bem’s blog

My work issued HP 8510w recently had the type of hardware failure that
causes random complete lockups. No, it wasn't related to the memory, I
tested that. Much to my surprise, all it took to get it replaced was to
contact IT and tell them that it even had hung before even getting into
the BIOS. Even more surprising to me, they replaced it with a newer
model: I now have an 8530w.

 Given that I've posted before about how bored and disappointed I've been
with HP laptops, I figured I should post to say how nice the 8530w is
turning out to be so far. For starters, it is thinner and feels lighter
(but it's still 6lbs) and more solid than the 8510w. The screen is much
nicer, but since the 8510w had a 1920x1200 resolution, and this 8530w
has a 1680x1050 resolution, it's not quire apples to apples. I do also
prefer the keyboard, and they've added a keyboard light, which while not
as slick as Apple's backlit keyboards, gets the job done. (And takes me
back like 8 years to the IBM X21 I had... ;-) While the 8510w was fast,
the 8530w is even faster, and amazingly enough, seems to run cooler and
quieter.

 While they do seem to have fixed most of my gripes with the 8510w, it
does seem like no one but Apple understands that people with laptops
carry their power supplies around with them. How hard is it to
incorporate an easy way to wrap up the cord into the design for the
power brick? Oh, and for some entirely inconceivable reason, the power
brick for the 8530w is bigger than that for the 8510w. Yes, you read
that right: they made the brick bigger. I just don't get that part.

 Oh, and Ubuntu (well, Linux in general) rocks: I got new hardware,
simply moved my hard drive to the new machine and booted up, and
everything works. It does help that they both have nVidia graphics, etc,
 but still, that part was awesome. Oh, and for anyone that happens to
have a laptop with a new nVidia chipset and doesn't have working
brightness controls, the newest version of the nVidia drivers fixes this
problem! For users of Jaunty, I uploaded the Karmic packages to my PPA, compiled
for Jaunty. (I can't seem to figure out how to make it so that it would
also compile the same sources for Hardy, but maybe I just haven't spent
enough time looking at it or did the proper RTFMing)

It looks like at least some of the Firefox font issues are fixed in Ubuntu 8.10. The fonts are comparable in size to Opera now, but Opera's fonts still look slightly better. They also seem to have fixed the "use system proxy settings" so that it actually works, which is neat. The thing is, Opera does have a lot of nice features that I do like about it, like the fact that it groups popups in a per-tab basis, and you can configure things like popup blocking and whatnot on a per site basis. If it wasn't for the fact that it seems to have weird issues with flash performance (today I was watching Zero Punctuation, and the audio kept on going fine, but the video would stop and then run really fast and then stop and then run really fast.), and I have had flash actually lock up the browser, so that only one tab locking up thing must have been a fluke. It's really too bad that I actually want to use web content that needs flash, since my life would be so much easier without that plugin. Anyways, I'm contemplating switching back to Firefox, for reasons that are completely not even remotely the fault of Opera. We'll see where this goes.

HP has released the new Mini Note 1000. It actually looks pretty nice, and has an Intel Atom in there as well as an Intel graphics card, so it should be pretty easy to get running with Linux. They also made it available with a 10" screen, which is a big improvement. Yes, it's still only 1024x600, but that's not all that bad, especially in something that weighs 2 pounds. I'd like to see what reviewers say about its battery life, and how it stacks up against the Dell offering. (Though it probably makes more sense for me to snag the HP one, since I actually get a discount on that. =)

According to a couple of news sources, they will be releasing a version with some HP custom Linux on it. That's pretty cool, but I'd still have to pave it and put Ubuntu on it. Which means that the one that comes with a Windows license might end up being a better deal, especially if the Linux one is only available with low end hardware.

Apparently, pictures of the new Mini Note 1000 accidentally ended up on the HP shopping site. I'm still intrigued by the possibilities of getting a nice tiny laptop, and if this one uses the Nano as rumored, it'll make it higher up on my wishlist than the 2133 did. Hopefully it will also have better Linux compatibility, my coworker spent a good amount of time searching and recompiling before he got X working in Ubuntu. (And if I can't run Ubuntu, I don't want it. ;)

Firefox on Linux has never felt quite right to me, and I've recently
discovered what it was. There's something different about the way
Firefox renders fonts for webpages and the way all my other (GTK+ and
Qt) applications render fonts. It's especially strange, since the
buttons and other form widgets render fonts like the rest of the GUI,
but the web page text is different somehow, and thus seems a bit
off.

I actually discovered this because the laptop that I've been provided by
work has an insane native resolution of 1920x1200 on a 15" screen. Thus,
in order to actually be able to read all my fonts, I've raised the DPI
to 120. This works great in everything, except Firefox, which
stubbornly refuses to use the systemwide DPI setting for anything other
than UI elements. This wouldn't be too bad, because I could just zoom
the pages or raise the font size for webpages, but since form elements
use the system fonts/dpi, they are a completely different size font than
the rest of the webpages, causing no end of rendering weirdness.
Searching for ways to solve this problem was fruitless, since it seems
that there is no way to set the DPI for the web page text, and trying to
customize fontsizes to match everything else via CSS seems to be an
exercise in futility (and pain).

In desperation, I installed Konqueror, and found that it properly
respected my DPI settings, but didn't quite feel enough like a dedicated
web browser for my tastes. So I remembered that Opera exists, and I've
installed that. So far, it's as polished and fast as I remember, and it
seems to work on more sites than it used to. They also removed all the
ads, so I'm a happy camper so far. It's amazing what consistent text
rendering across the entire UI can do for a person. (As an aside, I
think this may be why Evolution feels better than Thunderbird for
reading mail, despite Evolution's somewhat fragile network layer and
lack of proxy support)

Anyways, we'll see how this Opera experiment holds out. We'll see how
long it is until I miss the del.icio.us plugin and Firebug.

A couple of nights ago, the flash plugin crashed yet again on me, and I decided to look into it. Here's the details of what I found, in the hopes that it may help others. This is a bit Ubuntu specific, but the information might be useful to those running other distributions.

I found ubuntu bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/192888 which describes what is happening in great detail.

For those that don't want to click on the link, the short of it is that the flash player has an interface so that you can write an library to make it support audio output libraries that it doesn't natively support. There is a bug in the flash player that makes the player very unstable when this interface is used. Modern Linuxes all tend to use this interface to support modern sound servers, since flashplayer doesn't have any support for sound services.

Apparently, flashplayer 10 does support the sound correctly, so I ended up following the instructions here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5587712&postcount=472 and that seems to work. We'll see how my milage fares.

Note that I tried installing the flashplayer manually from here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html. But I couldn't get the sound to work, so there is still something wrong with ubuntu's sound packages, and one really does need the backported packages from Intrepid to get player 10 to work.

For those of you not on Ubuntu, you can try removing libflashsupport and installing flash player 10, as that might work just fine for you.

This link here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4928900 is the manual steps that one can do to get the Ubuntu audio configuration to be sane (and also has instructions on how to install a wrapper for mozilla plugins so that when they crash, they don't take down the browser), but I couldn't get everything to work right with player 10 with those instructions, and I then noticed the link at the top which redirected me to the other forum post that I mentioned earlier.

Phew. Hope this helps.

Note: This was originally written at least a month ago, and somehow, It never got posted. I started up Evolution this morning after not using it for a while, and apparently it had this unsent message in it's queue. I guess my network setup wasn't working very well at all when I wrote this.

I've generally been annoyed that Network Manager in Ubuntu doesn't give you the option to save a dynamic DNS configuration when you save a network configuration that uses DHCP. Also, I'm unhappy that Network Manager doesn't save the Gnome proxy configuration as part of the configuration. But these are minor gripes. I have recently found out that while Network Manager will let me configure my wireless for a static IP, the resulting configuration will not actually work. At all. I can get associated with the access point, and the routes and other network configuration looks fine to me, but I simply cannot send or receive anything. (And in troubleshooting this, I found that Network Manager doesn't save your WPA password between invocations (when you have a static setup), so if you do something like change the configured IP address, you need to remember to also re-enter the WPA password, otherwise, it will happily forget it.)

Anyways, I ended up having to figure out wpa_supplicant (which is surprisingly straightforward), and reconnect to the access point manually. Now things work, but with the general amount of polish Ubuntu has been showing lately, I really didn't expect to find something this integral to the system as this unfinished. It just makes me sad. I've seen some reports that Network Manager 0.7 fixes the static IP issues, and that's coming in Intrepid Ibex.

Anyways, that's enough pointless complaining. I'm going to do something productive. And perhaps after I move, I'll find enough free time to see if I can help fix some of these problems with Network Manager, because it really is my biggest pain point in Ubuntu these days.

It looks like Debian's been impacted by the popularity of Ubuntu. They just released etch-and-a-half, which for the first time in Debian's history, is a update to a stable version of the distribution that includes new packages to support newer hardware. I am impressed. I'm not planning on going back to Debian for my laptop or desktop (the sauce Ubuntu adds to Debian is quite tasty), but it's a good step for Debian to make. (I remember having to build custom install disks to get Debian stable to boot on new hardware, it would be good never to have to do that again... =)