Big Screen, Little Power

I discovered this on my older laptop, the Dell Latitude C600. It has an S-Video output on it, so I decided to hunt down how to enable it. I’m running Debian Squeeze on it at the moment, so I ran this command to get the necessary utility:

sudo apt-get install atitvout

Then, with the S-Video cable plugged into the laptop at one end and a large (I’m guessing around 150cm (~60 inches) diagonal measurement) RCA-brand HDTV on the other, I ran the command like so:

sudo atitvout -f t

to force off the LCD screen and enable the S-Video output. To reverse this, just type:

sudo atitvout -f l

to disable the S-Video output and reenable the LCD screen.

Unfortunatly, I cannot yet get a higher resolution on the television screen than I can on my LCD, resulting in a blurry image. It would of course help to do some research on what resolutions the television will accept, but as I’m borrowing the S-Video cable, and must return it today, I simply won’t have the time to further experiment with it.

Also, I cannot enable BOTH the LCD and the S-Video output at the same time, from what I can determine from my experience and what Scroogle found. This would be a very handy feature to have, if I had to make a presentation that required hooking up to a projecter that had only an S-Video input and no VGA input. Good thing that’s very unlikely to happen!

A Thousand Apologies, My Good Sirs/Madams

I’ve been extremely busy with college for the past month, and have had little time to do more than update my Twitter occasionally.  I’m still stretched for time, so for now I’ll simply give a link to something I found interesting.

K. Mandla’s 120MHz “Turbo” project from 2006

Font info specifics: Arch Linux

I mentioned some time ago a page on Wikipedia discussing rendering support for East Asian fonts, but I’ve just noticed that it doesn’t state what packages are needed on Arch Linux. Most Arch users probably just look at the “Debian-based GNU/Linux” part of the page and use pacman -Ss to search for Arch’s equivalants, but I’m going to leave myself a note to refer to.

ttf-arphic-uming   wqy-zenhei

More info on Arch’s wiki here. If I discover a need for any of the additional fonts listed there, I’ll update this post to include them and where they’re needed.

Acer Aspire One A0751h: Part Five

For various reasons which may or may not be related to wanting to try something new and shiny before the servers get overloaded in 8 days , I have installed Ubuntu 9.10 beta on this computer via a netboot iso image, and gone through the painful process of getting the Poulsbo chipset drivers from Jaunty to work with it. (More on that in a later post.) Everything Linux-related I’ve mentioned previously still applies however, and I *will* be going back to Arch. I simply find that Ubuntu makes figuring out what I want to do much easier.

Although we can configure the font sizes manually, this gets to be a pain. It is much easier to just specify a DPI setting for Xorg to use, and let the font sizes be configured from that. For 1366×768, a DPI setting of 100 is satisfactory for me, so in Ubuntu I create a file:

/etc/init.d/xsession

and add a line:
DPI="-dpi 100"

The biggest place I’ve seen this be helpful in is the Netsurf browser, where font size configuration is otherwise a royal, useless pain. It helps the overall appearance as well, however.

I wasn’t paying attention to screen real estate when I made this change, but I’m very certain that I gained some space from it. A happy accident.

I pulled this from Mozilla’s article on configuring the font sizes in their browser software, and it stated that this tweak is for Debian-based distros. If anyone says that this works in Arch, I’ll add that here — otherwise, I’ll find out myself when I try it on my Arch desktop.

Which reminds me, it’s about time for me to update my Hardware page…

Acer Aspire One A0751h: Part Four

Sorry for the cliffhanger-esque silence for the past week, school projects are piling up.

But I promised a way to get full resolution on this machine without the Poulsbo chipset’s drivers in Arch, so here it is at last.

First, you must have a kernel with uvesafb support, otherwise nothing else here will be of any use. The stock Arch Linux kernel has this support.

Second, you’ll have to install the 915resolution-static package from the AUR as described in the ArchWiki.

In /lib/initcpio/hooks/915resolution, replace the contents (as root) with this:

run_hook ()
{
msg -n ":: Patching the VBIOS..."
/usr/sbin/915resolution 5c 1366 768
msg "done."
}

and save.

Third, as root, install uvesafb’s helper daemon with pacman.
# pacman -S v86d

Edit /etc/modprobe.d/uvesafb so that the “option” line reads like so:
options uvesafb mode=1366x766-32 scroll=ywrap

and save.

Then add 915resolution and v86d to the HOOKS line in mkinitcpio.conf, and regenerate you initcpio (eg, mkinitcpio -p kernel26).

Remove any “vga=” line or similar from your bootloader’s configuration, as this overrides the uvesafb with the standard vesa framebuffer.

Reboot and enjoy the 1366×768 framebuffer, if you wish — I’m going on to add the last step to getting the X server to access that hi-res glory!

You will need to install xf86-video-fbdev first, then configure Xorg to use it — if you aren’t already using it. I’ll use the depreceated xorg.conf method here, as I haven’t had time to learn the new HAL-based method.

This is the relevant section of my xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
### Available Driver options are:-
### Values: : integer, : float, : "True"/"False",
### : "String", : " Hz/kHz/MHz"
### [arg]: arg optional
#Option "ShadowFB"
#Option "Rotate"
#Option "fbdev"
#Option "debug"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "fbdev"
VendorName "Intel Corporation"
BoardName "System Controller Hub (SCH Poulsbo) Graphics Controller"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
EndSection


And that should do the job — 1366×768 Xorg graphics! No backlight control, so you’ll have to it with the brightness keys while the GRUB menu is still displayed, but it’s better than nothing.

Acer Aspire One A0751h: Part Three

Well, there is still some stuff that needs to be done with the Windows side of the netbook, such as installing an antivirus program and another firewall, and some deep tweaking, but as I’m not planning to use Vista any more often than I have to I’m going to skip on to the good stuff: Arch Linux.

The basic installation was pretty standard, so far as an Arch installation can be standard, so I won’t discuss much of the specifics. The Official Arch Linux Install Guide can handle that more than adequately. I do think it’s good to mention, however, that I used the ext2 file system for /boot and ext4 for / and /home. I didn’t install syslog-ng because it writes the logs out to the hard drive — which wakes up the drive from its powersave mode.

Oh, right — power savings, I should probably put a note about that here, too. To save power on a laptop, there are certain things I want to have control of:

• CPU frequency, if there is support for frequency scaling.
• How often data is written to the hard drive, and thus
• How long the hard drive stays in its sleep mode.
• Ability to ‘Suspend’ the system at all.
• Ability to ‘Hibernate’ the system (optional, I don’t really need this.)
• Control screen brightness.
• Use full screen resolution
• Set the system to automatically Suspend when I close the lid.

I haven’t managed to get all of those working yet, but I do have command-line control of a few things. As root, after you have done any updates you need to do with pacman -Syu, execute this:

pacman -S acpitool laptop-mode-tools cpufrequtils

Now we can enable the cpufreq module
modprobe acpi-cpufreq
and control the CPU frequency. The Atom Z520 supports a power-saving 800MHz mode, a slightly faster 1.07GHz (which, oddly, I have to specify as 1 GHz), and a “speedy” 1.33GHz. I prefer longer battery life, so I set the frequency to minimum with
cpufreq-set -c01 -g powersave
ensuring that the cpu is automatically put into the lowest frequency available. If you want the frequency to increase when you need more processing power, and then return to a lower setting later, replace “powersave” with “ondemand”.

Surprisingly, I didn’t need to do any extra work to get ‘Suspend’ working. Remember acpitool, which we installed earlier? It doesn’t just display the current battery charge remaining or the current tempreture — it also can send the machine into its sleep mode.
acpitool -s
On this machine, I haven’t had any problems suspending-to-ram or returning to normal operation with this method.

That’s all for this entry, in the next one I’ll try to give a tutorial on how I got full resolution (1366×768) in both the framebuffer and Xorg — without the Poulsbo drivers. I haven’t been able to control the brightnes of the screen this way, so I have to  set with the Fn-Arrow combos while the GRUB menu is still being displayed, but at least it’s stable. I haven’t figured out hibernation either, but I really don’t have much need for that anyhow.

EDIT: Apparantly, I can’t control the brightness from within GRUB Legacy either — haven’t tested with GRUB 2.

Acer Aspire One A0751h: Part Two

This second entry in the netbook saga focuses on removing the programs that do little more than take up space — the OEM Bloatware — so more space can be freed for a Linux installation.

I started by removing the trialware Microsoft Office — I tried loading it once, and it was slow, besides taking up several hundred megabytes. I also stripped out Microsoft Works, which reminds me strikingly of Microsoft Word about ten years ago and takes up 562 MB. Don’t forget to trash the “2007 Office System” compatibility pack and the MS Office “Suite Activation Assistant”, if you don’t plan to reinstall.

Then I methodically (and with great annoyance) individually uninstalled everything whose publisher was “Oberon Media” — they’re all trialware games. Feel free to play them some if you want, first…but remember, the “Dream Day Wedding” game alone uses almost 90MB, and there are a lot of these games. Yeah, the harddrive is 220GB or so, but I don’t like my Windows installations and their software using 20GBs or more when I can do the same with less. And besides, they are a distraction, and detract from the main purpose of a netbook: web browsing, document editing, music playing, etc.

Why they put a DVD/Blueray player application that uses 96.4 MB of disk space in a netbook that doesn’t even have an optical drive of any kind, I have no idea. :rolleyes:

Personally, I know enough of what needs to be done to maintain a Windows system without having Acer’s “help”, so I trash Acer Assist, eRecovery Management, Registration, and Screensaver. I doubt I’ll every really need the webcam, but I’ll leave the CrystalEye program installed, just in case I’m wrong. Which happens every couple of years.

I know nothing about the Carbonite Online Backup service, but if I want to store things in the cloud I’ll use Dropbox.

Once those million bits of hard-made digital junk are gone, what’s left is, conceivably, actually useful. If you use Windows Live, that is — I don’t even care to know what it is, personally, and I get rid of it and gain a total of about 124MB additional space.

I assume the Powerpoint viewer will be good to have, if Openoffice Impress can’t handle something on the Linux side. I’m not sure how useful eSobi (which appears to be an RSS agr is yet, so I’ll leave that in for now and will update this later.

Don’t forget to run Defragmenter on it — or better, get UltraDefrag, an open-source defragmenter that actually shows you how much defragging remains to be done.

Acer Aspire One A0751h: Part One

I recently purchased a netbook, brand and model number is there in the title. Handy thing — small, portable, relatively cheap. (US$315 with sales tax.) Standard battery is rated at 2.5 hours, although I’ve gotten three or more out of it, and (in Vista, with Power Save mode and the screen brightness at minimal) have had “time remaining” estimates of four hours.

It has the largest screen I know of a netbook having:- 11.9 inches, 1366×768 max resolution — but that still doesn’t give much vertical screenspace, which can be annoying with Firefox and a toolbar. So, today’s segment is about gaining more screen space in Windows Vista.

Yes, I said Vista — this model, despite having only a 1.33GHz Atom processor, is loaded down with Windows 6(66). As I plan it, this mini-series will mostly be about Linux and FOSS software, but this thing is still under its 15-day warranty, and I’ve already come perilously close to violating that. So, this begins with the simplest things of making Vista more netbook-friendly. (Yes, I start with the miracles first. )

First thing, unless you simply cannot stand the default theme — change it. Right-click the Desktop, select “Personalize”, and then click “Theme”.  Change the Theme to “Windows Classic” and click “Ok”. Wait a moment, and the theme will change to the “old”-style, Windows-2000esque appearance. This has far less to render, so it’s a bit faster.

Now for a little more screen space. (Close the Personalize window. ) With the faster rendering, we have more than enough power available for a little animation. Right-click ye old taskbar, click properties, check the box by “Auto-hide the taskbar”, and click “Ok”. This tweak also works in earlier versions of Windows — I don’t remember for certain in Windows 95, but I do recall doing this in Windows 98, so it should work in every operating system since.

Also, to gain some screen space in Firefox (I’ve only tested this with 3.5.3),  the Compact Menu plugin is a boon — it replaces your menus with a menu of menus. This menu is represented by a blue icon with a down-arrow on it.

Continue this by right-clicking on the area left of the new menu button, click Customize from the drop-down menu, and start rearranging things. Personally, since I almost never use anything besides keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-Tab to switch tabs, Alt-Left arrow to go back, etc.), I throw out everything but the address bar, which I drag into the Menubar. I then close the Customize box, right-click the menubar again, and deselect every toolbar except for the Menubar.

If the only reason you don’t disable the status bar, at the bottom of the browser, is because you want to know how far the page has loaded, the Fission plugin will move that into the address bar. (Thank you, Firefox Mastery!) The plugin’s homepage, as well as my personal experience, both say this doesn’t work well with some themes, but it works fine with the Windows Classic theme we selected earlier. Now you can disable the status bar. (File -> View -> Status Bar).

You can also hide the tab bar in Firefox by going to Tools -> Options -> Tabs and deselcting “Always show the tab bar”, but this only does anything when you only have one page open.

That’s all for today!

Less Browser, More Web

Five pieces to this puzzle.

1. Xmonad window manager, granting tiling and razor-thin-edge window borders
2. Firefox 3.5.3
3. Compact Menu 2 plugin, to merge those menus into one icon.
4. Personal Menu plugin, to allow rearranging search bar, controls, etc into one line, create a custom menu, and choose which controls will be available.
5. Classic Compact theme, which frankly looks better than the default GTK+ theme

Which adds up to:

Doesn’t help the memory consumption any, as you can see on the right, but at least you have more screen real-estate to see the important stuff.

P.S.: This is REALLY handy for netbooks!! Not only do you get a tiling window manager — meaning that you don’t have to constantly resize and reposition windows — but you can switch from tiling to full-screen mode with a single key-combo.

A Note About Elinks

Elinks with 256-colors and logging into Wordpress.com