New article on laptop woes
I've expanded my "Linux on Laptop" notes and given it a permanent page on this site here. As I tweak this machine I'll continue to update it. Historians will thank me someday.
Jim on 12.29.05 @ 08:41 PM ET [link]
To while away the Christmas vacation time, I decided to install Kubuntu Linux on my work laptop. This is a 6 year old Dell Latitude CPx that I mostly use to carry to meetings and do work from home. It's been running Win2K for the last 6 years and it's about time for a change. The goal was to dual-boot Windows and Linux on this thing.
This laptop only has a 10GB hard drive, which was fairly full, so I scraped off all unnecessary Windows stuff, booted it up with a Knoppix live CD, and ran kparted. I resized the current NTFS partition to 5GB, added a 500MB FAT32 partition for shared data (safer than trying to use NTFS from Linux), a 500 MB swap partition, and filled the rest of the disk with an EXT3 partition for Linux. The Kubuntu install went smoothly. GRUB installed on the MBR, which Windows seems OK with.
Now installing Linux on a laptop is an iffy proposition in 2005, unfortunately. Will my wireless card work? Will my CDROM work? Will I be able to suspend/resume? Will my touchpad work? But after the Kunbuntu install was complete I only seemed to have two problems.
First and foremost was that suspend/resume would work, but the touchpad wouldn't work after the resume. After a little googling, I found a kernel patch for the ALPS touchpad to fix just this problem. The kernel patch didn't apply cleanly for some reason, so it required a little hand editing. I reconfigured the kernel before building, starting with whatever .config was in the source tree. Built and installed the kernel (about 1.5 hours of building) and a bunch of stuff was broken.
Hmmm. Went in and enabled a bunch more modules in the kernel config, and tried again (1.5 more hours). Sound card doesn't work now. Harrumph. I decided to bite the bullet and start with the standard Ubuntu .config, which is basically a "kitchen sink" kernel configuration. Built that. Took 5 hours. But afterwards most things do work.
The only remaining glitch is that having both a wired and a wireless card installed seems to confuse the wireless network. I can live with this for now. Then I moved Lotus Notes to the shared FAT32 partition, installed Wine, and it works.
Now if I just had a few more GB of hard disk space...
Jim on 12.27.05 @ 08:42 PM ET [link]
I did some WiFi sniffing around our house and found two open LinkSys routers, one on either side of our property. I can't tell exactly which houses they belong to, but they're close enough to actually use if you stand by the window. Both had encryption turned off, which isn't really surprising, but one actually had the router's administrative page open and still using the default factory password. I could have easily taken down their network with nothing more than a web browser. In fact, I discovered this from my Palm sitting in my living room.
On my one and only shopping trip into the city yesterday I wanted to check my email from my Palm. So I just walked over near an apartment building. Voila. A half-dozen access points, maybe half of those unencrypted. Just pick one and you're on the net. How nice of those people!
Jim on 12.23.05 @ 11:42 AM ET [link]
I installed Kubuntu Linux on my home desktop, replacing Mandrake. It still dual-boots to Windows 2000, mostly for photo editing in Paint Shop Pro (man what an annoying web site, now that Corel bought them) and for Canon RAW conversion using Capture One. For everything else, I try to stay in Linux.
After messing around with ACPI scripts for a while, I finally got Kubuntu to hibernate to disk on my Dell. The standby to RAM doesn't work, but that's not such a big deal for a desktop machine. And printing to my old HP Deskjet is pretty slow, but usable. But the "apt" and "synaptic" package management on (K)ubuntu (from Debian) is great!
Kubuntu (or Ubuntu) is getting closer to actually being usable by your average Joe user on the street, but it's not there yet.
Jim on 12.19.05 @ 09:18 PM ET [link]
From The Onion, Autopsy Reveals Subject Was Still Alive When Autopsy Began.
Jim on 12.18.05 @ 06:21 PM ET [link]
I spent a couple hours writing a Soduko puzzle solver in C++ today. It works perfectly, and much faster than I though it would. A 9x9 puzzle is solved in a couple milliseconds on my modest PC. A 16x16 puzzle can take up to 7 seconds to solve. And I ran out of patience before the 25x25 puzzle completed.
The solver works recursively, trying every possible combination, but pruning those paths that lead to contradictions, which usually happen fairly quickly. On a 9x9 puzzle it typically recurses to about 35 levels deep.
It's also a Sudoku generator. Puzzle generation and solution are nearly the same thing. To generate a puzzle, you just populate the top row with randomly permuted digits and solve it. Then you need to go and select which squares to show to the player - something I haven't done yet.
I've posted the code on my tools and toys page. I'd also like to code it up in Perl, just for comparision. It will certainly run slower, but a lot of the list/array processing is cleaner to write in Perl.
Jim on 12.03.05 @ 07:44 PM ET [link]
Email: jim@jimandbarb.DELETETHISPART.net
(please remove the DELETETHISPART before sending me mail!)