Sat, 05 May 2012
First-rate Linux support by Xerox
When buying hardware for a Linux system, often we need to hunt for their support status by searching for PCI or USB IDs in the kernel source, or by looking up the printer model on the linuxprinting.org (now freedesktop.org) openprinting database, or similar things. This is something I'm used to, and not at all unexpected anymore. And after having done it a thousand times for several customers as well as for myself, it's become routine.
So in that light, I was pleasantly surprised last monday when I delivered and installed a Xerox WorkCentre 3220 at a customer last week to see that they support Linux on the same level as they do Windows and MacOS: the "system requirements" part of the manual contains a section laying out the requirements for a computer running Linux, as does the "troubleshooting" section; and when there are Linux-specific bits to be said, there'll just be a Linux-specific section in the manual to tell you what to do. Also, the CD-ROM that came with the device has a Rock Ridge extension, which means that if you pop it into a Linux system you'll see an installer for CUPS and SANE drivers.
The only criticism I have is that it's an installer, and not an LSB package or some such. But hey, for once I didn't have to fight to get a printer to work properly!
Thu, 29 Mar 2012
Apple hates quality
I own a DAS Ultimate S keyboard, and am very happy with it. Yes, the price tag is pretty high, especially when compared to those cheap keyboards you'll find in every bakery shop these days; but the difference in quality isn't something to be ignored.
A while back, I got three PowerMac G4 machines from someone, so I could work on them for Debian. They'd been gathering dust for a while, since I'd been busy with other things, but this week I had a look at them.
One of the three was incomplete; it lacked a video card. The other two, however, were quite usable. They came with MacOS 10.4.something, and one of them had a 40GB hard disk, while the other had an 80GB one. The disks were quite noisy, but I've already replaced them with a CF-IDE adapter, so now they're running off some solid-state storage, which should be at least somewhat faster, if not entirely efficient.
However, installing a quality operating system on them proved to be somewhat harder than expected.
When I connect the DAS keyboard to the PowerMac, put the Debian CD in the drive, and reboot the machine, it will eject the CD rather than trying to boot off of it.
When I disconnect the keyboard, it will boot off the CD fine, but since OpenFirmware apparently doesn't support USB hotplugging, that means yaboot will sit there forever waiting for me to enter "install" and hit enter.
When I replace the high-quality, 130-euro DAS keyboard with a cheap crappy "I don't know what a proper ISO layout looks like" 5-euro Logitech "keyboard", suddenly everything works as it should.
Except that my hands hurt from trying to type on that thing, of course.
I swear, Apple hates quality.
Fri, 01 Jul 2011
New toy
My previous laptop was due for a replacement. It's not that old yet—only two years—but it was getting on my nerves. The (second!) battery only gave me 45 minutes anymore, the wireless had issues, and I never really liked the processor—note the lack of the VT-x extension; at the time when I bought this laptop, I wasn't aware of the fact that Intel was segmenting their products based in processors with and without hardware virtualisation.
Originally I was going to buy a Toshiba R700-14J, but after I'd been waiting for far too long, it turned out that it had been EOL'd. So eventually, I succumbed to the dark side and bought me a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 instead. I've never been a fan of thinkpads before; I don't like what they look like, especially not the earlier models. But since I didn't want to wait a very long time again, I decided to go instead for a model that my suppliers' extranet site told me they had in stock, which kindof limits your options.
The model I got is one with an SSD, which is new for me. I'd previously been holding off on getting an SSD until the technology had matured a bit, having heard some horror stories in the past about how some earlier models would run very slow after a while, but I guess it's safe to say that kind of problem should now be past us.
It's crazy how fast this SSD is. The original 5 second delay which grub implies almost doubled the boot time. I notice that the 'networking' initscript no longer waits for a DHCP request to complete, which has the rather funny result that sometimes when I log in, I don't have networking yet, which means that libpam-krb5 can't do it's job properly, yet.
There's one thing I'm not very fond of, and that's the display aspect ratio. 16:9 is just wrong. While I still prefer 4:3, I can live with 16:10. Very unhappy about that. There are still some laptops available that do have 16:10, but that would've required me to wait, which I didn't want to do anymore...
Oh well.
Fri, 28 Jan 2011
Dear lazyweb,
I found out the hard way that my laptop's BIOS is not battery-backed. This means that if the battery runs flat (or it is removed for a prolonged time), that BIOS forgets two things: the system time (which is annoying, but easily fixed), and the MAC address of eth0 (which is more than annoying).
As a result, my laptop's MAC address is now set to something rather invalid. Since this MAC address is configured in a few DHCP servers here and there which give me a fixed IP address when they notice my laptop on the network, I'd like to set it back to what it should be.
With ip link set eth0 address <mac> I can easily set the address back to what it used to be. But, of course, that isn't permanent, and once we reboot, it's gone.
So, dear lazyweb: how does one change a MAC address in a permanent way?
Tue, 28 Dec 2010
Wanted: a "DAS keyboard" with ISO mechanical layout
Some people claim that AZERTY is a crime against humanity. I claim that if you're going to point and laugh at one layout in defense of another, you should have that other be something actually better, like the dvorak or Turkish F layout, not QWERTY.
One additional reason: the mechanical layout of a US QWERTY keyboard (the ANSI layout) is inferior to the mechanical layout of the AZERTY keyboards. This is a mathematical fact—the ISO layout has 102 keys, the ANSI one has only 101 of them.
In that light, I find it highly disappointing that Thinkgeek.com's Das Keyboard uses the ANSI mechanical layout, and that there is no ISO version of the same thing. If there were, I'd have bought one years ago.
(Yes, that's meant as a hint, in case you didn't catch that)
Update: apparently it exists, it's just that ThinkGeek doesn't have it. For those who want one, it's available here, amongst others.
Fri, 22 Oct 2010
FSF Hardware endorsement criteria
The FSF has published criteria under which it would endorse hardware as being 'free hardware'. My guess on the number of companies that would be interested in this policy in its current form:
0
My reason for that is fairly simple:
Any product-related materials that mention the FSF endorsement must not also carry endorsements or badges related to proprietary software, such as "Works with Windows" or "Made for Mac" badges, because these would give an appearance of legitimacy to those products, and may make users think the product requires them. However, we don't object to clear factual statements informing the user that the product also works with specific proprietary operating systems.
In other words, "if you're going to be using our badge to say that your hardware is free, you must not be using the official badges that show it also works with other operating systems." Or, also: "if you want to make your product more attractive to the 10% of users who prefer free solutions, you must in the process make it less attractive to the 90% of users who don't (yet)."
I don't think that's going to fly.
Mon, 22 Mar 2010
N900 back!
So, a short while ago, the battery of my N900 had run flat. As in, completely, utterly flat. In itself, that's no big deal -- you connect it to a power outlet, wait until it's gone past the low-battery charging bits, then boot and use as usual.
Except that it wouldn't. I'd recently installed a firmware update from Nokia (which contained some bug fix that I really was waiting for), and now the bloody thing wouldn't boot. Rather than do the low-battery charging dance, it thought the battery had enough power that it could just go ahead and boot.
Of course it was wrong, so whenever I powered it on, it would sit there fore 30 seconds, try to boot, fail, power off for about a second, and start over. I left it like that for a night, but it didn't recharge.
Needless to say, that was quite annoying.
So I sent it in for repair, and today there was a package in the mail, containing my (repaired) N900.
They'd reflashed it. A reasonable course of action, I guess, but of course that meant all data was gone. Good thing it has a backup application, and good thing I stored those backups on an external micro-SD card.
Restoring those back-ups was a breeze; they'd also stored the contents of sources.list and have done something akin to "dpkg --get-selections", since now the application manager kindly asks me whether I wish to reinstall the applications that I had installed. Cute.
At any rate, I'm very happy I finally got rid of this awful Samsung "cellphone". It's a SGH-C140 that I had as a replacement until my N900 got back, but there was something very very wrong with it; I don't know whether it's a design flaw or just a wear-and-tear issue (these replacement phones aren't usually handled in the best possible way), but it managed to lose connection to the network every once in a while. So people who would call me would immediately get my voicemail, and then they'd be angry with me later because I was unavailable. Well, duh.
Anyway, that's over now. Whee.
Fri, 05 Mar 2010
Netgear WNDR3700 and OpenWRT
I wanted a machine on which I could easily run OpenWRT. So I'd went to the #openwrt channel on freenode a while back, and just asked for suggestions; people suggested to me that the Netgear WNDR3700 was a good choice, so I ordered that.
I assumed that it would be easy enough to install OpenWRT on this device, but hadn't actually looked into it, planning to wait with that until the device had arrived. Little did I know that the machine actually comes with OpenWRT preinstalled. Now there's an interesting twist.
Now you do need to run some "telnetenable" thingy to be able to get a shell, after which "telnet <device>" gets you a root shell (with no username or password by default). Supposedly you should update that by using "passwd", but they managed to break that in the firmware that comes with the device.
I am missing a few things, though.
root@WNDR3700:/bin# dmesg /bin/ash: dmesg: not found root@WNDR3700:~# uname -a /bin/ash: uname: not found root@WNDR3700:~# hexdump /bin/config |more /bin/ash: less: not found
Unh?
root@WNDR3700:~# alias more='less' vim='vi' root@WNDR3700:~#
Aahh.
And for those who were wondering: no, it does not have any 'vi' installed, either.
Oh well.
The fun thing is, this device has a USB connector, too; so it should be possible to connect a USB storage device, install Debian, and use it as a very potent home server/router/switch/whatever. That'd require me to understand how hostap works, though, which I haven't played with yet. I'm sure I'll figure that bit out -- at some point.
Tue, 08 Dec 2009
Hardware RNG
So, as many people probably know by now, the nice folks over at Simtec Electronics, some of whom were at DebConf9 last summer, have created a nice small device that plugs in a USB port and, with a userland daemon and some encryption for security, generates entropy (randomness) for the Linux kernel to use (through /dev/random and friends).
I've plugged one in my server today, and suddenly my server's entropy pool was full. This is a really nice thing. For a simple example of what happens when you insert such a thing into a server, check out my munin graphs.
Very nice for such a cheap device...
Sun, 11 Oct 2009
Fuck you, Sony.
I had wanted to buy a PS3 ever since I learned about this interesting processor that is called the Cell. Not that I'm very much into console gaming or any such thing; I'd have settled for any kind of affordable Cell hardware, really, but that basically is 'the PS3' these days.
What I had missed, however, was the fact that recent PS3 machines don't support running Linux anymore. Apparently this was all over the interwebs, but unfortunately I didn't see that.
That's €300 I won't see again, for a useless (to me) piece of hardware.
Stupid morons.
Some mail is welcome in /dev/null. Real mail, however, is welcome at my email address
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