/home/freduardo

Hostnames, and ‘names’ in general are important. Clear and simple.
They make it easier for us to identify a machine or a node, especially on a network or a group of networks. If we would have to remember and recognize every machine or node by its IP address, or even worse its MAC address, it would all get very complicated.
Hostnames, and ‘names’ in general can also be fun. It’s fun to name things for a specific reason. Or at least, I think it is.

Anyway, to the point:
With all the new machines, networks, etcetera I now have around here, I needed to rethink some of the names I had given to my “things”, and also come up with some new ones.

Before, I’ve already explained my geeky, exaggerated method of naming my “stuff”. To summarize, I name them after characters from “The Godfather”.

And if you thought I was exaggerating back then, wait ’till you see the new list. This time I really went bonkers …

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Despite the slight issues I have experienced with any Linux distro on my laptop, I decided it was about time to finally wave goodbye to Windows Vista. Even with the acpi problems, I still preferred booting into Linux over Vista.
Plus it takes up a huge amount of hard disc space. Seriously, 20 GB for an OS install, is that really necessary?

So it’s gone. Free again at last! Free at last!

I’ve installed Ubuntu 8.04 x86_64 instead, mainly to test and monitor the patches and fixes System76 will release to resolve the battery and suspend issues on the daru2 models.
I’m probably not Ubuntu’s biggest fan, as I think it’s way too bloated out-of-the-box and because it’s tendency to avoid the command line almost at all cost annoys the hell out of me. But I have to admit that, if you have fast enough hardware, it is a great distribution for any Linux newcomer.

Nevertheless, I want to switch back to Arch as fast as possible. Therefore, I’m going to dualboot it with Ubuntu for as long as I’m having these issues. This will give me the chance to thoroughly test the patches/fixes/workarounds (whatever you want to call it), and at the same time I’ll be able to try and port them to my Arch install.

The laptop has a 250 GB hard drive, which is roughly 235 GB in reality. So what I did was create a 200 GB logical partition at the end of the drive for all my important data (music, school stuff, films, and so on). Then I added a 4.1 GB Swap partition. And finally I evenly split the rest of the free space between Ubuntu and Arch, so about 14 GB each.
Unfortunately I still lose 1000 MB on that silly Vista rescue partition, but I don’t want to remove this because I’m afraid I’d lose my warranty (or they’d at least be a bit upset about it) if I ever have to send it back for repairs.

I’ve already installed the full bloat of an Ubuntu Gnome desktop, so now I’m about to add a lightweight Arch + Openbox setup to it.

Again I know, but it’s just one of the most pressing linux-related issues I’m dealing with at the moment. And it probably won’t be the last blog post about it.

Anyway..

I did some further testing with the driver on Ubuntu Gutsy, followed up on the important topics on the Ubuntu Forums, and I learned a few more things:

As Jose commented correctly, suspend works, but only to a certain degree. I had set up the laptop to suspend automatically when the laptop lid was closed, and it did, but sometimes it wouldn’t wake up afterwards. Other times it would wake up, but when I wanted to shutdown later on, it hung. Forcing me to shut it down “the windows way” (keeping the power button pressed for ten seconds until it died).

The sound is indeed a bit flakey, but once you know how to handle it, the workaround is simple. When using a headphone jack, you basically have to make sure the front speakers are muted and the headphone switch is ticked on in the Gnome Volume Controls. This isn’t really a big problem as long as you use Gnome to control the volume, or something similar. I don’t know how I’m going to handle it when I set up Openbox, but if necessary I’ll just load up a small part of Gnome to get it working.

So apart from that, on Gutsy, the rest worked pretty well.

Alas, that is not all…

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Up to now, so for about seven months since I moved here, I’ve been using the DNS servers provided by my ISP. And they did the job well.
However lately, DNS resolving on all my computers got slower and slower.

First I thought it had something to do with ipv6 or so, but even after disabling that, it continued to be painfully slow.

Until yesterday I stumbled upon a similar issue on the Ubuntuforums, and so I followed the advice posted there, which was switching to the DNS servers of OpenDNS.

I replaced my old DNS server addresses with those of OpenDNS, being 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220, and I must say there’s a huge difference in speed, even compared to when the old ones were working good enough.

So if you’re experiencing this as well from time to time, you might want to give OpenDNS a shot.

Well, it does what it said it would.

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) x86_64 last night. After updating, I immediately installed the System76 driver and rebooted.

To summarize:
- Suspend works fine.
- Hibernate works fine.
- The battery state is indicated correctly.
- Alsa is b0rked.

I’m not really sure if alsa was already messed up when I was using Arch or even before applying the driver on Ubuntu. I was too distracted by the other issues to notice this. But now it’s definitely not working like it should.
Normal sound playback is working fine, but when you plug in a headphone jack, things get freaky. The front speakers continue to play sound, and through the headphones I just hear a lot of noise.

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I promise.

At least for a while

Yes you read it right, not entirely out of free will though.

In short, my laptop has some serious power management issues; If I understood correctly, the kernel continually receives interrupts from the battery, which somehow confuses it. This results in the OS never really knowing the state of the battery, or whether or not it’s running on AC power or on battery.
Sometimes the info displayed in /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state is correct for like 5 seconds, but most of the time it isn’t. Causing warnings of low battery, dimming and undimming of the screen, etcetera. All very annoying things.

Additionally, suspend and hibernate don’t work either. And it being a small laptop, intented for dragging along almost everywhere I go, it’s kind of essential that I manage to get that working properly.

So why would Ubuntu provide a solution that isn’t possible under Arch Linux ?

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Last week, I removed my craptastic 17″ CRT monitor from my old desktop (actually I moved the whole thing into another room as well). So I now have a home server again.

Nothing fancy though. Its just running Debian stable with Samba for filesharing with the windows computers, openssh and irssi in a screen session.  Its also NAT-forwarding to an old Linksys wireless router so that I can have a decent wireless connection in my room (our regular wireless network downstairs seems to be out of reach).

First thing on the to-do-list is setting up a decent firewall script with IPTABLES. This looks pretty complicated at first, but once you get the hang of all the different chains and rules, it’s all very logical.  The only thing that really makes it complicated is my silly network layout (with the two routers). So it’ll still require some tinkering.