Ubuntu Hardy Heron
Today I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron on a desktop computer. I am pretty distro/desktop agnostic (see my ten year anniversary post), but since Debian Etch is a bit old for a desktop and Hardy Heron has Long Term Support (I do not want to update/fix a computer every half year!!) Ubuntu was my choice.
There are unlimited gnome improvements which I don't care about, but some things stand out for me in this release.
- Firefox 3 is much better than 2. The memory improvements and the renewed linux (gtk) focus helps. And luckily you can disable the stupid new urlbar in about:config with browser.urlbar.maxRichResults = 0 .
- The way non-free installation for media-playback, video drivers and browser plugins is handled, is sweet! The installation of this software is painless here. I even got a nice 64-bit(!) Java firefox plugin, which I was unable to install in Debian (thanks redhat/icedtea).
- And most important: the colors in the gnome-terminal are smoothened. Now that is what _I_ call eye candy. Less work and much more satisfaction than the integrated compiz.real ;-).
So thanks again for all free software developers!
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [web] [personal] [linux]
Helping the environment
A lot of work is done in making linux suspend work better. For me it works perfect (from linux kernel 2.6.20 or so). Therefore I wanted to go a step further and let my class A, heavy power-using receiver switch off when my desktop computer suspends (to ram). And switch back on when my computer wakes up. The motivation is that I only listen music via my computer.
To achieve this I bought the Gembird Silver Shield, a USB-switchable power adapter. I was prepared to do some nice USB snooping and C programming to get this device working in linux, but (un)fortunately there was already a working utility for this device.
Configuration for suspend/hibernate is not so easy and documentation is sparse for the user mode utilities. Since it took me more than the usual googling I will summarize my conclusions here for later use. First the gnome-screensaver measures the idle time. After this timeout is expired the gnome-power-manager starts to measure his own timeout (so before suspend the two times will stack). When the gnome-power-manager times out it will look at the Inhibit flag. If there is no inhibiting (for example my rhythmbox pushes Inhibiting, because I do not want to suspend when music is playing) your computer will suspend.
Since a custom script should be added to switch the power-switch off via usb with sispmctl the suspend-backend is important. Gnome power manager can use multiple backends to go to suspend mode. This works via hal (the hardware abstraction layer). Configuration for this is in /usr/share/hal/information. HAL is responsible for calling the suspend-backend. The default suspend-backend on my machine is pm-utils. (which can be tested with pm-(suspend/hibernate/power-save etc.). I also have a package called hibernate (which can also suspend, confusing isnt' it?). A third one is suspend2 (which can also hibernate....). These backends have different ways of adding custom hooks.
To add a hook to hibernate I added a file called local in /etc/hibernate/scriptlets.d/. The API is as follows (ugly in my book):
# -*- sh -*-
UsbPowerSocketDown() {
/usr/bin/sispmctl -f1
}
UsbPowerSocketUp() {
/usr/bin/sispmctl -o1
}
AddUsbOptions() {
AddSuspendHook 10 UsbPowerSocketDown
AddResumeHook 10 UsbPowerSocketUp
return 0
}
AddUsbOptions
Pm-utils has a much nicer API. To add a custom hook add a file to /etc/pm/sleep.d . This uses init style ordering. So look in /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/ for a proper number. I needed to talk to the usb-bus AFTER the modules were loaded, so a number lower than 50. So I added /etc/pm/sleep.d/10usbpoweroptions with content like this:
#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
suspend)
/usr/bin/sispmctl -f1
;;
resume)
sleep 1
/usr/bin/sispmctl -o1
;;
esac
After all this fiddling it works like a charm! Now hopefully one standard will emerge; because how to achieve the same result with KDE I don't know. I had to manually patch rhythmbox to change calling (via dbus) the Inhibit method from org.gnome.powermanager to org.freedesktop.powermanagement (because i used a wrong combination of versions..), so this suggests a move in the right direction.
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [music] [linux] [science]
Good 2008 to everyone
There is only one week between this picture and the one below.... The trick is of course the invention of the aeroplane, which enabled me to make a trip to Egypt, a wonderful country. See more soon in my photo section of this site.
Anyway, good 2008 to everyone!
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [photos] [personal] [holiday]
Happy holidays
From a snowy Leiden I wish you pleasant holidays and a good 2008!
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [personal] [holiday] [photos]
Qemu/kvm and xorg screen resolution
Fast virtualization is cheap nowadays on linux. Just apt-get install kvm on a recent kernel and VT-enabled processor and you are ready to run all kind of different os-es on your host. No more recompiling the vmware kernel modules *again* or fiddling with xen-modified kernels and difficult networking setups. Yeah!
One problem I encountered was getting a decent resolution (f.g. 1280x1024 or higher) in the guest xserver (xorg). Google was not really helpful this time so therefore I post this note for future reference. Qemu emulates two kind of video cards, standard is a cirrus, -std-vga provides you with a vesa one. Vesa was not able to help me (garbled screen), so using the (default) cirrus emulator is the way to go for a linux guest.
The trick was in changing the monitor sync and refresh rates, autodetection did not work properly (in my centos 4.0 guest). So here is my working snippet of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "Device" Identifier "Generic Video Card" Driver "cirrus" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Generic Monitor" Option "DPMS" HorizSync 28-64 VertRefresh 43-60 EndSection
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [linux]