Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by lilwong

Shop in LowYat selling U-DIMM RAM modules?

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 07:30:00 +0800

Shop in LowYat selling U-DIMM RAM modules?

lilwong — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:46:17 +0800

Hi,

I need to upgrade the RAM in my Fujitsut P7120 laptop, which uses U-DIMM / Micro-DIMM modules instead of normal SO-DIMM modules. Does anyone know of a shop that sells this RAM type? Trying to see if I can do the upgrade at a price where I don't find myself paying the equivalent of a new netbook laptop just for the RAM.

Thanks!
Wong

Setting up Kubuntu Jaunty for your desktop/laptop

lilwong — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:11:00 +0800

In case anyone's interested, I documented all the steps I took to setup Kubuntu Jaunty (that's Ubuntu but with KDE installed by default instead of Gnome).

The packages installed are more geared towards developers, but it can be used in a general sense as well.

http://envb.sapphirewillow.com/writings/20...velopers-setup/

It's not all smooth sailing though. There are quite a lot of steps, mainly due to problems with the default packages, which I've documented separately about here:

http://envb.sapphirewillow.com/writings/20...t-cos-i-use-it/

Push for Wiggy's Linux driver

lilwong — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:55:44 +0800

Dear all,

It seems that P1's Wiggy was designed and developed locally here in boleh-land. Hence, any Linux driver would most likely have to be developed by P1's engineers as well. That will not happen if P1 perceives the Linux market as too small to be commercially viable.

I have submitted feedback to them on behalf of my company, requesting for the development of a Linux driver, without which, we are unable to subscribe to their service. I would like to invite the rest of you to do the same.

Celcom and Maxis' broadband modems are basically Huawei devices which are commonly used overseas as well. Linux drivers for these devices are fairly common due to the international community of users. Even Izzi's USB modem has Linux drivers in the form of a small sourceforge project for iBurst kernel drivers.

However, if the Wiggy is a true homebred device, unless Green Packet starts licensing out its design to overseas Wimax providers, it looks like it's up to us Linux users to generate the demand and to let them know about it.

Something to think about and act on for y'all

Wong

P.S. BSD users are free to run this message through "sed s/Linux/BSD/g"

P1 Wiggy really designed and developed locally?

lilwong — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:31:19 +0800

According to:

http://www.wimaxian.com/2009/04/06/p1-unve...sb-wimax-modem/

QUOTE

Wiggy was designed and developed locally by P1’s parent Green Packet and manufactured by Taiwan’s OEM company.

So the device is a completely local design? Impressive, if that's true.

However, that may not be a good thing for me, as a Linux user, as it looks like I'd be completely at the mercy of their schedule and judgment on when it's commercially viable to come out with a driver for Linux. At least for Izzi, they took an OEM design which was used many times by similar ISPs overseas and by the time the Izzi modem hit our shores, an independent opensource driver for it already exists.

[Works] Acer eMachines EL1200/ V193HQ on (K)ubuntu

lilwong — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:05:48 +0800

Posting this up to let y'all know that (K)Ubuntu works fine with this very cheap machine. Perfect for aunties or college students on a budget who just need a basic setup for communications, surfing and document editing.

My g/f's aunt wanted a simple PC setup to do checking of mails and to keep in touch with relatives. I have had my eye on this really cheap Acer eMachine EL1200 sold in All IT so I recommended it to her. RM1068 for the machine inclusive of monitor.

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 2650e / 1.6 GHz
RAM: 1GB DDR2
HDD: 160GB
Optical Drive: DVD+/-RW
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE Integrated
Sound Card: Integrated NVidia MCP61
Monitor: 19" LCD 1366x768 native resolution (VGA only)

More details here.

Installed Kubuntu 9.04 Beta (released just last week) and intend to upgrade it to the production version when it gets released in about a month's time. Installation was generally smooth except for a few issues that I'll detail below:

1) The opensource NV drivers will be used by default. Resolution of 1366x768 is detected automatically but there's a few pixels eating beyond the right border of the monitor, obscuring a bit of your windows' right scroll bar and close window button. Nothing too serious though.
2) Switched to using the propriatary NVidia driver and it defaulted to 1280x800 which was totally out of whack. Played around with the xorg.conf a bit and I have a working configuration here. The pixels off-border issue with the opensource drivers are not present either.
3) Sound recording isn't set up properly by default. Big problem 'cos chatting online is a major use case for this particular user. Managed to configure it properly after tweaking KMix a bit. Anybody with problems can drop me a PM. A lot of trial and error here.
4) I had read that aMSN supported video over MSN protocol so I tried it out. But turned out it has basic video sending but not audio. Kinda defeats the purpose of having the video itself, for all intents and purposes. Skype Video works fine though, so I guess I'll be asking her and her relatives to use that. I'm also checking out Meebo's TokBox to see if it can be used or not later.

Overall, I'm really pleased with the performance of this machine, given the price. I'm running full desktop effects with Firefox (the eternal RAM hog) and a couple of OpenOffice documents open, and I don't feel much of a lag at all. Other than the hard drive, everything else about the machine is quiet. Bootup time is FAST (will post up some figures next time I reboot with a watch handy). All my partitions except for swap and /boot (ext2) are on ext4 (no data migration 'cos this is a new setup). Eventually, I guess a RAM upgrade would be handy but for now, I think this machine wouldn't embarrass anyone as long as you bear the pricepoint in mind.

Wong

Getting desktop search to work in Kubuntu/KDE 4

lilwong — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 03:27:34 +0800

Check out this link: http://www.howtoforge.com/desktop-search-i...bian-in-kde-4.2

If you're using KDE 4.2 on Intrepid, more likely than not, desktop search is broken. The reason is because the only fully-functional indexing backend is partly dependent on Sesame2, which is in turn dependent on Java. The KDE developers are currently working on an alternative indexing engine which runs natively on C/C++, but for now, if you want to get desktop search working, this is the only way.

The instructions in the link specifies using the OpenJDK packages but you can easily replace them with Sun's JDK packages as well, as long as your JAVA_HOME env variable is set correctly.

I've tested this out and it works swell so far. Strigi is still going through its first pass indexing on my laptop so it's a bit laggy but I'll post an update later on how it performs after indexing is done.

I've been waiting for desktop search to work for ages so color me elated right now. I'd been having Google Desktop envy for the longest time... no more

Availability of Netbooks running Linux?

lilwong — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:35:14 +0800

Hi,

Would like to find out if any of you know of a vendor who supplies any Netbook that comes with Linux pre-installed? I've trawled through the entire LowYat a couple of Saturdays ago and came up with zilch. It seems that only Asus offered their 701 model when only Linux was available and the moment an XP variant came out, all vendors switched to it in a hurry.

Seriously, I don't blame the vendors entirely as they're running a business too and it costs money to maintain stock. But it's also up to us consumers to show that there's a demand. How do we show it? By organizing a bulk purchase?

Over in Singapore, it seems that the same thing is happening. I managed to find someone selling 'em but they're selling it at the same price as the XP model! Which just means higher margins for 'em. Crap.

Personally, I like the HP Mini 1000. The keyboard is relatively large which makes typing easier. Dell Mini 9 doesn't seem available here yet (from the website).

Wong

First impressions of HTC Dream (Google Android)

lilwong — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:44:04 +0800

Just picked up a HTC Dream from Singtel down south in SG over the weekend. Not telco-locked so I can use it here with Celcom with no issues. Haven't tried the root unlock hack yet.

Some of my first impressions:

1) lack of a soft keyboard is pretty darned irritating. you need to whip out the QWERTY even when you want to edit a contact's phone number. The only soft key pad available is for the outgoing calls dialer. fortunately, I downloaded a 3rd party tool that creates an iPhone-like soft keyboard just for SMS, so some of my concerns there alleviated.
2) you can pretty much expect to charge the phone once or twice a day under heavy usage.
3) props to Singtel for choosing not to telco-lock the phones unlike T-Mobile. I could just slot in my Celcom SIM n use it from the get-go.
4) the touchscreen sensitivity is better than other older HTC models i've tried, but still a bit off compared to iPhone's (I didn't get the iPhone more because of ideological principals)
5) GMail and Calendar services work great. However, you can only bind one gmail account to it at any one time (for all google-related services). Worse is, if you want to switch to another active gmail account, it seems that you need to reset the whole unit back to default settings. I have several gmail accounts (both corporate and personal) so I shared all 2ndary calendars with my primary account and use the browser to check 2ndary mails.
6) A lot of repetitive crap in Android Market right now. Mostly for free. You can choose from abt 20 Sudoku games to install

Do note that this is my first time using a push-to-mobile technology so I'm more easily impressed. Those of you who are used to Blackberries and its ilk may find it hard to stifly a yawn...

Some of the guys in HardWarezone forums are trying to gauge the interest for an Android boot camp with Google over there. If you're interested, you can say so here.

Upgrading Kubuntu Intrepid from KDE 4.1 to 4.2

lilwong — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:08:33 +0800

If you're using KDE 4.1 on Kubuntu Intrepid, 4.2 is worth upgrading to. Unfortunately, the upgrade process is anything but smooth. I think I've done this enough times to roughly know what to do (just spent last week upgrading 5 laptops and 1 PC):

1) do "sudo aptitude safe-upgrade" to get your system up to date first.
2) Add the following repos to your sources.list.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/digikam-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Note: if the URLs above are formatted wrongly by forum, refer to http://paste2.org/p/152231 for the proper text.

3) do "sudo aptitude update"

if aptitude complains about missing repo keys, copy the offending hexadecimal key and paste it into the following command (all in one line):

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys <paste repo key here> && gpg --export -a <paste repo key here again> | sudo apt-key add -

4) Run "sudo aptitude safe-upgrade" and press "n" to quit immediately. Read the output. You will see a list of packages that has been "kept back". This literally means that there are repo conflicts. Copy out this list into a text editor.

5) Remove these conflicting packages: sudo aptitude remove <list of packages>

This will remove these packages and some other dependency packages as well. Aptitude will also ask you to confirm some dependency issues, just say "Yes".

WARNING: After you have removed them, do NOT log out of your KDE session until this entire procedure is complete. You won't be able to login again for now.

6) Do: "sudo aptitude safe-upgrade". This will upgrade a bunch of items that were not conflicted in the first place.

7) After completing the first round of upgrades, do the following to reinstall previously conflicted packages:

"sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop digikam"

8) Add the following repo to your source.list for Amarok 2:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu intrepid main

9) do "sudo aptitude update"

10) do "sudo aptitude install amarok-kde", which will uninstall your existing Amarok installation and install the new one.

11) now, you can either restart X or reboot. There've been a couple of times for me when just logging out didn't work and KDM failed to start up so rebooting may be a good thing.

Sounds scary? Yeah, well... I nearly crapped in my pants the first time I did it as well. Now it's routine for me. Your mileage may still vary, so don't sue me if it eats your hard drive.

What you'll get with this:

1) KDE 4.2, which features a much smoother experience overall.
2) Spinning cube in KWin; I reckon a lot of compiz junkies want that
3) less artifacts in the system tray (still happens once in a while)
4) selective hiding of icons in system tray works now
5) another alternative KDE app launcher menu in the form of Lancelot
6) "vi" mode in Kate, w00t
7) (currently) release candidate 2 of the KDE 4 version of Digikam (see my earlier post about Digikam)
8) Amarok 2; which looks nice to me but has less functionality currently than the previous version (you may want to skip installing it if that bothers you; go Google for more info on what has not been implemented yet)
9) Kopete is much less crash-prone now
10) The ability to set your Desktop to behave like KDE 3's desktop (display all files in $HOME/Desktop as icons on the desktop) instead of using th)older View feature (I for one, prefer using Folder View)
11) Unified notifications in one area has started to work (Kopete and general file movements use it now; Amarok has not implemented this yet and still has its own notification widget)
12) ... and many, many other changes that basically makes KDE 4 much more usable. There's also a nice article on 4.2's new features here.

I have successfully done this on the following machines (all running stock Kubuntu 8.10):
1) Dell Vostro 1400
2) Compaq V3628TU
3) Compaq V3532TU
4) Compaq Evo N800v (clunker of a machine, but 3D effects still work pretty smoothly
5) self-assembled machine running on old Athlon chip and ATI 9800 card
6) Compaq Presario 2800

Good luck,
Wong

[addedon]March 5, 2009, 9:35 am[/addedon]Kubuntu PPAs just got updated with KDE 4.2.1 binaries this morning. I'd suggest you do not install it yet. As usual, it wasn't smooth. I've got a broken KDE right now that I can't really do anything with

LG laptops in Malaysia?

lilwong — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 16:21:57 +0800

Hi,

anybody knows if the new LG laptops (S1 etc) are sold anywhere in Malaysia? If yes, any contacts?

Thanks!
Wong

SimplyMepis 3.4.3

lilwong — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 16:19:16 +0800

Ok, since I recommended Mepis in another thread and had downloaded a copy of their latest release 3.4.3 a few days ago, I decided to burn the ISO and give it a quick lookover.

About Mepis

Mepis is one of the better known small live CD Linux distributions oriented towards desktops. While it doesn't have any big corporate names behind it, it has garnered quite a reputation for being one of the more hassle free and complete distros for the desktop user. The ISO is freely downloadable but to get high priority access to its servers, you need a subscription. A small list of free mirrors are provided as well on its website and once out in the wild, torrents are easily downloadable from Linux Tracker.

One of its differentiating factors is the fact that, unlike other free-download distros, it packages a number of popular but license-encumbered libraries and executables inside the distro. While the legality of this act is debatable and I'm pretty sure RMS would have nothing nice to say about it, the end result is users are spared the hassle of hunting around forums and IRC channels looking for ways to play mp3s.

About the review

I'm only taking a quick look-see into the overall capabilities of this release. As it's a live CD, all I did was to pop in the CD, booted up and take a quick test of it's applicatoins and features. I did not install it to my harddisk. However, as the purpose of the live CD is to act as a proof-of-concept that the distro would install on your PC without hitches, you can take this as a general indication that what I found running the live CD would be the same if you installed it on your hard drive.

Hardware

Testing was done on a white box PC with the following specifications:

CPU: P4 2.4GHz
Mainboard: Biostar U8668-D
RAM: 256MB 333MHz
Video: Integrated
Audio: Integrated
CD-ROM drive: Samsung 52X
DVD-R/RW drive: Lite-on
Speakers: Generic stereo
Printer: HP Officejet 4255 AIO with fax/scanner/print capabilities

Bootup

Upon booting up, I was presented with the GRUB interface. With a few options for normal, video-impaired, debugging and for generally slower PCs, I chose the normal bootup. A basic splash screen was shown as it went through the bootup process. As this is a live CD bootup, speed wasn't impressive but you can expect serious improvements if you install it to the hard drive. As it is now, on my machine, it took 2 minutes and 8 seconds from when I made my Grub selection till I saw the login screen. The login screen itself is simple: a list of accounts are displayed and you choose one of the accounts by clicking on it and entering your password. For this test, I entered the root account (not a good thing to do on a regular basis!)

Inside Mepis

Upon logging in, I noticed that the KWeather weather report plugin at the bottom of the screen updated itself immediately. This shows that my network card was detected and configured successfully as I needed network access to get the weather information. Out of my speakers came a nice welcome tune so that means the integrated sound card was detected successfully as well, unlike SuSE Linux 10 which had perpetual problems with my soundcard.

Mepis uses KDE, which is one of the 2 window environments reigning supreme right now. The version used is 3.4 though, which is one step behind the latest release. A quick look through the K Menu yielded no surprises:

1) A bunch of basic arcade, board, card and strategy games ubiquitious throughout most distros.
2) Graphic tools
3) Internet applications
4) Media applications
5) OpenOffice
6) System and utility tools

The version of OpenOffice used is 2.0.1 so that's updated enough. Maybe in a couple of years KOffice would be matured enough to take its place as I'm really not a fan of OpenOffice and its lack of performance. The slowness becomes even more pronounced when you run it as a live CD.

I mounted a network share using the Konqueror file manager by typing "smb://username@network-address". Browsing through network shares was no problem as was always the case. Having said that, you'll see later that playing media files over the network can sometimes pose problems.

The file manager supports multi-tabs like Firefox and also functions as a web browser. Personally, I've always preferred the rendering performance of Konqueror's KHTML versus Firefox's Gecko. Firefox is included as the standard web browser though, as is Thunderbird along with KDE's own Kontact. Browsing the web was no problem and I also managed to download a few mail from a test account using all the mentioned applications.

It was puzzling though that Mepis didn't seem to come with the standard KDE IM client Kopete while Skype was included.

The 3.3.X Mepis family used to come with Adobe Acrobat Reader to view PDF files. However, since the native KDE PDF viewer KPDF has matured significantly since then, Acrobat Reader was left out. This is a good move in my opinion, as PDF files can be viewed inside the Konqueror window thanks to KDE's embedded KPart technology.

I ran the live CD on a PC with some NTFS drives on it. The drives were not mounted automatically and I had to mount it by issueing the "mount /dev/<partition-name> /mnt/<mount-point>" command and the command line. This may have been a fail-safe move as write operations for NTFS file systems are not well-supported in Linux. I had no way of verifying if a FAT or native Linux file system would be auto-mounted.

Having established that all the usual applications are intact, I proceeded to try out opening some documents and media files. Opening office documents would be the same using OpenOffice on any operating system so I will not go into that here. Instead, I concentrated more on opening media files and testing if they played properly. The list of file formats tested and their results goes as follows:

1) MP3 files - no problems
2) WMV files - no problems
3) ASX files - no problems
4) AVI files - no problems
5) MPG files - no problems
6) OGM files - no problems, I was testing a file with dual audio and subtitles and I could toggle between all of them easily using the KDE media player Kaffeine
7) Matroska files - I could only open the audio and subtitle streams but not the video stream. However, as Matroska is a container format, I'm not sure what video stream was inside that I couldn't open

In any case, this proves that media files in general are no challenge for Mepis and it would satisfy the needs of most users. However, all the files above were only successfully played on my NTFS mount. When I attempted to play the files over a network share, it not only threw an error but gave an erronous error message at that, claiming that the relevant decoding libraries couldn't be found when in actual fact I had all the required libraries.

To my disappointment though, I found that my HP AIO printer couldn't be detected. I ventured no more than this as this is just supposed to be a cursory look through the default capabilities of Mepis. So I removed the printer's USB cable and stuck in a thumbdrive instead. Ah, much better. The thumbdrive was detected and an icon to access it was placed on the desktop Mac-style.

Lastly, I attempted to burn a CD-R using KDE's K3B. I selected the ISO file for the very same Mepis that I'm reviewing right now and the entire burn process went without a hitch. So now I have TWO copies of Mepis 3.4.3. Not exactly smart of me.

In conclusion

I was extremely happy with my installation of Mepis 3.3.1 about a year and a half ago and I'm happy to say that the sentiment remains. Barring a few niggling issues and a slightly bigger one in the printer (which I'm sure can be solved as I've managed to get the printer working under OpenSuSE), Mepis remains one of the most complete basic desktop distros in the market.

MediaPortal

lilwong — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 02:24:29 +0800

Does anyone have experience using the opensource media center MediaPortal? It looks quite neat. Am thinking of rigging up one of my spare PCs to my TV and hifi to use it.