Handhelds aplenty

I went a bit crazy on eBay recently and purchased a whole bunch of second-hand PDAs:

* iPAQ h1910
* iPAQ h4150
* Jornada 680e
* Jornada 720
* iPAQ h3850, h3870 and an h3660 all three of which I plan to give away to prospective kernel hackers.

All of these devices were chosen not only because they are now quite cheap, but also because there are already existing working Linux ports for them. They still need someone around to support them however, and in the case of the 4150 there is some minor bugfixing work to be done in Opie (eg. the record button not working, although this could be a keymapping issue). The 1910 works almost flawlessly, hats off to aquadran for a very complete port and thanks for choosing Opie as well :)

I really like the form factor of the Jornada devices - having a usable size keyboard is excellent; however the screen in comparison to screens on other devices is absolutely awful - blurry, dimly backlit, and the colour response is somewhat patchy. It does not help that the touchscreen on the 720 is a bit worn out also. Still, it's plenty good enough for testing. I was able to run the JLime distribution on the 720 which is available with IceWM or a slightly old version of Opie (1.2.2). On that machine, some features are missing (most notably suspend/resume and sound). I haven't gotten around to trying Linux on the 680e, but from what I can tell the port is a little more complete.

As for the h3800/h3600 devices, well, they badly need bringing up-to-date (to the Linux 2.6 kernel). This needs the help of someone with kernel hacking skills - see my mailing list post for details.

SparkLAN Wifi card and Linux

People often ask about which Wifi card to buy to use with Linux, and in the past this was a difficult question to answer. When you're talking about a card to use on a PDA the available selection is even smaller.

However, on a whim I recently purchased a SparkLAN WCFM-100 which is an 802.11b/g CompactFlash card to try it out. Linux compatibility was listed in its product documentation, which is a good start.

It didn't quite work out of the box, however all I needed to do was enable building the libertas and libertas_cs modules in the kernel defconfig in OE, rebuild it, copy the modules over to my Zaurus, extract the firmware (instructions here) and copy that over to the Z, load the modules, and it worked. So I would definitely recommend this product to anyone wanting a wifi card for their Linux-based PDA. When I get some time I will try do document the procedure properly and/or submit some patches to make it easier to get working in Angstrom.

Click-click-click-click... uh-oh...

I have not exactly had great luck with hard drives lately. First, a Seagate 320GB SATA drive in my main PC started acting up - fortunately only a few files were unreadable and I managed to copy the rest of the data off without issues. Then, just days later a Seagate 120GB IDE drive in my parents' PC (of which I am the de-facto maintainer) began to bite the dust - it was pretty much unreadable and making lots of nasty noises. After trying a few other options I attempted copying the entire drive using Acronis Disk Director, and following several hours of constant grinding to my amazement it seemed to have copied all of the data successfully, this time onto an IDE RAID 1 array to avoid further faulty hard drive hassles.

You would think that the story would end there. Unfortunately not. A week later Windows XP on my parents' PC begins to report corrupt files, so it seems that one of the drives or the cheap no-brand IDE RAID controller is faulty. If it is one of the drives then it obviously isn't serious enough to make the RAID controller fail the drive out of the array, because it helpfully reports that everything is OK. Should I mention that the two drives in the array are both brand new Seagate 160GB IDE drives?

Right, that's it - no more Seagate. I used to be a loyal Seagate buyer, but two confirmed failures and one possible failure in two weeks, plus at least four previous failed drives in the last seven years is just too much to bear. To replace the failing 320GB drive in my machine I've gone for two Western Digital Caviar "RAID Edition" 320GB SATA drives in a Linux software RAID-1 array. (The RAID Edition drives have some added reliability features, but also have a 5-year warranty and aren't all that much more expensive than the standard WD drives). Since I've just moved to a new PC I've given the old one to my parents, and tonight I have rebuilt it for them using two new WD RAID Edition 160GB SATA drives in RAID-1 using the onboard Promise RAID controller. Third time's a charm...

Earlier this year I read two interesting articles on hard drive reliability (which are summaries of two research papers) on the StorageMojo site:

Google’s Disk Failure Experience
Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong

In my case, the comments regarding how useless SMART is were definitely borne out - SMART reported no errors at all before the problems started. In fact when I was attempting to recover the 120GB drive using SpinRite it was still reporting no errors in the SMART status as it was clicking away. Brilliant.

I guess the only lucky thing to come out all of this is that no significant amount of data was lost. It has also been a bit of a wakeup call in that I realised I hadn't done a backup in ages. Needless to say I have since rectified that oversight :)

NetworkManager, Wireless cards and WPA

So, I was setting up a PC for my sister running Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) and she needed wireless to be able to connect to the internet. I had a spare NetGear MA311 PCI card, and I figured it's fairly old, it's been well supported for ages using the hostap driver - so it should just work out of the box, right?

Wrong. I couldn't even see any networks using KNetworkManager. After fiddling around I discovered that not one, not two, but three wireless drivers were dueling to access the card, and the one that won was the old linux-wlan-ng driver which doesn't support any wireless extensions that NetworkManager needs. After searching through the bug reports at launchpad.net and blacklisting the prism2_pci, prism2, hermes, orinoco, and orinoco_pci modules, I eventually got it so that hostap was the only driver in charge of the wireless card. I tested all of this on a spare machine at home and it connected to my wireless just fine.

I drive back over to my sister's place in full anticipation that it will now work with no hassles. Nope - I discover the network at her flat uses WPA, and inexplicably KNetworkManager can see the network but thinks it's only WEP. Unfortunately I had not tested making a WPA connection at home beforehand or I would have discovered this problem immediately. I tried connecting manually with KNetworkManager, I tried running wpa_supplicant directly (again, it could see the network but insisted it was WEP), and I tried putting the connection settings in /etc/network/interfaces; nothing worked.

I knew I could connect to the wireless network at my sister's flat just fine with no configuration from my laptop (running the same version of Kubuntu, but with built-in Intel wireless using the ipw2200 driver), so I knew it could work. So after looking through what was available for purchase here and checking up on Linux support, I bought two more PCI wireless cards - an Edimax EW-7128G and a Netgear WG311T.

At home I tested the Edimax card first. It was detected (using the rt61 driver) and again could see my now WPA-encrypted network, but again it told me that it was encrypted using WEP and not WPA, and would not connect to it. Sigh.

The Netgear card was another story altogether. The test machine I had at home wouldn't even get past the BIOS screen with it plugged in, which was disturbing. However, I tested it in another machine I had using a Kubuntu live CD and to my surprise it connected first time with no configuration. Next weekend I put it into my sister's PC and it connected out of the box. Wireless problems solved!

So, if you're looking for a PCI wireless card that should work out of the box with Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux, then the Netgear WG311T could be the answer - assuming your PC will boot with it plugged in, that is. I'm sure there are other cards that work well, too, and with the introduction of the new wireless stack in the soon to be released 2.6.22 kernel, things will hopefully get a lot better for wireless under Linux in the next 6 months. Still, right now it can be a little frustrating :(

Kubuntu on a laptop

I just installed Kubuntu 7.04 ("Feisty Fawn" for those who like those codename thingies, which I don't) on my laptop, a Toshiba Satellite M50. I rarely use my laptop, but when I do use it I want it to "just work" (TM). I use Gentoo on my desktop but given the amount of messing about that requires it was obviously not an option for this machine.

I've been through the Kubuntu install process before and it was fairly smooth - the only hitch being that it told me it was unable to create the first partition layout I gave it, without telling me why. I chose a different setup and it continued. Once everything was installed the laptop booted into Kubuntu, complete with nice smooth startup screens. I was very impressed to see that I could plug in my ethernet cable and even switch on the wifi and it happily connected automatically to both of them with no problems. Plugged in a mouse, digital camera, USB stick - all detected and worked immediately. It even suspended and resumed with no hacking required, which is a first as far as this laptop is concerned.

However, I would be remiss if I did not mention the problems that I had after installation:

1. Setting up DVD playback using the instructions in the help documentation did not work. After a visit to Google and installing xine-ui the problem went away.
2. The version of vim installed by default, vim-tiny, is horrendously broken. Arrow keys and backspace don't work in insert mode - I mean, WTF?! Eventually I got sick of this and installed the proper "vim" package and it worked as expected.
3. Hibernate didn't work - when it booted back up it brought up a grey bar on the screen and froze up. Hibernate is something I can do without at the moment so I'm not too worried about this one. (I was able to recover simply by selecting the built-in recovery mode from the boot menu and then restarting).
   
4. The worst however was when completely on a whim I attempted to plug in an external monitor. After fiddling with the System Settings application I succeeded only in completely borking up my xorg configuration, without trying too hard I might add. After changing the settings and rebooting I was greeted with the primary screen being the external monitor (which was not what I set it to) and both screens stuck at 640x480, which on a laptop screen with a native resolution of 1280x768 does not look very good at all. So I thought I'd just log in and disable the second monitor - but no, as soon as I logged in the power manager applet crashed, and when I tried to run the System Settings - Monitor and Display settings, it also crashed. After a bit of searching it seems that this is a known bug - the xrandr library that both of these things use (which allows changing screen resolutions on the fly) just crashes when Xinerama (ie, multi-monitor support) is enabled. After much fiddling and cursing I found the only way to get back to a configuration where the laptop's widescreen video mode was detected and available was to restore a backup copy of the xorg.conf file, which fortunately the Monitor and Display settings applet had saved.
   

I'd have to say I'd still recommend Kubuntu to people looking for a nice desktop distribution, since apart from the problems mentioned above it seemed very well polished - for inexperienced users it certainly beats all of the other Linux distributions I have tried.