Getting hands dirty

Its been a while since I played with any core hardware. I've been postponing my temptations to get a beagle (now more options of hawk/leopard) board since over a year for reasons best known to me in my sleep. ;) I've been itching to get my hands dirty with one thing or the other. Last I held my soldering gun was when my ADSL was screwed up due to line static. I went around checking the cause for noise in the internal wiring and hunted it down to the rosette box. I tried bypassing that seeming balloon and that needed manhandling of the delicate telephone wire onto a rugged external line. I managed to solder it out. Its a penny job if you look at it, but the pleasure of holding the solder gun with the 60-40 melting is indescribable. :)

This time around, I was pissed off with how my Toshiba A100 laptop dies off due to overheating. Since the past 2-3 Ubuntu releases, long usages have been shutting off the laptop with the touchpad almost burning. I've tried to get a laptop cooling pad in vain, but what use are external set of fans when Toshiba overheats to death on its own? Its a shame. Vista, the junk that came loaded with the A100, used to keep the laptop booted for longer hours than Ubuntu as per my usage. That, however, doesn't solve my problem. My earlier experience with trying to pull the DVD drive off the laptop or pulling the HDD didn't seem userfriendly with the Toshiba. I'm a fan of Japanese products, but all the Jap products I've used are really service unfriendly! Sadly, I tried my hands to get to the internal fan yesterday not wanting to travel to a service centre which is quite far from here, not to mention that I hardly trust any of those people to do a good job and in time.

I've this addictive habit of taking a task to its very end knowing the risks at most times. So I opened the laptop which was a painful effort. I almost assumed that I will break a couple of plastic locks and then they won't fit back easily needing a bit of gluing together. To my surprise that didn't happen, but I was shocked out enough to write off 45k (cost price) worth of my laptop because the fan was way difficult to get to and all the cables between the top and bottom of laptop came off loose! This design sickens me to no end. All the cables are half my finger's length-- no exaggeration there-- 3 buses on the main board were held on to the connectors with latching locks. (Sadly, these connectors are new to me). It scared the hell out of me when they came off due to some tagging on to them when pulling the panels apart. Not only is the distance insufficient to put them back together but now I need to push the bus in the lock putting my thick hands between the panels and then push the lock to latch in the bus with the other hand. Crazy freaks! 3 of them!! Putting them together brought out other end of one of these sick buses. That was pathetic. After I got them together, somehow, there were 2 more button type grounding-like pins. What were they thinking making those dumb gold pin button connectors? To put these back on and keep them in place while playing with other connectors was an add-on pain. When I got all this together, I was good to go... Oh! I did not mention the reason I opened the laptop was the fan, which got taken care of. Before this mess of wiring got put together, I'd pulled off the fan and pulled the parts apart, blown away a ton of dust and washed the fan, save the coils. :)

Hmm, I was saying I was good to go... or so I thought. While closing the panels together I saw that there was this flat connector which I suspected to be the display cable. Now, believe you me when I say that this Toshiba design bottoms off even those sick main board connectors! This weirdo cable was half my nail's length from the panel, loosely changing its angle, and I'm supposed to fit this onto the main board while closing the panel! Barely a forcep's flat side was reaching into this gap! No press fit this one. I closed the panels praying that maybe they are press-fitting each other... high hopes. :) The laptop booted up, but without display, a much expensive problem to fix. Well, at least I was sure that its the display cable. I tried much and gave up yesterday. Now, I'd a bigger problem to look at: find a good service centre and somehow convince them to take an open laptop without display for a fan problem! An impossible proposition, very expensive, if possible. Just for a fan, I was quoted 2k+approx 1k labour. 3k there. Add the cost of explaining an open laptop without display! Hah! I realized I wrote off 45 grands, possibly.

Today I took the issue in broad daylight. Why the hell is the cable so short? I got no answers, not even dumb ones. I opened more parts around the cable to no avail. Then I decided to pull onto the cable with all my forcep-strength. I got another half a nail's length. Whoa! More pulling risked the cable/connector/display.. God knows whats at the other end of that cable. With multiple forceps, crushed fingers and God's will I got the connector in. And the A100 is working... to what cooling benefit I do not know. If I find a powerful fan, I will likely open it again. :D


Why such excruciating details, you may ask and I'll say fair question indeed. How else do you expect me to share my pain of accepting burning 45 grands due to many sick unthought designs into an otherwise good Japanese brand called Toshiba?! :D

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BBC's 24 hours with Ubuntu! Really?

This is in response to BBC's review of Ubuntu on its blog, spending only 24 hours with it, that too after they made erroneous statements about Ubuntu while advertising Windows 7 on their breakfast show. This follow-on for reviewing Ubuntu by BBC, after that faux pas on the show, was initiated by Canonical.

Most of it has been said, I'll try to say some things that got left out. Not one person made a point about how simple Ubuntu install can be for a Windows user who wants to try his toe in the water: wubi (ubuntu installer for windows)! Just download wubi.exe, run it from Windows, define how much space to use for Ubuntu, choose login creds, take a coffee/ lunch break, return to your comp with a dual install! Days of Linux install have become simpler since Knoppix launched a live CD that announced vocally on what devices are detected and installed! Just when I thought it doesn't get any simpler than that, Ubuntu gets better with each release.

Microsoft is so greedy, that when I bought my Toshiba laptop, I was forced to buy it with Vista, with a caveat that said "Installing any other OS voids the warranty". Even if I wanted to have dual boot, I couldn't do that in warranty. Funnily enough, any reinstall of Vista and other Windows flavours arrogantly overwrites any other OS! Why?

For almost everything that Linux can do with a command line for a desktop user, Ubuntu can do with GUI. Another thing about people who just hate to use keyboards are missing a loud point even in Windows GUI: all those menus have keyboard 'short'-cuts! Sometimes, keyboard is faster than the mouse.

If you've tried detecting and transferring files between XP and Vista on your network, that would tell you why expecting all your Windows machines to just popup on your Ubuntu map, without any protocol setups, is plain bias.

MrFaulty talks of WiFi install issues as a techie. WiFi on Vista has been a pain for me; it gets some godforsaken IP on a DHCP mode and I need to hardcode it to work well! Windows should have perfected it by now, but no; OTOH, it works smoothly in Ubuntu. And he also talks of RAID 0 when the article is about a layman desktop user. What you can do with Win for RAID, a similar experienced person on Ubuntu can do it in a jiffy too. But then again, if you are a technology person, you ought to mention developers, rate at which bugs get fixed on Ubuntu and umpteen development tools that come free, all of these things beat down Windows to death.

Getting hold of Wine to run Spotify is not as much of a bother as needing to get hold of Win7 pro version to do something as simple as getting an XP app/ device to work! The latter means shelling more money out to get Win7 do something that your XP did initially, which you'd already paid for, and MS made you buy Win7 instead. The former means installing Wine with a couple of steps and you're ready to go... simpler than buying local wine! :)

Finally, Rory, I think Ubuntu survived your 24 hours with it. Had you been a Linux user as long as you were using Windows and had to spend 24 hours with Windows 7 instead, I'm certain you'd have flushed the Windows netbook/laptop by now! :)

Getting Firefox backspace work on Ubuntu

For some like me who love the keyboard, more than mouse at times, Firefox on Ubuntu could get a little irritating to navigate between already surfed pages. On WinDoze, Firefox by default allows backspace to take you back to last visited page (while shift+backspace takes you one page forward). Of course, this is only with default settings and mostly everything is customizable. However, being the lazy me, I didn't do anything about it thus far.

Today, I did the following simple change to get it working and it didn't even need a browser-restart :)

i) Go to about:config by typing the same in the URL.
ii) Promise to be careful with it :)
iii) Type backspace in the filter-bar.
iv) Change the value of browser.backspace_action to 0 (by default, its 2)

You're done. No need to close the browser. Just press backspace and go back to where you left off before irritating yourself because backspace didn't work! ;)

Firefox Shiretoko

Firefox 3.5, code-named Shiretoko, has a brand new feature called private browsing. Its very useful if you share the laptop with some visitors every now and then, but not often enough for them to have a Firefox profile.

This feature, as some might think, is not proxy-browsing which hides and translates your IP into something else. Its also not really a setting which deletes all your history, cache and cookies when you close the browser. Its some of it and a little more. With Shiretoko, you can privately browse while keeping your old tabs intact. So if your friend drops by and wants to check his mail on your laptop, you just give him private browsing, without actually logging out of your mail and other accounts, while he gets a clean browser and leaves it clean too. Shiretoko continues just where you left off when he's done browsing privately!

Matrix in Windows!

You've to watch this if you liked Matrix and/ or like Ubuntu and/ or dislike Windoze: "Ubuntu. I'm going to learn Ubuntu".

Epson TX101 installation

Update, Jaunty onwards: Epson has a new release with libtdl7 support. Try that first instead of wasting your time doing the following. The following works only for Intrepid 8.10 and perhaps, Hardy 8.04 release with an Epson driver for libtdl3.

(In case you hit this page to find how-to install, skip blabber, jump straight to end of this weblog for stepwise instructions)

I bought Epson TX101 printer-scanner-copier a few days back and was waiting for the Epson chap to install it due to warranty issues that the seller told me of. Needless to say, when he turned up yesterday, not only didn't he know Ubuntu installation, but he hadn't even heard Ubuntu or Linux for that matter! He did some basic Vista install and looking at his "expertise", I had to ask him to just make the installation report and leave.

My efforts on getting it to work on Ubuntu took long U-turns due to my stupidity. First of all, I tried things yesterday night when I was barely keeping myself awake on the chair! Back to technicality, I tried gutenprint, iscan, xsane, CUPS and pips, when things didn't work by default when I plugged in the USB. Of course, I made the mistake of typing in xane instead of xsane earlier on. But today, I started afresh when iscan install cried for libltdll3 in the night! Later I found out that iscan was (perhaps) installed by default on Kubuntu, with a dependency error; same thing as libltld3.

Intrepid, possibly Hardy too, uses libltdl7. So a simple fix is to make a soft link to libltdl3 and I should have been on the way, but it didn't work. It needed a simple replug of USB cable and not only iscan, xsane worked too!

Steps:

1. Download the correct package from http://www.avasys.jp/lx-bin2/linux_e/spc/DL1.do.
2. Make sure you have sane and sane utils installed. Use sudo synaptic to find out.
3. Also make sure you have libltdl7. (Of course, you can't get a libltdl3! :) )
   
4. Install Image Scan and Print system by running sudo dpkg -i --ignore-depends=libltdl3 iscan_2.17.0-3_i386.deb (or whatever the name/version is).
5. Do a sudo find / -name libltdl.so.7. cd there. (Of course, one level higher!!!)
   
6. Create soft link by ln -s libltdl.so.7 libltdl.so.3.
7. For some reason (read above blabber), I did the following too. Do it if you need to.
   
8. Do a sudo find / -name libltdl7. cd there. (Of course, one level higher!!!)
   
9. Create soft link by ln -s libltdl7 libldtl3
10. Create soft link by ln -s libltdl7 libldtl3-dev
11. Plug-out (if plugged in) and plug-in the TX101 USB cable. I didn't do this and wasted a lot of time finding out why iscan and/ or xsane wasn't working. Both were needing me to replug the TX101!
12. You're done.
13. Test printer: Go to http://localhost:631 for CUPS, check if you've the printer right. Do a test print. You'll get the print below.
14. Test scanner: Open iscan or xsane. Scan works as below. :)

Intrepid Ibex on laptop

I've managed to get to Kubuntu on my Toshiba laptop, downloading a wubi based install throughout the day yesterday. Kubuntu kept me awake nearly till 0200 with its vibrant GUI and new apps. I was trying to get all work at once, but succeeded with some till sleep took over.

This morning, I found out that although I got the latest version 8.10 running, I've stumbled upon a non-LTS (Long Term Support) release post Hardy Heron 8.04. The next LTS release is Kubuntu 9.10 way ahead in Oct 2009, while another non-LTS Jaunty Jackalope is scheduled for April 2009.

A few days back, I made a wubi shift on my 64-bit dualcore AMD Anthlon XP2 desktop too, of course on NTFS now, but intend to make it a pure ext3 Linux machine. I want to continue shuffling WinDoze Vista for a while on the laptop alongside Kubuntu, just because I was forced to buy it in the laptop price! ;)