration command, /fixmbr or somesuch; and that just gets rid of grub all together.

Boxee on Win 7

Note that as of March 2012, boxee desktop (as opposed to the commercial boxee box) is at it’s end of life; so this is more of a historical curiosity

Fresh Win 7 Pro installed. Installed mobo drivers, but just the following:  chipset D:\ECSh61h2-m2\Chipset\INF ; lan  D:\ECSh61h2-m2\Lan\Atheros\AR813x  ; video D:\ECSh61h2-m2\VGA\H6x\W7Vista64.

installed fine out of the box, except won’t run. To fix that install direct X from microsoft

boxee-1.5.0.23596-2bcda77.exe

note that i initially installed a slightly older (late 2011?) version and it had an aspect ratio problem (black vertical bars on both sides of the screen when playing video; regardless of screen settings).

Boxee on Ubuntu / Linux

Note that as of March 2012, boxee desktop (as opposed to the commercial boxee box) is at it’s end of life; so this is more of a historical curiosity

installed 11.10 default from cd. Did not install anything extra or special. i.e. unlike win7, the lan and graphics seem to “just work”.

boxee-1.5.0.23596-2bcda77.i486.deb and installed by clicking on it and using gui (could have done: sudo apt-get install boxee… )

There were some instructions here… so i installed these dependecies. Thread on boxee forum about installing 1.5 on Ubuntu 11.10.

sudo apt-get install libssl0.9.8

my only confusion is I can’t figure out how to launch the program?? in the unity desktop, you can click on the ubuntu button and search for boxee and a shortcut then pops up and runs.

So it started up and ran pretty uneventfully

here is what some youtube embed code might look like:

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390"

src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/oUkiyBVytRQ" frameborder="0"

allowfullscreen>  </iframe>

Here are a couple of  good rundowns of what to do here or here.

One way to avoid the problem is to stay in HTML mode (and never Visual mode) when editing.

One solution offered is to use wordpress shortcode functionality. unfortunately this involves editing the functions.php file of the template which sort of stinks because you’d have to remember to do that again for every new theme.

Another way to go is a plugin that messes with what TinyMCE sees as valid. (i loaded this one up and activated it. then i could never figure out how to configure it?? where is “manage”?)

Iframe widget plugin. This uses the code (is this a shortcode?) dciframe, enclosed in square brackets. The contents are simply a url and optionally followed by a comma separated width and height. The whole thing is closed with a slash dciframe code. There are a whole bunch of similar plugins, i’m not sure if one is better than another. Here is an embedded youtube video:

Blockquote

Below is a blockquote…

this text is in a block quote. Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar

Here is some text after the blockquote has ended.

Text boxes

So the code looks something like this <div style=”float: right; width: 250px; height: 300px;  padding: 2px 6px 4px 6px; color: #555555; background-color: #eeeeee; border: #dddddd 2px solid;”>text goes here</div> … And you can also add in fancier CSS3 styles like box-shadow, text-shadow, and box-radius — they work, but the visual editor stripped the radius and box-shadow: -webkit-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px rgba(0,0,0,0.5); text-shadow: 3px 3px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.3);

The fancy stuff works on some browsers and not others, also there are moz equivalents, e.g. moz-border-radius for firefox.

lorem ipsum dolar immediately before the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before the text and lorem ipsum dolar immfssfediately before the text and random lorem ipsum dolar immediately before the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately bsfsfefore the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately other words before the text and lorem ipsum dolar.
Immediately befosfsfre the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before tsfsfshe text and lorem ipsum mix it up. Dolar immediately before the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before the tessxt and lo imm.

here are some other colors and no floating or width specification (full width) :

lorem ipsum dolar immediately before the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before tsfsfshe text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before thar immediately

Code (monospace)

here is some playing around with stuff that would want to be mono-spaced, e.g. dos commands.
after a break.

here is preformatted chosen from the visual editor's drop-down. It seems to me that if it is too long, it does not wrap as expected.
Rather you get this weird scroll bar.
I guess that would be good for cut/paste where line breaks are important.

…
I'm not sure what's the story with this code tag? Apparently it indents and wraps, so this looks pretty good. It renders as monospace courier in the visual editor, so that's pretty good.
lorem ipsum dolar lorem lorem ipsum dolar lorem lorem ipsum dolar lorem lorem ipsum dolar lorem
New line
…

WordPress version tales

In early July 2011, WordPress released a relatively major update, 3.2 which has as prerequisites php v5.something, and mysql v5.something. This was a minor problem for my older (azbikelaw) wordpress installations on Godaddy. Update to php 5 was a simple control-panel checkbox. The database update was more of a pain, though it was accomplished just through control-panel as well, i.e. 1) backup existing database 2) create new, empty v5 database 3) restore from the backup to the new. The only downside is this might take a couple of hours (the restore, in particular took quite a while). To make the final switch, I needed to manually edit the wp-config.php file to match the new database credentials. At this point, everything was still working — and the auto-upgrade then can be done and that went flawlessly.

Themes

I fooled around with a theme with the unfortuante name “Powered By”. See for the time being: wikisneaks.org . it has an interesting home page design, it takes advantage of custom fields. See Powering your design with WordPress.

I’ve used Gear 1.3 here on azbikelaw.org for a couple of years. I noticed something wasn’t working, menus or something. Anyway, I updated to 1.3.7 … not sure if that fixed anything. I may need to go to a more modern theme. The newest version, early part of 2010, predates this major wordpress update.

I should probably mention that my site has a trivial number of page views (a heavy day is like 300 page-views in terms of wordpress stats).

The service I have is very inexpensive, the full description of which is called “economy Linux”. It is about $5 bucks a month. It is what’s known as virtual shared hosting. A google search of that ip turns up the busier sites that share my ip/server, however I didn’t find any “slow” sites. A reverse ip from e.g. domaintools.com reveals that there are 3,753 sites sharing that server; i.e. my site and 3,752 others(!), which gives you some idea of the business model… very cheap for any one individual, but one server generates revenue of ~ $200,000 per year (and yes, there are other costs besides the server).

Anyway, I did locate a site by chance on the same server that was (probably not coincidentally) running wordpress and also running very slowly — page loads were on the order of 10 seconds:  100yearassociation.com/

history of Customer service contact

My needs are so un-demanding that i have probably not called customer service up until this point more than about 3 times over the past 10 years.

On Monday, Nov 15 i spoke with godaddy customer service; i got through reasonably quickly (maybe 5 minutes on hold) and talked to a very affable gentleman. He agreed it seemed pretty slow, so he “ran diagnostics” supposedly both against my database, and also against the server. Everything was “clean”. He advised I use the wp-supercache plugin, and also that i should wait a day or two and see what developed.

things more-or-less deteriorated, it was taking me perhaps 30 seconds to log into my wordpress control panel. Supercache helped (anonymous viewers) but even that was inconsistent, sometimes resulting in 500 errors, or “internal error”.

So, on Wed Nov 17 I called back. He also supposedly ran server diags and said everything was clean. He suggested i switch to grid shared hosting. There were no downsides (same price; invisible migration;  “unlimited” server power to help with peaks; of course i never have significant peaks). Anyways by that evening things were really really bad so I bit the bullet and pushed the button to migrate — the end user can do this right from godaddy account.

The migration takes “up to 72 hours”. During which time you can’t log into your hosting control panel (it will say something about pending migration). The guy on the phone also said i wouldn’t be able to ftp during migration but that didn’t happen or at least not on wed, thurs, fri, sat (now it’s sunday and can still ftp, and ssh for that matter).

Here’s the weird part: On Thursday about 2PM (arizona time), my site and  not coincidentally 100yearassociation.com, got way way quicker. now page loads were around 2 seconds, about normal for wordpress pages. This happened like a light switch.

So I called Godaddy back on Friday to “complain” that my site was working well, and confirmed that the grid migration had still not happened. They denied fixing anything (though of course the phone guy really probably doesn’t know).

The strong implication is that godaddy did in fact locate one or more users among the 3,752 others on that particular shared server who were using up too much cpu/database bandwidth; and by Thursday at 2pm had migrated them off my shared server. (this is a a relatively common godaddy exercise, see e.g. blogtips.org or search for something like the phrase unacceptable in shared hosting). I have no idea how much complaining has to be done to get this to happen.

In any event, i have no idea why but my grid migration is still pending on Sunday (which is more than 72 hours) — so eventually i will have to call them back and figure out why that is… right now i am locked out of the hosting control panel pending the migration.

Supercache

Supercache is really cool. It generates a static html page and causes this static page, rather than the normal .php dynamically generated page, to be served to any “anonymous” (not logged into wordpress) user.

For example here is the root page of my blog: azbikelaw.org/blog/wp-content/cache/supercache/azbikelaw.org/blog/index.html but here is the thing, sometimes it doesn’t exist. This probably has something to do with supercache ageing-out the pages.

This will SIGNIFICANTLY reduce the server-side cpu load because it doesn’t’ need to run any php or database lookups. But here’s the catch, it only really works/helps for busy sites, and mine is not busy.

The Migration

So I don’t know exactly why, but the migration took longer than expected… it is advertized as taking up to 72 hours. I called after about the fifth day, and they looked into it and opened a ticket and promised it would be done soon; and it was done within 24 hours of my calling. So as of Wed 11/24 I am migrated, may the godaddy gods have mercy on me.

Everything migrated apparently fine. my blog works. Even my php-list works.

But grid “breaks” multi domain hosting on economy. So I used to host domenicscycling.com just fine. The domain still works, and it still (thanks to the .htaccess rewrite rules) ends up with the right content, but it unfortunately ends up as azbikelaw.org/dom in the address bar, which is the correct content but of course i want it to retain the original domain name. That is used to work in economy linux hosting is apparently an accident. But in any event this sucks because now apparently the only option (from godaddy) is to cough up a few more bucks a month.

This might not be so bad, except that the performance on wordpress control panel sucks (the original problem), it’s taking on the order of 10 seconds to do stuff on wp-admin. boo. Though it seems to be highly variable, so I will have to re-visit the slowness later.

here is the magic incantation in .htaccess that used to work just fine with economy linux hosting:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !dom/

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domenicscycling.com$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://azbikelaw.org/dom/$1 [L]

I loaded up a live headers plugin for firefox to actually check out what was going wrong with the headers. What supposed to happen since i don’t have an ‘R’ on the rewriterule is that the host should simply respond with a 200 OK, and serve up the page. What is now (with grid) happening is that it is sending a 302 FOUND (which is a “temporary” redirect) along with the actual location of the content, which is then re-fetched by the browser causing the address bar to update… which is obviously not what I want.

I also can’t figure out one thing that has always bugged me, so migration automatically updated the a records of my other domains that i am hosting; e.g. domenicscycling.com, and bicyclewheelers.com. But how in the world does cupzncrepes.com know to get to the new server? This belongs to a separate godaddy registrar account.

Some Minutia

Pre-migration: My shared economy linux host is named “p3nlh065″, its IP is 72.167.232.195

Post-migration (“grid”):  hostname p3nlhftpg057 (from ssh), pinging azbikelaw.org (184.168.206.1)
reveals the name: p3nlhg130c1130.shr.prod.phx3.secureserver.net

A reverse ip lookup reveals 5,380 other domains hosted on this IP address which, if anything, means trouble!!

the name of my database host is and was databasename.db.4318490.hostedresource.com that number, 4318490, is interesting because in the new post-migration file structure (e.g. if you look in ssh), the full path is something like /var/chroot/home/content/90/4318490
whereas it used to be something like /var/chroot/home/content/a/z/b/azbikelaw

In any event, if the performance bottleneck was  database access, changing hosting servers will have no effect — at this point i don’t think that is the case, just pointing it out.

Other things I’ve tried

I also tried loading up wordpress from the godaddy app control panel.This way, I get a “clean” installation, and fresh and otherwise empty database. The process of setting up worked well and easily. The new install is located at azbikelaw.org/wordprezz. The database creation scheme is it created a dedicated host (presumably virtual) with azb followed by a (random?) 13 digit number followed by four more levels of boilerplate host name, here is what it is and what it resolves to. Note that this is created on a whole different IP range as my older databases (details of old databases is down below):

azb1033711271783.db.4318490.hostedresource.com resolves to (use ssh) ->

p3nlgriddb50033-02.shr.prod.phx3.secureserver.net (173.201.136.23)

In any event that clean, empty, installation of wordpress was also laggy (need to test again 12.3.2010) — so the slowness doesn’t have to do with something peculiar to my wordpress.

The old Database Host Scheme

The pre-grid scheme (and maybe still same scheme if creating db’s manually?) is databasename.db.4318490.hostedresource.com, so e.g. my oldest db is:

terrie.db.4318490.hostedresource.com

p3nlhmysql41011-01.shr.prod.phx3.secureserver.net (97.74.31.215)

where the number after the hypen is ordinal, and seems to resolve to an incrementing number in the IP, presumably a virtual host; but still it’s a live IP address. In any event this is in a whole different IP range as the one created by godaddy’s automated wordpress installation.

…

Here is an article on godaddy’s support site addressing the issue of slow wordpress; but it sheds no new light on the problem.

Here is a long thread on wordpress.org discussing specifically godaddy troubles, but it is almost a year old.

I installed dd-wrt on it following the general instructions here. Here is the official dd-wrt wiki entry.

The only problem i ran into when trying to use the firmware recovery mode was I was mistaking the red button (that’s the “setup” button) for the reset button (which is right next to the setup button, but recessed behind a hole — needing a paper clip).

After reading a few forum messages about this router, I settled on the “SVN11296” version which is just a few months old, but supposedly real stable.

I got the usb to work simply using the web interface, as described in the googlepages page linked above. Also following the instructions, installed the print server daemon p910nd just fine. Tried it with my epson R320 printer; configured a TCP port on a windows pc and installed the print driver there. Everything works (except stuff like ink level monitoring). Even the built-in sd memory card reader works — it auto-mounts it under /mnt (e.g. when ssh’ed or telneted into the router).

…

I set up as a repeater bridge. I guess that worked… one thing that’s really wild is the idea that you can create this “virtual SSID” and the security is independent of the real SSID. E.g. the physical access point had WEP, and I virtually repeated it in the clear.

I had some troubles, and ended up doing a hard reset via the button to clear NVRAM (power on, when power light goes out pre ss button and hold until power and radio light comes back on). This seems to have worked except upon another reboot (to get rid of flashing power led) when it asked me to change password, i couldn’t get into web interface, but telnet was fine. ended up having to do this:

nvram set http_username=bJ/GddyoJuiU2
nvram set http_passwd=bJz7PcC1rCRJQ

(this is all maybe bogus, i lost track. Can use web i/f to change BOTH username and password, then later i changed it back to root/admin).

Tried other encryption modes — for max compatibility says to use WPA2 mixed, AES+TPIK. Works of w/ tosh laptop client. Only weirdness is netbook takes way too long to acquire, but eventually does.

…

openwrt forum post that discusses troubles with multiple printers (e.g. via a hub) with p910nd print daemon and wl-520gx. It explains how the /dev/usb/lpx gets assigned by the kernel.

After my disappointment with the Amazon and the MSI Wind Nettop, I instead went with an Intel D945GCLF2 retail motherboard.

Newegg $86 w/shipping.

There are a bunch of reasons why this board works out to be cheaper than the MSI Wind: it uses standard i/o like ps2 keyboard connectors (i don’t have a spare usb keyboard), it has a parallel IDE connector (i have old, extra dvd burners and hard drives), it uses desktop ddr2 memory instead of so-dimm (i have extra of that, too). And it has a pci slot.

Power / Power Consumption

This mobo requires a standard ATX-style 24 pin (20 is ok too, just leaves the upper 4 pins open) plus a 4-pin 12V plug.

The neatest solution for power would be PicoPSU, a fan-less atx-style dc-dc converter. Mini-box.com sells them, e.g. a 60W bundle (includes the 12V dc “brick”) for $55. But I’m too cheap for that

In the meantime, I powered it with an extra, old atx power supply I have laying around. One that is already quiet, and relatively low-power.

ULtimately, at 36 Watts idling and 4W standby in windows is pretty good — though markedly higher than the MSI Wind Nettop which used only 24W/<1W.

BIOS

I couldn’t figure out what version I had, so I ran the latest from intel, version 0150 and I chose to do the windows version. I worked fine but was scarey, because the whole thing just goes dark for awhile. (though at some point when it rebooted it said checksum was invalid, and hit a key to continue).

Noise

The reviews were quite good, though a common complaint being the northbridge cooler fan (there is no cpu fan) is too noisy, a good replacement was suggested to be this $4 one: Scythe SY124010L which i probably would have ordered but was out of stock.

As promised, the northbridge cooler is pretty noisey. I tried it at 7 volts, and that was better.The color code for the cooler is white/red/black : tach/+12V/Gnd.

Speedfan sees two fans, the cooler fan jack (the 3 pin that is closer to the cpu; the motherboard says “MCH Fan”) is called Fan1 and the rear fan jack (motherboard says “sys fan”) is Fan0. The cooler fan runs at ~4400 rpm by default.

The bios has fan speed control — but here’s the catch; only “sys fan” is controlled. So I plugged the cooler into the sys fan jack, and set it to “not smart” and 50% PWM. Now it runs at 3500rpm and is pretty quiet (somewhat quieter than at 7 volts). I’ve seen some reports that say their fans won’t run at this speed, but mine seems fine.

There is much talk about the fan, see e.g. on silentpcreview. This guy is selling a Pabst 40mm fan on ebay. In any event it apparently is a standard 40mm x 10mm thick fan. And even 50%PWM or 7V is plenty to keep it cool. This guy did some heat sink mods.

Windows

Getting it booted up from usb flash drive, dvd, or hard drive was no trouble at all.

I loaded up XP Home, SP3 using an IDE DVD-ROM and a SATA notebook hard drive.That went uneventfully. At completion, many features were not working: graphics, audio, ethernet.

I ran the supplied on CD drivers install (which took a long time — 15 minutes?), and as far as i could tell everything worked great.

Windows 7 Beta

I had no luck loading the Windows 7 Beta (build 7000, 32-bit). The first phase; file copy and whatnot runs fine but once it reboots i just get the cool splash-screen and then a BSOD. I guess I could try the 64-bit, but i don’t have it downloaded. This guy says it runs fine.

MSI Wind Nettop 100 Desktop PC (1.6 GHz Intel Atom  Dual Core N330 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, Barebone) Black. The price was $178 free ship which seemed pretty good.

It came in early March 2009 — despite it being on backorder, and despite amazon’s projected delivery of 3/31.

Anyway, it was a typo on Amazon’s part; it doesn’t really have Ram, or a hard drive — so I sent it back. Here is the same item at Newegg.

I can’t exactly find it on the MSI website, but this one is pretty close. The one i got definitely had the N330 Atom, though.

So while i had it, i put in a 512mb so-dimm (it only has one mem slot) and an extra 2.5″ sata hard drive. I tried out both Ubuntu live cd, and Windows XP sp3.

The only peculiarities were 1) the front sd slot isn’t available for booting (bios limitation? Which is weird, because i can boot from the sd slot in my msi wind netbook), and 2) Installstion of XP from cd booted fine from a usb dvd-rom drive, but then hung — I had to rustle up a sata drive to boot from. The sd slot wasn’t accessible to windows until i loaded the included cd of drivers.

The unit drew ~ 24 Watts running windows. Which is great.

Noisey

MSI claims that this pc is “Ultra Quiet” and “offers a true noise-free comfort even during heavy game playing or intensive computing applications“. This is not true.

The only source of noise is a 50mm(?) case fan which is controlled by the motherboard. The bios seems to have no settings for this. It only reports the fan speed. The CPU and chipset are covered by a machined aluminum heat sink.

It starts up with a brief roar, then settles down into what could be fairly described as nearly inaudible. Unfortunately the slightest activity (e.g. opening up a tab in firefox) causes the fan to speed up and become quite loud — for a minimum of a couple of minutes. then if it’s idling, the fan will revert back to nearly inaudible. It’s pretty annoying.

One ray of hope: the latest bios, 1.7 said “Fine Tune Smart Fan”. My hopes were quickly dashed when it turned out my machine already had the latest

Promiscuous mode: the Ralink won’t do promiscuous mode.

I was pleasantly surprised when I plugged in a Dlink DWL-122 (which i use on my Tivo) and it “just worked”, and it even worked in promiscuous mode — but that is 802.11b only so it’s only useful for testing.

I got ettercap to do some penetration testing. For some reason i couldn’t find it in Synaptic package manager(?). I had to do something on the command line (from memory: “sudo aptget -install ettercap”) and that worked.

Speaking of penetration testing, I downloaded a distro called BackTrack and installed that to a usb flashdrive. It booted up okay on wind but then i can’t remember what happened. It ran well on my other Toshiba laptop with an Intel prowireless 3945ABG (promiscuous).

—

a few details, to get my ralink wireless going with Ubuntu 8.10: First get dkms (sudo apt-get install dkms), then install the package (unfortunately, I can’t remember where I got it! It looks like it was on launchpad):

rt2860-source_1.8.0.0-0ubuntu1~ppa2_all.deb

Then afterwards, a little gizmo appears and you can click on it an configure wireless security and whatnot. [more unfortunate news: as of Dec 2009 upon trying Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, the above package fails to build/install -- i haven't tried to figure out why]

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

(perhaps mid-2010 timeframe?) After a hiatus, i wanted to give a newer release a try. It loaded up fine and looked really slick. I downloaded the .iso, and used the pendrivelinux.com universal-usb-installer. They also have info there about how to create an (any-sized) casper-rw partition (hint use the newer gparted’s label function, just label it casper-rw. note: a file named casper-rw is used first, then it looks for a partition, so you can have both on one device).

It even loads wireless drivers! so everything (camera?) just works, right out of the box! Unfortunately, the wireless was unreliable coming out of suspend. And this being a laptop that was unacceptable. Here is a thread, I had no luck (p.s. there is a file called /etc/default/acpi-something where you can tell it to unload drivers; but i had no luck).

So, i gave up, in favor of Lucid Lynx (see below) which turned out to be reliable coming out of suspend.

Much later (in July 2011) I did find a fix for the problem; I noticed when the problem occurred — and it occurred every time i reconnected to another access point, or came out of suspend — in dmesg there were errors thrown by rt2x00pci. There is a whole mess of rtxxxxyyy drivers that seem to conflicet with the rt2860sta driver; in 10.04 (where everything works) there are none of these rtxxxxyyy drivers even loaded(?), so on a whim i simply renamed the rt2800pci.ko (not the rt2x00pci one!) driver, it is in /lib/modules/2.6.35-…./kernel/drivers/net/wireless/rt2x00/ folder. It is probably the case that I don’t need any of these extra rt2xxxyy drivers, just the rt2860sta one.

With this, miraculously, everything seems fine. This may have been the trouble with natty narwhal, too??

Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS Lucid Lynx

Everything seems to work, including wireless suspend/unsuspend.

Fooling around with powertop. (sudo apt-get install powertop). reports around 12W usage. If i force the hard drive to spin down (sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sda ), and let the screen dim, and otherwise idle it drops to 10.3W

Other fooling around with ClamAV, and “offline” anti-virus scanner. Couldn’t get it to detect my cache of known viri, trojans, etc. (from Domenic’s infection). So give up on that for now.

From what i recall; i installed this onto the hard drive so now i can dual-boot windows or Ubuntu. IIRC it uses GRUB (not GRUB2). The latest update I did May 30 2011 or so took me to kernel 2.6.32.32

Ralink troubles with WPA AES encryption

Somewhere along the line my rt2860sta wireless driver stopped working with WPA whenever AES was involved — so TKIP worked ok, but it would fail to connect to routers where WPA or WPA2 Personal TKIP+AES or AES was selected.

on 6/1/2011 I finally broke down and fixed it by (what else?) downloading and building a driver

searching these instructions, saw this blog entry that sounded juicy:

This fixes everything (can now connect to ztinet, and e.g. hillsidespot as well as my own ddwrt router.
got this file 2010_07_16_RT2860_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.0.tar.bz2.tar.bz2
from here ralinktech.com (here is a local copy, and here is a copy with the changes below already done, and compiled for a couple of newer kernels) Oddly, I had to change extension from bz2 to gz in order for the archive tool to extract files. Then on pretty straightforward:

1. edit the file ./os/linux/config.mk ensure these two say yes: HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y   HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y
2. edit the file ./common/cmm_wpa.c. Use the find command to locate MIX_CIPHER_NOTUSE. Replace this entire linewith this code WPA_MIX_PAIR_CIPHER FlexibleCipher = WPA_TKIPAES_WPA2_TKIPAES;
3. then just do a sudo make, sudo make install (does that really need sudo?). It threw some warnings about framing size exceeded or something.
4. backup the file /lib/modules/2.6.whatever/kernel/drivers/staging/rt2860/rt2860sta.ko
5. copy ./os/linux/rt2860sta.ko to /lib/modules/2.6.whatever/kernel/drivers/staging/rt2860
6. reboot

(the blog has lots of stuff that should let you pull out the existing driver and replace it without rebooting but none of that seemed to work for me).

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

As mentioned above in 10.10, a fresh install yields problems with the wireless, particularly when coming out of suspend. The problems seem to be coming from rt2800pci.ko — so i simply got rid of it (renamed it. its in /lib/modules/2.6.so.forth/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/rt2x00 folder).  And eventually i got rid of the entire rt2x00 folder. The only problem seems to be when it resumes from suspend, it (sometimes?) won’t connect to the wireless on the first try; it times out and then gets it on the 2nd try, so that is no big deal…. plus a whole bunch of drivers that would otherwise load up (do a lsmod | grep rt), now there is just the rt2860sta one.

SSD: since i also installed the Kingston cheapie V100 64G SSD, I made some of the tweaks listed here. notably, i added discard and noatime to fstab option; and i  changed the “swappiness” (cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness revealed it was 60, by default). Maybe i should get rid of swap all together? I think i have 1G of ram. (Oops. Ubuntu won’t let me do it, even with sudo. Hmmm). To change it, edit the file /etc/syscntl.conf (or something, i’m going from memory), and edit or add the line vm.swappiness=x. I set it to 10.

11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

I tried this and regretted it. It had wireless troubles with the rt2x00 drivers. And if i simple renamed them, the wireless card doesn’t work at all — the staging/rt2860sta.ko is gone entirely. I assume if i was smart enough, i could build that driver (which should be no problem) and somehow figure out how to get it loaded up.

It’s a shame, because otherwise 11.10 seems to work really well on the netbook…. but alas I just reverted (i ended up doing a clean install) back to 11.04 and deleted the /lib/modules/…/wireless/rt2x00/ directory.

Oh and by the way; apparently Canonical FORCES the so-called unity desktop. I don’t like it, and i restore the old gnome look; i think i used these instructions http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/12/how-to-make-ubuntu-11-10-look-and-feel-like-gnome-2/ which mainly involves just doing a

sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback

And logging in gnome classic (instead of ubuntu); by clicking on the “gear” at the login screen. It still looks klunky for some reason. I noticed on my production netbook w/11.04 there is something called “gnome panel 2.32.1″ that i can right-click on and and change their behaivor; e.g. to auto-hide the task bar at top and bottom.

Free Sectors: 2,298,496
Free Space: 4,707,319,808 bytes
Free Time: 510:48:46 (MM:SS:FF)
Supported Write Speeds: 2x, 4x, 6x, 8x, 12x, 16x, 18x
Pre-recorded Information:
Manufacturer ID: MCC 03RG20
Physical Format Information (Last Recorded):
Disc ID: 0@P-!-00
Book Type: DVD-R
Part Version: 5
Disc Size: 120mm
Maximum Read Rate: Not Specified
Number of Layers: 1
Track Path: Parallel Track Path (PTP)
Linear Density: 0.267 um/bit
Track Density: 0.74 um/track
First Physical Sector of Data Area: 196,608
Last Physical Sector of Data Area: 2,495,103
Last Physical Sector in Layer 0: 0

…