Fading Memories

I remember that just before Naomi was born, Irina and I said to each other "we'd better buy that hardware now, after the kid is born we won't be able to afford new computers anymore", so we bought a Psion series 3 for her and a Compaq Aero notebook for me. Little did we know....

So, when Irina's Toshiba laptop broke down a couple of weeks ago, she could make do with C20 vintage Gateway Solo laptop that used to be my work computer, until that one broke too. Enter a spanking new Lenovo Thinkpad R61e... Irina decided to run OpenSUSE 11 on it, although we had a recent Kubuntu as a fallback option.

Pretty much everyone seems to work out of the box: sound, suspend/resume, graphics, mouse, usb... But not the wifi. When I ordered the laptop, the specs said it contained an Intel wifi chip, but it's got an Atheros AR5212 a/b/g wifi adapter and I cannot manage to get it to work. OpenSUSE loads the athk5_pic driver by default, but for some reason that doesn't work (dmesg says "probe faild with error -5"). I've tried getting it to run with madwifi, but failed, and I've tried ndiswrapper, and failed, too. It doesn't work under Kubuntu 8.04 either...

It does work under Kubuntu 7.10 -- and I suspect that OpenSUSE 10.3 also works. It isn't the first time I've noticed this kind of regressions when upgrading: Naomi's very old Dell 5150 laptop has always worked perfectly. But an upgrade to Kubuntu 7.10 killed her sound.

The power supply of my ten year old hub started smoking. My 3com wireless router was already flaky -- it tended to go meekly out of the way when more modern, more powerful wireless routers came onto the air.

So, now I'm the proud owner of a Sitecom 54g turbo storage Linux-based wireless router, nas usb server thingy. Comes complete with written offer for the GPL'ed bits. It took ten minutes and a restart of the router (after changing the essid) to be up and running again. It seems hardware has improved since 1995 :-)

Oh, and it says it's a print server, too, for printers connected to a usb port. I wonder how I can get that to work...

This morning, General Logistics Systems finally delivered my new laptop. Or rather, almost didn't deliver it. A bit of street in front of the house was broken up and the driver obviously didn't want to walk the thirty or so meters with a smallish package. So he'd written up the Addressee Not At Home slip and slipped it into our letterbox. Well, we were just as obviously at home so I contacted GLS through their mailform, asking them to phone the driver to go back and deliver the package.

Well -- you can probably imagine my surprise when that actually was what happened: the driver came back, delivered the package all the while loudly expostulating that really, he had rung the bell, obviously we hadn't heard it ring. Yeah, right... The idiomatic Dutch word is smoesjes.

The X61 tablet laptop is pretty spiffy: kubuntu gutsy installed like a dream, after upgrading to todays version sound and wireless worked. Two things aren't working yet: the wired lan connection and resume-after-suspend. The former just doesn't do anything. That's a bit of a problem since my home dir is about 25Gb and it takes a long time to restore over the air. The other issue is weird: the laptop does resume, but I have to go back to an ascii console to get the screen back. I'll investigate some more.

The Gutsy installer is pretty confusing in one area, by the way. I wanted to resize the vista partition (didn't want to delete it -- I want to see how vista does the handwriting recognition, and I want to try Corel Painter), but somehow I confused the old and the new partition and managed to give Vista 80GB instead of Linux. Which meant that my home dir didn't fit, which in turns means reinstallation time...

But twisting the lid and sketching with Krita is really a truly marvellous experience. I'll see about getting rid of the cursor and the fringe benefits (dockers, toolbox) and adding a few shortcuts for stylus-only mode.

Today I got mail from Misco: the laptop that I ordered, and which whas in stock when I ordered it, according to their website, actually won't be delivered for at least two and a half weeks. Zut. What now? I got a work laptop, but that's Windows and besides, it's locked down enough that I cannot connect to my home network or run a life cd. Besides, I'm not supposed to use that for private stuff. I'm pretty well stuck, I guess.

I fixed sound and wifi on one of the Lenovo 3000 C200 laptops I bought for Menna and Rebecca's birthday. It was a bit fiddly, at one point the sound system made a noise like an angry modem. But everything is fine now, except that the speakers aren't muted if you plug in earphones. Youtube works, planet penguin racer works -- what else can a 12 year old wish for? Krita is installing now.

This is the essential link:

• http://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/Lenovo3000C200_8922AZG

(The Ubuntu wiki is quite difficult to navigate: there's so much stuff that the authoritative pages often don't show up in the first few pages of Google hits.)

I'm pleasantly surprised by the performance of these laptops: they crawl under Vista, but run really smoothly with Kubuntu Feisty and even compilation isn't painful. Next the other 3000 C200, and then I'll try to fix Naomi's old Dell.

Sometimes I wish we could do without all this tiresome hardware. Of course, I have to do without the hardware I need for hacking on Krita for a while, since I returned my laptop to Tryllian today. Monday will be my first day with Omnitrans.

Still, that gives me time to try to get my daughter's hardware working. Menna and Rebecca are going to get a new laptop each (a Lenovo 300 C200) for their birthday, on Sunday, and I want to make sure it runs Linux before then. And running means sound and wireless network. Which is kinda hard.

Kubuntu apparently installs something called avahi and another something called network manager that insists on inventing IP addresses instead of asking my dhcp server about it. Besides, the wireless adapter is a broadcom, and I need to perform various incantations I haven't needed for years to get it working. And then, on rebooting, nothing works again. The simple Intel sound chip doesn't produce any sound, although the mixer sees it just fine. Silence is golden.

In the meantime, Naomi's laptop -- the last of the famous Dells -- is acting up. Somehow, the pcmcia wifi card no longer works. I guess it's the cradle, because the same card works fine in my ancient Pismo. So I bought a Sitecom USB wifi stick. Modules get loaded, and I've been able to use it using Feisty and Gutsy, though not after rebooting. OpenSuse and Mandriva Spring 2007 don't see it at all.

And worse, for my teenaged Amarok-addict, sound suddenly stopped working completely after I upgraded her laptop from Breezy to any of the four distributions above. Once I managed to make sound work again with Gutsy, through some recompilation of alsa modules -- but as soon as I got the usb wifi stick working, sound stopped working.

I've got a day off tomorrow, and somehow, I already know what I will be doing. And it's not hacking on Krita.

I learned in response to our Krita donation drive on the Dot, people have donated more than 700 euros already! We're getting really close to the point where we want to be -- two small tablets with the assorted tools. You can still donate:

We need this hardware not just because it's cool: it's simply impossible for us to support all the features that artists need without being able to test them and verify them -- so at least two Krita developers need an Intuos with the right tools!