So I was too late to help Rage Against The Machine prevent another drippy X-Factor Christmas No. 1. But when a friend at work said they’d never heard Killing in The Name Of, I had to download it and somone had told me it was cheap on Amazon.

But what a hassle! Amazon insisted I install software to get the download. While it was good that they offer a linux version (4, actually!) of their downloader, incuding one for ubuntu, there’s no 64bit version. I was really annoyed to have to install amazon’s software on my computer to get what I had paid for, especially as it is proprietary, closed-source, meaning that nobody except amazon has looked at the code to see whether it can be trusted. Amazon will have made sure the code does what they want, but they have little interest (or experience, I would expect) in checking it doesn’t have any adverse affects on anything else I might want to be doing on my computer. I really don’t see the need for it, and I’m going to be looking for another place to buy mp3 downloads.

But, back in the office, I thought just this once, and found helpful instructions on installing on a 64bit system, so I thought I’d share.

But amazon hadn’t finished messing me around, and even after downloading their software, overcoming my conscience, getting it installed, and configuring my browser (!) my one mp3 download was nowhere to be found. I sent a volley of messages out using amazon’s unhelpful help or feedback pages, most ignored and a few answered by robots along the lines of “oh, I see you are stupid, if you click amazon and click spend money, then we consider our service complete.”, eventually I got connected by good old phone with a human. Although a human clearly bound by a tight script and clearly without the official authority to issue apologies, they were able to “increment my download” and finally, about 3 hours after I thought this’ll be 5 minutes’ fun, I had the song.

Anyway, here’s that link again: blog.hyperandy.com/2009/11/25/installing-amazon-mp3-in-ubuntu-karmic-9-10-64bit/

The good

Xubuntu installed really quickly, absolutely no bugs or crashes. In half an hour my system was liberated and cleansed of that corporate virus called M$ Vista, the 500Gb hard drive was formatted with the new ext4 fs, and lightening-fast, beautiful, simple-yet-flexible xubuntu was up and running (I was once a KDE enthusiast but we went our different ways when they set the path for KDE4/Dolphin).

The Radeon graphics card was immediatly supported (with the open source driver) and although I’ve not done anything to really test its capabilities, it seems fab.

Whether it’s the processor speed or the 4Gb of RAM I don’t know, but intensive tasks are a breeze. I love RawTherapee for processing RAW digital camera images (photos I’ve done with this), and the results of changes are immediate (on my last computer I would have to wait about a second to see the effect of a change).

Being ubuntu/debian based I was able to get all my favourite applications installed and working really quickly: firefox, thunderbird, Openoffice, Apache+PHP, MySQL, Gvim, Inkscape, SSH… and added some excellent new-to-me software too:

• tilda (to replace yakuake)
• gigolo/gvfs (a much more satisfactory replacement for KDE’s kio slaves)
• cheese for the built-in webcam which just worked straight away.

The bad

Of course it won’t suspend. Or rather it won’t wake. Whether this is really an issue is debatable: if I want instant-on then just don’t suspend it. If I want to keep my apps open then hibernate works fine (although takes 30 seconds to turn off and about a minute to turn on again). Otherwise shutdown takes just a few seconds and boot times are around 40s anyway thanks to the new upstart implementation.

The fan seems quite keen to be on (pretty much all the time) and is quite noisy.

The ugly

So I’ve had a little “fun” getting stuff working, but I’m almost there. Here’s where I got to with the more challenging bits:

Wireless

Dell studios come with either an intel or a broadcom card. The first is reported to just work. You can guess which one mine had….

I have the Broadcom 14e4:4315 chipset (as reported by lspci) which is actually BCM4312 802.11b/g – low power.

There seemed to be a lot of chatter about the b43 open source driver although linuxwireless reports that support for my card is “in progress” (26 Nov 2009). A very long ubuntuforums thread implies it’s straight forward to get it up and running in karmic. But I could not get this to work. Lots of Fatal DMA errors in the syslog, as reported by lots of other users on that thread.

In the end I went with the proprietary wl driver, in the package bcmwl-kernel-source which only works if you uninstall linux-backports-modules-karmic. It works just fine, so far!

The only confusing thing is the hardware wireless (radio) switch (F2). If that’s off (and there is nothing to tell you whether it is or isn’t – no lights, no syslog entries…) then obviously, it’s not going to be able to connect.

I was really pleased to see that the latest version of Network Manager has support for fixed IP addresses per-network, too because previously I had to do a bodge (you can kill -STOP dhcp and then assign different ip with ifconfig using a hook in /etc/network/if-up.d/) to achieve that.

Brightness buttons

Put acpi=noapic in grub’s kernel options and these will work again. For a while. And sometimes not. And one poster reported that this caused the fan to come on more, which makes me think that has something to do with it. The screen is so bright! It is useful to be able to turn it down (as well to save battery power). See helpful comments below from Martin on this.

The BIOS lets you choose what the function/multtimedia keys require the Fn button for. Oddly my BIOS seems to keep resetting itself to Multimedia first, which is annoying because I regularly use function keys. (this odd behaviour has gone away and now my function keys work fine).

Monitor Gamma was way too high

I now use xgamma in an autostart script to set more correct levels. I used Norman Koren’s 3 colour charts to find appropriate values.I’ve added the Gamma settings into the Monitor section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf which was created by (from console)

sudo service gdm stop
Xorg -configure
sudo mv xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf
    ...add this line into the Monitor section:
    Gamma           1.03 0.86 0.67
    ...
sudo service gdm start

Install ATI’s graphics driver

I got very poor OpenGL performance with the open source driver, so I switched to the fglrx driver and things are much better, I’ve even fallen to temptation and installed compiz! However the nice fade from splash to desktop on boot up does not work anymore.

There was a problem with slow alt-tab switching, too (w/out compiz but with xfce’s compositor turned on). I realised that this is solved by turning off the option to show a border around the windows while alt-tabbing. No tears shed for turning that switch off!

So there you go. If there’s anything you think I should know, please post a comment!

Ug! what happened to my drawing?

The FAQ says to embed all the images, or vectorise (trace) them. Embedding is often not practical if you’re working with high resolution graphics: why should you need to copy your photos, doubling your disc space to use them in your drawing? Tracing them is pretty daft IMO unless you want to achieve that effect because you end up with intensely complicated paths that make your whole drawing (a) massive and (b) slow to render/work with.

So how to fix it?

1. Open the .svg file in your favourite text editor.
2. Assuming your images are JPEGs, do a search for .jpg
3. You’ll see image tags like this
   [xml]<image
   xlink:href=”file:///path/to/your/photo.jpg”
   width=”377.84216″
   height=”251.89478″
   id=”image3559″
   x=”0″
   y=”0″
   />
   [/xml]
4. Edit the xlink:href attribute to either:
   1. remove the “file:///path/to/your/” bit leaving just “photo.jpg”
      If you do this you need to put a copy of each photo.jpg file in the same folder as the inkscape document.
      or
   2. change it to point the correct path
      
5. Repeat for the other occurrences.
6. Save the file with a new name, (just in case!)
7. Open in inkscape.

Good luck!

Of course you could code it easy enough if you found you were always losing images.

Hope this helps someone.

git-fetch on its own jus t fetches from the origin. What I want is git-fetch –all but this isn’t an option. Here’s how:

[bash]
cd /path/to/your/repo/git/refs/remotes/
for r in * ; do git fetch “$r” ; done
cd -
[/bash]

I’ve wrapped this up in a script to automate it. Seems odd that it’s not a function in git, but then again I’m quite new to git and so maybe there’s  something I’m missing!

Cadair Idris

A lovely day walking up Cadair Idris, Wales. Amazing weather.

Check out the photos.

And shout out to the open source developers at RawTherapee for making the excellent RAW digital camera image processing program which is fab.

So I had the day off after working the weekend. I dropped Harvey at nursery after a trip to the playground and headed for the allotment. mayBe’s morning bell text advised being in a garden for a time today, reflecting on the earliest Genesis stories, which seemed to match my plans to go the allotment again.

I dug-over the first plot, got rid of three barrow-loads of weeds/grass. Annoyingly my stupid unreliable Sony-Erricson phone chose to lose my before shot completely. Ah well. I’ve left it mostly (but not entirely) covered up with what cardboard/black plastic we had. The allotment patch, that is, not the phone.

Respect to farmers worldwide, what hard work it is!

We’re going to start some seeds off at home. Peas, courgette, squash. Possibly potatoes and some other bits.  Still early days, but we had fun yesterday which seems to be the point for now!

Photos on flickr

I’ve replaced it with Wordpress because I’m using that on a number of other projects, so I hope it will make it easier to maintain.

Looking for pics of Harvey? They’re on our flickr account.

I’m going to make this pretty soon.