Getting stuff working
Doc is trying to get EVDO working. Interesting to watch the troubleshooting process that Generation M goes through.
How to get stuff working
1. Read blogs and mailing list posts written by people who are trying nifty products. Search Google and Technorati for product names. Look at devices that people are carrying around at freedom-loving events, and ask how well they work. ("That's a cool camera, does it work with gPhoto?" is a good way to meet random people, too.)
2. Wait for someone to post an "I got (product) working" article that describes something you like, and is reasonably clear and spell-checked.
3. Do what that person did. When you go in to buy the product, reveal as little information about your intended use as possible to the product vendor.
4. If the product doesn't work right away, ask questions on the blog or list.
5. If you do have to call for hardware replacement, don't contradict any instructions that the support person gives you. "Send replacement" is at the end of a maze that includes a bunch of hoops for you to jump through.
By the way, "re-branding" AT&T Wireless as Cingular cost the phone company $4 billion (Advertising Age, registration required). Now they're switching the name back. Will they spend another $4 billion? Advertising consultant Judy Neer said, "To the real techies, they get it and they understand it. But to the average consumer, it's very confusing." She forgot the hate. Where's the hate? That $4 billion came from somewhere. Oooo, Jonathan Coulton ringtones!
(Personally I really wish they had kept "Cingular" so I wouldn't have to type & all the time, but I guess phone company name changes are the biggest dead-cat bounce for the TV industry since DTC pharmaceutical advertising. Maybe I'll just call the company T, since stock symbols are harder to change than brand names.)
Tue, 11 Jul 2006Hardware support models
(Updated: added link to Robert O'Callahan. Original posting date 28 July.)
The old Linux hardware support model, which basically amounted to releasing new hardware and waiting for the Linux developers to figure it out after it's been on the market for a while, is broken.
But so is the old proprietary OS hardware support model of putting software on a CD in a box, knowing that the OS will be updated while that box is being shipped to the store, and the OS running on the customer's system is unlikely to be the same as the one that you tested with.
Keith Shaw hits that one head-on. New security policies restrict some bundled software that must have worked fine when the hardware vendor tested it with a previous OS release.
What all hardware customers, regardless of OS, need is a driver process that recognizes three fundamental facts of life. First, people invent new hardware. Second, people discover security bugs and fix them. Third, if you don't test two pieces of software in combination, they're going to break when the user tries to run them.
I have a lot of hope for the Novell Partner Linux Driver Process. Also, Greg K-H (who works for Novell) comments on Microsoft's WinHEC and compares driver development models.
(Worst of all is the bastard spawn of the two hardware support models that people are now fighting in Linux 3D support. Jamey Sharp and Greg are making me happy about the future of this area, though. Between Intel's push into higher-performance 3D hardware and the r300 project's ATI support efforts, we should have a decent 3D scene soon.)
If you're interested in these issues, and in trying to come up with a driver development plan that works for your company and for the users, check out OSDL's Linux Open Drivers page. Upcoming event: Open Drivers Summit, which should cover some of the same things we talked about at FreedomHEC 2006, along with product management and legal considerations.
Mon, 10 Jul 2006Dude...
Dude, you're getting a fire! (via Paul McNamara.) Will the TSA start making you mail your Dell home?
I think that was a ThinkPad I saw in some recent International Space Station photos. Hope so.
Mon, 15 May 2006Wes Felter on driver lag
Wes Felter has some comments on the Linux driver process.
"I think release schedules and middlemen are a big problem for Linux drivers. A device vendor ends up with two middlemen between them and their customers. First the vendor submits a driver to linux-kernel, where it takes a month (best case) to get into an official kernel release. Then you wait 3-6 months for the next distro release that incorporates that kernel release. By the time the driver gets to the customers, the device is half obsolete. Worse, the only way to get the new driver is to upgrade the entire OS."
That's something to bring up at FreedomHEC, along with this discussion between Ben Williams and Greg K-H.
Best case for the Linux driver process is (1) plug in device (2) it works because your kernel already came with the driver (3) do your thing with your device and be happy. And given some advance planning, even the worst case, getting an updated kernel with backported drivers, shouldn't be too bad either.
Making users dork around with driver discs or "click here to agree with legal mumbo-jumbo and install driver" isn't the answer. That only gets you to "as easy as" proprietary OS products, and the freedom-loving side has to take advantage of every available opportunity to exceed the legacy OSs in usability.
Sat, 15 Apr 200620 Volts? Are you mad?
I have 16V power supplies behind the couch, behind the bed, on my home office desk, on my desk at work, in my laptop bag, and in the cabinet by the dining room table. I don't have to worry about finding a power supply, or what happens if one breaks.
I'm living the 16V Everywhere Lifestyle
and loving it. (Time to fire up Button
Maker by Adam Kalsey....
)
There's only one thing that Lenovo could do to get me to abandon all my perfectly good power supplies and buy a 20V laptop.
Tip: if you're worried about the power connector on the laptop breaking when some clumsy person kicks the power supply, just put Velcro on the back of the laptop and stick the Velcro strap from the power cord to it. The tug gets absorbed by the strap, not the connector.
Mon, 26 Dec 2005Intel graphics
Good notes on the Desktop Architect ("Dumbledore's Army") meeting at OSDL, from Dan Kegel. "Intel is currently doing things right; their graphics hardware isn't the highest performance, but their drivers are open. We should focus on a positive message praising companies that do have open source drivers."
So, yay Intel. You just sold me my next motherboard.
Fri, 02 Sep 2005alt.fan.altivec
Fired up about the advantages of Altivec over SSE, SSE2, and SSE3? You can still get rack-mount PowerPC boxes.
Sun, 17 Apr 2005Actiontec HWC01170-01
Fry's, $29.90. Works with the Orinoco driver but does not have an external antenna connector as the Orinoco cards do. It's flat enough to fit two in two neighboring PCMCIA slots but I didn't get two so don't know how well this would work interference-wise.
To make this card work, put this in /etc/pcmcia/actiontec.conf and restart PCMCIA:
card "Actiontec HWC01170-01"
version "ACTIONTEC", "PRISM Wireless LAN PC Card", "0381", "RevA"
bind "orinoco_cs"
Feature set for a 3D card
Hugh Fisher writes, "Over the past four or five years a huge gap has grown between what the hard core 3D gaming market wants, and what everybody else who does 3D wants."
Syba SD-ATA133R
The Syba SD-ATA133R works with Linux 2.6.8. It's based on the Silicon Image (formerly CMD Technology) SIL0680. I haven't tried the RAID 0 or RAID 1 feature of this card, just Linux software RAID.
Notes on keeping the desktop machine quiet, version two.
Distance is your friend. Position the desktop machine as far away from your ears as possible. With a USB hub, you can run one long VGA cable and one long USB cable from the system unit to your work area, and you can use a USB CD or DVD drive so that you don't need to be near the box.
Position the box on the other side of furniture from you. Put it on a carpeted surface.
Feel for resonant sheet metal parts and move any vibrating parts away from them. Some people use Dynamat, but it's probably overkill for most cases. Check for rattles.
Tighten all screws and Velcro all cables.
Use smartmontools to monitor drive temperature and Lm_sensors to monitor CPU temperature. Monitoring means you don't have to over-cool.
Install a Zalman ZM400B-APS power supply. It's thermostatically controlled.
Install a Zalman CNPS7000A-Cu CPU cooler, with the pot cranked all the way down. Crank it up if your CPU is running hot.
(That does quite a bit for two obvious noise sources -- the power supply fan and the processor fan. That leaves the hard drive.)
Use a Seagate Barracuda hard drive.
Install lots and lots of RAM.
Use tmpfs for /tmp.
Make /var/tmp a symlink to /tmp
Set a long "commit" for the ext3 filesystems, except /home, in /etc/fstab.
(Yes, folks, there is such a thing as the "commit" option. Don't believe the man page.)
Set a reasonable hdparm spindown time (on Debian, you can do this in /etc/hdparm.conf)
Sneak up behind the VM subsystem and throw salt on its tail:
echo 120000 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs echo 90 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio echo 90 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
(From LWN -- I'll have to modify this when I have a kernel with laptop mode on the box.)
Disable MARK in syslog with "-m 0"
set xscreensaver to do an APMS blank instead of running a display hack -- yes, finding a random hack will make the drive spin up.
turn off your web browser's on-disk cache, and crank up the memory cache.
Antec SLK 1650B
This is a high-quality, reasonably-priced mid-tower case that has a good work-inside design as well as some nice touches for quiet PC aficionados.
The company calls it a mini-tower, but if you get 3 5.25 in. bays and you can see the top of the motherboard without removing the power supply, I call it a mid-tower.
The 3.5 in. drive cage has three sets of rubber grommets for the drives, along with special screws to mount them.
There's a hole in the side panel over where the CPU usually is, with an 80mm duct attached. You can attach an 80mm fan to the inside of the panel and re-mount the duct. This might let you get rid of a fan on the CPU heat sink.
To open it up, remove two thumbscrews, slide off the top panel, and lift off the side panels.
It comes with a big 120mm fan in back below the power supply, and there are places for two 80mm fans -- the side panel one mentioned above, and one more in front at the bottom.
Unusual feature: three, count 'em, three, hard drive LEDs.
And it's not Dumbass PC Beige. Hooray!
(The same company does a fanless PC power supply.)
Down with wall warts
Rich Sharples echoes Douglas Adams and writes, "My house is full of these little black umbilicals - every time I buy a new gadget - half of the box is taken up by the adapter and they are all different - every manufacturer of gadgets has a different adapter and they change them every time they change the model"
We already have a standard low-voltage power interface -- USB. Make phones, cameras, and portable music players charge from USB, and that means you're schlepping one transformer, for the laptop. Helps clean up the desk at home, too.
--
Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>
