Marcin Juszkiewicz - dell

New laptop: Asus UL30A

2010-06-09T11:28:00+02:00

New job, new laptop someone would say… But that’s not so easy when you have own company.

But my Dell D400 became desktop laptop due to nearly dead battery and I had UDS-M to visit so needed new mobile computer for use. After some checking of reviews, user opinions etc there were few models selected. Hopefully nearly at same time my brother-in-law bought Asus UL30A so I could check live how good/bad it is.

And one day my own UL30A arrived. Hard disk was clean — no MS Windows, no ASUS ExpressGate. Grabbed 2GB pen drive, put Kubuntu 10.04-rc2 image on it and booted. With help of “alternate install” which in reality means “Debian installer” I was able to setup it in my way (encrypted partition with LVM on top so rootfs, swap, home are encrypted).

System works fine, all components were supported out-of-box. At least that was what I thought. After some checking it was clear that something is wrong with touchpad — it got detected as PS/2 mouse with scroll. 2.6.34 kernel from Maverick solved problem after using “force_elantech=1” option for “psmouse” module.

Dual core SU7300 processor maybe is not fastest possible but does work properly and uses small amount of power. During UDS I was able to carry only laptop with me — power supply was on desk in hotel room. With few tweaks from PowerTop I was able to get 8h of work (sometimes even 10h were reported). Such long battery life was the main reason for buying ;)

When it comes to graphics everything works fine. Intel 4500 chipset works fine with my 42” plasma TV offering me 1366x768 from internal LCD + 1920x1080 over HDMI. Watching films never was such easy — I just need to plug cable and play as audio is also sent. Problem is that I had to tell MPlayer which ALSA device to use for HDMI :( Maybe one day it will be automatically detected and switched. What surprised me was console output on TV when I rebooted with HDMI cable attached. Nice thing.

Playing 720p movies from local hard drive required few steps from me (otherwise it gets out of sync):

disable internal LCD
switch TV to 720p mode (instead of 1080p)
big cache for MPlayer

Maybe other players works better but I am so used to MPlayer… Before it I used avifile iirc.

Do I recommend this laptop? Yes, I do — long battery life, 13,3” screen, 4GB of memory, 320GB hard disk and dual core cpu make it nice portable work station. Small enough to watch films during train trips, keeps long enough to allow to do that even in trains without power sockets. It is good replacement for my Dell D400.

What defines good laptop?

2009-06-26T09:22:00+02:00

Currently I am using Dell D400 laptop. It has few years and battery holds just for about 40 minutes. But it works still and is fast enough even to make OpenEmbedded builds.

During LinuxTag I played with different machines to check which things bother me most. As a result of that I created some kind of list of things which good laptop needs to have (order do not define priority):

1Gb ethernet card
wifi which works ok with mainline driver
hardware wifi switch handled by rfkill subsystem
wifi status indicator
bluetooth built-in
hardware bt on/off switch
bluetooth status indicator
touchpoint (touchpad can even not be installed)
comfortable keyboard layout (Fn not first key, cursors under right Shift key)
WXGA resolution
graphics chip with framebuffer in native resolution + working X11 driver
backlight supported by mainline driver
card reader (at least SD/MMC)
3 USB ports
4 hour on battery
battery used also in few other models
everything supported in mainline kernel

I can live without serial port because I have nicely working FTDI USB-serial dongle and most of time I do not use laptop to connect to developer boards. From the other side I do not like to waste precious port for Bluetooth dongle. FireWire, infrared, pcmcia, expresscard or smartcard are not required — I do not remember when last time I used any of those things. Integrated video camera and microphone are bonus but also do not required (but should work if present).

It can have any graphics as long it will provide me working framebuffer and X11 (at same time). But after fighting with my current one I would think twice before buying something with Intel chipset… I am afraid that they can forget about it existance like they did with 855GM which I use now (intelfb supports it but refuse to work with it). So it looks more like I need to check how situation looks like with ATI Radeon chipsets.

What to buy and when to buy is other thingy… Many people recommend Thinkpads, market will also be filled with ARM based netbooks soon which will rather do not cover most of requirements but should give much longer battery live. The choice will be hard but I have few months before my next conference trip.

Cursing Intel

2009-05-04T13:57:00+02:00

I am using Dell D400 laptop as my 32bit test machine and during conferences. It has Pentium-M cpu and Intel 855GM/ICH4 chipset. And this is where problem starts…

As I like to use text console on it I wanted to get XGA (1024x768) framebuffer on it. So first try was “use intelfb”. But “video=intelfb:mode=1024x768-32@60” or “modprobe intelfb mode=1024x768-32@60” results in same message:

[ 1760.280291] intelfb: Framebuffer driver for Intel(R) 830M/845G/852GM/855GM/865G/915G/915GM/945G/945GM/945GME/965G/965GM chipsets
[ 1760.280368] intelfb: Version 0.9.6
[ 1760.280471] intelfb: 00:02.0: Intel(R) 855GM, aperture size 128MB, stolen memory 892kB
[ 1760.289927] intelfb: Non-CRT device is enabled ( LVDS port ).  Disabling mode switching.
[ 1760.290251] intelfb: Video mode must be programmed at boot time.

The solution is to give kernel “vga=792” argument but it is not possible here as kernel thinks that 800x600-8 is highest available one.

OK, I can use X11 and terminal there — this works fine. But why kernel got so broken? Probably Intel developers do not test their changes on something older then i945 chipsets (and thats only because it is used in Atom based devices).

Looks like I need to do “git bisect” to check when it broke and then create some hack to get proper behaviour…

Second is very long time

2008-07-08T11:15:00+02:00

I am at GUADEC now and typing from my Dell D400 laptop. The fun part is in battery — it is more or less dead but in interesting way…

For last few minutes it say that I have 3% of battery left which will give me 1 second of work. It is quite long second :)

After all the battery has enough juice to give me about 30-40 minutes of usage (with removed everything not needed like USB, Ethernet) with WiFi enabled (on Broadcom 4306 chipset). And to avoid data loss I have all partitions mounted read-only now.

UPDATE: some more facts:

11:08 — 3% battery left, 00:00:01 remaining

11:31 — 0% battery left

12:02 — still working…

12:08 — started dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null to give some work for CPU. Machine stopped working

1 hour with unknown status of battery… It was enough for reading Google Reader over WiFi.

Stuck at 600MHz

2008-05-27T16:31:00+02:00

During this week I work on my Dell D400 laptop. It uses Pentium-M 1.6GHz processor which has few work frequencies available due to acpi-cpufreq kernel driver. The lowest one is 600MHz and normally this machine spends most of time with that speed but goes up when there is some work to do (due to ondemand governor which I mostly use).

But since yesterday it is not so nice… During boot CPU is often detected as 600MHz one:

[    0.693310] Detected 598.133 MHz processor.

instead of nominal speed:

[    0.693310] Detected 1594.845 MHz processor.

I tried rebooting but even if there was boot at nominal speed it sooner or later got stuck at lowest:

root@maluch:/var/log# cpufreq-info
cpufrequtils 002: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2006
Report errors and bugs to linux@brodo.de, please.
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: acpi-cpufreq
  CPUs which need to switch frequency at the same time: 0
  hardware limits: 600 MHz - 1.60 GHz
  available frequency steps: 1.60 GHz, 1.40 GHz, 1.20 GHz, 1000 MHz, 800 MHz, 600 MHz
  available cpufreq governors: powersave, userspace, conservative, ondemand, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 600 MHz and 600 MHz.
                  The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 600 MHz (asserted by call to hardware).

Weird it is… And this is not overheating because 44°C is nothing strange for this machine. Maybe CPU fan require replacing… but this also means splitting laptop into small parts to get access to it :(

Battery replace time?

2007-10-09T14:03:00+02:00

During GUADEC I decided that I need to buy new battery for my Dell D400 laptop. Current one is giving me 40-50 minutes of working only. According to ACPI informations it is really low charged:

11:44 hrw@maluch:BAT0$ cat info
present:                 yes
design capacity:         42000 mWh
last full capacity:      11530 mWh
battery technology:      rechargeable

So it does not get even half of nominal charge. I wonder how much time I will be able to get from 4400mAh battery (current one is 3800mAh when most of available ones are 3600mAh).

And this time I really need to buy one.

UPDATE: bought one — will get it in few days.

Partition Signature !=55AA

2007-07-27T13:46:00+02:00

Due to fact that some of embedded devices require using vendor tools I decided to install Microsoft Windows XP Professional on my Dell D400. As this machine lack CD-ROM drive I had to find other way. “Unattended” project provides boot discs which allow to make installation over PXE (netboot).

I followed DOS way and gave my tweaked copy of installation CD for it. The first problem was that I got “Partition Signature !=55AA” message after reboot and machine was unbootable. Hopefully I can boot grub4dos over PXE so I was able to go back to the Debian.

How to fix it? In my situation marking FAT32 partition as bootable solved problem.

The message is messy because there was 0x55aa signature at the end of MBR…

17” laptops are huge

2007-05-25T10:44:00+02:00

Few days ago one of my friends asked me for help on choosing laptop. The idea was “I want to buy laptop to use instead of my 7 years old desktop”. We were discussing few options and he finally found Dell Inspiron 9400 for less then 1000 EUR. It is interesting machine:

17” display with 1400x900 resolution
Core 2 Duo cpu
2GB ram
ATI X1400 gfx card
160GB Serial ATA disk

After checking who seller is we decided that I will go and buy that laptop (seller was from Poznań).

Yesterday I bought that beast and I have to say one thing — it is HUGE (bottom one on photo). I am used to my 12” D400 (top one on photo) and sometimes I use Ania’s 15.4” laptop (middle one) when I need MS Windows.

A pile of laptops

As usual it comes with MS Windows — this time it was Vista Home Premium. It was my first time with Vista — so now I can tell that I used all MS Windows versions (from 1.01 to Vista). What do I think of it? Hard to tell because I do not used it too much. Looks nice and takes some time to find things which were in XP.

Now when I used 17” laptop I know that I do not want such one — 12-15.4” are enough size for travelling. And for desktop I prefer desktop machine with big LCD then 17” laptop.