Category Archives: SCALE

BeagleBoard frustrations: a call for help

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Here I am, a week before SCALE, and the Gentoo installation on my BeagleBoard rev. C2 still isn’t finished. Or really working. It’s ridiculously unstable.

I have it connected to a powered USB hub. The Beagle draws its power from a USB-to-0.5mm jack, and the hub also powers the keyboard, mouse, and Asix USB-ethernet cable.

However, either the hub’s power supply is faulty, or the Beagle is, or both. After some time has passed when the Beagle has been left alone, either to idle or while crunching on packages, everything connected to the Beagle dies. None of the peripherals work anymore. The ‘net connection seems to die, too. Replugging doesn’t work. And since the input devices are dead, I can’t wake up the sleeping LCD panel to check its progress.

I’ve heard that even powered USB hubs aren’t stable for the Beagleboard, that I should get an external power supply. I’ll check into that, but then I’ll still have the problem of a kernel and u-boot that I can’t work with.

My Gentoo install is based on an image a very kind Gentoo user (dougztr) provided me, but it and u-boot.bin/uImage were originally designed for the Beagle rev. C4, which has different power requirements.

I suspect that the kernel (an Ubuntu uImage actually) and the u-boot.bin are partly at fault here, but none of the other images on the internets work. Nothing I’ve compiled from linux-omap will load, and even compiling my own u-boot doesn’t work.

Is there another Gentoo user who has a working kernel and u-boot.bin for rev. C2?

1. What modules do you use? What’s in your /boot/?
2. What’s your source and/or patches? My problem with the ubuntu kernel, besides the fact that it’s slow and bloated, is that I can’t tweak it. I have no sources for it. And the linux-omap kernel compiles just fine, but can’t be booted. No idea why it’s failing; all I know is that it doesn’t work.
3. All the Angstrom, neuvoo, etc. u-boots are dead, too. Only one that works is the one Doug gave me, and it’s tailored for a C4.

I need your help to get this thing working!

I’m not even trying to do the real tricky stuff yet, like setup the DSP or SGX graphics. I just need a basic, stable, kernel and bootloader. Any assistance you can render is appreciated — either via blog comments or email.

Thanks!

New Year, new stuff, etc.

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Back again. Started to really get back to work on Gentoo, with more documentation commits, bugfixes, etc.

Also started using some new gtk+ applications: beandog added my ebuild for brasero-0.7.0 to Portage, and I got drac to keyword asunder-1.0. I’ve been meaning to ditch k3b for awhile now, so I finally unmerged it, and started cutting down on the number of dependencies. I still need qt for Rosegarden and Hydrogen, bah! In the meantime, I now have a pair of decent disc writing & ripping tools for my CD collection. Still a couple of bugs, though — brasero doesn’t seem to like writing single-layer DVDs (though dual-layer works fine), and asunder’s mp3 encoding flat-out doesn’t work, at least so far on amd64. Still doing further testing on x86. Also, it’s rather slower than most other tools out there. At least FLAC, wav, and Ogg work, though I already have those through sound-juicer. Now that I’ve got mp3 encoding working in sound-juicer, I’ll use it until I can figure out asunder. I’m working actively with upstream to get this worked out; major props to Andrew for being so responsive.

On the laptop front, I’ve found some possibilities. The hard cost limit is still under $600, but I’ve found several intriguing models in the $380 to $500 range. Originally, I was set on finding a used Everex StepNote of some kind and installing the developer edition of Zonbu on it, then using that stepping stone to turn it into my usual Gentoo environment. Don’t get me wrong; the price on the Zonbu notebook ain’t too bad, but for almost $500, I think I could do better. There are still used/refurbished StepNotes out there for only $400. There’s also an Acer model or two at that price range, but they’re usually out of stock at online merchants, as well as being only 14.1″.

Side note: former Gentoo developer plasmaroo (Tim Yamin) works for Zonbu, and has been doing much to get that tricky VIA hardware working & other things. Perhaps he’s one of the reasons why Zonbu went with Gentoo as their base OS?

I’ve also found a couple of interesting cheap dual-core Gateway laptops such as the ML6720, though no real information can be found on their Linux compatibility.

I’ve been kind of hoping that my new laptop would be dual-core, but that’s just asking for reduced battery life. It’d make compiling faster, but at the cost of power, heat, and definitely price. If I stay closer to $400 I won’t need to worry about future-proofing with dual-core; I’d just buy a new laptop at a similar price point sometime in the future. Single-core desktop usage & development ain’t that bad on a laptop, right?

Just tonight I found some extremely attractive Lenovo notebooks. Intel X3100 graphics and boast up to 4.5 hours battery life. Now, this last bit is flat-out amazing. I was all gung-ho on getting a cheap VIA-based notebook like this one because of the 3-hour battery life, and it is an alternative to Intel. Hey, I have an AMD workstation. But the Lenovos I’m looking at . . . sure, they’re more than $400. And some of them are only Celeron chips (historically underpowered).

But man oh man . . . I found some new & used Thinkpad 61-series models that look good, as well as some Lenovo 3000 N models. And they’re 15.4″ widescreens. Light. Acceptably thin. They even have CD/DVD drives, which is almost optional for me. One’s even dual-core.

So now I have to figure out how much money I really want to spend — $400 to $600 is really a huge price gap; there are far too many features and choices available for any given manufacturer.

What’s really starting to sway me over to Lenovo, despite my earlier post, is whether or not the integrated wifi, pointer, and fingerprint reader are in solid working condition. Specifically for the R/T/X/61 & 3000 N series. And whether the rest of ACPI, hotkeys, power management, HDAPS, and disc drives work correctly. And that I can get CPU/HDD temperatures, remaining battery life, and processor speed reported in a graphical utility. Apparently lm_sensors shouldn’t be used on Thinkpads, so I wonder what else would report that info. On the fingerprint reader front, dsd is working on some kinda fingerprint software. Will have to check. Will also have to find some recommended spindown & sleep settings for Thinkpad hard disks.

For features, Thinkpads are looking better and better. It’s true, they do look like refugees from 1985. But still . . . they’re starting to become attractive.

Laptop is here!

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Because my Thinkpad R61i arrived today.

I lucked out in three critical ways:

1) Shipping condition. Not a scratch; it’s like it was never used.
2) Trackpad. I booted the x86 2007.0 LiveCD, and it seems to think that it’s a real Synaptics device. I mean, scrolling on the pad was enabled and everything. Though it did decide that the top middle button, when pressed, should be an M key.
3) Working fingerprint reader. While lsusb isn’t present on the LiveCD, some poking around /proc/bus/usb/devices showed a vendor ID of 0483:2016, which is supported by fprint, and presumably by thinkfinger as well.

I only had time to boot it up and quickly check the hardware specs before heading off to work. Will post more on it later, and I think I’ll write up some installation notes and stick ‘em in my devspace too.

Happiness is an awesome laptop. This thing is so quiet. Lightweight, too. And it seems to have hardware that actually works in Linux. Sure, the keyboard layout isn’t satisfactory, but I can probably work around that with keybinding. It’s otherwise a dream machine. Well, mine anyway.

I want to take it to SCALE in a couple of weeks, but now I’m worried about it being stolen. Figures. I’ll at least bring along my ancient crappy Toshiba laptop as a booth demo machine. That worked last year.

Thinkpad Configuration, part 2

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Right, I’m almost done setting up the Thinkpad.

The keyboard is still taking some getting used to — I hate having the Fn at the far left, where the Ctrl key should be, and I hate not having the Del/Home/End keys vertically aligned with the right edge of the keyboard. I also keep forgetting I have a working middle mouse button for Firefox. Too used to having to Ctrl-click tabs on the Toshiba. And . . . I love the scroll function on the synaptics touchpad. Love it. The pad itself I don’t use much; I’m too used to trackpointers. Plus it’s too easy to turn a drag motion into a sudden click. I do like the IBM trackpoint more than my Toshiba; the IBM one is more accurate and has a nicer surface.

Fingerprint use: for the time being, I’ve uninstalled fprint, and installed thinkfinger instead. Why the switch? Because thinkfinger works out-of-the-box with SLiM, and pam_fprint doesn’t work with it at all. If it worked with SLiM, I’d switch back. Also, thinkfinger’s enrollment seems to work better. I’m getting far fewer rejected scans. I’d like to file a feature request bug with fprint upstream to get SLiM supported, but its bugtracker mails aren’t getting through to my devmail. dsd, you reading this?

I still haven’t bothered playing with hdaps yet or finding out why it thinks my disk is unsupported. While on the subject of disks, it occurs to me that I really should have created a /usr/portage partition and formatted it as ReiserFS. ext3 is just too slow for Portage ops.

I at least solved my networking issues by adding a couple of required modules and undoing parallel startup. I also fixed a typo in conf.d/net. I don’t plan on using NetworkManager any time soon, as it requires lots of Gnome dependencies. For now, I added a second network block to wpa_supplicant.conf:

network={
        key_mgmt=NONE
        priority=-9999999
}

I haven’t tested it yet, but I think this should work for unsecured public access points. Actually, I think this was probably in wpa_supplicant.conf before I deleted everything and added my own config.

My desktop and development environment are just about complete; got my keys imported and my firewall setup and everything. Still haven’t setup my system for Bluetooth or audio production yet. Or games.

As promised, I’ve made my working kernel config available. For all you Intel X3100 users, this may be of use in setting up uvesafb. Also, if you’ve got an IPW3945 ABG network card, this may be useful if you’re using the in-kernel iwl driver. I’ve enabled the appropriate statistics options to use powerTOP, which is a very nice way to monitor power usage. I get about 2.8 hours doing basic wireless internet, docs work, etc. with my screen almost at full brightness. Not bad. I think I waited too long to get an Ultrabay battery; SCALE 6x is less than a week away!

Speaking of SCALE, I’m going. So I should probably get tickets & registration completed. Oh, and a hotel reservation. My new laptop has been such a distraction.

I’ve discovered a really unusual bug/behavior. I removed alsasound from the boot runlevel, in case I’m running on battery. Now, unless you blacklist them, your sound modules will still get loaded regardless, taking that much more power (even with aggressive soundcard power management enabled.) So what I had been doing was starting and stopping the ALSA initscript once my desktop was loaded. Here’s the bug:

Starting and stopping ALSA this way actually kills all GTK theming in Xfce. The decorations revert to GTK defaults, the window colors go to their GTK defaults, the panel becomes ugly, you name it. All I have to do to re-apply the default (pretty) Xfce GTK theme is open one of Xfce’s configuration utilities. Any of them. Isn’t that bizarre? I have no idea why the hell that happens. Every time I stop ALSA. It’s a minor nuisance, I guess.

On thinkpad_acpi and hotkeys:

It’s a known bug that the brightness hotkeys don’t work, but echoing values directly to /proc does. There won’t be a fix for this any time soon, either. I’ve been in contact with upstream, submitting reports to their database, etc. Still have to go through and test the rest of my hardware (Bluetooth, etc.) and submit another report, but the outlook is not favorable for hotkeys. I still need to find a good program that will recognize the Fn-Home/Fn-End key command for brightness adjustments. xbacklight works, but I need keybinds to call it. Xfce has a built in keybind program, but it can’t see Fn key combos. I’ll have to find a sane xbindkeys setup (or similar app); there’s probably something on ThinkWiki or the Gentoo Forums.

Signing off for now . . . maybe I’ll see ya’ll at SCALE? Come on by the Gentoo booth!