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I downloaded the 4.3 GIGABYTE iso image of the SuSE 10.0 EvalDVD image because I wanted some of the bits noted as missing from their OSS version, like ncftp and vpnc. Well, no luck. I mounted the image, and they’re missing. I google a bit and discovered they’re only available on the DVD in the boxed set you buy, not in the eval DVD version. And I can’t find anywhere you’d be able to download them.

Lame! Hmm…any reason you can’t buy their boxed set and copy all the missing RPMs off it, putting them up for FTP somewhere on a nice high-bandwidth generous server?

Update: Jem Matzan has a great article in The Jem Report which addresses this directly. He explains how to set up YaST to be able to automatically get stuff you’re missing like Thunderbird, MP3 support, and Java. It has the other parts I’m missing, including ncftp and vpnc. Yay! I could also finally get the NetworkManager packages, which I came to really enjoy when I was using Fedora Core 4. Thank you, Jem!

I tried Fedora Core 4, then Ubuntu, then Debian 3.1, then Fedora Core 4 again (without ATRPMS which caused problems the first time), and finally SuSE Linux 10.0, which is definitely the winner.

Some bits learned along the way:

1. The Fedora Core 4 installation program, when asked to leave the existing partitions (two Windows XP ones, to keep the C: and D: drives created by Sony but shrunk down by Partition Magic), did leave them but actually changed their order in the partition table. This broke Windows; I had to boot with a Knoppix CD and use fdisk to fix the partition table to put the C: and D: drives back in positions 1 and 2 of the partitions, moving Fedora to the rest. That and a quick edit of /boot/grub/grub.conf to fix the root partition it knew about, invoke grub-install and all was good. Well, almost: I installed ATRPMS, and it had some trouble with duplicate versions of things being installed. Next time I won’t force apt-get. 🙂
2. Ubuntu 5.10 “The Breezy Badger” got caught in an infinite loop while figuring out the video hardware. I found this both with the Live CD version and a regular full install. I haven’t yet tried to figure out which script is failing.
3. Next came Debian 3.1 “Sarge”. Its startup didn’t give me a working X-Windows til after I edited my /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. No i810 driver for the Intel 915GM video card. The TX1XP’s trackpad didn’t work even with gpm (the console-based cursor movement); I had to make it boot under one of its 2.6.* kernels to have it work. And, it had no ipw2200 driver at all for the TX1XP’s wireless card. Bummer, I really like Debian but perhaps it’s not best for a really-new laptop.
4. Back to Fedora Core 4, this time without ATRPMS. The ipw2200 wireless driver and the i810 support for its 1366×768 screen weren’t working by default—you have to do a hefty update of everything to make them even hope to work. I did discover I needed to invoke up2date --nosig to make it not pause after every F’in package to ask me if it’s okay that the package wasn’t GPG-signed. It needs a “ignore now and always” sort of option. Later I realized in the initial up2date dialogs, there’s an option that lets you not require valid signatures on stuff before installation. Oh well. Next, I found a sonypi driver on someone’s website which I could try to control the brightness of the screen. (People are having trouble getting the Fn button to work properly on the Vaio.)
5. Then I saw my local news agent had a copy of Linux Format, a UK-based Linux mag that has CDs & DVDs of incalculable enjoyment. This time around, they had SuSE 10.0. Yay! I’d been thinking about trying it out but never considered a download. It worked like a dream!

I was able to make the display use the whole screen just by changing the /etc/X11/XF86Config to have this entry in its install-generated Modes section:

Modeline “1366×768” 88.03 1366 1424 1680 1816 768 770 782 808

(I found this via Google from someone else’s post on a totally different topic.) Then the Screen section just needed "1366x768" added to each of the Modes lines. To be consistent, I copied the other post’s values in Monitor to be

HorizSync 31.5 – 90.0

though I’m not positive it’s necessary.

SuSE already has the sonypi driver for brightness, letting me just invoke

powersave -k 4

choosing a number from 1 to 8 on how bright I want the screen to be. Update: With thanks to ph030’s great bits about his experiences putting Gentoo on the TX1XP, you can also install the spicctrl package. It “uses the Sony Programmable I/O Control device (SPIC), which is part of most Sony Vaio laptops, to perform several functions, such as changing the display brightness, controlling
Bluetooth power, or reporting battery status.” The first practical use of this for me has been to turn off Bluetooth so it’s not using any battery. The command spicctrl -l 0 does the trick, but I found it helpful to put these lines in my /etc/rc.d/boot.local:

# Turn off bluetooth by default.
test -x /usr/bin/spicctrl && /usr/bin/spicctrl -l 0

I haven’t managed to change the brightness with it instead of powersave, but I’ve not spent much time using it.

I tried making the laptop sleep as well as it did under Windows, but I’m only halfway there. I edited /etc/sysconfig/powersave/sleep to make DISABLE_USER_SUSPEND2RAM be yes but this did NOT work—it could sleep okay, but it never woke up properly. And DISABLE_USER_STANDBY never works. I did get suspend-to-disk to work, though (aka hibernation). For this, I edited /etc/sysconfig/powersave/cpufreq/events and changed EVENT_BUTTON_LID_CLOSED to be suspend_to_disk.

When the screen saver blanks the screen, it actually turns it off, where all of the others could only ever make the display turn to black but still obviously still be physically emitting light from the screen. My first guess is how the others had a hard time using anything but the vesa driver in the Device section of its XF86Config or XF86Config-4, while this is happily using i810.

Finally, as was suggested by rcpowersaved in /var/log/messages when it started up, I changed /etc/sysconfig/powersave/cpufreq to CPUFREQD_MODULE to be speedstep_centrino.

SuSE has been working really well, though I have one complaint: the SuSE 10.0 “OSS” version omits a lot of stuff compared to the “EvalDVD” version. In particular, both vpnc and ncftp are noticably missing. I downloaded the 3.6Gb ISO image of the DVD version mainly to get those files. Now I just need to mount it and get the RPMS from it that I want.

Why doesn’t Novell make it possible to download any of the RPMs that’re in the DVD image? Thus you could make YaST2 just point to the right place to get “all” packages, instead of the less complete set that’s on the OSS version?

Update (originally in a later post): Jem Matzan has a great article in The Jem Report which addresses this directly. He explains how to set up YaST to be able to automatically get stuff you’re missing like Thunderbird, MP3 support, and Java. It has the other parts I’m missing, including ncftp and vpnc. Yay! I could also finally get the NetworkManager packages, which I came to really enjoy when I was using Fedora Core 4. Thank you, Jem!

It’s a wonderful laptop so far. (Wouldn’t it be cool if Sony gave you stuff like a second AC adapter for free when you make comments in a public fashion in support of their products? 🙂 )

“Dad, I want to do lots of work.” Patrick announced. “So I can learn some money. So I can buy things.”

“What would you buy?” I asked.

“I need a remote control helicopter,” Patrick replied.

“So you can make it fly up into the sky?”

“No, it might fly up in the house, and then into the lantern—that lantern,” he said. pointing at the light in our livingroom.

“So how much money do you think you’d earn doing this work?” I asked. “Like lots of money or a little money?”

Change of context: he now looks at our wedding picture and says he sees his cousin; the image is much younger than the 12 year-old boy he met this Spring.

“Where was me?”

“You weren’t there yet,” Elana told him.

“I was in your tummy?”

“You weren’t there yet.”

He stared intently at the framed photograph. “I was scared being in there.”

“You remember being scared?”

“I was screaming,” he said matter-of-factly.

“You were screaming in there?”

“Yes. I liked it outside cuz I’d never been outside.”

“So you liked going new places?”

Patrick proclaimed with finality, “Uh huh.” Next topic.

Random conversations are so much fun.

It’s been beautiful weather in Ireland for the last few days, even if it drops near enough to freezing at night to leave frost on our grass for hours in the morning. Today in particular is gorgeous, as evidenced by the vast number of people enjoying the farmer’s market over in the park.

Yesterday (Saturday) was equally enjoyable. It was so nice, in fact, that Patrick and I took out the lawn mower (and his dump truck) to finally cut the back yard. It’d been growing for a good 6–8 weeks and started to feel a bit bashful about being obviously in need of a trim.

At the start Patrick followed me closely as I worked the mower from the top all the way to the rear wall separating the different properties in our neighborhood. As I cut the grass, he pushed behind with his dump truck.He carefully picked up the bits of chopped grass that didn’t make it into the mower’s grass-catcher.

About half way through his efforts began to wane. Finally he and his dump truck retired to the set of steps used to access the back yard from the path next to our house. He watched, I pushed (slowly, that grass was pretty thick and, to my surprise, still a bit damp with dew). I started to make a dent into the second half of the effort. Soon I noticed he was calling out to me, repeatedly and fervently. His dump truck just sat there staring off into the distance like it always does.

Through the roaring sound of the mower I could make out Patrick’s words: “Dad! Dad! Dad? Hey Dad!!” I cut the engine and looked up at him expectantly in the now dramatic silence.

“Yeah? What do you need?”

He asked with all honesty,”Are you done yet?”

I needed a moment to regain my composure before I could respond.

A recent patent issued by the US Patent Office is for—get ready—the design and creation of a warp drive (the file’s a PDF). Yes, the one on Star Trek.

A really great op-ed piece written by President Jimmy Carter explains how he believes this isn’t the real America any more. He describes horrible transformations taking place in the government, evidenced by a variety of steps the United States has taken that are in sharp contrast to its past views on how to do things. One particular part of what he wrote really struck me:

Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).

It’s sure got a fast easy interface, but there’s nasty stuff lurking in the engine room.

A week ago my wonderful Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046 laptop named lisa died under mysterious circumstances. Its successor, kaylee, is the tiny, fast, and light Sony VAIO VGN-TX1XP. But, I can’t really start to use the replacement laptop until I take care of some unfinished business.

Sidebar: The Sony was in second place to lisa‘s natural replacement, the Fujitsu Lifebook P-7010D. It lost out because in an effort to make the right-side Shift key larger—there were some complaints for the P-2046, though I liked it—they shrank down the comma, period, and slash keys. After only a little bit of typing on one our friend Michael was trying out and I knew it wasn’t meant to be. I suffer from RSI and strain/pain in my wrists and arms after too much typing. Those little keys were going to cause all sorts of trouble for the nerves and tendons in my right wrist and hand, sigh.

But I think it’s gonna do just fine in the market, because I wasn’t using it the way everybody else will. A few years ago, in a tag-team effort with Sven Heinicke and Pat Quairoli, I started to use the Dvorak keyboard layout. It’s absolutely fantastic and has drastically reduced the problems I felt using a computer. (Admittedly, it took me a good month to get used to it; imagine going back to school in your teens or younger to learn from scratch.) So the big problem with the P-7010 won’t be as dramatic for folks who type on “normal” QWERTY-format keyboards. But for my Dvorak, that meant the letters W (on the “,” key), V (the “.” key), and Z (the “/” key) were now on these half-width keys from hell. Trying to type “zen” with my right ring finger trying to hit “/”, or “sven” with my right middle finger having trouble getting “,” instead of “.”, and there was no WAY it would really be usable. It’s a gorgeous laptop and for every other reason was my first choice. Oh well. 🙂

Anyway, the reason for this post…when lisa died she had a lot of stuff on her hard drive that I still need to use for work, for our finances, you name it. (I think the number of people in the world with computers who perform even weekly regular backups of their computers—even just files that changed—is less than 0.001% of its population.) Thus the puzzle of how to fix it. I contacted a place that gets stuff off disks, but it was going to be a bit expensive. Plus, the hard drive in a laptop is usually a 2.5″ disk with a special small set of pins to plug into the inside of a laptop; I couldn’t just plug it in somewhere else.

At a local shop I lucked out and found a external enclosure (Mapower MAP-KC21x) for 2.5″ drives that can plug into your computer using either USB or Firewire cables. It’s perfect! And I could easily take the hard drive out of my laptop and put it with no real effort into this enclosure. Having both ways to connect it also meant that later, if I format it properly, I could find ways to use it on either a Linux system, Windows (cough), or E’s Mac.

I tried the steps below first with it plugged in via Firewire, but it kept stalling or giving me an odd error message about a file having disappeared. On the console were lots of errors like

Nov 11 20:45:16 homer kernel: ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
Nov 11 20:45:16 homer kernel: Write (10) 00 01 df 35 a5 00 00 08 00

so I gave up trying to use Firewire. I plugged it instead into my system homer‘s USB port (catching a theme in the names?), and this worked like a dream:

# lvm vgscan
# lvm vgchange -a y
# mkdir /mnt/boot
# mount -o ro /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/boot
# cd /mnt/boot
# for f in * ; do rsync -vax "./$f" /bigdrive/lisa-recover/ ; done

homer runs SuSE Linux, and I just needed to install the lvm2 package to have the commands available. It’s happily extracting all of the files now. Thank goodness! When it’s done, I’ll be taking out the 20GB disk that was in my Lifebook, and putting in a 80GB drive I got as a replacement/upgrade of the Lifebook—the disk arrived a day after the laptop was dead. This will then be a really easily transported large amount of space. The enclosure comes with a nice small leather carrying case and both USB & Firewire cables. (The USB cable is a Y-adapter version that plugs into your computer’s USB port but lets you chain another USB device off of it. I’d never seen this neat trick before.)

Next comes installing something (Debian? FreeBSD? SuSE? RedHat?) on the Vaio…

My dear Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046 has passed on. It lasted me for a good four years, and had only a single failing: the power jack on the back, where its power cable plugs in. Looking at a few different forums about the Lifebook, it’s a known problem. Well, except for the Fujitsu service center in Northern Ireland, where I sent it for repair to solve exactly that problem. (Not able to charge the battery consistently, and had to wiggle or wrestle with the plug or hold it at an angle to register any power on the system. They blamed the AC adapter and couldn’t reproduce the problem. It’s happened to hundreds of others, yet somehow Fujitsu didn’t know about it??)

I’d had my desires distracted by another laptop, and I think the Lifebook could figure it out. This was a wonderful laptop—small, light, able to do everything I needed, and withstood countless airline flights and tossing around in the awesome satchel given to me by E’s dad and step-mom.

Alas, this laptop is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!

THIS IS AN EX-LAPTOP!

Ahem.

Farewell, lisa-the-laptop. The last computer I’ll have named after Lisa Simpson; the first was 14 years ago when I was given the first Solaris box at Cygnus as my desktop machine. Based on her unchanging age, this means Lisa Simpson is technically now old enough to live on her own and buy Duff Beer.

Yesterday a friend and I went to see Howl’s Moving Castle, the latest work of Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎駿). I think we were the only pair of adults in the house; most of the other folks had kids with them.

We’ve seen many (but not all) of his other movies including Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Kiki’s Delivery Service. While my favorite so far has been Kiki, I think Howl’s Moving Castle was the best yet. It was absolutely beautiful, in the writing, the animation, everything. We had fun identifying the voices of the English dubbed version, and felt Christian Bale‘s was perfect for the part of Howl.

Of course I still want to see Serenity before it leaves the theaters!