Power Management Regression?

Recently, i noticed that on my laptop, it didn't last as long as it used to be. I think this happened after i upgraded to Linux Kernel 3.6.x. Previously, i was using Linux Kernel 3.5.4 and it was fine and it could last for 8-9 hours, but now, it only last for at maximum of 5 hours.

Perhaps there was a regression on the Linux Kernel or perhaps i didn't reconfigure my laptop-mode package after i upgraded to the latest version? Well, i need to sort this problem out when i have time. Now is not the time unfortunately :(

Wiping ArchLinux and Welcoming Slackware

I just wiped out my ArchLinux installation on my old laptop and replace it with the development version of Slackware (-Current) which will eventually be called Slackware 14. ArchLinux is a great Linux distribution with a rolling release model, but unfortunately that may not be suitable for me due to some reasons.

I also take this chance to help Slackware by testing the new installation on old hardware and making sure that everything works well. In my case, i used USB flash drive to boot the Slackware Linux kernel because i didn't have Slackware 13.37 DVD at home (i probably left it on my office) using usbbot.img file that are placed under usb-and-pxe-installer. I transfer it to my flash drive and boot using it.

Before i started the setup, i placed Slackware-Current updated repository into another flash drive and mount it locally on my laptop. When the setup runs, i point it to the slackware-current directory which contains all the packages of Slackware-Current per July 15 (the latest version at this moment). So it's basically i'm installing Slackware 14 on my laptop. Everything went well, and now my laptop is already running Slackware 14 on top of it. Sweet.....

BIOS Update on Laptop

My students asked me today whether his laptop is the same as mine. I replied him with my model and he answered that he had the same model with mine, except that his laptop is in black, while i'm in white color.

So i asked him again about performance problem when using any USB devices. He mentioned that he had that problem in the past and it's now fixed after updating the BIOS to the latest one. He also mentioned about the utility provided by the vendor to easily flash the BIOS by downloading the new ROM and start the application from BIOS screen. At first, i doubted that this application will work, since usually they works only with Windows, and i have wiped my pre-installed Windows 7 on this laptop and fully replace it with Slackware Linux.

I got a new idea after looking his demonstration about the tool. Surprisingly, it can detect the flash drive, so all i need to do is put the new ROM into the flash drive and start the utility and find the correct drive and it will detect it. I tried and it WORKS!!! I can finally update my BIOS to the latest version available from my vendor.

I haven't tested the new performance yet, but i can do so easily. Just by copying files from flash drive to hard drive or vice versa via Dolphin, i can measure the performance with the USB-based devices. Let's hope this update can fix my problem with USB devices.

Weird Bugs

Another strange thing happend on my wife's laptop. After her ethernet card disappeared from her laptop, i unplug the cable from her laptop and leave the laptop turned off.

When i turned it on today, i checked the system hardware and the Ethernet is now back and listed as one of the default hardware detected by the system. I plugged the cable and it's now connected again to the Internet. What a weird bug by Windows (or Dell as the vendor)

ASUS-Switcheroo Project

For two years, i have spent my time to find a way to make my NVidia card works on my ASUS laptop since it's a hybrid (it has Intel and NVidia combination). Since i only have Linux on it, and Linux doesn't seem to be supported by Asus, so the only thing i can do with it is disabling NVidia so that it consumes less power than when both of them are working together.

Dave Airlie's switcheroo project doesn't help much, as it doesn't work on my hardware, but there's hope by the new project by A. William called Asus-switcheroo. Basically, he tried to hack Airlie's work but focusing on Asus laptop only. He made it for his ULV30, so what i need now is to try to hack it so that it will work for my ULV80vt

The script provided only for Fedora, Ubuntu, and ArchLinux. I need to hack it so that it will work on Slackware as well

Installing Fedora Replacing Ubuntu

This morning, i tried to upgrade my Ubuntu installation to 11.04 Alpha 2. I know it's so damn risky, but i used my old laptop which is used for testing purposes with no important data in it, so i have nothing to lose. I decided to take the risk.

Actually the upgrade process went smooth. I can upgrade to 11.04 safely without any problem at all, except that my WiFI and NVidia driver are no longer working in 11.04. After rebooting, i tried to enable NVidia driver again and this is where the nightmare begins. After rebooting for the second time after enabling NVidia driver 96.xx series, my Ubuntu stuck at Ubuntu logo and it won't continue. I have tried to reboot for several tries, but it reached the same point all the time. I think it's because of the NVidia driver which probably incompatible.

So i decided to switch to Fedora 14 for some time. I had downloaded Fedora 14 and used it on virtualization only, so no real installation was done, so i guess this is a good chance to try Fedora 14 on a decent hardware (my laptop was bought in 2005). Right now, i'm in process of installing Fedora 14 on my laptop. Hope everything is OK without any problem

Stay Calm With Google Chrome OS

Google user interface designer, Glen Murphy has just demonstrated a video about how you can safely work with your data even if your laptop was damaged or stolen or broken since everything is saved on the Cloud by using Google Chrome OS.

On the videos, he demonstrated creating a documents, cropping an images, chatting with his friend and while doing so, some engineers took the laptop (it's an analogy of being stolen) and then break the laptop with nasty things until it's unrecoverable and then Glen gets a new laptop and he can continue on his last work without losing any data at all.

As usual, Google produce another interesting video and it's said that there were 25 laptops were broken in the making of the videos (quite expensive promotion ads), but it's worthed to see the results of the video.

Here's the video if you would like to see:

Slackware-Current on Laptop

OK, now my laptop has been running Slackware-Current, except that it still uses the old XOrg Server packages, due to problem with the KMS (i hate this). I have installed the kernel module which will enables me to disable the NVidia Card since it's not yet supported (GPU Switching). I hope it will be available on Linux Kernel 2.6.34, which has been started by Linus few days ago by releasing 2.6.33 and that means opening a merge window for 2.6.34.

I also compiled a new kernel 2.6.31.12, since i had problems with 2.6.31.7. It has a very low performance on copying files to another flash disk on EXT4. When i saw the Changelog for 2.6.31.8, i realized that this version has a lot of bugs in EXT4 file system, so i decided to get the latest one for 2.6.31.x version. Why wouldn't i go straight to 2.6.32 which is newer or 2.6.33 which is the latest? Based on review, 2.6.32 suffers more EXT4 problems, so i decided to avoid it. While for 2.6.33, it's too early to use that (even though Slackware-Current has started to use it for the default kernel stock currently). I will wait until -Stable release has been released by Greg.

Another Linux Users

One of my student recently bought a new Dell laptop and he installed Slackware on it. There were some problems, but after he came to me this morning, i was able to fix some of his problem. I leave the rest for him to work it out, but i gave him a clue and at night, he reported that he managed to fix the wireless driver using my hints.

The remaining problem is the touch pad. It still couldn't detect the click event on it, so he had to use the button on the back of the touch pad to simulate a left-click on the mouse. He has installed Synaptic, but still no luck. This situation didn't apply to my laptop, as it is working perfectly. All the normal functions and also the scroll works.

Good luck to Gregorius

Fully Linux

Few days ago, i bought a new laptop since my previous laptop had a problem with one of the rotating pin which is used when opening/closing the lid. It's an ASUS UL80vt with good specifications. Check it on Amazon but mine is using 500 GB of hard drive instead of 320 GB listed on Amazon's site. The rest is the same.

It comes with a pre-installed Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit edition since it is equipped with 4 GB of RAM. I tried Windows 7 a little bit and i found it lighter than Vista, but some UACL annoyance is still there (even though it's less than in Vista).

At home, i reformatted the hard drive and removed all Windows 7 partition (including the hidden partition) and i install Slackware Linux 13.0 on it. I wanted to use Linux fully on this laptop. It's a new challenge, but i'm sure i'll live with it

My experience installing Slackware and fixing bugs on this laptop has been written on my SlackBlogs

Laptop Accessories

Even though cellphones and smart phones are becoming more advanced than it used to be, laptop, notebook, and netbook are still one of the most favorite items to be brought by some people. Higher computing performance and specification are two main reason why it's still being chosen by many people. Even the fastest gadget available is still considered slower than the slowest laptop available on the market.

Laptop, like gadget can be equipped with many accessories. Even though you may have given a laptop bag, in most cases, people would buy another bag. That's where laptop accessories will come in handy. This site offers numerous laptop case and other accessories related to laptop, notebook, and netbook. For case, they have many variations, depending your laptop size. It ranges from 8.9' up to 17', so it covers all available notebook and laptops on the market. This site also offers items from several brands, so you will have lots of options when you buy items from this site.

They also have unique page dedicated to specific laptop brand, for example Dell Mini 10, Sony Vaio P, Asus Aspire One, and MSI Wind series. This pages are usually chosen from top selling items.

One item that i like is this speaker. It's so slick and it matches with my desktop at home which has black color also. It can last up to 11 hours of continuous playback from a single charge! Awesome right? The design looks like a mine, so you should watch out if you plan to bring it on the plane, especially if the border officer doesn't know about it.

Like any other e-commerce site, this site also accepts payments from differents credit card vendor and they uses secure shopping feature using HTTPS to secure your private data. If you are still unsure about giving away your credit card number due to fraud threat, you can still uses PayPal which is also supported by this site. It's so flexible so that customer will have many options to pay the bill.

Waiting for Good Rate

I have been thinking about buying a new laptop to replace my current laptop, which has been with me since 2005 (that's four years old). My current laptop is still usable and i'm still using it when i teach in class.

The problem with it is the new requirements of software which makes it slower. I have tried to upgrade the RAM into 2 GB, but it won't boot, even though it support it. Other problem is the disk space. When i bought the laptop in 2005, 60 GB was considered quite big, but as time passes by, it's just not enough for me anymore, even though i still have some spare space on it.

When i have decided that i would buy a new laptop, the rate is not at the good position. At the time i write this post, the US$ rate is around 12.000, which is very high and definitely not a good indication for me to buy laptop which is sold based on dollar rate. I think i should wait for some time until the rate is getting better.

Graduation Day

Finally, after completing all my graduation papers, i can officially get my master degree this morning. The graduation was scheduled to start at 8 AM, but the students must be there at most 7 AM and sign an absence list. This was a mechanism to sort the certificate, so if you didn't sign it, you won't get called even though you attend the event. It will be embarrassing at that moment.

The event was finally over around 10 AM, just like as planned and i went to my friend who owned a photo studio and take some pictures there with my parents and my girlfriend. My sister didn't attend my graduation because she has to work and it will be to costly just to come here and then she would have to go back to his city few days later. No problem for me though.

Well, graduations also means to my laptop, as it graduates and being upgraded to use KDE 4.2 as the default window manager . Some photos of my new KDE 4.2 are on my Facebook account. It's running on Slackware-Current, but the KDE packages are still working for 12.2 for now.

US$10 Laptop ??

OLPC shocked the world by making US$100 laptops (which finally released above US$100). This idea is then followed by other vendor that tried to make small and cheap laptops for children and growing nations. Well, guess what? India is developing US$10 laptop. I wonder what will the specification be . It's not a joke since it came out from minister of the federal government.

The research is done by Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai.

Another Slackware User

This morning, i helped one of my student to install Slackware 12.1 on his laptop. He had a nice Acer Aspire laptop (i forgot the series). The installation was very fast, due to high specs he had. By default, Slackware comes with vesa driver and i simply install the NVidia 173 driver and without any problem, i can load the new driver and also modifying the X configuration to use higher resolution (he used 1280x768).

Another good thing is that almost all the hardware is already detected by the operating system, leaving him with wireless which i hadn't tried. I had no experienced with Intel 3945, but as far as i seen, Intel has developed a good driver which is already included in the Linux kernel, so no more pain like in the old ipw2100/ipw2200 case (which right now also managed to be included in the Linux kernel). Everything seems so smooth, including when executing OpenOffice.org which is well-known of slow application compared to other office suite.

It's just another seduction for me to buy new laptop . Mine is already about three years old, but it's still functioning well. I also wanted to try the new Mac, so more options here

Adeona: Track Your Stolen Laptop

Ever feel worried about your laptop being stolen? Yes, you should. Statistics said that every year, number of stolen laptop are increasing. This happened not only in the big countries, but also in small countries or developing countries. What can you do?

There's an open source project developed by Washington University called Adeona that could help you track your stolen laptop. Here's the description about the project taken from the original site:

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service.

Here's how it works (taken from the site again):

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner's laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.

This application can be installed on Windows, Mac OS X, and also Linux. But you will need several tools installed for Linux, for example Cron for scheduling, traceroute, openSSL, and also iwconfig (optional). You will also need an Internet access to be able to track your laptop, since it will gather the data and send them to the server which will then track the location.

Laptop Comparison

Jessica Hupp has written an article about Laptop comparison. It's not an ordinary comparison, but only limited to top 5 sub US$300 laptops. The participants are Classmate PC, OLPC XO, Elonex ONE, Zonbu, and of course Asus EE. The results can be seen on the page

Secure Your Laptop

Do you work mobile by using your laptop and like to browse the Internet while working? If the answer is yes, then you should read this article from Information Week about 10 Tips to secure your laptop. Although the article is a common thing, but most people forgot about them and it could risk your laptop's security when you are accessing public connections, such as public hotspots.