Archive for the ‘work’ Category

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Bad HP, continued…

Friday, July 25th, 2008

So the motherboard got exchanged. That’s fine. The MAC address of the ethernet card changed as a consequence, that’s unavoidable and no real problem.

But why on earth do they have to change the DMI identification strings of the machines in mid-production?

Before, the machine reported itself like that (”s2ram -n” output):

This machine can be identified by:
sys_vendor = "Hewlett-Packard"
sys_product = "HP Compaq 2510p Notebook PC"
sys_version = "F.0A"
bios_version = "68MSP Ver. F.0A"

Now it reports

This machine can be identified by:
sys_vendor = "Hewlett-Packard"
sys_product = "HP Compaq 2510p (RU537EA)"
sys_version = "F.0A"
bios_version = "68MSP Ver. F.0A"

When I entered it into the s2ram database, I of course used the full “HP Compaq 2510p Notebook PC” string, not expecting it to change within the same model.

Bah!

But I should have known better: looking at whitelist.c shows, that HP has always had the bad habit of changing those strings all the time (just look at all those different nx5000 entries).

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Bad HP, bad…

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

My cool new machine was already sent back for warranty repair. The external display, connected to the docking station, did not get a signal anymore, so the motherboard had to be replaced. Ok, bad luck, but nothing to worry about. I had another similar machine (nc2400, the predecessor of the 2510p) to use during repair, so it was not that bad. But what really pisses me off is the fact, that i needed to boot Vista, just to reactivate the built-in UMTS card. When I first had to do it after fitting the card into the machine, I was thinking that it might be Sierra Wireless who needs the card to be “activated” or that I just had overlooked some BIOS setting in my eagerness to use the new toy, so I did not bother too much.
But today - I had of course booted Linux and wondered where the ttyUSB* devices had gone - I searched all the BIOS settings and everything, but there was just no device appearing on the USB bus. So I finally had to boot Vista, start HP’s “Wireless Manager” and switch it on there.

That’s 10GB of valuable harddisk space wasted, just for an UMTS activator program. I hate that.

Shame on you, HP guys. I’m really pissed.

Posted in UMTS, linux, work | Comments Off

Cool KPowersave tip of the day

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

If you got a notebook where changing the backlight brightness via software is possible in linux (check the info dialog you get when left-clicking on the kpowersave icon in the systray), try this: move the mouse pointer over the kpowersave icon and roll the mouse wheel up and down.

Have fun :-)

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Triple Dragon continued

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

This week is entirely dedicated to getting the Triple Dragon started with some usable software - and it is going along quite well.
I feared that I would have to dig down into DirectFB to solve my original framebuffer problems (on the first try I was unable to set the transparency - the setting, which is done with a private ioctl(), was always ignored), since the original software uses DirectFB, but in the end this is fortunately not the case.
The solution was simple: I need to issue the transparency-ioctl() after setting the framebuffer parameters, not before.
Right now, enigma is pretty usable, the “normal” TV viewing stuff is already working. I’m now refining the build system, so that I can tell people what they need to do to build the software, then I’ll look at the init scripts etc, so that they can even boot it.
Next thing will be fixing the not yet working stuff - some hardware-dependent like the SCART switching stuff, some software like the media-player and record / timeshift features, but then I’ll hopefully have some more people working on the project ;-)

Posted in linux, tripledragon, tuxbox, work | 6 Comments »

Suspend to disk with low memory machines

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Now this is an interesting bug report :-)

Executive summary: if your machine has less than 128MB of RAM, then please turn off the splash screen in /etc/suspend.conf

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HP BIOS update madness

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Say you wanted to update the BIOS on a colleague’s HP nc6230. You go to the HP website to find a “ROMPaq for HP Notebook System BIOS (68DTA) – FreeDOS Bootable Diskette”, which sounds exactly like what you’d want to download.
Well, follow that link and you’ll get a file called sp35281.exe. Does not look like a floppy image at all.
So let’s find out what it is:

~> file sp35281.exe
sp35281.exe: MS-DOS executable PE  for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit

Damn. A Windows executable, just to create a floppy image…
But there is always wine, so we’ll start it with that…

…long story short: it is some kind of self-extracting archive, which extracts an executable (of course for Windows, not DOS…), which then will write the image to the floppy disk.

There would probably be the possibility to configure wine to use a floppy image as drive A:, but fortunately this was not necessary. Examining the rom.exe, not even too closely gives:

~> du -b .wine/drive_c/SWSetup/sp35281/rom.exe
1502208 .wine/drive_c/SWSetup/sp35281/rom.exe

Which is exactly the size of a floppy disk image (1474560 Bytes) plus 27kB.
Just guessing, i extracted the last 1440kB from the executable:

tux@d173:~> dd if=.wine/drive_c/SWSetup/sp35281/rom.exe of=floppy.img bs=1k skip=27
tux@d173:~> file floppy.img
floppy.img: DOS floppy 1440k, x86 hard disk boot sector

Voilá - a bootable floppy image. Now i only hope for HP to start recognizing that they are doing no favour to their customers by obfuscating their BIOS updates like that…

Posted in linux, work | 7 Comments »

Cool new machine for me

Friday, May 16th, 2008

My boss was a good easter bunny. A little bit late, but the gift he brought was all the better: a brand new HP Compaq 2510p notebook (see e.g. Notebookcheck.com for the gory technical details).

It came with the “small” 6 cell battery, which lasts for over 5 hours without any aggressive power management employed, later i got the “big” 9 cell battery which lasts well over 8 hours. Who says size doesn’t matter? ;)

I additionally got the HP hs2300 HSDPA Wireless module (which is very much just a rebranded Sierra Wireless MC8775 with different USB IDs) for which i already sent patches upstream for the Linux kernel and HAL, so that it will work out of the box with openSUSE 11.0.

What can i say? This is an amazing little machine.
LED backlit 12.1″ display (why do the HP marketing guys call it “illumi-lite” instead of just plain saying “LED backlight”? It has an ambient light sensor which adjusts the display brightness automatically and works very well for me, but it can be switched off with a key combination.
The internal HSDPA card has an amazingly good reception - much better than all the external PCMCIA / ExpressCard cards i had so far. This might be due to the better antenna built into the display, but i don’t care why - it just works much better. Additionally, it does not consume a noticeable amount of the battery unless it is really used for transmitting data. I cannot say this of any of the external solutions.
The Ultra Low Voltage Processor is not a performance monster, but it performs at least as well as the ThinkPad X32 (Pentium M 1.8GHz) i had before, and it additionally has VT extensions nicely usable with KVM and qemu-kvm, combined with the 2GB of RAM it is more than suitable for my needs.

Everything on this machine works just fine: the intel 4965 wireless, the bluetooth adapter, suspend to RAM and suspend to disk - everything. Apart from that, it is really portable and still has a built in DVD burner - what else can you demand from your friendly easter bunny?

Thanks!

P.S.: of course, all this is with the current openSUSE Factory. There was a Vista Business installed on the machine, but after fiddling around with that for a few hours, to get it small enough to resize the Partition to less than 10GB, i never booted that again, i just was not impressed by it at all.

Posted in UMTS, linux, work | 6 Comments »

Activation Of Internal UMTS/3G Datacards

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

What to do if you got a brand-new ThinkPad X300, but the internal 3G data card (a SierraWireless device with the USB ID 1199:6813) simply refuses to find a network, and as a result cannot connect?
Well, maybe the card is just deactivated by default to save battery. You can enable it easily by sending:

at+cfun?
+CFUN: 0

OK
at+cfun=1
OK

to it (AT+CFUN? returns the current state, AT+CFUN=1 enables the device) with a terminal program of your choice (i always use “screen /dev/ttyUSB0″ for such tasks). At least the card remembers this setting, so you don’t have to repeat it every time. However, a setting somewhere in UMTSmon to automatically deactivate the card when the program exits would be cool to save some more battery power… I will have to look into that.

Posted in UMTS, linux, work | 1 Comment »

Cross-Distro Packaging With Build Service Rocks!

Friday, March 7th, 2008

During last hackweek a few days ago, i finished one of my pet projects: to fix up and package tuxcursors. That’s fine for SUSE users out there, since i guess the package will be included in the next release, however it does not help the users of other distributions directly.
So i made my first try on building packages for Fedora and Mandriva (apart from my umtsmon packages, but those worked more by accident…) and i have to say that it is pretty easy and straightforward.
So if you want cute penguins waving at you as mouse cursors, go ahead and install the tuxcursors package for your distribution from my Build Service Home, easily found via http://software.opensuse.org/search/ (search for “tuxcursors”, of course).
And if you think about packaging your project for more than one distribution, the openSUSE Build Service is definitely worth a look.

Posted in linux, work | 4 Comments »

A warm welcome to the planetsuse.org readers

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

I finally got my act together and got syndicated on Planet SUSE which will probably multiply the number of readers of my ramblings by quite a big amount.
For those who don’t know me already: i’m one of the guys of the fabulous Team Mobile Devices, located in the Nürnberg facility.
If i don’t do things related to bluetooth, power management, UMTS/3G, suspend or other portable-computing stuff, i quite often hack on some small digital TV set-top-boxes, of course running Linux.
There will be the odd post in german on my blog, usually for stuff of local interest only. I hope you all can stand that.

So let’s have a lot of fun…

P.S. if you want to reply on my blog, make sure not to have the string “http:” in your comment, or i will not even see it for moderation. Thanks, spammers!

Posted in work | 1 Comment »

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