Suspend works again!

Decided to spend a peaceful Sunday pursuing Feisty's inability to suspend my laptop.

After a dozen reboots and no solution in sight, I decided to install the latest 2.6.22-8 kernel from Gutsy. I'd tested suspend with 2.6.22-6, but that hadn't worked. But with 2.6.22-8, it worked! Kinda. The nv driver doesn't bring up the backlight, so I had to go back to the nvidia driver. But now it works!

Regressions: bcm43xx doesn't really work with my card, and ndiswrapper is not included in 2.6.22-8. Dunno why. The changelog has this cryptic comment "No longer provide ndiswrapper or ivtv modules (l-u-m does)". Unfortunately, I've no idea what l-u-m is!
Attempting to recompile ndiswrapper results in some dependency problems which I'm in no mood to fix (requires linux-headers, but linux-headers requires libc6 2.6, etc.).

Ah well. It's still a couple of months away.

Update: l-u-m is linux-ubuntu-modules, which I found out by following the dependency chain from linux-generic.

Why FOSS is Better, Yet another Case Study

Recently developers at Intel released a tool called PowerTOP. For users familiar with top on Unix systems, this tool is similar, except it displays information on programs that are "waking" up the CPU often. What does this mean? To cut a long story short, it means you can now identify which programs are interrupting a CPU's sleep, and determine if that interruption could have been handled in a better way, letting the CPU sleep longer. That way, battery power could be saved.

Why is this tool a good example of Free Software at work? Not only did the developers create this tool, they also identified many free/open source software programs where things could be done better. Because the source was available, they were even able to make patches -- or modifications -- available so that battery life was extended by "an hour or more!" This is amazing. Imagine doing this on your insert-favorite-proprietary-operating-system here. It'd take years for the OS vendor to get it, then the programmers to get it, and then for them to get together and do it.

Why is this on my blog? I use liferea, a feed reader that manages my RSS feeds, and the latest release has this cryptic changelog: "This release decreases CPU power consumption for laptop users". My life is already better, thanks to PowerTOP.

Oh yeah, bonszai says, "Thank you, Intel!"

The Feisty Fawn Upgrade

I finally did it last Thursday, upgrading from Edgy to Feisty. I thought it would be fun to relax by installing Feisty after a rather tough academic session. Oh boy, was I wrong! Regressions, a root file system corruption, and the eventual re-installation kinda disappointed me. But I'm running Feisty now! Here's how it went off.

After burning the DVD, I noticed the cdromupgrade script on the DVD, and decided to run it, instead of the normal aptitude dist-upgrade. A couple of clicks and one hour later, my system was upgraded to Feisty Fawn. Such simplicity -- I thought -- it can't be this easy! Yet it was. In a way.

Unfortunately the reboot failed. It would come to the boot screen and simply hang. Turns out, I had installed a custom kernel in Edgy, which was also set to be the default. This was simple to solve. Just select the Feisty kernel in the grub boot menu, and later reconfigure the previous kernel, dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-old, and it booted fine. I guess upstart's not really working well with the old kernel's initrd. Boot time is now 45s, down from 55s for Edgy.

The nv driver, as I mentioned in an earlier post, works perfectly. The coolest feature about X.org 7.2, is its ability to run without a xorg.conf file. Just remove the xorg.conf file, and see it run perfectly! It did, for me, atleast. I did have problems with the scrolling on the touchpad, but that was easy to fix, just add options psmouse proto=exps to /etc/modprobe.d/options.

Unfortunately, there were two regressions. The most evident, and a show-stopper for my laptop was support for the headphone jack. Unlike Edgy, where it wasn't even recognized, and I had to install the latest ALSA, in Feisty, both speakers and headphones work, but have a single volume control. Unfortunately the speakers aren't muted when I plug in my headphones. Incredibly annoying, as my labmates will testify, as I blasted Jonny Quest's theme song again and again. Feisty ships with ALSA 1.0.14rc1, and I had to compile and install 1.0.14rc3 from Debian, which was, thanks to make-kpkg, a breeze. Now, plugging in my headphones automatically mutes my speaker, and vice-versa. It's not perfect yet, I've to trigger the detection by muting/unmuting, but this is how it should be. The speakers also seem to sound much louder. FYI, the sound card/codec is a NVIDIA/Conexant CX20549 (Venice).

The second regression was Suspend/Hibernate. I use Suspend rarely, and it used to work beautifully in Edgy. Unfortunately it's broken in Feisty. I first thought it was a problem with nv, but the nvidia driver has the same problems. Also it turned out that my forced shutdowns ended up in me corrupting the root filesystem. Ouch.

Recover or re-install? Well, I always wanted to re-install Feisty (just for kicks), and here was the opportunity. So I wiped the root partition, and re-installed Feisty. Took about another hour, and I'm still re-installing apps -- but thanks to aptitude that's not much of a pain. All of my settings and data were not affected -- thanks to the good fortune of having a separate /home partition. What is a painful is that main in Feisty does not fit on the DVD, and you'll need the web repositories too. Irritating.

Oh yes, beryl 0.2.1 doesn't work either. The window decorator (emerald) doesn't work.

After all of this, what's Feisty worth to you? If you're using Edgy on a laptop and it's working, I recommend you continue. However, Feisty's GNOME feels much faster and lighter (and is too!), and having the latest and greatest applications always feels good. As I said, fun, but not relaxing. It works, but keep your fingers crossed!

What's really different about this install is the amount of software I had to add to make it all work. For Feisty, only ALSA. For Edgy, I had to do ALSA, ndiswrapper, network-manager, and some other stuff I've forgotten. So, this is progress. Two steps forward and one step backward, but progess nevertheless. Now to wait for the Gutsy Gibbon.

Update: May 7, 2007 Monty is my hero! Here are the options to add to the screen section in xorg.conf to get beryl working:

Options "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Options "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"

Freedom in Sight?

I justed booted into Feisty Fawn today, using the live CD. Some pleasant surprises were in store.

Video worked perfectly. With the nv driver. Yes, the free nv driver. And from what I can tell by reading the X log, it seemed to have detected the external video outputs as well. If this really works, drivers from nvidia get thrown out.
Not only did the nvidia driver give me fewer resolutions, it also messed up my console. I used it only because it gave me VGA-out support, which is needed for presentations using bonszai. If nv can do that, well, nv it is then!

And bcm43xx, the free driver for Broadcom-based chipsets? It works too. Not only can the latest bcm43xx-cutter (006) use the drivers provided by Compaq, it also warns me that support is not in mainline yet for those drivers. So I must use the older drivers. Which is fine with me. So far web-browsing works. Web downloading does not, with speeds of 4--5 KByte/s (which is worse than dial-up)But to be fair, I really haven't tried wireless from my new location, so maybe I better check out my older version. Ubuntu now has network manager, which is really a painless way to configure networks, across operating systems I must add.

Given that video and wireless were the only two components of bonszai that used non-free drivers, I'm looking forward to running a fully-free bonszai!

Wirefree!

I received a Jabra BT135 Bluetooth Headset, courtesy HP, a couple of days ago. Funny thing is that they import it to a place that's ten minutes from the Institute, but I had to wait for two months for it!

My primary purpose for this new toy was to use it with Bonszai, rather than with a mobile phone. Yes, it's mono and not stereo, but going wireless with audio would be fun! Turns out Linux does support these headsets out of the box, with the snd-bt-sco driver. Essentially, this driver supports bluetooth headsets by appearing as another sound card to all applications. This page has more details.

Unfortunately, nothing ever works out of the box for me. Turns out that because I'd re-compiled ALSA separately from the rest of the kernel, the snd-bt-sco driver refused to load, citing lots of missing (and version mismatched) symbols. Either I could recompile the entire kernel or go back to the older version of ALSA (and lose the normal headphone support!). I decided instead to upgrade to kernel 2.6.20 which I knew would have the latest ALSA. The only thing that would break would be the nvidia drivers.

So there I was, snd-bt-sco loaded, btsco running, and trying to get a song to play using aplay or mpg123. Except it just wouldn't play! The headset would pair up, authenticate, send messages to the computer whenever I pressed buttons, emit a ringtone when I commanded it from the computer, doing everything short of playing a song. All the music playing apps would just freeze. Others had encountered this situation too, but nobody seemed to have found a solution to it. Just bugreport after bugreport. I struggled for a long day, before giving up.

Today, I found this bluetooth-alsa page and this thread that documented a fix to exactly the same problem. The solution was simple: use the force_scofix argument to the hci_usb module (when you load it the first time), especially if you're running a Broadcom adapter.

Voila! It worked! Sound is not that great, but it is convenient to listen to music about 5 meters wire-free away!

I hate Broadcom. What's wrong with them? First wireless adapters, now Bluetooth adapters. Sigh.