Marcin Juszkiewicz

As we plan to move from Poznań to Szczecin this week we are spending at Ania’s parents house.

To have better work equipment then my Dell D400 laptop I grabbed some unused components from home to build computer. The list was not so long:

• 120GB ATA hard disk (it was system one some time ago)
• DFI RS482 mainboard with 2.1GB ram and Athlon64 X2 cpu (my previous desktop)
• cpu cooler
• keyboard
• PS/2 mouse (which I used before buying wireless one)
• power supply
• USB->Serial adapter and some other USB gadgets
• some cables
• headphones

The only thing which was needed to make it computer was case. And this shown that Szczecin lacks good computer shops — I had to visit 4 of them just to buy decent case as most of time they only had cheap ones.

Anyway I am using this machine for few days now (connected to old 17” CRT which I used in 2006) with on-board ATI graphics card. It has many names… “RS485, ATI Radeon x1250 Chipset” etc… And this is crap never mind which drivers are used ;(

First I started with “xf86-video-ati” one. Version shipped in Debian ‘sid’ (6.8.0) is very old and reports that I have the same monitor connected to VGA and DVI outputs. Result is not funny. Driver from “experimental” is much better. But 1024x768@85Hz resolution which is default is not so nice — 1280x1024@85Hz is much better but needs to be set by XRandR call or tweaking of X11 config file.

So I tried to use official ATI driver: “fglrx”. As usual it required patching to build with last release kernel (2.6.25) but patches are already in Debian so it took less time then my last fight with NVidia driver. Effect is also strange — this time monitor started in 2048x1536@60Hz which is just insane on 17” CRT. After switching with XRandR to sane 1280x1024@85Hz it is much more usable.

Good side is that I do not need to use this machine too often so it will stay like it is for some time. When we move it will be one of my build machines.

And if I ever will have to use it I will put NVidia card into this — they at least works perfect in X11.

During LinuxTag 2008 I got one funny gadget during visit on Sun microsystems stand. Nothing too fancy — just time, date, seconds like in watches from 80’s.

The whole fun is in power — any liquid. Instruction suggests beer, soft drinks, salt water, tea, coffee — standard liquids found anywhere. It can even use clean water but this will end very fast (I tried that first due to lack of other liquids). Currently it is powered with salted water which is electrolytic enough for few days (instruction suggests changing fuel once per week).

This is nothing new — back cover has “(c) 2004’ but that does not change situation that it is funny enough to take space on my monitor stand for some time.

Over year ago I wrote post about USB — connected most of my devices/gadgets into desktop USB ports and checked how system reacts to it. As Kees Jongenburger gave me USB AF/AF adapter during this year LinuxTag I decided to do the same with N810 tablet.

Required software

In theory nothing is needed as N8x0 tablets are equipped in USB On-The-Go port and proper support is enabled in kernel. To make things easier users can install USBControl (available in normal Maemo repositories).

But there is one problem — default kernel is compiled with OTG whitelist enabled. As a result some classes of devices are rejected — for example all my USB Hubs. After disabling of CONFIG_USB_OTG_WHITELIST (and recompilation of kernel) they got supported.

Attached hardware

I decided to not connect everything USB I have but most of it. Resulting list (names in brackets are added by hand):

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 (Nokia N810 internal USB Host)
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 058f:9254 Alcor Micro Corp. Hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 058f:6362 Alcor Micro Corp.
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0c76:0007 JMTek, LLC.
Bus 001 Device 008: ID 0409:005a NEC Corp.
Bus 001 Device 020: ID 1457:5122 (OpenMoko GTA01 phone)
Bus 001 Device 021: ID 046d:0b02 Logitech, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 023: ID 046d:c70e Logitech, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 024: ID 046d:c70a Logitech, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 026: ID 0409:005a NEC Corp.
Bus 001 Device 027: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd 8-bit FIFO
Bus 001 Device 028: ID 0fce:d016 Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB
Bus 001 Device 029: ID 05e3:0606 Genesys Logic, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 030: ID 0a81:0205 Chesen Electronics Corp. PS/2 Keyboard+Mouse Adapter
Bus 001 Device 031: ID 1130:0202 Tenx Technology, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 033: ID 0a46:9601 Davicom Semiconductor, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 034: ID 13fe:1d00 (2GB pendrive from GUADEC 2007)

In other words:

• 3 hubs (2 of them were powered, one had 7 ports)
• Ethernet card (dm9601 based)
• serial port
• PS/2 -> USB adapter for keyboard and mouse
• 2 pendrives
• Bluetooth adapter (those 3 Logitech entries)
• panic button
• Openmoko GTA01 pda/phone
• my cellphone
• multi slot card reader

Obligatory screen shot

Screenshot must be — especially when it shows that GUI was not ready for this amount of devices. But thats expected — in normal situations no one connects more then one device (especially when USB hubs are not supported).

Conclusion

USB Host ports are handy in devices like N810 tablet. Would be nice if there would be possibility to update firmware from thumb drive like it is one few other devices.

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 :(

Few days ago I gave my 2GB pendrive for my wife as she was going to fotolab to make some photos. It contained our wedding photos. Today I mounted it on one of my systems and discovered “nice” thing on it…

In root directory there were two files which were not present there before — MS32DLL.dll.vbs and autorun.inf which executes first one. From first look it does not make too many harm for Microsoft Windows systems — looks like it only change window title for Internet Explorer so many people will not even notify but I wonder how many fotolabs or other such places put even more nasty things on client’s media…

Some months ago Ross Burton wrote about checking email authors on LinkedIn:

I generally thought that LinkedIn was pretty useless for people like me. I have a community of like-minded associates available via Planet Gnome and so on, so apart from collecting friends it is pretty useless.

But recently it’s been becoming quite useful. For large companies it generally appears to be company policy that contact with open source projects is done via anonymous email domains, like GMail. This obviously makes it tricky to guess where someone is from when they appear on a mailing list… but LinkedIn to the rescue. Search for a name and hey presto, their CV!

Today I got interesting mail… It was technical question about my blog post “Recent Poky changes” where I wrote about updating QEMU in Poky to handle ARMv6/v7 rootfs. Question like question — but why it came to my OpenedHand email instead of private one? This is private blog…

The interesting part was mail author. As it came from private account which does not tell me anything so I did search on the LinkedIn. Result was nice — one of PDA vendors. I wonder when they will release phone with ARMv6 processor.

Anyway I answered and decided to share answer with other people which want to run ARMv6 Linux under QEMU. So to get it done few things are needed:

1. recent Subversion snapshot of QEMU
2. patch for Linux kernel to enable ARMv6 for ARM Integrator PB devboard
3. ARMv6 rootfs
4. some time to configure kernel

All those steps can be handled with Poky (or OpenEmbedded) of course. Kernel for “qemuarm” device use properly patched kernel — just kernel config change is needed to enable ARMv6 support. To get ARMv6 rootfs you can adapt “qemuarm” machine config to use proper optimizations (“tune-arm1136jf-s.inc” instead of “tune-arm926ejs.inc”).

Some time agoI wrote that I am considering switching back to KDE 3.5 after few months with KDE 4.0/4.1-svn. Finally I did it.

Reasons are the same as in previous post — lack of stability and I for now I do not see bright future for KDE 4.1 (but this can change after release if developers will work on fixing bugs instead of adding new features/rewrites). With 4.1 svn snapshots there was guessing ‘what is broken today and how badly’ — mostly Plasma desktop was more or less unusable. For example panel which works in 4.0.72 stopped working with 4.0.73 unless enlarged to normal size, second panel nearly never worked (or even made Plasma crash each time).

So for now I am back on KDE 3.5 with few components from 4.1-svn (window manager, Okular, Dolphin) and wait for 4.1/4.2 releases to have something to test.

During last two weeks I did two 250km trips. First Poznań -> Szczecin, then return. Road into both directions is good and it is impossible to get lost but I took my N810 with me.

Before trip I started Maemo Mapper to generate route and fetch all needed maps (from Google Maps street view). This part was fast. I checked generated route does it have sense and stored on card as there is no offline route generation — you can do it only online by querying author’s website which send query to Google Maps, converts and returns XML.

Ok, time to go — I packed car with all our luggage and during that left N810 in car to get “gps fix” as internal GPS needs time for this operation. During trip we looked from time to time just to check are we on track. Few times tablet just rebooted which resulted in no GPS fix until next longer stop :( But it does not need to reboot to lose position — look at our return trip track (clean road, no tunnels etc):

I know that there are people who use Nokia tablets for car navigation. But how does it compare to TomTom Navigator which I had occasion to use one day…

Let’s see.

So it looks like I will not buy HH-12 car holder to use N810 for car navigation but rather TomTom device or some Windows CE/Mobile navigator with TomTom software to have something usable.