The Dismantler

Android ICS 4.0.3 generic x86 image

2012-02-04T10:45:00.002+02:00

x86 port of Android lacks precompiled iso-image for general x86 hardware, or at least I didn't find one, so I compiled it myself. You can download it from here.

Install Arch Linux on Nokia N900

2011-12-25T04:13:00.001+02:00

Updates
24/01/12 Added section to handle watchdogs properly
19/01/12 Added emmc & swap
18/01/12 Updated DSP (now works)
18/01/12 Updated Xorg (new driver)
17/01/12 Updated Battery, DSP, Keyboard

Todo
kernel and kernel package
Integration packages
3D

Installation
On N900, you'll need rootsh, multiboot and kernel-power. You also need free partition for Arch. I use 6GB partition on SD-card. Prepare the partition by creating a filesystem on it. I used ext3, while some say ext2 is better for cards. Mount that new partition somewhere. Next, you'll need to download http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-omap-smp-latest.tar.gz and untar it into partition of your choice. Remember to sync. When done, copy kernel-power's modules from Maemo /lib/modules to Arch /lib/modules. Repeat the procedure for /lib/firmware.

Keymap
Download nokia-n900-keys.map to Arch /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/arm/qwerty/. Chroot into Arch and put KEYMAP="nokia-n900-keys.map" to rc.conf (might as well configure other options to your liking and disable daemons you don't need) to make keyboard usable. You might be pleased to know that Sym is tab and € is pipe.

udev
Install udev-oxnas to prevent udev and syslog hogging up all resources.

Watchdogs
Install package watchdog and modify /etc/watchdog.conf as follows:


watchdog-device = /dev/twl4030_wdt

interval = 10

realtime = yes

priority = 1

Add watchdog to rc.conf daemons as early as you can. The other watchdog doesn't do anything unless touched so we'll leave it alone.

RTC
Put hwclock --hctosys to rc.local.

Multiboot
When you're done in chroot, exit and create multiboot item to boot Arch. Here's mine:


Nokia-N900:~# cat /etc/multiboot.d/11-arch.item

ITEM_NAME="Arch Linux ARM"

ITEM_KERNEL="2.6.28.10-power49"

ITEM_MODULES="fbcon ext3"

ITEM_DEVICE="${INT_CARD}p1"

ITEM_FSTYPE="ext3"

ITEM_FSOPTIONS="rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro"

Battery
There is a script in http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2010/01/enabling-rtc-clock-battery-charging-and.html but it uses the proprietary bme. Fortunately, following script by Pancake should do the trick.

#!/bin/sh

i2cset -y -m 0x77 2 0x6b 0x04 0xc9;

status=$(i2cget -y 2 0x6b 0x00)

echo status=$status



# next register 0x03 is device ID, always 4b and r/o; so we skip to 0x04

i2cset -y -m 0xff 2 0x6b 0x02 0x8c;

# 0x8c = 3v5 + .640 + .040 + .020 = 4V200, BE CAREFUL and DON'T CHANGE

# unless you know what you're doing. 4V2 is ABS MAX!

i2cset -y -m 0xff 2 0x6b 0x01 0xc8;

i2cset -y -m 0xc0 2 0x6b 0x00 0x00;



# tickle watchdog, while status indicates 'charging from wallcharger'

#while [ $(i2cget -y 2 0x6b 0x00) = 0x90 ] ; do

while [ $(i2cget -y 2 0x6b 0x00) = 0x10 ] ; do

        echo charging...

        sleep 28;

        # reset watchdog timer:

        i2cset -y -m 0x80 2 0x6b 0x00 0x80

done

echo "charging finished, status(reg0)=$(i2cget -y 2 0x6b 0x00)"

You need to get i2c-tools from AUR and modify PKGBUILD to make it work, or just compile manually.

Xorg
You can install Xorg by following Arch Linux documentation. Once installed, you need to copy /usr/share/X11/xkb from Maemo to Arch to get keyboard working. Here's my evdev configuration for touchscreen and keyboard.


Nokia-N900:/# cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf

Section "InputClass"

        Identifier "evdev pointer catchall"

        MatchIsPointer "on"

        MatchDevicePath "/dev/event*"

        Driver "evdev"

EndSection



Section "InputClass"

        Identifier "evdev keyboard catchall"

        MatchIsKeyboard "on"

        MatchDevicePath "/dev/event*"

        Driver "evdev"

EndSection



Section "InputClass"

        Identifier "evdev touchpad catchall"

        MatchIsTouchpad "on"

        MatchDevicePath "/dev/event*"

        Driver "evdev"

EndSection



Section "InputClass"

        Identifier "evdev tablet catchall"

        MatchIsTablet "on"

        MatchDevicePath "/dev/event*"

        Driver "evdev"

EndSection



Section "InputClass"

        Identifier "evdev touchscreen catchall"

        MatchIsTouchscreen "on"

        MatchDevicePath "/dev/event*"

        Driver "evdev"

        Option "Calibration" "172 3880 3780 235"

EndSection

I had some dead keys, it was solved by putting (watch the layout ;)
setxkbmap -rules evdev -model nokiarx51 -option grp:ctrl_shift_toggle -layout fise -variant ",qwerty"
to .xinitrc (or by adapting it to Xorg conf). You might also find xvkbd useful.

By default, Xorg uses fbdev as a driver, which is fine but lacks features like Xv. You can use omapfb (which has Xv) as a driver but the one in Arch repos is unpatched and does not take advantage of NEON, and causes Xorg to segfault. Good news is that I patched and build omapfb driver with NEON acceleration; the package can be found here. To use this driver, install it and create /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-omapfb.conf and put the following content in it:


Section "Monitor"

        Identifier    "Monitor0"

EndSection



Section "Device"

        Identifier    "Device0"

        Driver        "omapfb"

        Option "fb" "/dev/fb0"

EndSection



Section "Screen"

    Identifier    "Screen0"

    Device        "Device0"

    Monitor       "Monitor0"

    DefaultDepth  16

    SubSection "Display"

        Depth     16

        Modes     "800x480"

    EndSubSection

EndSection

I will create proper pkgbuild someday. This driver should be usable on any Cortex-A processors.

Wifi
Should just work. I use wicd to manage connections, but you can use your own script for connectivity if you like. Consult Arch documentation if you must.

Audio
Install alsa packages and wget this into /etc/udev/rules.d
Use alsamixer to unmute speakers and raise volume.

DSP
Copy DSP binaries (/lib/dsp) from Maemo.


modprobe mailbox

modprobe bridgedriver shm_size=0x500000 base_img=/lib/dsp/baseimage.dof

modprobe dspbridge

should initialize it. Put into rc.conf or adapt to modprobe.conf.d and rc.conf.

Get libgstdsp.so and copy it to /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10

To test, use gst-launch-0.10 -v playbin2 uri=file:///file.ext

EMMC & swap
For a reason or another, mmcblk devices are not created in /dev, use mknod to create them.

mknod /dev/mmcblk0 b 179 0

mknod /dev/mmcblk0p1 b 179 1

mknod /dev/mmcblk0p2 b 179 2

mknod /dev/mmcblk0p3 b 179 3

If you need swap, it's /dev/mmcblk0p3. You can turn it on with swapon command.

3G/Modem
I honestly have no idea how to make this work, so any help is welcome. So far, I've understood that you need to use some proprietary software to make it work.
/mnt/initfs/sbin/phonet -a 0x6C -i phonet0 ; ifconfig phonet0 up
should bring the interface up, and /mnt/initfs/usr/bin/pnatd /dev/tty should give you a device to use. That's about all I know about it.

More

Obviously there is loads of stuff not yet working but hopefully this guide helps you to a start. I'll update this post if there is any progress. If this has been any help, please send me new toys or at least click the ads :) Happy hacking.

Thanks
Jebba, Pancake, SHR-project, Debian on N900, Meego/Mer, Maemo and forums, natisbad.

Native Arch Linux on Nokia N900

2011-12-24T22:21:00.000+02:00

Edit: http://dismantle-it.blogspot.com/2011/12/install-arch-linux-on-nokia-n900.html

I've successfully installed and booted Arch Linux for ARM on N900. Tutorial will follow after holidays but basically you need to disable watchdog from your N900, install kernel-power and multiboot, untar Arch to dedicated partition, copy over kernel modules and firmware from Maemo and tweak and fix things, like keyboard layout and so on. Sorry about the quality of the photos, I'll add better ones later, and possibly a video too.

Nokia N900 as USB WiFi router

2011-12-10T14:38:00.001+02:00

Here's how to share your N900 WLAN (or 3G) connection through USB-port.

First, you'll need kernel-power, usb-networking-modules, rootsh and udhcpd packages installed to make this work. Once installed, open up terminal and create file routerup.sh with the following content:


#!/bin/sh

ifup usb0

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -s 192.168.2.0/24 -j MASQUERADE

iptables -I INPUT -s 192.168.2.0/24 -j ACCEPT

iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT

udhcpd

Next, make routerup.sh executable

chmod ugo+x routerup.sh

Now, create file /etc/udhcpd.conf with following content:


start 192.168.2.20

end 192.168.2.30

interface usb0

opt router 192.168.2.15

opt dns 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4

Create routerdown.sh


#!/bin/sh

killall udhcpd

ifdown usb0

echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

iptables -F

iptables -t nat -F

and make it executable too.

You can use these scripts manually by plugging USB-cord (choose PC Suite mode) and then executing routerup.sh (and routerdown.sh when you're done) as root. Scripts wont work as normal user. Any modern linux system should now be able to get ip from N900 dhcp-server and have network.

If you need this connectivity often, you can put routerup.sh into N900's /usr/sbin/pcsuite-enable.sh before last line which reads exit 0, and routerdown.sh to /usr/sbin/pcsuite-disable.sh to use scripts automatically on PC Suite connection.

Windows users need http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/MADDE.php to make this work, can't write more specific instructions because the lack of windows ;)

Get the best out of your Soundblaster Live! value in KDE

2011-09-28T17:55:00.000+02:00

Pretty useless post for most but if you're like me and enjoy quality sound, have decent audio equipment and want to get the best possible stereo sound out of budget SB Live! value (might apply to other emu10k1 cards too) in KDE environment then this is for you.

1.

Use rear channels of the card only. SB Live! Value has different opamps for front and rear, and the one used for rear is a bit better one. By default, analog stereo in front channel is used so you need to change this in System settings -> Multimedia -> Phonon -> Audio hardware setup and select Analog Surround 4.0 which enables rear channel.

Unfortunately you need to make few adjustments to pulseaudio, and configure kmix to display alsa controls instead to make volume control work smoothly because rear channel has its own volume control independent from master and pcm controls. As a bonus, rear channel does not get distorted like front channel does if you crank master and/or pcm over 70%.

Edit your ~/.bashrc and add line export KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 to it. Exit kmix completely and start it from console like this: KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 kmix &. You'll have loads of new controls, Surround is the one controlling volume of the rear channel. From kmix menu, make it your default master channel.

This alone is not enough, ie. Amarok will replace volume to 100% every song change and generally volume controls behave somewhat strange, which is caused by pulseaudios feature called flat-volumes. To disable it, edit (as root) /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and add this line: flat-volumes = no. While you're at it, add this line too: resample-method = src-sinc-best-quality and restart pulseaudio by running pulseaudio -k. From now on, use kmix applet (or whatever) to control your "new" master volume. All applications have their own independent volume controls from now on, this is needed to eliminate mixer weirdness with volume.

2.

Use phonon-vlc as phonon backend. It really makes a difference. Really.

Unetbootin and Arch Linux cd-image problem

2011-09-24T13:21:00.000+02:00

Unetbootin (version in Fedora 15 at least) does not change usb-drives label and Arch Linux install image needs specific label to boot. If this is the case for you, to fix it you'll need mtools installed and use mlabel to change that label to whatever Arch tries to find during boot. In my case the correct label was ARCH_201108. Now, do this as root and usb-drive unmounted:

echo mtools_skip_check=1 >> ~/.mtoolsrc

mlabel -i /dev/yourusbdevicepartitionhere ::ARCH_201108

Remember to replace device and label accordingly.

Fedora 15 minimal (and perhaps even server) install

2011-09-12T01:17:00.000+02:00

This blog entry is for everyone else having a hard time reading: took a while for me to figure this out..

So, the usual Fedora installation media does not allow you to customize your install that much, no server or minimal root-shell only installations, just desktop. No worries, the trick is to get Fedora 15 DVD (from here) instead the usual live media. Just choose minimal install and if you want, you can also choose what additional packages the installer will install. Neat.

Lubuntu 11.10 : You and your vintage hardware will love it blindly

2011-09-09T19:13:00.000+02:00

I was given an old Fujitsu Siemens laptop (1.5GHz Celeron M, 512MB, 40GB and (oh so poor) VIA chipset) for free from a friend so I thought to put it in good use.

I've been looking for a truly lightweight, modern and up-to-date linux distro for some time now with varying results: most are fugly, too complex, not that lightweight or just not bleeding edge enough for my taste. I tried few of the better ones and was somewhat disappointed. Didn't like anything Bodhi offered, Fedora 15 (both XFCE and LXDE spins) needed more than 640MB of RAM to install and lacked some love and polish I require, Crunchbang didn't even boot to installer for some reason, Xubuntu was almost perfect but still not lightweight and responsive enough and well, I'm just too lazy for Arch nowadays. So I thought I'd give Lubuntu a try despite the hilarious name (I wish Canonical would switch their naming policy to something like Red Hat has with Fedora) and was positively surprised and very much impressed.

Lubuntu is the newest member of the whole Ubuntu family. Version 11.10 will be their first release under Canonicals wing and is currently in beta like it's bigger brother. Compared to Ubuntu, Lubuntu uses the lightweight LXDE as desktop environment and has it's own selection of default applications geared towards low-end machines. Installation was a breeze as expected and after the first update there's almost no feeling of beta in the default install. Besides the responsiveness and low memory use I really like Lubuntus polished and modern looks as well as default applications used: the most awesome Chromium as browser and good old Audacity as audio player. If only they had chosen VLC as default video player instead of Gnome Mplayer. There's also Sylpheed for email, the usual Abiword + Gnumeric combo for office work and Pidgin, Transmission and (borrowed from XFCE) Xfburn.

So if you need modern, good looking, fast and lightweight distro be sure to try Lubuntu, it really is a bright light among all of the lightweight linux distros out there.

Lubuntu 11.10 beta 1 & LXTerminal

Lubuntu 11.10 beta 1 & Chromium & PCManFM

Build OpenCBM in Fedora 11

2009-07-30T00:19:00.005+02:00

First, install few dependencies:

yum install linuxdoc-tools libusb-devel kernel-devel make gcc

Next, install cc65 from here: ftp://ftp.musoftware.de/pub/uz/cc65/RedHat/cc65-2.12.0-2.i386.rpm

get OpenCBM and xu1541 from svn:

cd /usr/src

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@opencbm.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/opencbm co -P opencbm
cd opencbm

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@opencbm.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/opencbm co -P xu1541

Now, edit LINUX/config.make: replace line XU1541DIR = $(HOME)/xu1541/include/ with XU1541DIR = $(PWD)/xu1541/include/

Compile it: make -f LINUX/Makefile all

And finally, install it as root: make -f LINUX/Makefile install-all

Hope it works, good luck.

XBMC, Intel DG31PR suspend, MCE remote wakeup and violence towards innocent

2009-07-14T19:42:00.009+02:00

Sometimes hardware gets you angry and desperate. This is one of those times. I've been building up HTPC to watch *krhm* movies and play music in my bedroom, which has lately become my ultimate hideout (yeah, i have kids) and i happened to have parts lying around from my former NAS box, all-intel mobo DG31PR and Celeron 440, with a whopping 1GB of 800MHz DDR2. Well, i just spent last two days trying to get suspend (and wakeup via usb) to work. It was hell. Really. I've now heard the annoying 4-or-5 beeps after resuming for about 700 times, as well as the irritating blocky bios screen when it does not resume, but resets instead. But hey i got it working finally, it appears there's a lot of fixing to do in Ubuntu Jaunty with this particular motherboard.

For a software side i chose XBMC, which really is about as good as media center can get. After switching from Mythfrontend, i've never looked back. After too many hours of playing with XBMCLive (problems, loads of) i decided to continue with minimal installation of Jaunty, as the bloat king is a bit too much for XBMC alone.

After successful commandline only install, i installed bunch of basic packages needed, openssh-server, acpi-support, alsa-utils, uswsusp and so-on. Next, i set up XBMC PPA and proceeded to installing it and all of it's dependencies. Everything fine for now..

Okay, now i had XBMC up and running. Guess what? Yeah, jerky video, no suspend. This is where the debugging started, and in few hours it came very clear to me that this is not going to work. Apparently, for suspend to ram to work, you need kernel 2.6.30. For good video performance, you need 2.6.30 and newer drivers for intel gma. No probs, the procedure isn't new to me at all. For everyone who has been somehow able to live with ubuntus stock kernel, user psyke83 from ubuntu forums has written an excellent howto about this subject covering both kernel and drivers.

After kernel upgrade, suspend to ram works near perfectly, for me at least. NVIDIA owners know what might happen when you install mainline kernel from kernel ppa? Yeah, DKMS can't build NVIDIA drivers anymore (i heard this was fixed recently?). Of course the same thing happened with lirc-modules-source, with my luck and everything. Bit of googling around: Lirc 0.8.4 wont compile against 2.6.30. How very nice, it's the same version Ubuntu ships with. So, I have to compile 0.8.5 then. Luckily, lirc package had left init-script and configs all in place, so i just installed build-essential and automake, did ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-driver=mceusb2 (after trying setup.sh.. or something like it.. ubuntu supplied init-script does not work if you don't use --prefix) and make install. Additionally, i made a rule for udev, but don't really know if it was necessary, if it does not work, check lirc.rules from sources, under contrib. There's some info in here, and here.

Only one more thing left to solve: wake up from suspend with remote. Wakeup behaviour can be changed per device with /proc/acpi/wakeup. First, i had to change suspend state option from bios to S3 instead of S1, otherwise usb-devices can wake only from S1, and i'm using S3. To enable usb-wakeups on boot, i put a line echo USB3 > /proc/acpi/wakeup in /etc/rc.local. Number of usb-port might be different, check output of lsusb or just enable them all. I also put lirc_mceusb2 and lirc_dev into MODULES_WHITELIST in /etc/default/acpi-support (btw, if you get no network after suspend, try putting r8169 forcedeth to MODULES in the same file).

Now it works, finally. I gotta sleep.

UPDATE:
Xorg crashes after every second suspend, and drops into gdm login screen even though autologin is enabled. Nice. I ditched gdm and followed this guide at mythtv wiki to launch XBMC without gdm, with the ability to respawn when X quits/crashes. Instead of .xinitrc, i used .xsession with the following content:
exec xbmc -fs --standalone
logout

Works like a charm, and reduces boot time slightly.

UPDATE2:
Today i finally got Antec HTPC case and NVIDIA 9400GT with passive cooling i ordered last week, and i must say i'm quite happy with my HTPC now, it's quieter, somewhat cooler and definetely better looking than before (was in rattling modecom case ;)
Club3D 9400GT with it's massive appearance/heatsink only required me to install nvidia drivers and remove intel specific stuff from xorg.conf. VDPAU works right out of the box with XBMC, and it's _really_ impressive. 1080p h264 content plays smooth, with 3-8% of CPU usage (440 celly is 2GHz single core). Overall i'm really satisfied, as it now plays _anything_ i throw at it, which is really nice for under 200e machine.

Fedora 11 64-bit and Unetbootin 356

2009-07-09T13:08:00.002+02:00

Continuing on getting 32-bit binaries to work on 64-bit fedora, here's a little something for unetbootin users, which worked for me..

sudo yum install libpng12.so.0 libSM.so.6 libXi.so.6 libXrender.so.1 libXrandr.so.2 libfontconfig.so.1 libgthread-2.0.so.0 libstdc++.so.6

Fedora 11 64-bit, PS3MediaServer and tsMuxeR

2009-07-09T05:38:00.006+02:00

I've been migrating from Ubuntu to Fedora in a past few days. One of the most important piece of software for me, is the amazing PS3MediaServer (PMS from now on) which has the ability to transform PS3 into "The Media Center Solution" which Sony promised it to be in the first place.
Yeah, Sony lied. Anyways, PMS relies partly on tsMuxeR (gotta love these idiotic capitalizations) and of course, it's maker SmartLabs is only releasing it as a 32-bit binary (actually, a shell script with gzipped binary embedded in it, insane :P) for linux, and of course it didn't work out-of-the-box.
I spend an hour scratching my head why my movies show up as corrupted data on PS3 before i figured out it was tsMuxeR segfaulting. The shell script and packed binary combo made it somewhat tricky to find out what was wrong, as ldd didn't play nice with it and only error i could get out of it was segmentation fault. Problem was solved by trying to run older version of tsmuxer, which happened to inform me that i was missing few libs.

So here comes the simple fix:
sudo yum install ld-linux.so.2 libfreetype.so.6
Now, enjoy your matroskas ;)

Btw, if you're about to try PMS (and you really should if you own PS3 and rely on it as a media center) you'll need to enable RPM Fusion, both free and nonfree. After that, sudo yum install ffmpeg mplayer mencoder unrar , poke holes to your firewall, chmod +x that tsMuxeR binary and then you're ready to stream your movies.

Sharing your files with NFS, the easy way

2009-06-28T17:29:00.005+02:00

I've been losing my mind with NFS sharing files based on their numerical uid an gid. Here's a quick note to do it properly (shared files are owned by clients uid & gid) ..

1. install unfs3 on server
( Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install unfs3 , note that this removes nfs-kernel-server)

2. edit it to use single user mode
( Ubuntu: /etc/defaults/unfs3 , just uncomment the single user line)

3. Configure your exports on server like you normally do with nfs

4. put something like this to your clients fstab to allow your user to mount:

192.168.0.2:/path/to/share /home/who/where nfs noauto,user,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,intr,nfsvers=3,tcp 0 0

and put mount /home/who/where to your startup if you want automagickx.

Moblin V2 beta, Aspire One, Multimedia

2009-06-06T02:15:00.004+02:00

Yeah, moblin runs very nicely even with my old SSD model, really, UI is insanely good already, and all the other praises you've already heard +1. Well, guess what? They don't ship/provide gstreamer-plugins-bad nor ugly or anything else that would allow you to play anything but theora, vorbis & flac. I managed to install gstreamer-ffmpeg just to find out that their media player still refuses to play anything common, it just crashes. Onwards then! We all know exactly what is needed to play pretty much anything. Yeah, sudo yum --noplugins --nogpgcheck install mplayer, and we're rolling. As expected, mplayer does the trick (try with -vo gl, xv is like diaslide), hopefully moblin crew fixes their player _and_ provide repo for restricted stuff.

You're propably dying already for howto, am i right? Well, i'm not going to bother to do that, but here's roughly how i did it:
1) install yum-priorities and give moblin repos priority of 1. Without this you'll going to update from fedoras repo -> screwage.
2) now you need to enable both fedora 11 repo and rpmfusion, and leave these without priority, default is 99 which is ok. Beware of incoming repofile tweaking: you need to change $releasever from name and baseurl to something more appropriate.
3) fight with the keys (or use yum --nogpgcheck when needed)
4) install mplayer or whatever (sudo yum install mplayerorwhatever)
5) rip your hair, dependencies might not match at all.
6) Wait for official release ;)

BTW writing this with fresh google chrome alpha for linux x86_64, and it works like a charm. No flash or anything but still, i'm pretty much impressed.

Microscopic PAL NES / SNES power adapter mini-FAQ

2009-01-23T09:33:00.004+02:00

Seems like there's alot of confusion dealing with NES and SNES power adapter (AC adapters, power supplies, whatever you call them) so here's (uh, almost) all you need to know of 'em. This is about european PAL models only. I'm not responsible if you break your console, yourself or anything else. Always doublecheck and if you're unsure of something, don't do it.

Q: So, what are the specs regarding power for my european PAL NES/SNES?

A: Officially, both take 9 volts AC. NES PSU is rated 9v or 9.8v 1.3A. Same applies to SNES.
Unofficially, you can plug in just about any 9V AC or DC adapter with any polarity into both NES and SNES and it will work (at least if the plug fits nicely in ;) and NES has been reported to work with as little as 410mA.
I personally use 9V DC 1A with my SNES without any problems, and actually, American SNES wich takes DC directly in (NEVER try to use those with AC adapter. NEVER!) is rated 10V DC 850mA which most likely is a bit overkill too and snes will work with less. In the innards of NES, that 9 volts is regulated to 5 volts, so it will work with up to 12 volts, with the side effect of regulator heating up more than usual, but it should not be an issue as the regulator is rated up to 18 volts. In theory, everything from 6V to 18V should work, but I'd stick with that 9V if possible. I have no information if this applies to SNES, and i advice you not to try anything than 9V or less, as SNES may have different power regulator (can anyone confirm or check it out perhaps?). There's also some talk of UK models having different specs but i cant confirm that and it sounds kinda silly to me, that there would be different PAL models. So, use your common sense.

Q: Should I buy overly priced (possibly used) official nintendo parts?

A: If you want to and can find one. I personally would recommend third party adapters, as both NES and SNES have somewhat rare sized plug. If you're buying international, check input voltage and wall plug so that it will work in your country. Other option is to buy those cheap adapters which have multiple plugs (most have right sized plug, some don't) and adjustable voltage. Or if you have broken adapter gathering dust, cut the plug from it and change it into any otherwise suitable adapter. You can even make your own 2-in-1 adapter that way, by getting proper plugs and wiring them to one power adapter.

That's it.

Linux filesystems benchmark on Acer Aspire One SSD Part 1

2008-12-10T18:25:00.012+02:00

I did some benchmarking in order to find best filesystem to use, as AAO SSD is somewhat bottlenecking the whole system. Benchmarks were done using Bonnie++ running on Fedora 10 live system and are, in my opinion, quite interesting. You can all make your own conclusions about results. I was really surpriced when i saw ext2 results, which were quite dramatically lower than what i got from Ubuntu 8.10, i think i'll need to exam that behaviour bit more. So, Ext2 should still be the best bet if you wanna play safe, Ext4 is the best performer and i'm definetely going to test it more. For battery life, you should, as noted many times everywhere, use jfs or xfs with lazycount enabled (some say lazycount reduces journal use, so it should reduce ssd wear). So here are the charts, higher is better in benchmarks, lower is better in cpu utilization results.

There you go. Part 2 will show ext2, ext4 and jfs performance against other systems and effect of io schedulers.

Btw i asked few SSD manufacturers to sponsor just about any hardware they could spare, no answers yet. It would have been nice to see how other SSDs perform.

Nokia USB-storage problems in Ubuntu

2008-11-22T21:57:00.017+02:00

Nokias usb-storage has not worked for me (in linux that is) since n-gage days so i decided to dig a little and see why unmounting screws up filesystem on my new 16GB MicroSD i bought to go with my N95.

Exact problem in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex is this: Transfer some files, unmount. Phone seems like it's unmounted in gnome, but it's not, it doesnt drop connection and "you can now safely remove usb-cable" (or something like that) message does not appear on phone. Removing cable (sometimes) corrupts cards filesystem and there goes my music and everything else.

Problem was solved by doing sudo eject /dev/sdc1. So what kind of a solution is this? Not a good one, at least i'm too lazy to touch terminal for things that should work automagically. After some digging through hal documentation, i came up with a working solution..

Create new policy for hal with your favorite text editor

sudo nano -w /etc/hal/fdi/policy/nokia_usb_storage.fdi

and paste in these lines:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
  <match key="storage.hotpluggable" bool="true">
   <match key="storage.removable" bool="true">
    <match key="storage.vendor" string="Nokia">
     <merge key="storage.requires_eject" type="bool">true</merge>
    </match>
   </match>
  </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

Then, restart hal (or if you like doing things ms-style, reboot;)

sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart

tada, unmounting works!

As usual, warranty void if tried and this is tested only in Ubuntu 8.10, although with a little adapting this should work in any distribution with hal.

Custom Ubuntu kernel for Acer Aspire One

2008-11-22T17:19:00.008+02:00

AA1 feels kinda sluggish from time to time, and i've been working on improving it's performance on ubuntu. So, here's custom kernel for AA1 and Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. It boots somewhat faster (from grub to login screen 22s compared to stock kernels 39s) and takes less memory (boot to desktop, 172MB used vs 192MB used). Also, SSD writes don't choke AA1 that much as it does with stock kernel, so generally system feels somewhat faster and alot responsive.

Again, kinda beta-quality in here but everything seems to work for me, might not work for you. I've stripped loads of modules from this so your external hardware might not work at all, at least if it's something else than usb-memory or hd (which should work fine, duh!). Theres also config for you if you want to compile your kernel yourself. Please give feedback and reports how it works for you.

UPDATE: Oops! Forgot module for NFTS :P I will add it for next version.

UPDATE2: Got boot time down to 19 seconds, still tweaking, gonna post new kernel-image in few days. Seems like it's going to be my holy mission to make ubuntu boot into gdm in 15 seconds ;)

UPDATE3: Latest ubuntu updates (kernel and the modules) broke wlan on AA1, at least for me. Nice. I moved to 2.6.28-rc6 and compiled it with ubuntu 2.6.27 config, modified it for AA1 and enabled few essential modules. I also removed some useless stuff not needed, and have pretty nicely working kernel currently, definetely feels more responsive than with ubuntu kernels. However, there's still lot to remove and some testing to do, so no new kernel-image yet.

UPDATE4 aka "The Final and Last Update to This Post": I removed link to old download, there are now two kernel images with headers in http://skry.isengrim.org/files/aao_ubuntu_kernel/ for download. There's two versions, 2.6.28-rc8-one and 2.6.28-rc8-onelite. One is basically compiled with ubuntus stock kernel config with some fixes and modifications, so it should work quite fine. Onelite however is _very_ stripped down version, just for aspire one. It boots somewhat faster but lacks bootsplash and a shitload of modules (I tried to include essential ones in kernel, and there's some modules I thought necessary for system like this. Also, there's still some small problems with onelite, be warned that you should change your fstab in a way that instead of UUID you have correct device in there (like /dev/sda1 or whatever) before you boot. Onelite does not have initrd so it wont boot with UUID. Neither of these boot in 15 sec, even though onelite is quite fast to boot. Both of these break DKMS but that should not be an issue for most. I have not tested these that much, because I kinda gave up as it just takes too much to make any use of this machine, and installed linpus lite back. If you want to finetune these, you'll get kernel configs by installing the kernel image of your choice. Good luck and give feedback on how it works (or doesn't). Few final words then.. As usual, you're on your own if something breaks in any way, I'm not responsible for that. These worked for me but they might not work for you even though they should. Over and out.

UPDATE5 (oh well..):
Remeber kids, if it does not boot, do that fstab trick. I really can't remember anymore if it was mandatory or not. Also, if you have AA1 with HDD, don't even try this one.

Acer Aspire One, Ubuntu and Powertop

2008-11-11T02:25:00.006+02:00

Can't keep my hands off this beauty, so here's some info about its power usage. Tested with powertop and Ubuntu 8.10.


Running idle with wlan on :......... 9.0w
Idle with compiz and wlan :......... 9.4w
Display with lowest brightness :.... 3.2w
Wlan (Connected, idle) :............ 0.3w (Can't be? :)

I also tested power usage when watching movies with different players and settings. Results varied from 10.9w to 12.8w between players, mplayer was the most power hungry and vlc played with least power, though difference to totem was only marginal. I also noticed that pulseaudio hogs somewhat noticeable amount of cpu cycles, usage varying from 18% to as high as 48%. It should be noted that mplayer was the only player to decode 720p HD content without skipping/pausing/glitching too much (mplayer -vo xv -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all -framedrop). Totem choked on scenes with highest peaks in bitrate but otherwise performed very well. VLC couldn't handle 720p at any settings.


Watching SD XVID movie (vlc, default settings) :........ 11.3w
Watching SD XVID movie (mplayer, xv, pulseaudio) :...... 12.1w
Watching HD h264 720p movie (mplayer, xv, pulseaudio) :. 13.7w
Watching HD h264 720p movie (totem, default settings) :. 13.2w
Watching video from Youtube :........................... 11.5w

So, you should be able to watch 2h sd movies with one full charge.

Acer Aspire One + Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex + Netboot Remix + Netinstall

2008-11-06T18:18:00.016+02:00

Here's a quick guide for setting up Intrepid with Netbook Remix via Netinstall method on Aspire One. Again, you and only you are responsible if you break something. So read carefully and everything will be fine.

First, I prepared AA1 for installation by following this guide. Documentation points to installer for Hardy, you can find correct files in here.

Now, it would be right time to find cable if you were using wlan, as ath5k module was moved to module backports in Intrepid, so it's a no-go for wlan. Otherwise the installation is a breeze, I repartitioned SSD to include only one EXT2 partition, as i have 1.5GB of memory which makes swap (almost) obsolete. If you want swap, just create partition for it and remember to change value for vm.swappiness (you'll read about it later on) to ie. 10, as 0 (later suggested) means swap is off. Do not use EXT3 as filesystem cause journaling is something you don't want with SSD. Note that by default EXT3 is used, so go with manual partitioning. Then, choose Ubuntu Desktop when asked for what to install, or whatever rocks your socks and go watch some tv or something while you wait. First thing i did in my fresh install, was to go to Synaptic and install package linux-backports-modules-intrepid which includes ath5k module needed to make wlan work. Once installed, reboot and you have a working system.

Now it would be a good idea to tweak your fresh installation. There's a brilliant howto in here which you should first read and then tweak. NOTE: at time of writing, there's no word on that guide about Interpids Xorg which comes with empty xorg.conf, and just pasteing the device section in there does not work. Also note that defaults work fine, modify xorg.conf only if you want those special options. Here's my working xorg.conf for you all to use if needed.

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
        DisplaySize     195 113
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
        DefaultDepth    24
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Driver          "intel"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Option          "MonitorLayout" "LVDS,VGA"
        Option          "Clone" "true"
        Option          "AccelMethod" "EXA"
        Option          "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
        VideoRam        229376
        Option          "CacheLines" "1980"
        Option          "NoDCC"
EndSection

You should disable any unneeded apps from both System > Preferences > Sessions and System > Administration > Services. Disable visual effects (read compiz) from System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects if you want Netbook remix.

For Netbook remix, just install packages go-home-applet maximus netbook-launcher window-picker-applet (no need to add any repos anymore) and go to System > Preferences > Sessions and add entrys for netbook-launcher and maximus to start them up automagically.

EDIT: Seems like there's error on Ubuntu pages. For working usb powersave, change the lines (in rc.local) starting with -x to start with -w like this:
# Decrease power usage of USB while idle [ -w /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-5/power/level ] && echo auto > /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-5/power/level [ -w /sys/bus/usb/devices/5-5/power/level ] && echo auto > /sys/bus/usb/devices/5-5/power/level
Also, fighting with audio settings is no more necessary.

Flash not working with Firefox3 in Xubuntu Hardy

2008-10-04T00:16:00.003+02:00

Solution for me was sudo apt-get install libflashsupport

Acer Aspire One + Compiz + Cairo dock

2008-09-15T22:29:00.029+02:00

NOTE: I take no responsibility so you're on your own if something that did work for me, doesn't work for you. For your own sanity, take backups of all files you modify/delete so you can easily go back to defaults. Theres been issues with usb autorecognition and network-manager for some people, i myself have had no troubles with this setup. For now i would suggest everybody to use Ubuntu 8.10 as it runs great if you have 1GB or more memory installed (Xubuntu 8.10 for 512MB), is breeze to install and has everything you need by default.

I think we all agree that AA1 is some fine piece of equipment. It's too bad Acers own "implemention" of otherwise great XFCE Desktop is somewhat limited and in my opinion handicaps this otherwise fine system. Now, let's see what we can do about it.

First of all, to make this easy, we should have a fresh and clean install of OS straight from the recovery cd/stick. Go ahead and setup networking, let the live update do it's job and we're ready to go.

XFCE4

Desktop solution provided by Acer is.. a bit limited. We don't want it. We want real XFCE4.

Hit Alt+F2 and type in terminal to start console and do the following

sudo mousepad /usr/bin/xfdesktopnew

Change the line /usr/bin/xfdesktop2 & >/dev/null 2>&1 to /usr/bin/xfdesktop & >/dev/null 2>&1

sudo mousepad /usr/bin/xfdesktop

Again, change the line /usr/bin/xfdesktop2 & >/dev/null 2>&1 to /usr/bin/xfdesktop-xfce & >/dev/null 2>&1

sudo mousepad /usr/share/search-bar/start-search_bar.sh

Comment out (or delete) all lines by adding # into beginning of each line, to get rid of the horrific search bar.

Next we'll enable desktop menu, which is used to run installed software and so on.

xfce-setting-show

Xfce settings window should appear. Go to Desktop section and find option "Show desktop menu on right click" under Behavior tab.
Enable it and change desktop icon and font size to suite your taste (IMO 32 for icons and 8 for font is quite fine, the smaller the better) and if you want, now it's good time to disable or change that (ugly) default wallpaper under Appearance tab.

When you're done, close Desktop preferences and drag the main window upwards so that you'll see button labeled User Interface. From User Interface, change font size to as small as possible. Smaller font means more space, Sans 9 works for me. Also, you might want to enable sub-pixel hinting to get smoother fonts.

Now we've configured everything to make AA1 boot into (almost) normal XFCE desktop. Keep in mind that you might have to repeat all of this if Acer updates change these files. You'll notice if this happens. It's time to boot into our new desktop.

Compiz

After succesfull boot we'll continue our UI revamp by enabling Compiz. If you're new to compiz, prepare for love. Start with Alt+F2 and run compiz-manager. You should notice window animations and other eyecandy. There are loads of guides about compiz and its features, you should definetely read few of them. Now we need to make compiz start at boot. Alt+F2 again, and run xfce4-autostart-editor. Click on Add-button to create new entry, and use the following values:

Name: Compiz-Manager
Command: /usr/bin/compiz-manager

Thats it.

Compiz window decorator Emerald has rather ugly red default theme as you might noticed already, compiz-themes.org is a good place to search something more suitable. Before we continue, check out Desktop menu -> Settings -> CompizConfig Settings Manager, and enable at least plugins jpeg, expo and video playback.

Cairo-dock

See that dull grey panel at the bottom of screen? We'll get rid of it and replace it with Cairo-dock.

First of all you need to fix fedoras repository by adding a new key. There's instructions in here. Next, go to Desktop menu -> System -> Add/Remove Software to run package manager and from there Edit -> Repositories. Tick updates-newkey, updates-testing and Updates-testing-newkey from the list. When done, search for cairo-dock, and install all found packages except devel and you're ready to start cairo-dock. You might want to hide xfce-panel before you start playing with your new dock, click the arrow on left side to do that.

Now go ahead and explore cairo-docs settings and themes, and configure everything to suit your taste. When cairo-dock is configured the way you want, let's remove xfce-panel. Note that you'll lose systray and logout button so be sure to have those in cairo-dock.

Hit Alt+F2 and enter sudo mousepad /etc/xdg/xfce4-session/xfce4-session.rc
Find line 44 which reads Client2_Command=xfce4-panel and replace it with Client2_Command=cairo-dock
Now you'll have cairo-dock launching at boot and old panel disabled.

Update:
To get usb automounting work, do the following steps suggested by g.diego:
Open terminal and launch "xfce4-autostart-editor" and add this command: "sudo thunar --daemon"