nion's blog

Yesterday I got an Asus EeePC and I'm really impressed by it. One of the hardware pieces where I thought you get exactly what you pay for it.

So far I ripped off the Xandros installation. While it may fit some users it is a really stripped down installation, you can't actually do much with it. Instead I gave the DebianEeePC project a try. The installation was pretty straight forward like described in the wiki. Put the installer img on a USB stick together with the network driver and install

Most things are working like they are supposed to work, even the webcam and suspend works. Yay!

However some things don't work yet. For example acpi reports the remaining capacity in percentage rather than a real capacity in mAh. You just have something like 100 mAh in your proc which means 100%. This is really annoying, while it works to show the remaining percentage you can't calculate the remaining time. An additional deficit of this is that it is only capable of reporting this in steps of 10 here (until you are under 10% then it gets a bit more precise). This seems to be a BIOS or a battery firmware problem.

Another thing is that nearly all special keys do not work with unmodified acpi-support because the event ids don't match
For some strange reason asus-brn-up.sh is always executed no matter what fn key you use and even if another script like voldownbt.sh get executed as well.

Apart from this I am really happy with the device, I get a working X desktop with openbox in 25 seconds and even the often criticized small screen is not that small in my opinion. A bigger problem is the keyboard. If you have big fingers I think its not fun to type on it, the keys are extremely small.

So far, thanks to everyone for the efforts put in DebianEeepc to make this possible!

See tuxmobil for some other collected installation reports.

UPDATE: it takes like 3 hours to charge the battery while it's switched on which somehow sucks.

UPDATE: it seems like there is a very good reason to not use the default installation on the Eeepc, I did not confirm this though since I already ripped it off.

After people reported that Apple is cutting of the Linux users it has not been much time in reversing this issue but it is already solved:

http://main.wtbw.co.uk/hash_linux.zip

So if you bought a new iPod have a look at:
http://www.backdot.com/?p=50 for installation instructions and have fun.
Yay!

I just released a new version of yacpi. yacpi displays various ACPI information like batteries, ac status, thermal zones, fans and some information about CPU.

The new release is a complete rewrite based on libacpi (yacpi is now the 3rd tool using libacpi).
For those of you already using yacpi here are the relevant changes:

• yacpi now depends on libacpi, compile, install, ldconfig


• -m option removed, default is to display just the present batteries, use -n if you want to see not found items too


• Removed interactive delay input in ncurses interface, restart yacpi if you feel like changing it


• Samples are not needed anymore, I rewrote the algorithm to compute remaining time in libacpi


• Immediate reaction on user input in ncurses interface, thanks select(2), fuck halfdelay(3)


• New options for every feature, the default is to print everything but you can now decide what you exactly want to see, check yacpi -h for new parameters.

Quite some things changed so if you use yacpi in shell scripts, check for the new command line options.

Ncurses:


Plain-Text (yacpi -p):
| BAT0 = 100% discharging rtime 04:49 h | ac = off-line | THRM = 50 C | gov = ondemand | cpu = 600/1500 mhz

Have fun: http://www.ngolde.de/download/yacpi-3.0.tar.gz, http://www.ngolde.de/download/libacpi-0.2.tar.gz.

For those of you who are interested in ACPI on Linux especially in things like when it comes to ACPI vs. APM or why it is not usually not ACPIs fault that your suspend to disk is not working I can recommend the following paper presented at the Linux Symposium:
https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/2007/Reprints/brown_1-Reprint.pdf

Very interesting to read.
[via linux kernel monkey]

Yeah I now did an aptitude install molly-guard (I guess most sysadmins know this tool, thanks mika for the hint) after I
halt'ed modprobe.de by accident (Strato dedicated server). I was also able to reboot my file server at home 2 times last week because of.... ssh, well and of course bad shell prompts, inattention etc.

The tool is basically a replacement for halt, reboot and shutdown to prevent such accidents. To give you an impression what this looks like:

[root@bone] /home/nion/ halt
W: molly-guard: SSH session detected!
Please type in hostname of the machine to halt:

UPDATE from madducks comment:
Please note that etch's molly-guard has a bug that hits people running shutdown -h: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=426107.

I suggest to install version 0.3-1 from testing, which shall be in etch r2 soon.

deifl asked for a tool to indicate disk activity on the keyboard LEDs. There wasn't any tool doing this, just for IP traffic and other stuff.

Since I wrote a little led tool in the past and I wanted to know how disk activity is monitored by the kernel I wrote a small program for this.

Find it here: http://nion.modprobe.de/hdled.c.

After a few month typing on fairly new Cherry keyboard I felt somehow uncomfortable with it so I started searching for a new keyboard.

I thought about buying one of these natural ergonomic keyboards but they have two drawbacks, they have many additional function keys which are not supported by non-Window$ (zoom for example) and which I don't want and they are made by Microsoft.

My new keyboard is a Dell Spacesaver and I feel really comfortable with it,particularly because it has absolutely no special function keys (ok apart from the MS-key) and the flattened keys at the bottom of the keyboard feel really good when typing.