Critical Exponent

One of the problems I’ve noticed in my trips is that it is something of a hassle to record your adventures after the fact. On the Newfoundland bike trip, for example, every few days I would sit in camp updating my hand-written journal. When I got back home, it took me several weeks to slowly transcribe those notes into my computer, and several weeks more to actually pull a few entries and blog about them. In fact, it was so much hassle that my life had already moved on and I did not get to blog as much as I wanted.

To fix this problem, I’ve been lusting after a voice-recording solution so I can record my adventures on the fly. Finally, last night I bought a Belkin TuneTalk for iPod. I just tested it out, and it seems to work fine! I’ll be using it on the cross-country move trip.

My dream is to get voice recognition on my computer so that I can automatically transcribe my audio logs into text files. Unfortunately, voice recognition on Linux appears to be pretty much dead at this moment (email me if you know of a one that is currently available). I may have to take a risk and buy Naturally Speaking and hope it works on Wine….

I am now Webcam-enabled! Give me a call! You need to use software that complies with the SIP or H.323 protocols. AFAIK at the moment, here’s how:

SIP: I have an SIP address registered at ekiga.net. (You should get one too, BTW!) Give me a heads-up and then point your videoconferencing software my way:

• On Linux, use Ekiga
• On Windows, get an SIP client, such as the free 3CX VOIP (not an endorsement; I haven’t tried them)

H.323: This is the protocol that Windows NetMeeting uses. Go to Start > Run… and type conf. If I know your username and hostname/IP, I can initiate a call. You can probably do the same if you have that information on me.

IM: Gaim does not yet seem to support video chat, and Ekiga does not seem to support the usual IM protocols (I think). I’ve read that Windows Messenger (but not MSN Messenger nor Windows Live Messenger) supports these protocols. Let us hope Microsoft will start/continue being SIP/H.323 compliant, and that the open source packages will learn to work with IM protocols.

One caveat is that I’ve only tried this within my intranet— so it may take some fiddling the first time to make sure it works fine across my router/firewall.

Here’s a list of programs that work with Ekiga.

Technical Details

I bought a Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks Pro

I downloaded the UVC driver using

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk

and installed it using

# gmake clean
# gmake
# gmake install

On my desktop (but not on my laptop) I ran into an Anaconda installer problem: the wrong architecture is set up for compiling header modules. The fix is here.

I ran ekiga, and it just worked (after configuration the input and output audio devices)

I upgraded my desktop and laptop to Fedora Core 6. I downloaded the discs using BitTorrent for the first time (I first installed BitTorrent using yumex). The installation went smoothly. Here are some caveats:

• The Anaconda installer’s dependency resolution takes a long time when upgrading, but it really is running. One just has to be patient. Really.
• I think there’s a bug with the synaptic touch pad driver. A bunch of the windowing utilities on the laptop (buttons and menu) do not respond after you make a selection until you move the mouse some more. This is not happening on my desktop, which is why I suspect a bug in the driver and not in Gnome.
• To update the previously installed packages using yumex, you must first go to the yumex Tools menu and select Reset Repository Cache.
• The FC-provided nVidia driver works out of the box—but it does not support the desktop effects. Since the proprietary driver is free, I am installing this manually instead.
• Software suspend (suspend2) works out of the box when you run, as root, /usr/sbin/hibernate…and even when you choose Suspend from the Gnome menu. Nice! It appears to be unnecessary to force the nvidia module to unload when suspending.
• To install the fancy desktop effects, you need to install the compiz package, which adds a Desktop Effects option to your menus. Neither my desktop nor laptop video drivers supports Desktop Effects. Here’s how to configure the nVidia driver for the effects—but this seems to work only for beta versions of compiz, which I have not yet installed.
• I recommend using mjmwired’s reference page to finish updating the installation with useful utilities. In the process, I found I had to resize my root partition. Since system-config-lvm insisted on unmounting the root partition (impossible in a normal boot), I booted from a rescue disk and did vgdisplay and lvscan to display the logical volumes and partitions, and pvextend to resize the logical partition. I then booted the system normally and did resize2fs for online resizing of the file system into the larger partition.

Since Knox’s laptop (Windows, poor soul) is getting repaired from its deathbed, I wanted to let him use mine without logging out of my terminal session. I just could not find the user-switch option or applet which I was sure I’d seen in FC4. After Googling for a while, it turns out that the fast [console] user switch is still there but turned off in the menu by default. To turn it on, just right click on the menus and choose “Edit Menus,” then select “New login.” I learned of this here

Installing the extra laptop memory I ordered went off without a hitch. I just followed the instructions in the S580 User’s Manual.

I’ve been playing around with suspend2 since the Fedora 4 install. I’d gotten it to almost work: I could hibernate from run level 3, which meant I got the benefits of a quick boot but not of having my session preserved. The problem was the graphics card. I didn’t have time to investigate, and at any rate, I figured Fedora Core 5 would come out soon.

I have just gotten suspend2 to work with Fedora 5 and the nVidia drivers! I can now truly hibernate my sessions!

I followed the directions in Matthias Hensler’s page. I set upyum to access his repository, and then installed the modified kernel sources and the eye-candy progress meter: # yum install userui-suspend2-fbsplash userui-suspend2-theme-fedorabubbles # yum install kernel-suspend2

I added kernel parameters to the kernel line in /etc/grub.conf to disable SELinux, set the framebuffer for the progress meter, and disable the kernel’s AGP support:

   kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2111_1.rhfc5.cubbi_suspend2 ..... selinux=0 vga=791 agp=0

I also add a duplicate line with the additiional kernel option noresume2 to boot without resuming a hibernated kernel.

In nVidia device section of /etc/Xorg,conf, I enable nVidia’s own AGP: Option “NvAgp” “1″

I modified the /etc/hibernate/hibernate-conf script using this as a reference. Aside from unloading the necessary modules, and such niceties as locking the screen on hibernation and resetting smartdimmer on resume (since the screen brightness does not appear to be persistent) the crucial line appears to be the expected_compression:

 ProcSetting expected_compression 50

That’s it! Typing, as root, pm-hibernate hibernates me nicely. Andrei’s page says he had trouble suspending/resuming on battery power, but I don’t seem to have that problem. The eye candy does not work perfectly: the expected_compression line makes the progress meter appear only fleetingly both on suspend and resume, which is too bad– but at the end of the day, insignificant.

One thing I wonder: many of the references imply there’s a hibernate button in the “Logout” dialog. I don’t see it. I may be missing the corresponding package. I will try installing gnome-power-manager and see how that works. (Either that or a shell script will be necessary to invoke pm-hibernate as non-root.)

Not too long ago, I mused about how pleasant it is to discover that someone had paved a trail where you through you were stumbling alone. I just came across Andrei’s page on configuring Linux on the S580 laptop. Granted, he’s using Gentoo and I’m using Red Hat, and he uses KDE and I use Gnome. Still, for the low-level configuration, his page is a good resource for configuration settings to try.

It’s been pretty cold and rainy in Boston. Perfect time to upgrade Linux to Fedora Core 5.

DESKTOP UPGRADE: I began upgrading my desktop system using ISO images I burned onto CD RWs. On the second CD, installation failed saying the media could not be read. I re-burned disk two and retried it, and it kept failing. At that point I rebooted into the partial FC5 system (the kernel and core packages had been updated, but not the rest of the packages) and follows the unofficial directions on upgrading via yum. From there, it went without a hitch.

I like the new FC5 system, and everything seems to work, albeit with some changes. Evolution 2.6.1 took a while to migrate everything over, but it did, eventually; I like its new “Memos” feature. The automatically mounted USB hard disk is mounted differently than with FC4 (now it does not automatically mount all the partitions, though it thinks it has; this is a small bug). My flash card reader is now mounted as a VFAT system, which means all the names are uppercase; I took this as an opportunity to upgrade my scripts to accept uppercase filenames, though I would still like to find out how to revert back to the FC4 behavior here. Lastly, I noticed that the gramps entry in my application menu disappeared, though the package and binary are still installed.

LAPTOP UPGRADE: I began to update the VAIO VGN S580 laptop using yum, but ran into exactly the same dependency issues mentioned there. I figured I’d switch over to the CD installation, but I had media problems consistently on the third disk. All these media problems make we wonder whether the CD burner is bad or the CD RW media are bad.

At any rate, I figured that since I had the first two CDs installed, I might as well tried switching over to the yum installation again. I ran into a known boot udev problem that caused the system to hang. I followed the directions here to disable udev:

# cd /mnt/sysimage
# mv sbin/pcmcia-socket-startup sbin/pcmcia-socket-startup.bak
# cd ..
# reboot

Rebooting from the hard disk did not start up my network automatically (I am using an ethernet cable rather than the wireless for the upgrade), so I rebooted and ran

# /usr/sbin/system-config-network-cmd

I was then able to update the pcmciautils package

# yum update pcmciautils

and continue with the yum-mediated FC5 upgrade.

Once this one done, the system would not boot up the XOrg server (nor the network, since I had the setwork configured to not start up automatically). This was true even if I tried to install the nVidia driver. I rebooted with the rescue CD, did

# chroot /mnt/sysimage
# yum remove xorg-x11-server-*

to remove the XOrg packages, and

# yum install xorg-x11-server-*

to reinstall them. I then re-installed the nVidia server, and then rebooted. I got the nVidia splash screen, and then the graphical boot scrren but the login manager did not show up– the system seemed to hang. Looking at the nVidia forums, I came across a set of directions. I followed these to the letter and had the same problem. After a few days of tinkering, I tried running startx from runlevel 3 as root: I got the nVidia splash screen. This provided the crucial clue: nVidia was installed correctly, but somehow the gdm package had gotten removed. Grrrr.

All systems go at this point. Now I will make sure that the packages on the desktop and the laptop are in sync.

When I ordered the laptop, Sony was charging an exorbitant amount to get the maximum possible 2GB of memory–something like $1000, I believe. I decided to get the minimum amount of memory that would work with my nVidia video card (512 MB), and later upgrade.

I decided that this weekend would be a good time to order the extra memory. Unfortunately, none of the Sony documentation (not what came on the Windows installation, not what’s available online) detailed the memory specs. I emailed customer support; they told me to call. I called, and the person at the other end could not find the information either. However, he referred me to www.crucial.com, where you can search for and order the memory that is compatible with your system. It turns out that the S580 takes a 200-pin SODIMM. I’m not up on what additional numbers are needed to specify the memory, or what the compatibility issues are, so I wound up ordering from them. They seem to be only slighlty more expensive (assuming I’m comparing the right products) than TigerDirect, where I’ve usually done my online computer shopping.

Installing the extra memory will be an adventure, I’m sure. I’ve never taken apart a laptop.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2 and reactivated the plugins. It went without a hitch. I hope to explore the new features and spend some time on the website this weekend.