It is good to be back “home”

Well, that pretty much sums it all. After a little more than one month trying out KDE 4.1, it is great to be back on Gnome, thanks to the GSB Team (GSB-Testing now has Gnome 2.24.3 for Slackware 12.2).

Around December this year, I had upgraded Slackware on my notebook to the latest version (12.2), and since it would take a little while for the GSB and DLG teams to get a working version, I have decided to try out KDE 4.1 which could be found on Slackware’s -curent testing repository. I must say that, despite the title of this post, I was surprised in a very good way.

KDE 4 is far, far better than KDE 3. The overall interface improved a lot, some of its highlights to me are:
- The menu application launcher is cool
- The “plasmoid system” is interesting
- Simplified configuration menu, a lot better than the usual “boing 747 panel” on old kcontrol
- Good looking default theme
- The file manager dolphin is very good, reminding me a little of nautilus

There were also some other interesting things, but unfortunately they are escaping me right now. Nevertheless, what really drove me back from KDE 4 were the bugs, like:
- Dolphin crashing all the time for aparent no reason
- Very very slow window redraw and moving (kwin)
- Slow overall performance (playing some stuff like UT2004 with KDE running was simply impossible)
- Not being able to map several of my keyboard’s special keys (play, stop, etc)
- Screwed up icons on the notification area

Now mind you, KDE 4.1 is more or less on a testing state, I am sure most of those issues will be resolved on 4.2. And I also like more Gnome’s polished interface in general , so, it is good to be back home.

Kudos for the KDE4 team!

Notebook misadventures part 2: Toshiba A250-4612 (or something like that)

Heya,

Now we come to the second part of my notebook misadventures, this time with a Toshiba Satellite.

After I managed to get to refund for my defective HP dv6000, some friends of mine suggested that I should get a Toshiba Satellite. I have had found one with a decent price and a good configuration on a local shop here called KG Info. It was an A250, not sure about the exact model, but it was 46-something. It had 250gb of HD (4200 rpm), 4GB of Ram, C2D 1,66 processor, 15″ wide screen, fingerprint reader, memory stick reader and a 1.3 mp webcam. All nice and dandy.

So, I went to the shop to pickup the notebook and they bought it to me, it was a little odd, instead of the regular blue top with the Toshiba logo, it had a plain dark purple top, which was odd so I asked if there was anything wrong with the Notebook and the vendor told me Toshiba ships some of those like that, but since I tested it and it seemed to be ok (and had a good price) I bought it.

Now, when I got back to use it, I was amazed by their recovery system, which even included the recovery DVD (nowadays you have to record them yourself so the big manufacturer can save a few pennies) that allowed you to set the partition size you want to install the default system, perfect if you also want to install Linux or some other OS.

The system was working perfectly, besides a little something, the Webcam, which I did not tested on the store. So, it turns out the web cam was either “not connected” nor broken. By looking through the USB bus where it was supposed to appear and found nothing. Then a guy at the office arrived with a notebook he bought that was refurbished, and well, it had the same purple top cover, so I called KG Info asking if the notebook they sold me was refurbished, which they denied, saying that they don’t deal with refurbished notebooks and all that. So I decided to call Toshiba to check it, and they told me how to spot a refurbished notebook.

1 – Below the notebook, there’s a sticker with the Serial and Part numbers. It’s supposed to have a sticker on top of it saying it’s a refurbished notebook and the part number is supposed to end with a “b” chracter. Mine didn’t, but there were clearly glue marks on the serial parts, indicating that something was removed.
2 – In case of doubt, go to http://gedb.toshiba.com and enter your Part Number and Serial Number, if it says it doesn’t exist, add a “b” character in the end of your part number
3 – If you had to put a “b” for it to work, you will notice that the manufacturer warranty is only 90d, as in opposed to the 365 day warranty of an actual new one. Therefore your notebook is a refurbished one.

Well, so it was bullshit, I checked and my notebook was refurbished, and they sold me as a new one, they even removed the sticker saying it was refurbished! Plain dishonest if you ask me. So I returned it and they said they would try to get me a new one in 30d, which they didn’t, so they gave me the money back. The reason they couldn’t was clear, the price they were selling was low because it was a refurbished, so if they were to get a real new one to give me by the same price I paid for the refurbished one, they would loose money.

So, to make it short. I KG Info in Curitiba, Brazil (www.kginfo.com.br) sold me a refurbished notebook as a new one, and they refused to admit the fact, saying that it was probably an “error” with their suplier. I don’t buy it, I think they do stuff like that on purpouse, afterall not everyone knows how to differ a refurbished notebook from an actual new one. Not that refurbished notebooks are bad, mine had a problem, yes, but I think they tend to have less problems since they had to be re-reviewed, and people can return notebooks for all sorts of reasons, my problem was KG Info trying to sell one as a new! Which is a bad bad bad bad thing in my book.

I won’t be buying more from this vendor and I do suggest that others don’t unless they are really sure their notebook “is for real”.

Notebook misadventures part 1: HP dv6125BR (dv6000 series)

Hello everyone. Been a long time since I have actually wrote anything in here and this post is about one of the reasons.

My darned HP dv6125BR Notebook that I bought on May 2007 simply decided to not work anymore about six months after I bought him. Which was a shame since despite the hardware/technical support/warranty issues that I am about to related, it worked very well on both Linux and Windows and it had decent specs by the price I bought him for. It was a 15″ wide Semprom 3400 with 512BM DDR2 of ram (which I quickly upgraded to 1GB), 60GB Sata Hard Disk and a nvidia 6120go graphics card. Now, the story:

After a few months of use, I had to make a BIOS upgrade to allow me to set how much memory it would assign for the video card, since by default it was using 256mb, a waste for that video card. Anyway, the updated worked fine, but sometimes the machined failed to turn on totally (although I think that was already happening before and since I saw the same problem on some non-bios-upgraded-laptops I don’t think this was the cause). Basically it would turn up the machine and its fans, but not the LCD and would never get to the POST screen. At first I had to turn it off and back on about 2-3 times to get it booting and working, and it started to get worse everytime, and when it was impossible to turn it on I took it to the repair shop, which took 3 weeks to return the notebook to me, but, it was working so I was pleased.

About 3 weeks after it was returned, the same problem started to appear again, and worse, the machine simply froze all the time for no aparent reason. So I lost my patience and called HP’s helpdesk. They told me that they would need to repair the notebook again and that it would take another 3 weeks for that, but they would give me 2 months of extended warranty and that they would come to my office to get and deliver the notebook, so I figured it was ok to wait a little longer, but then the pain began:

1 – They went to my HOME to pickup the notebook instead of my office as it was agreed upon, on the 3rd week after I had called requesting the support;
2 – When I called HP, they told me that they would have to take another 3 weeks to retrieve the notebook and the attendant there had the nerves to tell me that she could not answer for the person who had oppened the first request wrong and that I would have to follow “the process flow” even though it was not my fault. I was so angry that I told her to screw with it and that I wanted to return the notebook. Which caused her to open another support ticket.
3 – More than two months passed with HP rarely contacting me (they always said they would call me back in X days, but never ever did) and no one being able to inform me of anything. Just waiting with a broken notebook and no money to buy a new one.
4 – After a huge while they returned me the money, which I don’t have anything to complain since they returned it with the corrected values (because of the time that passed) and they took the notebook away.

Now, one would think that I was just unlucky, but there are two different people here at work that bought HP notebooks from the dv6000 series (one in Canada and the other in the US) and they BOTH had hardware issues, one of them having the exact same as mine, so therefore I do not recommend anyone from buying computers from the HP dv6000 series unless they fixed those issues.

So that was a very short summary of my misadventures with my HP notebook, I hope it serves as a lesson for other people. Please note that I am not saying that “HP is bad” or something like that, just that mine and my co-workers experiences with their dv6000 series was very bad.

S.

VirtualBox 1.5 on Slackware 12

The past few weeks I have been testing VirtualBox 1.5, the latest version of InnoTek’s x86 virtualizer on my HP Pavilion dv6120BR laptop running Slackware 12 and I must say that so far I liked it.

VirtualBox is available in two versions, an open source one and a closed source one. The only difference between them is that the open source version has a few less features than the closed source one, like USB and iSCSI virtual hard disks. According to InnoTek, the exclusive features of the closed source version will be eventually ported to the open source version after some time, this way they can give their commercial clients an “edge”, while also supporting open source software.. Both versions can be downloaded on VirtualBox’s website, the closed source version is free (as in beer logically) for non-comercial use.

I am currently using the closed source version due to it’s USB support. Since there are no binary packages for Slackware, I had to download the “All distributions i386″ version installer. Here are the steps I had to follow:

• Run the installer
• Run /etc/rc.d/rc.vboxdrv setup to build the necessary kernel modules (it’s necessary to have the current kernel’s source on /usr/src/linux)
• Add /etc/rc.d/rc.vboxdrv and /etc/rc.d/rc.vboxdrv to /etc/rc.d/rc.local to start on system boot
• Add your user to the vboxusers group on /etc/group

With that, everything should be working… except USB support, in case you need it. VirtualBox uses us/etc/rc.d/rc.vboxdrvbfs in order to access USB devices, so the user who is running virtual box needs to have read and write permissions on the virtual usbfs filesystem which is mounted on /proc/bus/usb. After some testing, I found that the for some reason, it’s not udev that mounts /proc/bus/usb on boot (it has a rule for it), nor is there any hal rule for it or fstab entry. After some time trying to figure it out I had to use a small workaround to get it going. It might not be the best or correct approach, but it worked . Add the following line to /etc/fstab

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto,remount,devmode=0664,devgid=10 0 0

Substitute the number on devgid to a group that the user that’s going to use VirtualBox is on (in this case it’s wheel). The trick here was to add the remount option, I added it because that file system is mounted before /etc/fstab is parsed apparently. Not an elegant solution.

Now just run VirtualBox and voila.

Gotchas:

If you have an ABNT2 keyboard like myself, you will notice a very annoying error, the / key is mapped to \, and there’s no way to change it to the correct mapping. InnoTek says that problem will be fixed on the next version 1.5.2. Their web site says it will be released in “a few days” (please note that the post was made several days ago, so they are quite delayed). It’s annoying, but you can work that out by using the / key of the numeric keypad.

Using a Windows VM:

I’ve tested a Windows XP on VBox. It worked ok. By installing the “Host Guest Additions for Windows”, which came on an ISO image provided by VBox I was able to get some interesting funcionalities, like resizing the Window anyway I wanted (the VM adjusts to the new resoltution), shared clipboard, sharing a directory with the host system and the so called “seamless window mode”, which basically strips out the desktop, leaving only the start bar and the windows open, like they where windows on the desktop, not veeeeeeeeeeeery useful, but looks cool anyway.

Using a Linux VM (Slackware 12):

Everything works ok, as expected. By installing the “Host Guest Additions for Linux”, which comes is available the same way as the Windows version I was able to get some new funcionalities, too bad they were not as much as the Windows version . I was able to create a shared directory between the Host and the VM, use custom resolutions on X (like 1250×500 ), and basically that’s it. There’s no seamless mode or dynamic resizing for Linux hosts. The shared clipboard was supposed to be working, but I was not able to get it to work so far, I will keep on testing.

Well, that’s it.

PS: This post is dedicated to Tiago Salem, who keeps telling me to write here more often

UPDATE: Virtual Box 1.5.2 was released and the keyboard mapping problem appears to be resolved. 

Zim, the desktop wiki

Strolling on the Internet I’ve came across a very interesting program called Zim. It’s a very simple WYSIWYG desktop wiki, writen in GTK2-Perl.

Now, I’ve been using the apache/php/mysql/mediawiki combination in my desktop machine for a while, and I’ve found it to be a kinda of an overkill for what I wanted to achieve, which was a way to keep my documents organized in a simple fashion. Zim fitted like a glove.

It features a simple text area where you enter your text and a side panel on the left which shows the hierarchy of the pages you created (the pages can be organized by the use of name spaces). It uses wiki syntax to format the text in a very spartan like maner (links, images, bold, italics, underline, strike through, lists and 5 types of headings), so far you are not able to select custom fonts, change the font size and use different font colors. The data is automatically saved, similar to to Gnome’s Tomboy note taking application. It’s appearance allows you to navigate like a browser, going forward and backward, back to your “home” page, etc…. It has a spellcheck plugin which uses gtkspell, it’s good, but doesn’t allows you to choose which language you want to use the spellchecker with.

There are some ready made binary packages for zim, in it’s download area, but building it is rather trivial, instructions can be found on site (I really recommend installing all optional requirements to build stuff like it’s spellchecker and tray icon support). It supports Linux, BSD and Windows.

Here is Zim’s home page address: http://www.pardus.nl/projects/zim/. The only available version at the time of this writing is 0.5, even thou it considers itself a beta software, I have found it fitting and very stable, so far nothing has happened.

Cheers,

S.

First post!

Heya everyone,

After struggling for a while to find a decent place to share information with people I know, I have finally decided to create a blog, Yes… I know, yet another blog on the Internet.

Here I am going to be posting pretty much information that I find interesting to share with people like you, that are reading this blog. Most of the stuff I will post here will probably be computer related material, Linux stuff, but eventually I might post stuff about music, food, and other subjects.

I don’t plan to be posting here on a regular schedule, will simply do it when there’s something interesting to share. Keep an eye on the RSS feeds!

Best Wishes

S.