Holy Crap! I think it works!

OK, first off: Pardon me for the language, and pardon me for making yet another boring blog post about the PR200 and its acpi/battery issues. But I might have discovered something interesting here…

Last week I installed CentOS 5.2 on my laptop.
Why? I really can’t tell. For some reason I wanted to try something different but stable. And since I already had a short fling with CentOS a while back, but didn’t feel like I had given it a decent chance, I just chose to give it another go.

Anyway, I got it installed pretty smoothly, with the fully bloated GNOME desktop and all the other bells and whistles (except for compiz). And then I noticed that little icon in the System menu. It said “Suspend” next to it. Not expecting a great deal from it, I clicked it.

AND IT WORKED! Seriously. The laptop went to sleep. The power button flashed (which it is supposed to while suspended). And when I pressed the button, the laptop came back to life completely hassle-free.

Being a very skeptical, suspicious guy, I though it must have been a fluke. No other distro I had tried before did that out-of-the-box. In fact the only distro that managed to suspend the laptop was Ubuntu 7.10, but only after applying the System76 driver. And even then it didn’t always wake up like it should have, or it wouldn’t shut down properly afterwards, or the wireless would refuse to wake back up and reconnect,…

This time though, it woke up, I could reconnect to my wireless AP with one mouse-click, and the laptop shut down properly when asked to. Amazing!

Clearly a lot more testing is needed, before I go out there (well, here actually) and announce to the world that it works, like … properly. I already made the mistake of claiming that some of the issues were fixed, and five kernel builds later it was all messed up again. I’m not going to make an ass out of myself again (at least not consciously).

So, give me some time to do some testing (or try it yourself if you want to) and I’ll keep you updated.

Gentoo… finally.

I’ve been using Linux for almost five years now. And I think I can say that I’ve slowly but surely evolved from a total noob, who really didn’t know much about computers in general, to a reasonably skilled, intermediate user.

Back in 2004, when I first popped in my Mandrake (10-Community) installation discs, Gentoo Linux was probably near it’s peak of popularity. All the ‘cool cats’ seemed to be using this quite revolutionary distribution, which allowed you to (literally) build your own system to your own liking. Much like you would on an LFS system.

Of course this also meant that Gentoo wasn’t for inexperienced users. The installation procedure was long and rather complex, and configuration was only possible through a lot of CLI ‘magic’. Once set up though, a Gentoo system was the fastest around, as everything would be adapted to your specific hardware.
In short; Gentoo was for the elite, and I wasn’t part of them.

At least, that was what I thought about Gentoo, and its users, at that time.

Of course, I was (partially) wrong.
Yes, Gentoo is fast, reasonably complex to install and its users (at least the ones who managed to properly set it up on their own) are likely to be be quite experienced Linux users.
But no, it’s not the one and only Linux distro for the “leet”. And the CLI magic is just another, sometimes more efficient, way of maintaining a system.

Irrespectively, I’ve always wanted to try out Gentoo. Just to see what all the fuss was about. But I never got around to doing it. At first, I didn’t feel experienced enough to give it a shot. And later on, I was satisfied with Arch Linux, so I saw no need for change. Consequently, trying out Gentoo has been on my bucket list for quite some time.

Until about a month ago…

Yes, I finally did it.
Since my desktop wasn’t really used for anything serious, I wiped the Ubuntu install that was temporarily on there and installed Gentoo. Actually, I installed and re-installed it four times, just to make sure I did everything right.

Installation
If you’re somewhat familiar with the basic steps of an install procedure, and know a little bit what the important building bricks of an operating system are, then installing Gentoo really isn’t all that difficult. If you follow the handbook’s instructions (read it through before starting) it should be very feasible. Its elaborate, a bit time consuming, but very doable.

It’s also pretty important to know your hardware, ao. because you’ll be compiling your own kernel during the installation.*

Is it fast?
Obviously, installing software isn’t. Since Portage compiles everything with your own MAKE flags and USE flags. Especially if you like to use a lot of “big” software packages (like a DE, Openoffice, etcetera) it will take quite some time to set it all up.

I kept it all pretty slim, with only a few lightweight apps, X of course, and both dwm and Openbox as window managers. But even I found it a little bit annoying to have to wait until everything was compiled and set up.**

Gentoo with dwm and thunar.

Both the boot time, and the overall feel of the system is fast though. I can’t really express how fast, since I don’t have any benchmarks to compare it with. But all I can say is that it certainly feels just as fast as e.g. Arch Linux does.

Do I like it?
Yes, I do.

I had a few problems/annoyances choosing which USE flags to … erm … use. But once I settled on a set of flags and re-emerged everything. I really liked how everything worked. Choosing your USE flags is a learning process by itself. At first, I wasn’t really sure what to pick, so I picked way too many. But after some time, I managed to weave out some of the useless ones, and I think I got it right after a while.

Portage is a very thorough and efficient, package manager. If you use the ~x86 keyword, you get about the same level of updated packages you’d get on Arch. I also liked that Portage doesn’t overwrite your config files (although running dispatch-conf just for some minor changes in the comments can be a bit ridiculous, it is really secure).

Stability-wise, I haven’t had any problems either. Even with unstable (~x86).

Is it here to stay?
No. Actually it’s already gone

I’ve used it for about a month, but now I’ve wiped it out and installed Debian Lenny over it. Just because I felt like it. But I’m certainly not saying I’ll never use it again in the future. I might put it back up there, or on another machine. It all depends on what I feel like using at that particular time.

In conclusion, if it weren’t for Arch and Debian, I think it’s fair to say I’d be a Gentoo user.

* You can use genkernel to automatically compile a kernel for you. It’s a safe option but it also means your kernel will include a lot of stuff you don’t really need (drivers etcetera).
** You can use precompiled binaries in Gentoo as well. So you don’t have to wait, if you really don’t want to. But I thought I’d go for “the real thing”.

And so I jumped the gun.

Yet again.

Altough the battery issue on the MSI PR200 was fixed for a short time. It didn’t really last long.
As of kernel 2.6.27-7, it’s all fucked up again. The computer doesn’t go into poll mode anymore, but stays in interrupt mode instead. Which is exactly what causes the battery state to be read wrong, and sometimes the battery isn’t even detected.

In my five years of using Linux, I can honestly say I’ve never encountered any hardware issue whatsoever. Everything I tried out, always worked well on all of my (reasonably old) hardware. Sometimes it needed a bit of tweaking and fiddling here and there, but in the end it worked. So I never really understood how frustrating it must feel to have something so essential to not work properly.

Until now …

The thing is, I’m really starting to rely on that laptop to be my main, stable and portable machine. The old laptop, and my desktop are machines to play and have fun with. And so I don’t mind if every now and then, something goes tits up on one of them. But the PR200 should always be there, ready and fully functional for me to work on.

So what now?

Well, yesterday I’ve installed Debian Lenny on it. Which is soon to become the next Debian Stable. And it’s currently running on a custom compiled 2.6.27-6 kernel (in poll mode).

It’s something that “just works”. And that’s exactly what I need right now.

In the mean time, I guess I’ll go back to regularly checking the relevant forum threads and bug report pages, hoping for a permanent fix.

FM 2009.

In about two weeks time, SiGames will be releasing Football Manager 2009. It comes with a whole bunch of new, and exciting features, which I’m not going to sum up here (JFGI!). Although I’ll mention the biggest one; a 3D pitch.

Now this of course looks like a normal evolution that was bound to happen some day. But I’m not really happy with it, or let’s just say I’m very cautious. Not only because I’m afraid it will be a resource-hogging monster, but more importantly because it might potentially make it more difficult to run the game on a Linux powered machine. (Note though that I have no knowledge or ‘proof’ to back this up, I just think it might)

For those of you who are too impatient, the demo has been released on Sunday morning, and there seems to be at least one person who managed to get it working on OpenSuse. Although I would advise you to keep an eye out for any other, and hopefully more detailed, success stories.

I myself am not going to try the demo. I don’t like to get all “into” a save and then be forced to quit it because the demo only let’s you play half a season.

But I am definately buying the game. It’s an annual tradition.

The Bucket List.

I imagine every Linux enthousiast has one; An imaginary list of interesting and challenging “things” he or she would really like to do, or try out eventually. You could call it a ‘To-Do list’ or a ‘List of Resolutions’. In analogy with that (imho crappy) film, I like to call it my ‘Bucket List’.

Some people are doers, go-getters, who like a hands on approach and tend to have quite a short bucket list. Simply because they act on items that make the list quite rapidly.
I am more of a dreamer and a planner, I like to think and re-think about how I’m going to go about something. Consequently, I often never get round to actually doing anything, and therefore my list is long. Really long.

Here’s a bit of a preview of some of the most important items on my current bucket list, sorted in no particular order (except for the first two).

Less Linux Laptop Woes.

If the WordPress stats of this blog are even a tiny bit correct, a considerable portion of my few visitors stumble upon this site after googling (or something similar) for ‘MSI PR200′ and ‘Linux’.

Now I don’t really expect all of these visitors to find what they are looking for here, but for some strange reason I do feel some sort of an obligation to at least try and post some kind of update on the issues I have been dealing with.

So, let’s recap first. What were those issues again?
Well, there was a small quirk with alsa not muting the speakers when on headphones. The power management was all screwed up, causing the battery state to be wrong about 90 percent of the time. And finally, both suspend (S3) and hibernate (S4) did not work.

The alsa issue was easily fixed by adding a certain line to the /etc/modprobe file. At least that’s what I think was needed, unless I’ve misinterpreted what’s in the System76 driver.
On kernels up to 2.6.22, the battery issue could be fixed by using the ec_intr=0 boot option. As of 2.6.23 or 2.6.24 however, that option was no longer available, so we were back to were we started. (Which was also the reason why I stuck with Ubuntu 7.10 for a while.)
That same kernel bump also caused S3 and S4 suspend to break, which I had gotten to work thanks to the System76 driver on Ubuntu 7.10 (and some mysterious custom DSDT.aml file).

While I was sleeping…

The thing that amazed me the most, while I was ‘out of touch’ with what’s hot or not in the world of Linux, is how fast things evolve. Of course, being a Linux user and enthousiast for more than five years, I already knew this. Nevertheless, I was still pleasantly surprised.

To name a few:

- Linux kernel bump from 2.6.22 to almost 2.6.27
A few months ago I was still using kernel .22 (Although .24 was already released and widely in use, but I had to regress to .22 because of hardware isues). Right now I’m using Arch64’s stock 2.6.26 kernel, but I think we’re not far from seeing the release of .27, which by the way, is supposed to cure some of the acpi issues with my laptop even more. So hooray for that!

- Yet another distribution release frenzy is about to happen
Yes, it’s time for another biannual distro release frenzy, with new versions of Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora about to be released, either this month or the next. This is usually good for a string of “Best release ever” and “Linux is finally ready for the desktop” shouting on Linux forums, blogs and IRC channels. And I think it also helps in attracting new users to make the transition from Windows. So, that’s a good thing. Right?

But still, it kind of annoys me as well. Being accustomed to a rolling release cycle (first with Debian Testing, and now with Arch), I sometimes just don’t get what all the fuss is about. But that’s just me, I guess.

Oh yeah, before I forget. Debian is also about to release Lenny. They are even already fashionably late with release (Debian wouldn’t be Debian without a release delay.). I haven’t really noticed a big frenzy about Lenny’s release. Which is a petty because, in my opinion, this a much bigger ‘thing’ than any new Suse or Ubuntu.

- Tint ressurection!
I’ve always found the old Tint (ttm) to be the ideal task list to go with a lightweight window manager like Openbox. Unfortunately, the project died quite a while ago. Although it was still available in an unmaintained last version, I did end up switching to PyPanel in the end. But now someone (Cengztr) was finally brave enough to continue working on this incredible task ‘manager’! The new Tint2 has been cleaned up and was added with some new features. Basically though, it is still as awesome as before.

- Rubyripper made it to the official repo’s.
Of Arch Linux that is. I don’t think you’ll find it in Debian’s or Ubuntu’s. So for Arch users, it just moved from the AUR to the community repositories. Not really big news, but pleasing nevertheless.

All of this is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg…

Hiatus

Dictionary.com says:

hi·a·tus [hahy-ey-tuhs]
–noun, plural -tus·es, -tus.
1.    a break or interruption in the continuity of a work, series, action, etc.
2.    a missing part; gap or lacuna: Scholars attempted to account for the hiatus in the medieval manuscript.
3.    any gap or opening.
4.    Grammar, Prosody. the coming together, with or without break or slight pause, and without contraction, of two vowels in successive words or syllables, as in see easily.
5.    Anatomy. a natural fissure, cleft, or foramen in a bone or other structure.

I kind of had a “linux-hiatus” for the past few months. Due to all sorts of non-linux-related things (finishing education, holidays, jobs, …) I just didn’t find the time to browse all the forums, go on IRC, keep up with everybody’s blogs (Sorry guys and galls!), or keep up to date with what’s hot in the world of open source software. To be honest it felt kind of good to be out of it for a while.

Of course, I did still keep using Linux on my computers. But that’s really all I did, use. I didn’t fiddle with it and I didn’t reinstall every week to try out new distro’s, except for one time when I finally made the switch back to Arch on my laptop.

Obviously, I also didn’t blog about anything during those 4 months either, because there was nothing to blog about. And because this was never intended to be a blog with a new post every day, or even every week.

After a while though, I started to miss it.

So now I’m gradually starting to pick things up where I left them, by reading up on several forums, blogs and other websites.

So now I’m “back”. Nothing spectacular, right?