Kolbu » Technology

Asus Eee PC 901

webmaster — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:23:19 +0000

There are now officially six thousand, three hundred and forty-nine different Asus products bearing the name Eee. Or there abouts. Including a game controller called Eee Stick, which apparently . I’m primarily interested in the sub-notebook variants though, like the ASUS Eee PC 901. Shown here are the limited edition Korean pink and lime-green versions dropping in a couple of days, whereas the rest of the world will have to content with the black and white versions for a while yet.

Anyway. In a couple of months I’m off on vacation to Australia for five weeks, and would really like to bring a laptop to be able to check the weather for the next few days, book interesting excursions a few days in advance, check email, upload travel photos to home server etc. My trusty old ThinkPad T41p (best laptop ever) has performed that job for several years, but its days as a holiday computer are numbered. I need a sub-notebook. Any will do, as long as it’s cheap, small, lightweight and has a battery capacity of 4-5 hours at least. Screen, keyboard and looks are secondary objectives.

The new Asus Eee PC 901 seems to fit the bill. $600, size around a couple of DVD cases, 1.1kg and the battery claims to manage 4-8 hours. The screen should have been 1280 wide for todays web pages, but at 1024 it’s not that bad. I can deal with a certain amount of sideways scrolling to read my local newspaper on a beach in OZ.

There are quite a few contenders at this point of course. The MSI Wind (also sold under the Microtel Wind name) had a small 3-cell battery (aka useless) in the first batch, with the 6-cell battery slated for september. Now it appears that the battery shortage never materialized and that MSI is getting the 6-cell to the people a little early. 10 inch screen, spinning hard drive, Eee resolution, 1.3kg with the 6-cell battery and notably bigger though… We’re aaaalmost entering small notebook territory again. Note the Amazon-links are all for the 6-cell versions running XP. Don’t get the 3-cells.

The Acer Aspire One, somewhere between the 901 and the Wind. The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC has the resolution advantage, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to use those vertical mouse buttons. About the size of the 901 and lots of optional features available for a price.

The big boys are also loading their guns. The Dell 910 (wonder how they came up with that imaginative numbering scheme) looks promising, but the main thing there will be the price point. The Dell volume could take the entry in under $299. We should hopefully see in a couple of days. And Lenovo just rolled out the Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10, another $399 machine with comparable specs. Available in 2-3 weeks according to the Lenovo web site right now, several months earlier than previously thought. With the excellent Lenovo build quality and support, they may have a winner as well.

So, for the ones actually available for purchase right now it’s still the ASUS Eee PC 901 at the moment, but it’s still two months until I really need it so anything can happen.

Note all links are to the Windows versions of the various laptops. I will be getting the Linux version myself, but I expect most of you will opt for the Windows-version. If only to have a valid license to fall back on should you wish to reinstall Windows after having tried a Linux-distro. If you’re serious about getting one of the laptops mentioned by all means use the Amazon-links provided. Would keep me in coffee for a week or two!

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Logitech Duet, a problem solved

webmaster — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:23:25 +0000

You have a nice living room, with a stereo to match. And you have all your CDs ripped in the format of your choice and stored on a server somewhere in the house. Or perhaps you have a decent iTunes collection, or think Pandora is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But actually getting the sound to your stereo in a convenient manner has been somewhat elusive. PC by the stereo? Low WAF, and there is the small matter of where to put the screen and the keyboard. Roku Soundbridge or the old SlimDevices Squeezebox? Three line LCD panels aren’t really readable from the couch. Laptop by the sofa? Doable, but very overkill. Sonos? Better check that lottery ticket first.

If that problem sounds familiar, then just buy a Logitech Squeezebox Duet Network Music System. It Just Works and problem solved. If you’re not convinced, see the Logitech Squeezebox Duet-link in the Pages-menu on the right for more information.

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Excessive SCSI logging under Ubuntu

webmaster — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:01:04 +0000

For some natty reason, my 64bit Ubuntu 8.04 server sometimes insists that a SCSI logging level of infinite detail is good for my health. Which means my messages, syslog and kern.log files get 50-100 lines like this per second:

Mar 18 23:52:25 home kernel: [ 8661.700076] scsi_add_timer: scmd: ffff81004da8a700, time: 7500, (ffffffff88123ed0)
Mar 18 23:52:25 home kernel: [ 8661.700117] scsi_delete_timer: scmd: ffff81004da8a000, rtn: 1

If you too are suffering from this then do the following:

1. First, stop it right now by starting a shell and typing:

sudo sysctl -w dev.scsi.logging_level=0

2. To make sure it doesn’t start up again after a reboot then edit the file /etc/sysctl.conf and add this line anywhere in the file:

dev.scsi.logging_level = 0

And you should be all set.

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Legacy NVidia Ubuntu woes

webmaster — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:05:08 +0000

Somewhere along the line, NVidia got a lot stricter in their monitor handling. If you used to be able to run X at high resolutions but all you can get after an upgrade is something like 1024×768 then it is likely that you have been caught by the clock check bug. You typically get lines like these in your Xorg log (/var/log/Xorg.0.log):

(WW) NVIDIA(0): No valid modes for "1920x1200"; removing.
(WW) NVIDIA(0): No valid modes for "1600x1200"; removing.

To get the X server to tell you exactly why it’s removing those two modes, try starting X with -logverbose 6 as arguments, and it will log something like this instead:


    (II) NVIDIA(0): Validating Mode "1600x1200":
    (II) NVIDIA(0): 1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
    (II) NVIDIA(0): For use as DFP backend.
    (II) NVIDIA(0): Mode Source: EDID
    (II) NVIDIA(0): Pixel Clock : 162.00 MHz
    (II) NVIDIA(0): HRes, HSyncStart : 1600, 1664
    (II) NVIDIA(0): HSyncEnd, HTotal : 1856, 2160
    (II) NVIDIA(0): VRes, VSyncStart : 1200, 1201
    (II) NVIDIA(0): VSyncEnd, VTotal : 1204, 1250
    (II) NVIDIA(0): H/V Polarity : +/+
    (WW) NVIDIA(0): Mode is rejected: PixelClock (162.0 MHz) too high for
    (WW) NVIDIA(0): Display Device (Max: 150.0 MHz).

If this used to work for you, and all you did was upgrade Ubuntu (or some other distro), then edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and add the line

Option         "ModeValidation" "NoMaxPClkCheck"

inside either the Screen or the Device group. Restart X and it should start up in a higher mode again. For more interesting options to set, try looking at the NVidia X driver documentation.

Leave a comment if you’re lost and I’ll try to guide you through the tricky parts.

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Ubuntu Hardy upgrade woes

webmaster — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:57:11 +0000

This week, two showstoppers appeared in the Ubuntu Hardy upgrade system. First one was a botched upgrade of a language package under OpenOffice and the other was a problem related to Python/APT/dpkg.

First one looked like this:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  language-support-writing-en: Depends: openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-us but it is not installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.

The easy fix out of this one is to start up System->Administration->Synaptics Package Manager and uninstall “openoffice.org-hyphenation”. This will trigger a removal of about 85 packages including OpenOffice itself. When that is done, use the same Package Manager to install OpenOffice again and in goes the 85 packages again.

The second one looked like this:

Setting up python-apt (0.7.4ubuntu5) ...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 1593, in 
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 1587, in main
    rv = action.run(global_options)
  File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 982, in run
    self.pkg.byte_compile(bc_option, self.options.exclude)
  File "/usr/bin/pycentral", line 624, in byte_compile
    rt.byte_compile(files, bc_option, exclude_regex)
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'byte_compile'
dpkg: error processing python-apt (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

This has now been fixed, and a new python-central should be available at the repositories. I hacked my python-apt to bypass this before the official fix was out, but all you should have to do is update/upgrade as normal and everything will be fine.

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Dolphin from BoonEx failing after update

webmaster — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:38:37 +0000

After upgrading to Dolphin 6.0004, Ray 3.1 and Orca there are multiple problems you can experience.

First one is that whenever you enter the forums, you get a popup box saying:

main div is not defined
please name main content container

This is due to bad caching in the application, and you have to remove a few cache files from the server to fix it. From your web server document root, these files are in orca/cachejs/ and groups/orca/cachejs/. Delete all the files that have a file name that looks like junk, i.e. something like e3d43deace3edbc…

Second problem is that they messed up the Ray part of the upgrade so that all widget licenses are invalidated and can’t be reinstated. To fix this you have to download and apply a hotfix. Download the hotfix here. You get a zip file, unzip in document root and it will overwrite a handful of files. After this you have to input all your Ray widget licenses again, but this time it should work.

There are undoubtedly more, but those were the ones I experienced. Note that this is not an endorsement of this product at all, rather the opposite. It’s a complete mess with a non-existing support organisation and a web presence that boggles the mind. It’s spread across half a dozen web sites and I can’t find a single thing there.

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Mobile GMail problems

webmaster — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:09:50 +0000

If you’re hit by the dreaded

java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException:

after downloading and running the latest GMail mobile application, then try downloading it again and this time answering No to the question about whether to keep old data or not. Fixed the problem for me on my (t)rusty old SE K750i, may do for you as well. The newer v1.1.1 is significantly better than the old v1.0.0 so it’s well worth trying to get it to work.

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Server downtime

webmaster — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:24:09 +0000

Sorry about the downtime in the past couple of days. Life in the ADSL+ world isn’t all roses and the Thomson/Alcatel Speedtouch ST585 modem needs quite a bit of configuration to behave after a factory reset. Unfortunately I had missed out a few entries, so that what you got instead of the normal service was the web pages on the actual modem. All fixed now I hope.

Picture below is what the University of Maryland IT department had to deal with after being hit by a tornado. Glad my problems weren’t as severe…

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Popcorn Hour NMT (Networked Media Tank) A-100

webmaster — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:08:04 +0000

So it arrived. Hong Kong to Norway in little under 72 hours, not too bad except that half of that time was spent on the last 20 kilometers according to the DHL tracking website. I’ll start a review page which I’ll fill with the highlights today and update as I get more mileage out of the player. You’ll find the link in the menu on the right.

As you can see, they didn’t spend a lot on the packaging…

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I’ve got mine (soon)!

webmaster — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:43:17 +0000

There is currently quite a frenzy around the new Networked Media Tank from PopcornHour. The first batch was sold out in so short a time that the NMT/PopcornHour community forum flowed over with angry posts. Apparently PopcornHour had been playing it safe and only ordered about 50 units or so in the first batch, not really enough for the thousand or so eager wouldbe customers. So for the next batch it was not a repeat of the "hit refresh at the right time"-shopping experience the initial release had been. Instead they sent out invitations to the people having registered on the site on a first register first dibs basis. I luckily registered quite early (number 200ish) and got my invitation about a week ago. Today they billed my Google Checkout account, which should mean that they’re shipping. So if all goes well, I should have a unit in hand in a week or two and provide you with a review of the unit. Head over to http://www.popcornhour.com or http://www.networkedmediatank.com if you want to see what the commotion is about.

Update: It’s now reached DHL shipping facilities Germany, so should be on my doorstep in a day or two!

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