Life & hacking

Two weeks ago I bought my first real Linux notebook after my old HP nx6110 already was fully linux-compatible but still had Windows XP preinstalled.

So after booting up my new Dell Inspirion 6400 the Ubuntu installation wizard popped up asking me for username, password and timezone and I found a standard Ubuntu GNOME Desktop. As many others have already complained about, Dell did not install 915resolution and thus the display was 1024×768 instead of 1280×800 which was of course quite easy to fix. Until now, they still ship Ubuntu 7.04 but I hope they will update to the new version soon because it’s a bit like shipping Windows XP without SP2 while security updates are of course installed.

The next step was to update to Gutsy which is of course as “update-manager -d” and worked without any problems. I also enjoyed the new codec-loading featurs of totem a lot.

What works:

• Suspend-to-Disk
• Suspend-to-RAM
• All multimedia key except the rather useless “Media Direct” key which should launch the laptop directly into (Windows) Media Player
• WLAN

What not works:

• After Suspend-to-Disk NetworkManager hangs
• After Suspend-to-Ram sometimes the keyboard does not respond (sleep and wake-up again usually fixes it) and in rare cases the display is not switched on.

In general quality and battery capacity seem very good and speed is ok as well as the low price. I hope Dell will improve Linux-integration for the next models to get a good out-of-the-box Linux feeling.

When playing with my new bluetooth hardware I was very pleased that it was supported out of the box. Anyway, I also missed something that would give me some indication that the hardware is working. (e.g. the first I did was to check dmesg)

When you look a Windows, they have those tiny notifications telling you that the new hardware was detected (or that it is not working or whatever). I think we should also have something like that. We now have HAL und dbus and I shouldn’t be that difficult to implement though I have no idea how this works in details. So take this as a proposal or tell me that it already exists (I didn’t find it):

There should three modes of operation:

1. Hardware is plugged in and supported

• Tell the user “Detected xy – new hardware is now working” (alexl pointed out that we should not do this as it is obvious. I would prefer to have this notification for the first time the hardware is attached).
• Propose some common operations: Open files for an USB-Stick, F-Spot for a digital camera, gnome-scan for a scanner, etc. Of course with a notification and not with an ugly centered dialog like Windows.

2. Hardware is supported but needs configuration

• Show enough information that the user can complete the configuration
• If there is no wizard to do this in a user friendly way, at least point the user to a (distro-specific) tutorial or at a place where he/she probably could find help.

3. Hardware is unsupported

• Point the user to a distro-specific update tool to search for a driver (=> PackageKit comes in mind…)
• If there is really no driver, ask the user to report a feature request, based on the device id. This should be saved in a database to see which drivers are needed by many people.

The most obvious case are of course USB devices but maybe also stuff like pcmcia and bluetooth could be detected that way. I think this would make hardware support on linux a lot more user-friendly. Personally I neither have the knowledge nor the time to implement that but maybe someone likes the idea!

Yesterday I finally decided to give Bluetooth a go and bought the cheapest available USB adapter at the local electronic store. I must say that I expected it just not to work at all on Linux or that I would have to spend the whole afternoon to get at least some things working.

Anyway, I just plugged in the adapter and checked dmesg to see what happens. To my surprise it just told me that the driver was loaded and the bluetooth stack was now ready. I fired up the gnome-bluetooth-applet and clicked on “Browse Device…” to just see my mobile phone being detected and connected to it. I could not browse the files at first because the gnome-vfs-obex module was not installed but installing it fixed it.

After being able to browse my files I wanted to check if there is a way to sync my phone. After I checked that the phone (Sony Ericsson K530i) does not support SyncML I did not really expect to get anything going.

But as I wanted to give it a try for a long time, I first migrated from Thunderbird to Evolution to have a PIM-Suite and to have syncing support at all. Migrating is actually a real pain because you have to import all your folders manually but in the end it worked out. I have used Thunderbird/Netscape my whole mail live (about since 1994) and I still think that it is a good mail client. But Evolution is really better integrated into the GNOME Desktop and it has improved a lot since I last checked in those old 1.4 days. It could be a bit faster though and I found a nasty bug for people using small screens like me.

So back to syncing: I installed multisync after googling a bit what I need and added a synchronisation pair with Evolution and an “IRMC Mobile Device” (guessed that because some other Sony Ericsson phones were in the list). After clicking on “Sync” I expected an error message but instead the phone just synced.

So thanks a lot to anyone being involved in those Bluetooth and sync stuff – it’s really great!

This is something I noticed playing around in valgrind and seems to be quite common in GTK+ code. When you retrieve a string from a GtkTreeView, YOU are responsible for freeing it:


gchar* my_string
gtk_tree_model_get (model, COLUMN_MY_STRING, &my_string, -1);
g_message ("Printing my string: %s", my_string);
/* Do something more useful
------------------------------- */
g_free (my_string); // Important, otherwise YOU leak memory.


In the hope it is correct and helps some people…

So, I just read Christan Schaller’s blog about the patches Linux Torvalds submitted to metacity and control center.

As that is not really mentioned anywhere (and I had to search various mailing list archives) here is the original mail, so anyone can get an idea of what these patches do and why someone would want to have this options. I don’t know if this patches a good, useful, whatever.

I am just a bit upset about the way this communication happened between people from GNOME and some contributor. I say some contributor here because we should not make any difference between people willing to help us. Linus is like anyone else and if he sent patches to the wrong mailing list than we can politely tell him. Of course, Linus might not have ever been fair to the GNOME community but nevertheless nobody should treat him differently than anybody else therefore (see Code of Conduct).

GNOME rocks! Let’s make it even better!