Slacy’s Blog

So, the Lenovo S10 works great with Linux, particularly Ubuntu 8.10, but the one thing thats a bit wonky is the way the trackpad works.  The trackpad is non-square, but reports square coodinates, so the vertical motion is exaggerated.

I’ve compiled a hacked version of the X11 Synaptics driver that includes a fudge factor for the Y component.  It does hw.y *= 0.6 internally, and this pretty much compensates for the incorrect coordinates.

Here’s a link to a modified replacement Ubuntu .deb package.

Just download that file, and then run:

dpkg –install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics_0.15.2-0ubuntu7_i386.deb

And you should be good to go.  If/when the Ubuntu maintainers publish a new or upgraded version of this package, this version will be overwritten, so you’ll be SOL.  So, be careful with those autoupgrades!

In other news, there are patches underway to do this in a more configurable way, and its possible that future versions of the Synaptics driver will include the ability to adjust the vertical sensitivity.

Okay, I’ve had my Lenovo S10 since Friday.  I briefly played around with the default Windows XP install, upgraded the BIOS, and then installed Ubuntu 8.10 as my primary disk, and wiped the OKR (One Key Recovery) partition, since I don’t really want to ever restore Windows.

Here are my first thoughts:

1. The screen is actually more functional than I thought it was going to be.  1024×600 is just fine for pretty much everything.  There’s a little more scrolling than normal, but nothing huge.  I do find that I am running Firefox in fullscreen mode more, so maybe that makes up for it.
2. The keyboard is actually quite good.  There are only a few weird things.  The number keys are offset to the left a bit more than I’m used to, and that means I hit 2 instead of 1, for example.  There are some other keyboard quirks, like the ~ key and PgUp/PgDn buttons, but I’m sure I’ll be able to get used to those.  The key autoreapeat happens a bit faster than I’m used to, and doesn’t seem to be adjustable in Ubuntu.  (Although repeat on/off does work).  I’m just tapping faster than normal.  The keyboard is large enough that I can touch type at full speed with nearly no problems at all.  Excellent!
3. The synaptics track pad works, but the vertical motion is way too fast, and I’m tracking an xorg bug and discussion on mailing lists about the patches that are proposed to fix it.  As soon as I can get a build of the .deb for people to check out, I’ll do so.
4. Battery life.  I only have the “3-cell” version, and people complain a bit about the battery life.  It seems to be working for 2.5-3 hours for me, which is really just great for what I’m using the laptop for.
5. The CPU is plenty fast, the graphics are plenty fast, and 1GB seems like plenty of RAM.  It really doesn’t feel like it needs an upgrade.  I’ve even been doing some ./configuge && ./make stuff for the drivers, and it works speedily and well.   The Atom shows up as Dual Core, due to hyperthreading.  CPU Frequency scaling works, and the steps are 800Mhz, 1.07GHz, 1.33GHz, and 1.6GHz.
6. It’s very light, and seems very well built.  The LED backlit display is very bright (on full brightness, which I don’t really use at night).

There are a couple of weird quirks, that I’ve mentioned above but will reiterate here:

1. Touchpad vertical movement is too fast.  I’m getting used to it, but it would be nice for it to be “normal”.
2. Screen brightness is very dim after a resume from suspend.  (Dimmer than anything I can set with the brightness buttons, and it returns to normal when I adjust brightness manually)
3. I haven’t tested video (webcam) or microphone yet, but sound works great.
4. Keyboard quirks (~, PgUp, Home, F12, are all hard to press.  There are buttons unused by Ubuntu (The ‘Home’ button and Windows Menu Button)
5. I’m having a bunch of trouble with 3-button (middle mouse button) emulation in X11.  Supposedly the synaptics driver does it automatically, but I haven’t delved into this much.  It does work, but just not predictably.  I’d like to just set some key+click combo to middle mouse.
6. Keyboard key repeat rate is too fast and delay is too short, settings under Ubuntu don’t seem to take effect. (this is minor, and I’m sure I’ll get used to it)

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-939165.html

audacious and audacity are two different, but sorta vaguely similar programs.

Here’s a great page talking about how to tune the Linux buffer cache

Yesterday, I finally finished updating this computer from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora Core 8. I’ve completely swarn off Fedora, and if there were an easy way for me to migrate away, I’d do that instead of these insane upgrades.

Here were the major stumbling blocks:
1. The “depsolve hang in upgrade” bug which meant I needed to wait for a respin or follow instructions listed in redhat’s bug database. (I decided to wait for the respin)
2. The “respins” from fedoraunity.org took a while to be created, and use the totally insane ‘jigdo’ downloader. They took about 2.5 days to download 4GB. By contrast, a bittorrent download af the same data takes about 4 hours.
3. The installer ran mostly smoothly, but took several hours to upgrade my system.
4. The installer didn’t upgrade over 1100 packages on my system. I had to boot it up and run “yum update” to finish updating these.
5. Even after ‘yum update’ I had a bunch of issues getting my monitor resolution back to 1280×1024 (it wanted to be 800×600)
6. Fedora doesn’t inculde mp3 playback, mencoder, or mplayer, so you need to enable ‘extra’ yum repositories to get these files. There are several choices, and they usually just fuck up your system beyond repair. (atrpms, freshrpms, dag, livna, etc.)

All in all, it took about 3 months to progress from step 1 to step 6.

At least my system still works. Mail works, the web works, gallery works, music works. Phew.

Next time, I’m going to build a new computer, and I think I’ll just install gentoo. I’m not sure yet, though.

I’ve looked around on the web for a while for easy instructions about how to setup an mrtg installation to monitor my OpenWRT router’s throughput. Here are my easy instructions for getting this setup up and running:

Note: At first, I didn’t realize that mrtg would run on a remote machine. I didn’t try getting mrtg to run locally on the OpenWRT system, although this is theoretically possible. I use a secondary machine to pull data from the router.

1. Install smtpd on the OpenWRT router. This is as easy as:

# ipkg install snmpd

Once the install has completed, you need to start up snmpd. I just did this by hand, since my router has a pretty good uptime, and I was messing around. To start it by hand, say:

# /etc/init.d/snmpd start

If you want it to start automatically, then you should rename /etc/init.d/snmpd to something like /etc/init.d/S98snmpd.

2. Install mrtg on your linux box. My main webserver is a Fedora box, so this was as straightforward as:

# yum install mrtg

3. Configure mrtg using “cfgmaker”. mrtg comes with a default config, but since router setups vary so much, this default config is pretty much useless. So, I ran:

# cfgmaker –ifref=name public@192.168.1.1 > /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg

This created a reasonable config file with a bunch of sections (one section for each interface on the router). It needed a small tweak, and that was to define the WorkDir directory to the right place for Fedora, which is /var/www/mrtg. I then uncommented the bulk of the config sections in the rest of the file.

4. Manually run the mrtg collection scripts to bootstrap the system. You can skip this step if you want to just wait 5 minutes. I looked in /etc/cron.d/mrtg and just ran the command there, which was:

LANG=C LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg –lock-file /var/lock/mrtg/mrtg_l –confcache-file /var/lib/mrtg/mrtg.ok

I can this a couple of times until no error messages came out (the first 2 times may produce errors).

5. Alias /mrtg to /var/www/mrtg in your apache configuration file. This was necessary for me because I have a bunch of virtual hosts. People without virtual hosts can skip this step.

6. Create a simple /var/www/mrtg/index.html that links to the pages generated my mrtg. There’s one page per router interface, so I just made a bunch of hardcoded links. You can look in /var/www/mrtg to see what the filenames are.

6. Done! Now you can view my router graphs on slacy.com/mrtg. The interesting ones are:

eth1: Shows all traffic on my wireless network.
vlan1: Shows all traffic on my external WAN port (in/out to the ‘real world’)
Also note that I’ve configured them all to have logscale on the Y axis, since my ADSL line has such a discrepancy between input and output rates.

I haven’t exactly figured out what the rest of the interfaces are, but I can tell that vlan0 and vlan1 are inverse of each other.