barnoid.org.uk - The website of Barney Livingston : Tag linux, everything about linux

Lucid Muddle

Sun, 02 May 2010 01:15:00 +0100

Today I did the Kubuntu Karmic to Lucid upgrade on my Thinkpad T60 with 2GHz Core Duo CPU, 3GB RAM and ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 GPU.

The upgrade itself went ahead flawlessly but I started to see problems after the desktop started. Things seemed generally sluggish, especially moving windows around and scrolling, and it seemed to get worse over time. Flash video was very teary and unwatchable fullscreen. When I tried to play a 3D game it caused a strange horizontal black line interference that didn't go away until I rebooted. Also, seemingly unrelated, the wireless network would lose connection after a while and refuse to reconnect until I switched the wireless kill switch off and on again.

The solution to all these problems seems to have been to switch off Kernel Mode-Setting. I did this by editing the file /etc/default/grub and changing the line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash radeon.modeset=0"

Then running update-grub and rebooting. This has resulted in a much more stable desktop, but at the cost of making the boot splash screen look very ugly indeed. The wireless connection now works perfectly.

Now it's working properly the KDE desktop with compositing seems much more responsive than on Karmic. I might even leave effects turned on this time. Video is fine and 3D games work reasonably well, I've had trouble with 3D stuff before. I'm still seeing a fair bit of corruption on icons and window decorations, something I've seen ever since switching to the open source ATI driver.

So generally Lucid is looking good and I'm liking the new stuff in KDE 4.4. Perhaps it's still a bit early to be enabling the kernel stuff for the radeon driver though.

Seven OSs

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:59:29 +0100

Geek-out time!

We have here: Windows 3.1 Windows 95 Windows 98 SE Windows XP Mac System 7.5 (m68k) RISC OS 4 (ARM)

All running on Kubuntu Linux 9.04.

The Windowses are running in Virtualbox, System 7 in Basilisk II and RISC OS in RPCEmu.

Only XP is using full CPU virtualisation, it seems to disagree with the earlier versions.

Wooden Touchscreen Terminal - latest update

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 22:03:18 +0000

Here’s my wooden terminal again. Changes since I last posted about this are quite a few.

Memory is now at 512MB.

I stuck a slightly bigger heat sink on the processor and removed the fan. It runs fine like this and hasn’t had any overheating problems. The upshot of this is that the machine now has no moving parts and is completely silent!

I got a very short (25cm) monitor cable from Lindy. Made the cables much tidier, but didn’t improve the screen sharpness noticeably, as I was hoping it would.

I added a speaker socket on the back so at some point in the future I can use some external (wooden) speakers without needing the keep the front flap down all the time. I removed the non-working speakers from inside.

I put in an IDE to compact flash adaptor. The adaptor is accessible from under the front flap. My plan is to use the Linux suspend2 patch to resume from an image on the CF card with the aim of reducing the time it takes to get ready. I’m still working on making this work properly.

See also: the front for the original information and iterations one and two of the internals.

Make	Canon
Model	Canon EOS 300D DIGITAL
Exposure	0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture	f/5
ISO Speed	400
Date and Time (Original)	2007:02:18 18:25:31
Exposure Bias	0/3 EV
Metering Mode	Pattern
Flash	Flash fired
Focal Length	37 mm

Wooden Touchscreen Terminal - open flap

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 22:02:39 +0000

Make	Canon
Model	Canon EOS 300D DIGITAL
Exposure	0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture	f/4
ISO Speed	400
Date and Time (Original)	2007:02:18 18:24:07
Exposure Bias	0/3 EV
Metering Mode	Pattern
Flash	Flash fired
Focal Length	27 mm

Wooden Touchscreen Terminal - further update

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:58:50 +0100

Here it is again. This time with the front flap open showing what can be accessed there.

Thanks to more RAM being available and because of the headache I had with making Firefox do what I wanted it to, this now runs a full KDE desktop and Konqueror. KDE also allows nice seamless access to the contents of USB storage devices which can now be plugged in under the flap to the left.

Another thing which works nicely in KDE is Bluetooth, which is something I was intending to build in from the start.

Something which is not so good under KDE is the ability to configure and do certain things without a right mouse click.

See the original front picture and the updated internals picture for more information.

Make	Canon
Model	Canon EOS 300D DIGITAL
Exposure	0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture	f/5.6
ISO Speed	400
Date and Time (Original)	2006:10:20 13:39:17
Exposure Bias	-2/3 EV
Metering Mode	Pattern
Flash	Flash fired
Focal Length	52 mm

Wooden Touchscreen Terminal - update

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:41:45 +0100

Fitted an external PSU from linitx.com/product_info.php?cPath=24_54&products_id=142 which has solved the heat problems. Added an extra 64MB RAM. Added connectors for USB and audio under the front flap. Tried to fit the insides of a £4 set of speakers, but managed to break the amp I think. The speakers were already glued in place by this time. I’ll try again later with a better amp.

Compare with before. See the front for more information.

Make	Canon
Model	Canon EOS 300D DIGITAL
Exposure	0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture	f/4
ISO Speed	200
Date and Time (Original)	2006:09:28 17:42:12
Exposure Bias	0/3 EV
Metering Mode	Pattern
Flash	Flash fired
Focal Length	30 mm

Wooden Touchscreen Terminal - front

Tue, 23 May 2006 00:45:37 +0100

This is a 15" LCD touchscreen with a Celeron 633MHz board with 128MB RAM in a wooden case of my construction. The case also contains the PSU. The bottom part of the screen surround hinges down to allow access to the monitor controls. The button mounted on the base is the power button and indicator light.

It has no hard drive and boots using PXE from my server, then mounts its filesystem over NFS. It runs Debian Linux, xorg, XFCE4, Metacity and Firefox. The button on the left of the panel at the bottom of the screen pops up a screen keyboard.

Currently I’m a bit concerned about the amount of heat that builds up from the PSU (reaches 75°C after a while), an external PSU might be required. Also it tends to run out of RAM when viewing stuff on google video (no swap, no hard drive).

Update: I’ve done some work on the insides, see here. It still looks the same on the outside.

Further update: I’ve switched from the above described software to running KDE. More details here.

Make	Canon
Model	Canon EOS 300D DIGITAL
Exposure	0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture	f/5
ISO Speed	200
Date and Time (Original)	2006:05:22 18:36:20
Exposure Bias	0/3 EV
Metering Mode	Pattern
Flash	Flash fired
Focal Length	37 mm

Wooden Touchscreen Terminal - back

Tue, 23 May 2006 00:45:37 +0100

See the front for more information.

Make	Canon
Model	Canon EOS 300D DIGITAL
Exposure	0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture	f/4.5
ISO Speed	200
Date and Time (Original)	2006:05:22 18:35:49
Exposure Bias	0/3 EV
Metering Mode	Pattern
Flash	Flash fired
Focal Length	31 mm

Wooden Touchscreen Terminal - inside front

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:37:53 +0100

This is before I attached the screen surround. See the front for more information.

Make	Canon
Model	Canon EOS 300D DIGITAL
Exposure	0.05 sec (1/20)
Aperture	f/3.5
ISO Speed	200
Date and Time (Original)	2006:04:16 14:28:05
Exposure Bias	0/3 EV
Metering Mode	Pattern
Focal Length	21 mm

Wooden Touchscreen Terminal - inside back

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:36:50 +0100

See the front for more information.

Make	Canon
Model	Canon EOS 300D DIGITAL
Exposure	0.077 sec (1/13)
Aperture	f/3.5
ISO Speed	200
Date and Time (Original)	2006:04:16 14:26:21
Exposure Bias	0/3 EV
Metering Mode	Pattern
Focal Length	22 mm