Tag Archives: linux
May 13, 2009 Kuki 3.0 Pre Release 1.7 for the AA1 quick review
I’ve been trying a lot of distros on the aa1 recently, I’ve tried all Ubuntus from 8.04 till 9.04, sidux, slitaz, madbox, and now Kuki Linux.
Kuki linux is made specifically for the AA1, so I was expecting something nice. I only tried it live from usb, so this is what I got.
On hardware performance and recognition, everything kinda works. Webcam, audio, baterry recognition, wireless (good performance btw) no problem whatsoever. Wired I didn’ try but it should be working.
In terms of graphics I was initially very disappointed with the streaming flash video performance. Then I read the release announcement more closely and it seems they have a “special” xorg configuration that boosts the performance tremendously. I was skeptical, but stupidily so. The xorg configuration they made is great, I mean it’s as good as it gets. I had just tried Ubuntu 9.04 before and flash video was terrible. With their conf you can get daily show with no problem whatsoever, facebook videos with normal quality rolling beautifully, youtube not even worth mentioning. Fullscreen works great too. Glxgears outputs ~570fps. Gentlemen, they did it, hat’s off!
Card recognition depends on which one you’re looking at. The left one works great. Hot plugging working by default, and it’s really fast, wait where’s the bold, oh, really fast. You plug the card in and dare I say in less than one second Thunar pops up. My balls dropped. The right one isn’t working out of the box, but according to this post on the forums they have a solution, so it’s just a matter of making it to the distro. Strange bug though, after I tried the right card reader and then put the card back in the left reader, it stopped working. Not too worried honestly.
Software wise, you get the general assortment of xfce (4.6) apps. You know, mousepad, the ex xarchiver and shit. Then I think they made weird choices on programs. Ok, I take that back, it just comes with programs I don’t like. Audacious for audio playing, Mplayer for video. Ever heard of vlc? Bah. Also comes with this thing called “Zim Desktop Wiki” I have no idea why. A lame looking ebook reader. No office apps as of yet, not even abi word. But I’ll confess my ignorance, i don’t know what are the plans for the future on this end and I didn’t bother to look up. Either way, if you install this, you’re on your own, but this is ubuntu running underneath so installing anything I’m sure is dead basic.
Oh, almost forgot. Networking done by wicd which is awesome. I fucking hate network manager and this was really good to see. Works wonders.
Now the visuals. I was really happy when I saw that the login screen. I don’t have a screenshot but it looks really nice. The color looks really good on the screen, the fonts are beautifull. Then you login, and the background doesn’t flicker or anything, it goes straight to the desktop in this really awesome integrated experience. Sad part is, you walk beautifull to reach this sad thing
Holy shit. Why so sad?
No I don’t know if it’s just me, but I hate xfce. Seriously. Thunar (the file manager) aside, it’s horrible. Look at the font on the clock. Doesn’t it break your heart? Virtual desktops are vertical instead of horizontal, no option to change it. Bah. The icons on the desktop have no reason to be uncool, but for some reason they just look terrible. Maybe it’s because of the color background behind the name of the file. Maybe it’s because they look realistic and the rest of the desktop looks like ugly cartoons. Now look at this
Please stop, I can't take it anymore
Window border is horrific. Default gray makes me so sad I wanna cry. It’s this kind of prison gray, innit? Oh man it’s just awfull. You know, after coming from Ubuntu 9.04 using the awesome dust theme I look at this and just make a sad face. And really after trying madbox my standards in terms of looks just exploded thru the roof, just look at this
Now this is what I'm talking about
So ok, let’s make a conclusion. I couldn’t test suspend and hibernation, but I think that’s working out of the box in Ubuntu 9.04 so I guess it’s working, but anyway. In terms of what really matters, kuki wins big time. Performance is great, hardware recognition getting very close to perfect, boot time is good too. I didn’t try it, but I used the same kernel in ubuntu and it was good then, since kuki uses even less services and shit it can only be faster. Where it loses is in using xfce which i hate, they should have sticked to lxde godamnit!, and on the desktop appearance. But this can be worked out, although I never saw any good looking xfce desktop to be honest. It’s one of those things you can leave for last, but guys, aim for the top, for the ubber distro, and do something about it. After that you can all demand preferential treatment from us, the idiots, because you godamn deserve it. Gentlemen, it took a long time but we’re getting very close. Hat’s off!
Ps: I wonder what happens if I stick that xorg conf on ubuntu 9.04 running lxde or something.hm
Tags: AA1, acer, analysis, aspire, distribution, distro, kuki, last, latest, linux, new, newest, one, opinion, org, performance, review, ubuntu, video, x, xorg
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- Posted under AcerAspireOne, software
March 29, 2009 Making Firefox Prism and Google Gears get along the easy way
Yeah, it’s disappointing but if you install prism (both with the firefox extension, which I use, and installing by the reps) there’s no google gears for you.
Since this sucks, there are workarounds. The reference blog post is in brain dump, if you feel like dwelving thru the comments go ahead. Here’s the complete guide, no editing and no command line involved
1-Download the modded gears-linux-opt.xpi (my mirror)
2-To load the prism thing, you will need to first convert whatever website you’re interested in tools->”convert website to application” and create a shortcut in the desktop. The icon will most probably look like shit, but ignore that for now.
3-Install google gears on prism by going to the menu->tools->add-ons and drag and drop the file you downloaded.
4-After restarting prism you will see that gears is shouting already that it’s installed. Now when it asks if you want to create a desktop shortcut say yes because this one will have the nice icon.
You will need to do this on every web app you want to have on your desktop, there is no global google gears intallation for prism but a local installation for every web app you have.
Naturally, here’s the shot to prove I speak the truth
Hurray
Tags: 3, 8.04, 8.10, add, add-on, calendar, debian, extension, failure, fedora, firefox, gears, google, how, icon, instal, install, installation, linux, low, milk, on, prism, quality, remember, shitty, slitaz, the, to, ubuntu, ugly
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February 23, 2009 Tune your guitar in Linux the easy way
If you want to tune your guitar in linux, you’re in for some trouble. Compiling code, problems with audio etc etc. There are millions of guitar tuners for windows, why does it have to be so complicated in linux? The solution? Use one of those millions using wine.
The package is wine, the program I’m using is Digital Guitar Tuner, chosen randomly from tucows.com .
On Ubuntu 8.10, it just works. Double click the installer, install, access program from menu. There is some tweaking you can do in the options to control the expected noise level, I’m using something close to 30. There is no extra configuration needed, not in the tuner itself, not in the audio options in wine. If it doesn’t work, you probably have problems with the audio set-up.
Tags: 8.04, 8.10, debian, easy, fourier, guitar, install, installation, linux, transform, tune, tuner, ubuntu
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- Posted under software
October 27, 2008 Oct 28th get Crossover for free
Tomorrow, the 28th of October, get Crossover for free at http://www.codeweavers.com. I’ve been using an illegal copy of the program and now feel much better.
Here‘s the press release explaining what happened.
Official site for download.
(For those of you who don’t know, Crossover is a program very similar to wine that runs windows applications farely well. I’ll spare the details of the relation between wine and crossover, but some stuff really works great on crossover. office 2003 is impecable, photoshop CS2 is very acceptable. Give it a try!)
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October 21, 2008 Using Ubuntu 8.04? Get Flash Player 10 now
Have you tried flash 10? Almost good. Works better than 9 with pulseaudio, more lightweight and gives smoother videoplayback.
First off, remove flash 9 and libflashsupport if you installed it (if you have sound normaly in flash, without killing or tweaking pulseaudio, then you probably have). Close firefox or whatever browser first!
sudo aptitude remove flashplugin-nonfree libflashsupport
Now finally to download and install Adobe Flash Player 10 , issue the following command :
wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_10_linux.deb
sudo dpkg -i install_flash_player_10_linux.deb
Done. In Firefox if you type “about:plugins” in the address bar you should see flash 10 listed.
If you don’t like the command line, use synaptic to remove the packages, go to adobe’s site to download the .deb and double click it. But it will take 10 times more time than just copy paste this ; -)
Now, if you don’t have any sound like I did, this will probably do the trick
sudo aptitude install libasound2-plugins
asoundconf set-pulseaudio
But I haven’t rebooted so I’m just hoping the fix survives it because I have no idea what asoundconf does.
If it doesn’t work, then probably this post in ubuntu geek is the place to look.
This post was worth 1h30m of my time digging in google. Goddamnit sometimes linux pisses me off.
And by the way, my last post achieved some notorielaty. Quite amazin. Thx for reading, hope you enjoy the blog and give linux a try!
Tags: 10, adobe, audio, flash, install, linux, no, player, problem, pulse, pulseaudio, sound, ubuntu
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- Posted under software
October 5, 2008 Flock seems pretty cool
Just installed their latest 1.26 version. I’m currently writing this thru the browser, and want to test it out.
You can download it at www.flock.com, what you get is a .tar.gz with lots of stuff. Among them a binary file called “flock” that starts the browser.
There is a dependency you must install before running flock, which is the package libstdc++5 in ubuntu 8.04 or libstdc++6 in ubuntu 8.10
You can probably run the “flock” binary by double clicking it, but if that doesn’t work, it’s just a matter of hitting “./flock” in the terminal, in the correct folder.
Just found out that there is no option to center text in the default editor, and no option to directly upload an image. It only allows to insert images already hosted somewhere, thru the url That sucks. Saving drafts seems to work ok though
Now I’m editing it thru wordpress. As you can see, the tags are there but not in the wordpress default way. It just adds them to the end of the post. Strange stuff. Now I can add the screenshot
Here it is. Lacking some features unfortunately.
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October 2, 2008 Old habits die slowly – Real Player on linux
I recently discovered the new paradigm of downloading stuff. Back in the day, you wanted music you used soulseek, movies emule, anything torrents. That’s how I did it anyway, but now ilegally downloading content by violating international copyright laws is much easier. You don’t need programs, what you need is go to google and write “want you want rapidshare”. From what I understand, rapidshare has lifted it’s
Oh my fucking god
restrictions on free users. You get somewhere between 50-70secs of waiting, and a partially limited bandwith. But since you can download as much as you want, I seriously don’t care.
So the other day, this guy french that lives with me recommended this anime called “Monster”. In about 5 seconds I was in this page. 30-40 megs per episode, decent quality hosted on rapidshare just a click away?
Fuck me life is good.
The videos are in .rvmb format, which is typical of Real Player. Naturally, the videos weren’t playing in linux. I don’t know if you are familiar with real player, if you’re from that time. I am. And if you’re like me, you don’t like Real Player. At all. Maddox put it nicely:
“Back in the late 90s, everyone used Real Player. Then those cocks at Real Network got greedy, and tried to get their application to take over your entire PC, and people stopped using it.”
Yes, I have a very nice theme
So I runned desperated to google trying to find a solution, partially because Iassumed there was no linux version of real player, and even if there was one, there’s was no godamn way I was going to submit to using a player that included a web browser, horrible UI, anonymous usage statitics, advertisements, anoying popups all over the place, hell knows what the fuck. But after those 20minutes of basic failing every stupid fucking solution available on the internet, from compiling add-ons to mplayer to doing a one hand stand eating dogshit, I found out that there was a linux version of real player. Screw it, I’m tired, let’s do it.
Not bad. Seriously, I was impressed. Plain GTK, works ok, the progress bar is a little funny, but it works like it does in youtube, you click in a point of the bar and it goes straight there, instead of progressing a given amount, like in totem you know? Goddamn I hate totem. So overall, solid player, no bullshit. Did Real Networks gave up on their idiot ways? Had they confined themselves to making just a video player? Abandoned the strategy of applications that automatically include themselves in the start-up list and defaulting themselves for all the file types it plays?
Just today I found out the following.
You evil bastards
Old habits die slowly I guess.
Tags: anime, linux, monster, real player, review
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August 19, 2008 Backspace in firefox
One thing that always annoyed me using firefox 2 (i dont use 3, memory hungry and too heavy) in linux is that backspace doesn’t work as in windows, bringing you to the previous page. Taken from ubuntu.wordpress.com :
Type “about:config” in the address bar of Firefox and press Enter.
`Filter` for ‘browser.backspace_action’ and change its value to 0 (zero)
and voila, backspace’s working again 
July 22, 2008 It’s just when you’re about to…
… show linux to your sister that nautilus decides it’s not going to work.
“Oh, it’s so pretty! that cube is insane!”
And then I plug a usb external hard drive and guess what? Instead of mounting, it’s give me an error. What’s the problem? It can’t automount the hard drive because it’s in NTFS.
There are bugs, then there’s this, and there’s a sister that’s not going to try out free software because “it’s shit and nothing works!!!”
Damn.
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- Posted under bugs
July 3, 2008 Huawei HSDPA (3G) modem on linux
I’m from portugal and a couple of years ago this internet over 3G networks came to the market. I am *unlucky* enough to own of those slow things, and I have one of those white huaweii modems, like in the picture. Setting this up to work in linux was of the biggest battles I fought. And from what I read in Linux Format (UK magazine), it’s a common problem because it’s hell to get it to work properly. I finally got it to work, and learned a few helpfull things:
1- The modem is correctly recognized if it’s already plugged in when you turn on the computer, if you plug it in afterwards it won’t work. This happens because the modem is treated both as a mass storage device and a modem and the kernel flips. (there is a work around, I’ll talk about it in a minute)
2- The program used to connect to the internet is wvdial (comes with ubuntu) and you have to edit it’s configuration file (/etc/wvdial.conf) to make the connection work. There is a program to configure it automatically (wvconf I believe) but it didn’t work for me. Instead of wvdial you can use gnome-ppp, which is basically a GUI for wvdial but honestly, the program sucks.
3- Sometimes the dns address isn’t correctly extracted from the modem. It’s a possible signal this is happening if the led on the modem stops blinking, but you have no internet access. Defining the correct dns address in wvdial.conf didn’t work for me, probably due to a bug in wvdial.Handwriting the correct one in /etc/resolv.conf solves the issue, something like
sudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf
One of the most difficult parts is trying to figure out what configuration you have to put in wvdial.conf. There are a lot of different fields such as modem type, phone number, username, password etc. Asides from the hardware parts, the configuration is specific to each mobile carrier (I think that’s the word). Some ask for the password (which is the pin of sim card) others don’t, the username may vary. Who knows. Chances are some linux geek figured it out for you, but you’ll have to google it.
I’m attaching the configuration file for my mobile operator Optimus to this post and write some instructions in portuguese because it kind of makes sense. The attachment is wvdialconf.odt because wordpress limits the filetypes you can upload, so just rename the file to wvdial.conf and you’re good to go. Stupid, I know. Not my fault…
One last note about plugging the modem after booting the pc. I found a shell script that correctly mounts the modem, but I don’t have it right now and I think it was broken in linux version 2.6.24-16. The current version is 19, I’ll try and find it, test it and then post it here for future reference.
Agora em portugues, vou fazer copypaste dum email que mandei para um amigo meu. Deu à primeira com ele, e comigo tambem da por isso deve funcionar. Outra vez, isto e para modem huaweii como os da foto e para o serviço Kanguru da Optimus.
“Se tas a correr o ubuntu 8.04, ta td fixe pq o WvDial ja vem de origem e nao tens k instalar nada. Se tas com o 7… achas k tas fdd, tem depencias que nunca mais acabam.
substitui o teu /etc/wvdial.conf por
[Dialer 640k]
Init6 = AT+CGEQMIN=1,4,64,640,64,640
Init7 = AT+CGEQREQ=1,4,64,640,64,640
[Dialer kanguru]
Init2 = ATZ
Init3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
ISDN = 0
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Stupid Mode = 1
Modem Type = Analog Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99***1#
Modem = /dev/ttySL0
Username = myconnection
Dial Command = ATDT
Password = 8159
Baud = 460800
[Dialer 3gonly]
Init4 = AT+COPS=0,0,”Vodacom-SA”,2
Agora na secçao dialer defaults, a password é o pin do cartao. Eu tb nao sabia o meu, liguei pa la e os gajos disseram-me. É a unica coisa que tens que mudar. Para começar é so
wvdial kanguru
Nota1: Se keres k o modem monte direito, liga o pc ja com o modem ligado, nao o ligues so depois do ubuntu ter começado pq senao da merda. Qualquer merda com o modulo do kernel que ninguem sabe explicar.
Nota2:As ultimas linhas que o wvdial apresenta na consola mostram o ip e o dns. No meu caso, o dns é constante mal configurado. E assim, o modem fica com a luzinha ligada mas nao ha internet pa ninguem. Soluçao e veres quais os servidores dns correctos numa ligaçao do kanguru em windows, e depois metes isso em /etc/resolv.conf”
“
And that’s that. Follow up posts about the modem mounting script and an application I’m programming will ensue in due time. I’m currently in exams and I have zero spare time. I wrote this because I took an afternoon off after an electromagnetic waves exam.
And btw, just wanna say hi to the guy who wrote a comment in my first post. thanx dude : -)
attached: wvdialconf.odt
Tags: connect, connection, E220, HSDPA, huawei, huaweii, kanguru, linux, modem, optimus, wvdial, wvdial.conf
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- Posted under Hardware
