Karmic Koala on Acer Aspire 11.6" ZA3

I left my 8.9" Acer Aspire One behind with a really great Jamaican guy on a recent trip there.

It had Ubuntu Karmic Koala on it, so far the guy is doing pretty well, I've been impressed by his resourcefulness in trying to work around problems. One of the early questions I got was something like, "This wine stuff is a bit complicated".

Meanwhile, time for a replacemen beastie for me. There is a Canadian Computers store just up the road from me. The staff there are pretty clued in and helpful with it. The 8.9" acer has been excellent. Good points were the long battery life, light weight, compact size. I've found myself wanting a larger screen some of the time, but the plus points have offset this.

The 11.6" aspires were too tempting. Similar weight, half inch bigger all round, but 1366x768 screen resolution and 5 hours battery life. Perfect.

Only problem is the Poulsbo chip set used for the graphics driver. On the plus side, this is the chip that combines lower power consumption magic with the high resolution. The big problem is it is proprietary, with closed source drivers. At first sight, it appears to be an Intel chip, but it turns out they have done a deal with a third party, so the usual rule of thumb, where Intel really do play nicely with open source goes out of the window.

Nonetheless, Karmic installed from a USB stick without problems, bar the screen resolution. This thread provided the solution to the resolution problem. The scripts from lucazade worked like magic.

The only remaining issue is I have a choice between working sound and using the compiz 3-D effects. I'm sure someone out there has the answer to this one.

I was a little concerned tha the Atom Z520 processor might be a bit under-powered, but so far all is ok. I do have to keep an eye open for runaway firefox processes though -- occasionally it starts the cpu racing and then of course performance nosedives.

Meanwhile I've installed the Google Chromium browser with these instructions. I'm really finding it very slick on this machine. Added bonus is Chromium extensions are starting to trickle in, so it is becoming a viable alternative to firefox for me.

First snow flake spotted in Ottawa

From snow and balloons

Actually, this gets a fail as a snow flake. The real thing should be here any day now, so the baker can go and check what they really look like.

In other news, I went to a Halloween party as balloon boy at the weekend. Since then, I have carefully adjusted the balloons payload so they hover about the apartment. It is a bit worrying how much entertainment I'm getting from this.

From snow and balloons

Ottawa Karmic Koala Release Party

It probably wasn't the biggest release party, but a good time was had by all anyway.

I went along to the UMI Cafe in Ottawa for the Karmic Koala release party I had advertised.

On arriving at the cafe I was happy to see that the laptop that myself and Ralph Pitchie had set up there for anyone in the cafe to use, running Jaunty Jackalope, was being used. Since neither Ralph nor myself had been to check on the machine since early September it was great to see it still running without problems.

It looked like it was going to be a one man party for a while. I had assumed that the Karmic T-shirt would tip people off that this was where the party was, but it seems the fronts of these shirts are a bit too subtle -- it wasn't until I got up to take the photo below of the laptop being used that George saw the back of the shirt and realised who I was.

From Karmic release party

I decided not to try and upgrade the cafe laptop, as I expected the Ubuntu servers to be a little sluggish, due to the release. I'd already upgraded my netbook, as had George so we just ended up chatting about each other's linux use.

From Karmic release party

Later the party moved on to the Royal Oak (aka The Sooty Oak) on Bank Street.

From Karmic release party

Karmic Release Party, Ottawa

I've just put myself down to organise a Ubuntu Karmic Koala release party at the UMI Cafe in Ottawa.

With the help of Ralph Pitchie (Ralph did most of the work), I helped set up a laptop there running Jaunty, giving free web browsing to anyone using the cafe.

So the plan is to have a release party 7pm onwards on Thursday 29th. We will no doubt migrate to a pub later in the evening.

I'll have USB sticks with the release candidate on them (might have the distro itself so long as the torrents are working ok on Thursday).

Will try and upgrade the laptop whilst I am there.

Karmic Koala release candidate

I just upgraded my LG P300 to Karmic Koala release candidate. To be precise, I did a fresh install.

I have /home in a separate partition. I followed my usual Ubuntu upgrade procedure is as follows:

• Take backups
• Install OS to a new partition
• Test it
• Mount the old /home.

The desktop CD booted no problems. The install went well.

On reboot I ran into this bug. The good news was that moving /etc/X11/xorg.conf out of the way was enough to get the machine booting into X without problems.

Once in X I was able to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers and all has been good.

I decided to convert my home directory to ext4.

This is where I ran into a bit of fun. First of all, I'm a plonker and when I partitioned my disk a while back I created too many primary partitions and did not leave enough space for the one extended partition I created.

Once I had karmic running I decided to backup my jaunty partition, then do some re-partitioning, then copy the jaunty install back into a fresh partition.

Now karmic comes with grub2. One nead thing with grub2 is you can just run:

sudo update-grub

and it does just that, including scanning for other OS'es on your system. This nearly worked for me. Unfortunately, I hit this bug. Probably a pretty rare situation, but would be good if the OS probing could cope with this one.

With a little hand editing of /boot/grub/grub.conf (yes, I know you are not supposed to do this) and fixing up the UUID's in the fstab the old jaunty install was up and running again.

In the course of this I discovered: /dev/disk/by-uuid/

This is a folder with links named by the UUID's to the actual partitions in human readable form. Very handy.

What is new?

Empathy

I had mixed feelings about the switch to empathy from pidgin as an IM client. I've never been 100% happy with pidgin though, so I was prepared for a few rough edges. I really haven't used empathy long enough to give a fair assessment, but so far it is doing the job nicely.

Added bonuses are voice and video support. Voice also working to people running gtalk within firefox on OS/X.

Update: video also working from empathy on Karmic to gtalk running in firefox on OS/X.

Firefox 3.5

This seems very much snappier than firefox 3.0. I was using firefox 3.5 (shiretoko) under jaunty but that was sluggish compared with the karmic firefox3.5

Pulseaudio airtunes support

Pulseaudio now comes with support for airtunes.

You will need to install: padevchooser, pulseaudio-module-raop and pulseaudio-module-zeroconf.

With these it should automatically spot any airtunes devices you have on your network.

You can then fire up padevchooser, configure the local sound server to 'Make apple airtunes devices available locally'.

Now from the pulseaudio volume control, go to the playback tab and you should be able to select your airtunes device as the sync.

Lloyds online banking is a bit crap

Actually, it is a bit unfair of me to criticise Lloyds online banking as I've never actually tried it.

I've been going through a kafkaesque process since July trying to set this up. So far the only real beneficiaries are skype and Canada Post.

Now I see that even if I do get the thing set up it might not work for me.

It is 2009 and I'm afraid I never thought to check if they support firefox.

Update: The internet banking was finally set up today! Only taken 3 months and as an added bonus it seems to work OK with firefox on linux. So it appears that far from being a steaming pile of dung, Lloyds TSB is a wonderful organisation that really gets the net. My apologies for any confusion.

Karmic Koala -- sexism

There has been a lot of fuss about sexism in the Ubuntu world of late. I'm not going to comment on that, more than enough has already been said.

However, as far as I can tell these Karmic Koala T-shirts are only available as men's T-shirts.

How am I supposed to explain to my wife what I do if she can't even buy the T-shirt?