Computers / Linux

I'm starting to feel a bit frustrated with Booklet. It's basically very nice piece of hardware, but Poulsbo is so big failure in so many ways. Fucked up beyond any repair, you could say. But it may be possible to live with that anyway...

Anyway, yesterday I started to investigate this clicking sound I heard. It was obviously HD spindown. It made every 10-15 sec, basicly no matter what I did. Not very nice. Looking at 'sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda|grep 'Load_Cycle_Count'' showed that value is increasing like 1000 per day. Not very nice in any way.

First, I tried 'sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda', without any big success. Then I tried 'sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda' (to disable APM totally), without any success. I also tried to set big standby timeout ('sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sda'), that wasn't success either.

I couldn't find easily any reasonable reasons for spindown. I tried to disable them via Gnome's Power Management, without any success again. There wasn't any laptop-mode's set, so that couldn't be it. I then found one page, http://techjamaica.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90496, which had some hints. Well, I hadn't had any luck with more popular ways, so I tried these instructions.

sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-utils

/etc/default/acpi-support:
Add "ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true" in the end of file

/etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf:
Change line "HD=..." to "HD=/dev/sda"
Change line "BATT_HD_POWERMGMT=..." to "BATT_HD_POWERMGMT="254"

sudo echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
/etc/init.d/laptop-mode restart

According to linked website, that should do the trick. It didn't, even after rebooting, I heard clicks every 10-15 secs. I then started to play more with laptop-mode, I tweaked it a bit more

/etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/intel-hda-powersafe.conf
Change line "INTEL_HDA_DEVICE_TIMEOUT=..." to "INTEL_HDA_DEVICE_TIMEOUT=1800"
Change line "INTEL_HDA_DEVICE_CONTROLLER=..." to "INTEL_HDA_DEVICE_CONTROLLER=0"

/etc/sysctl.conf:
Add "vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=1500" in the end of file
Add "vm.laptop_mode=5" in the end of file

At this point, I decided to go to sleep, as it was way too night for hacking. I still could hear the clicks, also I got yet-another-kernel-oops, which looked to be related to filesystem/ext4. I already thought to revert back to 9.10, as Ubuntu's wiki says that it should be perfectly supported.

Big surprise was today, when I powered Booklet up, and I haven't heard any clicks so far. I mean, I have had it open for few hours now, and Load_Cycle_Count has increased just by one or two. I'll definately will be following this.

So, I wanted to get internal (A)GPS working. Too bad, it didn't have much documentation, at least directly Linux-related. Instead, instructions how to get it working in Windows can be found from http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Mini-Laptops/Can-I-use-GPS-without-have-3G-data-plan/m-p/594454. Problem was what are COM4/5 equivalents in Linux. After trying, I found that /dev/ttyHS4 is GPS control channel, and /dev/ttyHS1 actual GPS data channel.

It really has been **years** when I last used minicom other terminal programs. Thanks to my colleague, Pablo, who pointed me to use good old kermit, ckermit to be more precise, and try that. I got, yea! This is how I did it:

C-Kermit>set line /dev/ttyHS4
C-Kermit>set carrier-watch off
(C-Kermit>set speed 115200
/dev/ttyHS4, 115200 bps
C-Kermit>c
Connecting to /dev/ttyHS4, speed 115200
Escape character: Ctrl-\ (ASCII 28, FS): enabled
Type the escape character followed by C to get back,
or followed by ? to see other options.
----------------------------------------------------
T S7=45 S0=0 L1 V1 X4 &c1 E1 Q0
OK
ATZ
OK
AT_OGPS=2

OK

After AT_OGPS=2, second kermit-instance, connected to /dev/ttyHS1, started to output raw NMEA data. Very good. Now it's time for some kermit scripts:

~/bin/gps_on.sh:
#!/usr/bin/kermit

def port /dev/ttyHS4
def speed 115200
def carrier-watch off

set port \m(port)
if fail exit 1 Can't open \m(port)
set speed \m(speed)
set carrier-watch \m(carrier-watch)

output AT_OGPSP=7,2\13
input 3 OK

output AT_OGPSCONT=1,"IP","prointernet"\13
input 3 OK

output AT_OGPSLS=1, "http://supl.nokia.com"
input 3 OK

output AT_OGPS=2
input 3 OK

exit

For turning GPS off:

~/bin/gps_off.sh:
#!/usr/bin/kermit

def port /dev/ttyHS4
def speed 115200
def carrier-watch off

set port \m(port)
if fail exit 1 Can't open \m(port)
set speed \m(speed)
set carrier-watch \m(carrier-watch)

output AT_OGPS=0\13
INPUT 3 OK

exit

Still maybe some checking would be needed, to see if it really uses assisted GPS instead of "plain" GPS. It really doesn't matter so much, though assisted is much faster in locating you initially.

Next I'll have write scripts for monitoring GPS status, and then find some suitable navigation sw.

EDIT: I originally said ttyHS0 was data channel, while it really is ttyHS1, sorry about that.

I should have known better. At least two of my friends warned me that changing my Samsung NC10 to Nokia Booklet 3G is bad idea. At least when considering installing Ubuntu on it. What the heck, I have had battles before, I used to have some nice nights tweaking my desktop with older Nvidia and dualhead, Nvidia's legacy drivers and incompatible xorg ABI.

So, I got it running. I used 10.04.1 alternate install cd, cause I needed encryption also. First issue, at least for me, is that I could get only flashdrives created with Ubuntu's usb-creator-gtk working. I tried Unetbootin, I tried Pendrive Linux's usb creator. Latter didn't even boot, one created with Unetbootin didn't know how to install files from flashdrive, instead tried netinstall. Which didn't work for me, since Booklet doesn't have wired lan, and wlan doesn't work yet in installation. Good start! Problem was that I don't have any Ubuntu machines, since I normally use Debian. So I had to 1. Burn Ubuntu live-cd 2. Boot one of my laptops from it 3. Copy installation .iso to one flashdrive (since cd-live-laptop has only few hundred meg's free space) 4. Create install-flashdrive from another flashdrive

Ok, so ahead with installation. Nothing special there. It was too easy, it just worked. First boot, X resolution sucked. Known issue due to the buggy Poulsbo chipset.

First, I followed instructions from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsVideoCardsPoulsbo:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/ppa && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install poulsbo-driver-2d poulsbo-driver-3d poulsbo-config

And rebooted. Now also native resolution worked like a charm. Bad thing is that with Poulsbo-driver, all kinds of power management issues comes, so following same page, I:

sudo apt-get --purge remove vbetool && sudo apt-get install uswsusp

And rebooted. Now I could get suspend working with 's2ram --force'. Too bad that Ubuntu/GNOME doesn't provide directly options to change default suspend-command. So:
1. I replaced default pm-suspend with s2ram: 'sudo mv /usr/sbin/pm-suspend /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-old && sudo sudo nano /usr/sbin/pm-suspend'

/usr/sbin/pm-suspend:
#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/s2ram --force

2. Granted sudo-rights with NOPASSWD-option to admin-group users with 'visudo':

%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/s2ram

3. Created shortcut key ctrl-alt-p to execute '/usr/sbin/s2ram --force'
4. Changed s2ram as default suspend-command.

/etc/pm/config.d/00sleep_module:
SLEEP_MODULE="uswsusp"

/etc/pm/config.d/defaults:
S2RAM_OPTIONS="--force"

Then I played a bit with Power Management options in System - Preferences - Power Management, just to check that there's no "hibernate" anywhere, since I haven't tested '/usr/sbin/s2disk' (Suspend to Disk) yet. That's the next part.

Also, I noticed that:
1. Flash's can't be played fullscreen, only white screen shows. Not a big issues though.
2. Thunderbird can't be used. If installed from repositories, it shows blank menus & co. It's described at least here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/564011. Installing Thunderbird directly from mozilla.com did worked. I did:

tar xjf thunderbird.tar.bz2
mv thunderbird/ /usr/local/
ln -s /usr/local/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin /usr/local/bin/thunderbird
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/thunderbird/

Unfortunately, I got at least one kerneloop with thunderbird:

Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598586] BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at f76f4000
Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598607] IP: [] prep_new_page+0xe7/0x170
Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598630] *pde = 00007067 *pte = 00002c00
Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598643] Oops: 0002 [#1] SMP
Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598653] last sysfs file: /sys/devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0A08:00/device:1f/PNP0C0A:00/power_supply/BAT1/voltage_now
Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598665] Modules linked in: fbcon tileblit font bitblit softcursor psb drm_psb agpgart i2c_algo_bit binfmt_misc rfcomm ppdev sco bridge stp bnep l2cap joydev snd_hda_codec_intelhdmi snd_hda_codec_realtek arc4 snd_hda_intel snd_hda_codec snd_hwdep snd_pcm_oss snd_mixer_oss snd_pcm snd_seq_dummy snd_seq_oss snd_seq_midi snd_rawmidi snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq snd_timer snd_seq_device ath9k snd mac80211 ath uvcvideo cfg80211 psmouse lp parport soundcore sdhci_pci sdhci videodev v4l1_compat hso serio_raw btusb bluetooth i2c_isch snd_page_alloc led_class sha256_generic aes_i586 aes_generic dm_crypt usbhid hid video output pata_sch
Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598825]
Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598836] Pid: 3835, comm: thunderbird Not tainted (2.6.32-24-generic #42-Ubuntu) Nokia Booklet 3G
Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598847] EIP: 0060:[] EFLAGS: 00010246 CPU: 1
Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598857] EIP is at prep_new_page+0xe7/0x170
Sep 4 23:03:03 nauris kernel: [ 5381.598866] EAX: 00000000 EBX: f76f4000 ECX: 00000400 EDX: 0000000Sep 4 23:07:48 nauris kernel: imklog 4.2.0, log source = /proc/kmsg started.

... So I swithced to claws-mail....

EDIT
Seems that Thunderbird-issue (well, rendering-part, not the kerneloops-part) is described already here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9600101&postcount=1467

TODO
- Get mplayer working - Got it working by simply running this script: http://kanotix.com/files/fix/mplayer-vaapi-latest.txt
- Get (A)GPS working - See part II
- Test s2disk
- Check if that another thunderbird works or not.