The World of a Penguin

I installed Ubuntu, Eee-edition, on my Eee 900. One strange thing happened when I booted from my USB-memory to start the installation. The bootprocess halted. I removed the splasch to see what happened. Same thing again and I didn't get any clue. I removed the USB-stick and put it in another USB-port. Then suddenly the boot continued. The rest of the installation get smootly thanks to the instructions at Ubuntu-eee project site . I love that I now have the same environment on my Eee as on my desktop.

I have finally got an Eee 900. I am happy. The question is: Install Ubuntu or keep preinstalled Lin ux?

Or to be more corrects; parts to build a new computer. My idea is to have one desktop computer and one cheap small laptop like EeePC . I ordered: A new silent power supply Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3 AMD 770 chipset AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.5GHz 4GB RAM PC6400 CL4 DVD burner Dual-layer ATI HD 2600 Pro graphics card I will use an old box and old screen I already has. My priority was to get something not to expensive that is upgradeable to some extent. The motherboard can have 16GB of memory. I hope this will work smoothly with Ubuntu Linux.

It is my duty to inform you all that Pluto, my dear MSI S271 Laptop with Ubuntu has past away after an accident earlier this week . My attempt to bring Pluto to life has failed. He can't get any new power. I had hoped that his life should not end so fast.

Monday evening I accidentally dropped my laptop on the floor. At a first glance everything worked. But yesterday I observed that I was running on battery and that it did not charged. I checked the power adapter and it worked. First I run a new backup before further investigations. Afterwards I started unassemble the laptop. When I finally saw the power connector the positive poles sold were broken. When I dropped the laptop the power connector must have taken the hit. Today I started glue the plastic parts of the connector. Later I will solder the connector. I can only hope it will work. Wish me luck! Until the laptop is fixed I have to use my wifes laptop Piglet which also uses Ubuntu.

My wife is in London right now so I took the opportunity to upgrade her laptop Piglet (a Zepto 6014w) to run Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). It worked smoothly and Compiz is working great. The upgrade took less time than the roast I had in the oven. It is actually quite boring to write about this since it worked too well. No problem and no surprises. the lack of surprises mostly depends on that I have been using Gutsy for a while on my laptop.

According to the Swedish computer newspaper TechWorld OpenSource ( article in Swedish ) the Danish Laptop provider Zepto sells one of four computers without operating system. My wife bougth one half a year ago. It works terrific with Linux, in her case Ubuntu. I would not hesitate to buy my next laptop from them. Zepto sells computer on mail order all over Europe. I do not understand in what the major computer providers sees the problem. May be I do, it is called Microsoft.

I wrote yesterday that hibernate did not work for me in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). The solution was easy, I changed from the closed source fglrx to the open sourced driver ati. After that can my MSI S271 hibernate again. Information about the bug in fglrx can be found here . I continue to play around with Gutsy. Network-manager is now working. Entered the configuration dialog and activated roaming configuration and then restarted the networking init-script: sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

After have used Ubuntu 7.10 a little more than a week I have got some experiences, bote positive and negative. I have not spend any time to try to fix the problems I have, yet. So there may be solutions to them. The computer I have used Ubuntu 7.10 is my laptop MSI S271 with a AMD-CPU and a ATI graphics card. Lets start with the bad things. Hibernation have stopped working and I have found on the forums that I am not alone. This is definitely my biggest problem so far. I got disappointed that I can't use Compiz. It may work if I change driver I have not tested that. Both the new open source driver xgl and the older one may be candidates. Currently am I using fglrx Several sites have written today that AMD/ATI has released a new driver, that may be another solution. The network manager seems still not working for me, but thats no big deal for me. I can use wireless and it is not to big deal to change SSID and network in the old fashioned way. Finally I have some problems with pid...

After reading this I have started drooling to run Gutsy on my laptop. I love to use the dynamic configurations of the screen. But most of all I love each minute of longer battery time I can get. The article talks about empirical test given 33% more battery time. Guys, I would still love you if its only were 3%. The question is; can I wait until the final release?

A while ago Dell had a vote on the Internet about what Linux distributions we as users wanted on their desktops and laptops. Now, Lenovo does the same thing . It looks like it will be much easier to buy a laptop next time, without paying the Microsoft tax. Source: IDG, TechWorld .

This week I got a mail from a guy that wondered about CPU-scaling on MSI S271 running Ubuntu. Since I have had a lot to do I have not had the time to answer it yet. Today I planned to answer the mail, but I can't find it. It's gone, cant be find in my gmail-box. So if you who wrote it read this, you are welcome to contact me again. The mailer had some problems to get CPU-scaling work with Ubuntu using a AMD-CPU TL-56, which is the same CPU I have. There may be more people interested in this issue. For me the CPU-scaling worked out of the box. To check the CPU-scaling add the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor to the panel. In the kernel used in Feisty and earlier Ubuntu versions there is only support to for two speeds of AMD CPU:s, full and half speed. I have read somewhere that more scaling is on its way. It would be nice if someone could confirm this. As far as I know the CPU-scaling is included in AMD Powernow-technology. I have to scripts starting in my runlevel 2, check the /et...

When I ordered my MSI S271 I ordered it with 1GB of memory. When I bought more memory to my and my wifes cameras I also bought 1GB more to my laptop. Yesterday when the memory arrived I discovered that I not had the right Philips driver. A PH-00 screwdriver is needed. I bought one today and have now installed the extra memory in the laptop. I got a lot of help of the assembly guide from MSI. The assembly guide was a bit tricky to find since it was written for the MSI S262 (MS-1057), which is more or less the same computer as MSI S271(MS-1058). You need to go throw step 1-1 to 1-11 to expand the memory. Be very careful when you remove the keyboard in step 1-7 to 1-9, the keyboard cable is very fragile. Then you will see were to put the memory. It was covered with some aluminum foil in my computer. How to put the memory into the slot is described in step 3 in the assembly guide. The MSI S271 has two memory slots and can, according to the documentation , have 2GB of memory. The memory ty...

I have now installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on my wifes laptop from Zepto . It's a 6014W . I do my installation, as usual, through network boot (PXE). I noticed that Zepto has the same bug as my MSI S271 in BIOS for PXE-boot. It will only bot through PXE some times, with no clear pattern when. Unfortunately, I do not like the LVM-configuration in the text based installation. The installation worked smoothly, except the LVM-part. The cause was that I wanted to change what partitions to create. The resolution for the screen got right in the xorg.con-file, but not in the reality. The xorg.conf said 1280x800 but the display showed 1024x768. The solution, which is not obvious, is to install the package 915resolution. I would like to see this installed by default. No extra configuration needed. The default volume control must be remapped to work to another controller in the mixer. The sound worked out of the box. Other things we have tested are: The wireless and network manager works...

It is official that Dell will ship Ubuntu on some of their desktops and laptops. I can imagine that CEO:s at Novell and Red Hat are dragging their hair until they get bald as Steve Ballmer. They will wounder why they have not been able to write such an agreement with any of the major suppliers of client-machines. The answer is pretty simple; Ubuntu is a great desktop system that can be used by most people. It is cheap, or to be correct free. There are a community that are willing to answer questions from anyone in a lot of different languages. Who is up for the next deal? HP, Lenovo ... and with whom? Ubuntu again or will any of Red Hat and Novell take it? Congratulation Mark , Cannonical , and of course all in the Community. This is a big day for Ubuntu and for Linux.

Our "favorite" company SCO is trade at $0.80. This is the lowest value per share since 2002. As we had read on several news sites is now facing the risk of delisting from Nasdaq. I hope the court affairs around Linux soon will end and SCO goes bankruptcy. They have not provided any proof at all that they are right in their accuses against IBM etc. My wife are waiting for her new laptop that she has ordered from Zepto a week ago. They are kind to provide their computers without any Microsoft tax. I'll install Ubuntu 7.04 on it as soon as it arrives.

I tried to use earphones with my MSI S271 running Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) and it works. Yay!!! It did not work when I used Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) and now it works with no extra configuration. I can now listen to presentations and look on videos when traveling with train.

I installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) yesterday evening. I have tried it out a bit more today and continuously new nice features. One of the features I like most is that suspend works out of the box on my laptop (MSI S271). Another feature that I feel is very important is the suggestion feature where the desktop suggest what software you should install to be able to open a file. I will not repeat what every body else on the web are writing at the moment. The reception from boot the community and the press has been enormous. I have loved each new Ubuntu release more than the previous and 7.04 is not an exception. I already look forward for the next release, Gutsy Gibbon. I will also try to provide a more complete packaging of AppArmor for Ubuntu.

I don't know how I should interpret this . Is it a complain? My wife wrote in her blog about my desk containing one laptop, two desktop computers, a 20" CRT, two keyboards, and three mice. Under the desk I have another computer. My laptop and the computer under the desk runs Edgy and the other two desktops runs Feisty.

Except from having a terrible cold this week I have been at two seminaries. The first one was Red Hat and JBoss Value² Tour. Red Hat clearly show that they have entered into the offices of managers, CEOs, CIOs, VPs etc. They also show that they want to lock you in as any other vendor, but they can defend themself that at least the source is open. From a commercial and organizational perspective I think they do one important thing wrong. They are still not shipping proprietary drivers such as wireless, graphic cards, codecs etc. This means that as a system manager one must still handle these things to give the users a pleasant drive on the desktop. Here is an area where other providers such as Suse and also Ubuntu have done a tremendous job. On the other hand Suse trie to lock us in with Yast, even if it is open source, which makes it harder to manage from central point. Ubuntu on the other hand lack of kerberos/ldap/AD integration in main, which is a demand in many organizations. Red H...