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The last thing on my list to check on my recently Ubuntu-ised laptop was ACPI support, specifically the Fn+FX keys. Under Debian I had spent some time playing with the ACPI functions on my IBM ThinkPad R40, working out the signals each key sent and tying them in with shell scripts to do things. I had Suspend-to-disk and Suspend-to-RAM working absolutely fine. I even found that two unmarked keys, Fn+F8 and Fn+F9, had ACPI events associated with them. This means that I could trigger any command I wanted from these keys.

I had kept the /etc/acpi directory from my Etch install for comparison. Triggers for ACPI keys are kept in /etc/acpi/events and Ubuntu Breezy has a stock of triggers for Asus, IBM, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba laptops, as well as generic AC, battery, power button and lid button events. But it’s the IBM-specifc triggers that I’m interested in. The following details the default settings.

Fn+F3 is the lock screen combination. I never bothered with this under Etch, but it works out of the box with Breezy. Fn+F4 is the Suspend-to-RAM button. This didn’t do anything by default on Breezy. Fn+F5 is a “wireless” control combination. According to the IBM ACPI tools it only controls bluetooth, not 802.11 cards. As I don’t have bluetooth, this represents a rather pointless button for me. Under Etch I had mapped the key combination to a script that probed /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2100 and used that to enable or disable the wireless card. The Ubuntu guys have done something similar and have a script that works through /sys/class/net/ which works just as well and is more transportable across different wireless network devices. Good stuff.

Fn+F7 is the video mode toggle button, which under Windows usually switches mode between TFT panel, external CRT/projector or both. Under Linux this doesn’t seem to do anything, in fact the supplied Ubuntu trigger is marked as a place holder only. You can echo stuff to /proc/acpi/ibm/video but it doesn’t actually make any difference. Fn+F12 is the Suspend-to-disk button. Under Ubuntu the suspend aspect worked fine, it just crashed on resume. It gets part way through the boot process after suspending and reboots. The reboot takes it back to a clean login. echo -n disk > /sys/power/state worked only intermittently. Even disabling the splash screen on boot didn’t help, a tip gained elsewhere on the net. So I’m going to leave Suspend-to-disk alone until Dapper is released when I’ll try it again.

In order to get Suspend-to-RAM working, I poked around in the various scripts that are called. Some settings for ACPI behaviour are held in /etc/default/acpi-support. Uncommenting the ACPI_SLEEP=true line activated the Suspend-to-RAM feature, which then worked from the key combination.

I also copied the triggers for the Fn+F8 and Fn+F9 keys into the /etc/apci/events directory so I can latter map them to scripts if I want. The event triggers for anyone interested are:

event=ibm/hotkey HKEY 00000080 00001008
event=ibm/hotkey HKEY 00000080 00001009

I am not currently receiving any mail to my tonywhitmore.co.uk domain. Freeparking.co.uk are the registrar for this domain and host its DNS and mail services. (Contrary to the impression, it’s not a free service, I pay for it.) The mail service is actually just a simple forwarding service. However the mail server at Freeparking stopped accepting mail for this domain at about lunchtime yesterday. The DNS records for the mail servers in the control panel for the domain do not match those shown in a DNS lookup for the domain, either.

I’ve reported the issue to Freeparking first thing this morning but the issue hasn’t been resolved.

Next Saturday is a LUG meeting, back at Southampton Uni! All the details are on the wiki. We still need Greeters (there are still 4 slots left!) and remember if you have a specific problem you need help with, then please sign up on the I Need Help page.

N.B: You will not be able to use the normal entrance to the Zepler building, but will have to go round the back to the door opposite the main entrance. We hope to have posters with arrow signs up, but basically you need to come in where the green arrow is on the map. The red arrow indicates the normal entrance.

We will also be having another set of short talks. I’ve tried to schedule the talks to suit the speakers and allow breaks in between. They will only be short talks – 15 minutes, no more than 30. Hopefully there will be something in the schedule to interest everyone:

* 11:30am: Knoppix Remastered – Peter Savage
* 12:15pm: RPM – Vic
* 1:30pm: Notworking to Networking – Hugo Mills
* 2:30pm: “Getting to grips with the shell” – Graham Bleach

Pete kicks off the talks telling us how to make your own customised Knoppix CD, including your favourite applications and tweaks. Apparently this is a lot easier than it might sound and you don’t need to be an expert Linux user to do it. Vic will be talking about RPM, the RedHat Package Manager as used by RedHat, Fedora, SUSE, Mandrake and others. If you’ve got bad memories of RPM from years ago, this talk should demonstrate how much it has improved in recent years and show some of the cool stuff it can do.

Hugo will be giving an introduction to networking. If you’d like to set up a home network but don’t really understand how networks work, or perhaps would like to troubleshoot your network more effectively, then come along. Finally, Graham Bleach will be talking about getting to grips with the Shell. The command line can seem like a scary place at first for people used to the GUI world of Windows, KDE or GNOME. But it can do some very powerful things and make you a whole lot more efficient when working on your system.

Please post to our Mailing List if you need a lift or help getting there. Bring food! See you there!

… but I’ve installed Ubuntu on my laptop. I first installed Debian Woody on my laptop about 2 years ago then upgraded to Sid before switching to Testing for better stability. I spent ages battling the wireless drivers on my laptop (first Ndiswrapper, because ipw2100 didn’t support WEP at the time, then ipw2100 as its features improved) along with several other bits that took a lot of effort to get working. Anyway, I was pretty happy with the eventual setup after about a year of fiddling. However, I had to recompile various modules on a regular basis to get WPA support in the wireless drivers. And I never really got hotplug / hal / udev / whatever working to automount devices as they were plugged in.

So when I upgraded the hard drive in my laptop (80GB at 5400rpm – woo hoo!) I decided to try Ubuntu. I’ve used it at work for over a year and it does what I need. So one Breezy install later (delayed due to a dodgy CD), an evening installing about a dozen extra applications and copying my data over, I’ve got a working system. Even wpa_supplicant was suprisingly easy to get working, having already had a good configuration on my Debian install. I’m sure I’ll remember the odd utility or two over the next few weeks that I haven’t yet installed, but they’ll just be an apt-get away. The bonus is that I now have a 40GB drive to use with a recently purchased USB caddy. (I’m not entirely sure about the caddy though, it seems to stop responding when copying very large files.)

This might sound smug, but I’m really pleased with the way that Ubuntu has installed on here. It’s kind of frustrating that you sometimes have to wait a year or two for hardware to be well supported under Linux, but I know that’s often not the fault of the FLOSS community, rather the hardware manufacturers. Two things remain though: 1) I’m not sure if the GNOME battery monitor is showing the sum of the life remaining in the two batteries or just showing me the remaining charge in one. 2) I’ve got focus-follows-mouse working, but can’t work out how to not have a window raise to the front when clicking in it…

Update: A little practical experiment has shown that the battery monitor is monitoring both batteries, not just the one.

Update 2: Resiak tells me that Metacity doesn’t support not raising a window when clicking on it. I’d have to use a different Window Manager.

Update 3:Ghworg has e-mailed to say “you can get the behaviour you want from metacity as that’s how I run it. You need to run gconf-editor and go to “/apps/metacity/general” and unselect “raise_on_click”. ” Thanks Ghworg, works a treat!

I logged into my mail server earlier and the last thing in the output of dmesg was:

Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

Not sure why, but it made me smile.

Tonight I finally finished converting our wireless LAN to WPA. Because we only have one access point, I’m using WPA-PSK. I got my ipw2100-based laptop converted to WPA ages ago, after considerable strife but Laura’s laptop has a Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC and had until now proved impossible. This seemed to be down to odd behaviour and arcane settings in the madwifi driver.

But since I’d last tried, Laura had upgraded the laptop to Breezy Badger so I thought I would see what changes this new version had brought. The good news is that new versions of the kernel modules had been installed and wpa_supplicant had been upgraded. Having a working configuration on my laptop meant that I could copy it across and have a good base from which to start.

I was impressed that in less than two hours playing I had it working. Some of this time was spent installing the latest kernel and modules, so it wasn’t all WPA-based fun. Once that was all done I was able to get on with the actual configuring and testing. There are lots of forum posts about setting up wpa_supplicant, but significantly less on diagnosing and fixing errors. I really wasn’t getting anywhere for some time until saw a suggestion to bring the interface up first before starting wpa_supplicant. I did this with an ifconfig ath0 up then started wpa_supplicant in the standard way:

wpa_supplicant -i ath0 -D madwifi -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -d

Thanks to the -d switch I was able to see in the debug output the following:

EAPOL: SUPP_PAE entering state AUTHENTICATING
EAPOL: SUPP_BE entering state SUCCESS
EAPOL: SUPP_PAE entering state AUTHENTICATED
EAPOL: SUPP_BE entering state IDLE

After that, a quick dhclient ath0 and there was a new sparkling IP address ready for use. For reference, the configuration file contained the following:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0

eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1

network={
ssid=”tonylaura”
scan_ssid=1
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk=string-of-secret-things
}

Using pairwise=TKIP and group=TKIP as suggested in some forums did not work. Edits to /etc/default/wpasupplicant to keep the above incantation (minus the debugging flag) and enable wpa_supplicant sorted that part of the puzzle out. Then I edited /etc/network/interfaces to read:

auto ath0
iface ath0 inet dhcp
pre-up /etc/init.d/wpasupplicant start
post-up sleep 5

So that’s one big thing off the TODO list

Over the last few days I’ve been downloading and watching episodes of Systm, a US-based amateur IT video show. Although not specifically an Open Source or Free Software show, it’s certainly not adverse to talking about FLOSS, with Asterisk, Audacity and MythTV getting coverage. It’s impressive the results an amateur effort can produce with enough time and energy pored in, although I suspect UK viewers will take the presenting style with a large pinch of salt.

There are occasional captions, screen images and animated graphics but they avoid the trap of most amateur video editors and don’t over use them. Those that are used are mostly clear and genuinely illustrative. Highlighting of parts of a text file is an excellent idea that really helps. Other sequences use animations to demonstrate cabling or circuitry. The set is simple but well lit. They also have an impressive amount of demonstration hardware to discuss; various VoIP phones, cables, TV capture cards etc. etc. Overall the show perhaps strives to be more polished than it needs to be, with a fair bit of evidence of prepared questions and rehearsal. Obviously they want the show to be as entertaining and informative as possible, but I suspect that the program is partially a platform for the presenters to show their skills in the hope that they will be noticed by bigger shows or networks. As such, it would be nice to see the personalities of the presenters occasionally, unless their ultimate career aim really is presenting “infommercials”.

The show produces each episode in four formats and two sizes. With eight files being released for each episode they understandably prefer bittorrent for distribution. Given that the small files are about 50MB to 200MB and the large ones varying between 200MB and 500MB+ then this is sensible. However direct HTTP downloads are available. I initially downloaded the large Theora version of one of the episodes but my Meeja Box wasn’t man enough for this job. It played back fine on my laptop but the playback stuttered and eventually sound just packed in on the media box. I downloaded the small Theora version and this played back fine though. Checking the files, the large video versions have 640×480 frame size so it wasn’t necessary to have the higher quality version to view on a standard TV anyway. The small version, at 320×240, is more than adequate.

The episode on Asterisk started with a fairly clear break down of the technology, following a standard two-headed format. A lead presenter, Kevin Rose, asks most of the questions whilst the resident expert answers them. The presenting style is a cross between QVC, Ready Steady Cook and Tomorrow’s World. I keep expecting Judith Hann to walk in. Other episodes, such as the ones on the iPod Nano and Warspying, reminded me of Blue Peter with their demonstrations of construction (and dismantling) devices. The stress in the presenter’s voice as he tried not to snap the PCB inside his iPod nano is something that you don’t hear on Blue Peter when they’re building Tracy Island though.

The first part of the podcasting episode was mostly a tutorial on Audacity, although it was good to see them recommending the Shure SM58 as a microphone (I’ve got one somewhere….) and a proper hardware mixer. The focus on Audactiy is no bad thing as it is a great tool and has loads of features that I haven’t learnt about yet. The rest of the episode was a look behind the scenes at a larger podcast and some of the more serious podcasting kit.

They don’t seem to have an RSS feed to announce new episodes though, which is a shame, because I’d like to watch more episodes in the future.

Update: Yes, they have RSS feeds for the torrents, if that floats your boat. They are hidden in plain site on the right hand side of the main page of the site. Thanks to Popey for the tip.

Due to an error I made when migrating this domain from one registrar/DNS service to another, any mail sent to this domain between about 10pm last night and mid-morning today will have bounced. The problem is now resolved though, so if it was important, please e-mail again. Thanks and apologies.

March’s(!) edition of PCW contains an advert on page 30 for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 64-bit edition. The text in the advert reads:

How does Xerox Global Services manage millions of office devices for its customers? Their largest application requires 99.999*% availability and it runs on new SQL Server 2005 64-bit running on Windows Server 2003.

Once you’ve got over the excitement of the concept of a 64-bit SQL database, you might read the small print and notice that it reads:

* Results not typical.

Heheh, how reassuring.

We spent this afternoon up with my parents and long time family friends, Bob and Mary. It was lovely to see them both as we haven’t done in a long time. Oh, and the usual double helpings of Sunday roast went down a treat.