I was quite pleasantly surprised. Read on if you’re curious as to why.

The obligatory Ubuntu 12.04 Unity desktop screenshot. My gnome-terminal is using the lovely Solarized colours. Extra indicators include Dropbox, and indicator-multiload for showing the CPU, network, load and disk activity gaphs.

Installation

With the Linux Startup Disk Utility (actually called the usb-creator-gtk) on my Ubuntu desktop I installed the 12.04 x86_64 image on an old 1GB USB flash drive. A point of criticism is that the final “installing bootloader” part takes some minutes, without much feedback other than a progress bar bouncing horizontally. Booting the live disk went perfectly, and I could test basic functionality. Joining my TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND access point went without a hitch. Even suspend and resume worked out of the box. Resuming is fast, almost MacBook speed! During the installation, I used the partition tool to resize an existing NTFS partition to create space for the Linux installation. It still amazes me how smooth this process has become. From start to final boot, the whole installation took 18 minutes.

NVIDIA Optimus Support

After bootup, the first two issues I ran into were the miserable (estimated) battery life, and the fact that Super-W did not activate Window-Scale, as I was used to on other Ubuntu installations. A “ps uaxw | grep -i unity” revealed that I was running unity-2d, and sniffing through /var/log/Xorg.0.log yielded the tell-tale “(EE) Failed to initialize GLX extension (Compatible NVIDIA X driver not found)” (also that X was getting confused with the seeming presence of both Intel and NVIDIA graphics). It was clear that Ubuntu 12.04 doesn’t support Optimus out of the box.

On AskUbuntu I found this fabulous answer by one of the developers of the new Bumblebee. In short:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia
sudo usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER

After this log out and log back in, and you’re in Optimus heaven! My battery estimate was soon 3.5h+ on 80% charge (it was just under 2h at 80% before installing bumblebee), unity 3D was running, and I could start applications, using the optirun prefix, running on the NVIDIA graphics. With glxspheres, I get 1.9 frames/sec and 1.9 Mpixels/sec without and 115 frames/sec and 113 Mpixels/sec with NVIDIA graphics. Importantly, bumblebee automatically switches off the NVIDIA graphics when nothing is using it, resulting in the much longer battery life. All hail the four main developers of Bumblebee: Thulinma, Lekensteyn, Samsagax and ArchangeGabriel.

Unity

Unity, Ubuntu’s unique GUI, has improved muchly since 11.10. I gave Unity on 11.04 a serious go, and also on 11.10, but I gave up in each instance after a week or two due to glaring bugs. The 12.04 Unity has made great progress in fixing a number of small but irritating bugs, I think it might be a keeper. The heads-up display (HUD) is indeed awesome: Press “alt” (the default keybinding) and then type away to search through the menus of the currently foreground application. I’ve come to appreciate the screen space savings due to the global menubar, although it doesn’t work for all apps yet, vim-gnome being an example of note. At this moment, my only wish would be to have a window-overview like you get in the gnome3-shell when you press the super key.

There has been much bitching and moaning about the direction Ubuntu has taken with Unity, some of it valid arguments. Especially the fact that much effort is being diverted from the gnome-shell is concerning. However, although I’ve dirtied many a word using previous versions of Unity, I think it’s good that it’s exploring directions that create a new UI experience that represents a counter-pole to the Windows and OS-X approaches.

Fixing Chrome icon grouping in Unity Launcher

At the time of this update (2012-05-04) I did run into one old annoyance again. If  you start up Chrome (or Chromium) and then one of its application shortcuts, for example GMail, it groups both under the same icon on the Unity Launcher:

Chrome and Chrome Application shortcuts are grouped together under the first launcher icon, whichever that is.

If you start up the application shortcut first, for example GMail, subsequent Chrome windows will be grouped under the GMail icon. Durn.

Fortunately, the devs have been working on this bug, and the fix should soon appear as a stable release update (SRU). Until that time, you can download and install the bamfdaemon, libbamf and libbamf3-0 deb packages from here. Anything with version 0.2.116 and newer has the fix. Note that this only fixes it for the case where you’ve started up Chrome first (scenario 1 above), and not an application shortcut. See my comment on the bug report.

Multi-monitor support

I had low(ish) expectations when I connected my 40″ Sony Bravia TV to the HDMI port of the laptop, so I was more or less speechless for a while when, without me having to touch any part of the interface, Ubuntu simply extended its desktop onto the TV panel. BOOM. Just like that.

What I also like very much, is that Ubuntu by default puts the Launcher and its main menu bar on both displays (this is configurable though) and, even more gratifying, that the Dash appears automatically on the display currently containing the mouse cursor when I press the Super key. In the photo below, you can see the laptop below, on battery, outputting to the Sony TV via HDMI, and glxspheres humming along at just over 90 FPS using the discrete NVIDIA graphics. What you don’t see is me, smiling maniacally behind the camera phone.

Ubuntu 12.04 multi-monitor support FTW!

The Displays configuration window seems to think the 40″ panel is 72″, but the resolution has been correctly deduced.

Miscellaneous hardware support

Power saving looks pretty good. With the brightness set to 40% (brightness setting is not persisent unfortunately), my power usage at idle is just under 9W:

PowerTop says my idle power consumpting at 40% brightness is under 9W.

Actually with normal browsing over wlan, I was not able to push it that far over 10W. This is after having toggled 10 or so powertop tunables from “bad” to “good”. After having installed laptop-mode-tools, the tunables are all automatically and persistently “good”, except for a VM timeout. However, this seems to be a misunderstanding between laptop-mode-tools and powertop, and it is in fact quite OK.

The hardware config panel key (Fn-F1) does nothing, the touchpad disable key (Fn-F5) just works, the volume keys (Fn-F6 to Fn-F8) just work, but the hardware fan (Fn-F11) and wireless (Fn-F12) keys do nothing.

Initially the brightness keys (Fn-F2 and Fn-F3) didn’t really work, only allowing me to switch between two brightness levels (100% and 90%). Fortunately, this AskUbuntu question had the answer. Adding acpi_backlight=vendor to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub, running sudo update-grub and then rebooting gives you 100% working hardware brightness control. Based on the information on this page, this configures brightness setting to happen through vendor-specific driver modules instead of through the ACPI default driver.

In the working cases, you get the gorgeous notifier display (and in the case of volume even a mac-like audio feedback as you change levels):

Pretty notifications with Unity

As mentioned before, suspend to and resume from RAM works like a charm, out of the box, and the resume is really fast. Hibernate does NOT work. I tested this with “sudo pm-hibernate”, but when I switched the laptop back on, it acted like it was being cold-started.

I tested the webcam and sound setup (speakers and built-in microphone) with the gmail talk plugin and with the cheese application. These both work fine. However, with Skype 2.2.0.35 for Linux, you get the dreaded too-dark webcam image. The often-posted solution of using luvcview to adjust brightness does NOT work. Here’s a better solution: Install v4l2ucp, the video4linux2 universal control panel. Keep this running when you start Skype. If the video is dark, switch the “Exposure, Auto Priority” off and then back on again. This solves the problem on my setup (built-in WebCam SCB-1100N). Whenever you startup Skype’s video capturing again, it manages to screw up the setting, so you have to retoggle it with v4l2ucp unfortunately.

The touchpad can be easily configured for two-finger scrolling, but not for three-finger gestures like it can be on Windows.

The touchpad configuration dialogue.

USB tethering with my Android-powered (CyanogenMod 7.1) HTC Desire Z works like a charm. I connect the USB cable, activate USB tethering on the telephone, and my laptop is online. This definitely qualifies as a Just Works(tm), and it seems to connect a whole lot faster than Windows 7 does.

Conclusions

When I bought this laptop, I had resigned myself to not being able to use it for Linux, for the largest part due to NVIDIA Optimus. However, due to the efforts of the Bumblebee people, and also due Ubuntu 12.04 as a whole with the multi-monitor support being a highlight, my verdict is that this laptop is a great buy also when you’re planning to go exclusively Linux.

More resources

• My gnome-terminal uses the Solarized colour scheme from here, and my vim (both console and gnome) are using the setup from the main Solarized repository.

Updates

• May 6, 2012: Added USB tethering.
• May 4, 2012: Added the Unity Launcher icon grouping bug fix.
• May 3, 2012: Added the multi-monitor section after testing with my HDMI Sony TV. Added solution for dark webcam capture in Skype. Also, thanks to Ladislav Bodnar, host of DistroWatch.com, this review is now linked from the Ubuntu page.

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Blurry-appearing microwave, in reality quite sharp!

This is of course quite irritating, especially in a phone that is otherwise sheer brilliance. No amount of moist-cloth lens cleaning could improve the results. Fortunately I came across this forum thread, where it was suggested either to replace the whole phone back plate including lens, or to have the phone repaired by the service centre, or to clean the lens with a q-tip and some toothpaste. The first two options either costing money or requiring a telephone still within its guarantee were quickly eliminated. Although the third option, suggested by forum user allanl-o, sounds strange, we wanted to explore it, for science’s sake of course. As an aside, the lenses of our two test telephones as well as that of the thread started looked like this (picture courtesy of xudsa II USERT, the thread started):

What your lens probably looks like if you're taking really blurry pictures.

It seems that there’s some kind of coating that has started to flake off. In any case, it turns out that the mild abrasive in the tooth paste and a minute of two’s rubbing with a q-tip is just enough to clean up the glass in front of the lens completely, resulting in mega sharp photos again. Look at my microwave, now as sharp in the photo as it is in reality:

Microwave, sharp in reality and in the photo!

We’ve performed this procedure on two different HTC Desire Z phones, in both cases with great results. Let us know in the comments if this worked for you!

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I had one niggling problem though with version 2.1.10 (latest stable at the time of this writing): When I would export (or Quick Copy) references in IEEE style, it would abbreviate the author list with “First Author, et al.” if there were seven (7) or more authors. When I’m building a bibliography list, this is of course never the right thing to do.

Here’s the simple workaround for this problem:

• Go to Preferences | Advanced and click on the “Show Data Directory” button.
• Edit styles/ieee.csl with your favourite text editor.
• Look for the line starting with <bibliography et-al-min=”7″ … and change the 7 to a higher number, 100 for example.

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It's 2011 and this is Windows 7: Why does the console still make me want to gnaw off my fingers?

To summarise: You can only resize the window vertically (so you’re always restricted to 80 characters width which is just idiotic on modern widescreen displays), copy and paste is so painful that you’ll wish that they’d rather just not bothered with it in the first place and the cmd.exe interpreter itself is primitive when compared with any modern unix shell.

Enter the two-pronged solution of Console2 and Git bash! Console2 is a console that solves the UI problems (resizing! copy and paste! terminal transparency! tabs!) and you can use it together with any combination of command line interpreters, such as for example the existing cmd.exe, bash or anything else.

Here’s my setup, configured with Git bash (you get this for free with the Windows git installer, for this purpose it’s better than Cygwin as it’s a touch closer to Windows) as well as plain old cmd.exe. To configure a Git bash tab, set Shell to “C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cmd.exe /c “”C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\sh.exe” –login -i” (including all quotes) and Startup dir to %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%. I’ve also configured Ctrl-Alt-T to invoke Console2. With shift-mouse-drag I can select text (nice editor select, not cmd.exe block select, ptooey!), and I’ve set Ctrl-Shift-C and Ctrl-Shift-V to copy and paste so it’s like the Gnome terminal on Linux. Behold:

Console2 makes the pain go away.

My Windows experience is a lot more bearable now, perhaps even slightly pleasant! Did I just say that?!

Alternatives

• PowerShell replaces cmd.exe, but by default still runs inside the Windows console. Still much suckage in other words, plus that I don’t feel compelled to learn PS yes.
• Cygwin mintty is also often cited as a console replacement, but seems to cause problems (for example with git) as it’s not a full Windows console.
• Cygwin itself is really fantastic, but due to that POSIX compatibility layer which is otherwise a useful thing, differs too much from the native Windows goodies so that sometimes native Windows behaviour is interfered with.

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I finally found a forum posting by a user named deetsvl with a solution to this problem that I’ve confirmed works perfectly on this HTC Desire Z. Behold:

All hail WidgetLocker, solution to the HTC Sense accidental answering problem!

WidgetLocker going to cost you a whole € 1.41, but it does the trick just perfectly, if you remember to change the following setting: In “Settings | Popups”, check “Hide Incoming Call”. When you receive a call, you’ll have to slide horizontally first to unlock WidgetLocker, then the normal vertical business for answering / declining a call. If you manage to do that accidentally, I know a good side-show agent, so give me a call. On my Desire Z, I also checked “Settings | Buttons & Inputs | Slide Keyboard Unlock” so that I don’t have to unlock Widget Locker when suavely flick-sliding open the keyboard on this baby.

I hope that you enjoy your new-found only-answering-and-declining-calls-that-you-really-want-to freedom!

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Wireless N connects, but no packets get through

The first annoyance was when I successfully connected to my wireless N access point, but couldn’t get a single packet through. After much searching, it turns out there’s a bug in the firmware for the Centrino Advanced-N 6200 wireless adapter that keeps it from getting any data through.

The solution is to disable wireless N on your laptop by creating a file etc/modprobe.d/inteldisablen.conf with the following contents:

options iwlagn 11n_disable50=1 11n_disable=1

and then to reboot. If you don’t want to reboot, just rmmod and modprobe the iwlagn kernel module. I’ve confirmed that this fix works.

Google Chrome scrolls excruciatingly slowly

After resuming and suspending, certain 2D and GPU-assisted graphics operations slow down. Scrolling in Chrome, even on a simple Google results page, is excruciatingly slow with head-explosion-levels of lag.

The solution is to disable hyperthreading, or at least to disable a number of CPU cores, at suspend and re-enable at resume. My laptop i5 CPU has 2 real cores, and thus 4 virtual cores due to hyperthreading. I’m using the following script, taken from this forum thread to do the necessary core disabling / enabling automatically:

#!/bin/sh

# Disable hyper-threading processor cores on suspend and hibernate, re-enable them
# on resume. Presumably helps for buggy nvidia behaviour.
# save this file as /etc/pm/sleep.d/20_core_i5_disable_cores and make excutable
# with chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/20_core_i5_disable_cores

# from: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=158091

case $1 in
        hibernate|suspend)
                echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online
                echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu3/online
                ;;

        thaw|resume)
                echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online
                echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu3/online
                ;;
esac

I’ve confirmed both the slow-down behaviour and the working of the fix.

Eclipse scrollbars don’t work

Natty’s new overlay scrollbars screw with Eclipse’s scrollbars, leaving you with 100% non-working scrollbars! You can either disable the overlay scrollbars completely, or comment out the GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS line close to the start of the /usr/bin/eclipse shell script:

#export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true

On my setup, this fix works most of the time.

Conclusion

It’s a shame that these things don’t work out of the box, as some of them had been reported long before the Natty release. Before I forget, if you install 11.04 on this specific laptop, you might also have to follow my Ubuntu 10.10 howto if you see a black screen at bootup or resume.

Related posts:

1. Ubuntu 10.10 x86_64 on your Dell E6410 with NVS 3100m GPU

On this page you can download the MobiPocket version of the book and the HTML source files I generated to make it. You can also read on for the skinny on how you can do this yourself.

This procedure works best on a unix-like machine, as we’re going to use grep and sed along with some Python.

1. We start by doing a checkout of the reStructuredText sources of the book, moving the linked graphics into the same directory as the reStructuredText txt files and then creating a grepindex.txt file that will serve as the basis for our table of contents index.txt:

svn co http://djangobook.com/svn/branches/2.0/ 20svn
cd 20svn
find graphics/ -name *.png -exec mv {} . \;
grep -h "^Chapter [0-9]*:" *.txt > grepindex.txt

2. The grepindex.txt will now be converted to something more reStructuredText-like using this script, called grepindex2index.py:

# first do:
# grep -h "^Chapter [0-9]*:\|^Appendix [A-Z]:" *.txt > grepindex.txt
# then:
# python grepindex2index.py grepindex.txt > index.txt

import re
import sys

rst_header = """
===================
The Django Book 2.0
===================

Copyright 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss.
This work is licensed under the GNU Free Document License.

This ebook version was prepared by Charl Botha <http://charlbotha.com/> from
the SVN at http://djangobook.com/svn/branches/2.0/ on 2011-04-25, and is
hosted by <http://vxlabs.com/>.

"""

def main():
    f1 = open(sys.argv[1])
    print rst_header

    # this will match on "Chapter 10: the title" or "Appendix B: another title"
    # groups 0: chapter 10 or appendix A; 1: 10 (or None), 2: A (or None), 3: title
    pat = re.compile('(^Chapter\s*([0-9]*)|^Appendix\s*([A-Z])):\s*(.*)$')
    chapters = []
    appendices = []
    for l in f1:
        # Chapter 10: Advanced Models -> `Chapter 10: Advanced Models <chapter10.html>`_
        mo = pat.match(l)

        if mo.groups()[1] is not None:
            chapters.append("* `Chapter %s: %s <chapter%02d.html>`_" % (mo.groups()[1],mo.groups()[3],int(mo.groups()[1])))

        else:
            appendices.append("* `Appendix %s: %s <appendix%s.html>`_" % (mo.groups()[2],mo.groups()[3],mo.groups()[2]))

    print "\n".join(chapters)
    print "\n".join(appendices)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Save this to a script called grepindex2index.py, then invoke it with:

python grepindex2index.py grepindex.txt > index.txt

3. We’ll then proceed to fix all chapter references with the following bit of sed:

sed -i "s/\.\.\/\(chapter[0-9]*\)\//\1.html/g" chapter*txt

(this will change all “../chapter??/” links to just “chapter??.html”)

4. Everything is now ready to be converted to HTML:

for i in *.txt; do rst2html $i `echo $i | cut -f 1 -d .`.html; done

5. After downloading this django desktop background as cover image, I dragged and dropped the top-level index.html file onto the free Calibre software to import it, and then used the edit metadata function to set the cover image. After this, I converted the imported files to MobiPocket remembering to add the word “appendix” to the chapter detection xpath expression in the “structured detection” section of the conversion dialogue.

That’s all there’s to it! Have a good read.

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Based on the superb price / performance ratio of the MSI ePower 200AV II kit as extolled by this comparative review (32 powerline adapters were tested), and especially the fact that in the test setup these adapters managed to attain 32 Mbit/s even in the bad case scenario (two different circuits, 100 metres of cable separating the two adapters), I purchased the MSI ePower 200AV+ II kit to replace a wireless link I currently have in my house between the second and third floors. Based on iperf measurements, the wireless link currently manages around 22Mbit/s of throughput. Because the two power sockets I was planning to use are on the same circuit, I thought that I could improve on this existing connection with the two powerline adapters. Little did I know…

The MSI ePower 200AV+ kit still nicely in its box.

After taking delivery of the new kit, I started testing with both adapters in the same room. One thing that can be said for this hardware, is that it’s really plug and play. One adapter in wall-socket and connected to first floor ethernet hub, second adapter in wall-socket and connected to my laptop, and my laptop was online. No mess no fuss.

The first nasty surprise appeared as I installed and started up up the software that came in the box (version 5.0). It claimed not to find any homeplug adapters on the network, although the laptop I was running it on was directly connected to one of the PLCs. So I downloaded version 6.0 of the software, only available in German, from MSI’s website and that did manage to see both adapters. At least now I was able to configure both the PLCs (in German…) and set the network name to something private for security’s sake.

After moving one of the adapters to my study on the third floor and connecting it to a Linux server there, I could start running iperf on the server and my laptop on the second floor for testing. The two PLC adapters were now in the same-circuit sockets I was intending to use. Below is the output of three runs of iperf:

C:\Users\cpbotha\Downloads>iperf -c 192.168.1.126
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.126, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[148] local 192.168.1.38 port 49921 connected with 192.168.1.126 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[148]  0.0-10.0 sec  10.7 MBytes  8.95 Mbits/sec

C:\Users\cpbotha\Downloads>iperf -c 192.168.1.126
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.126, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[148] local 192.168.1.38 port 49987 connected with 192.168.1.126 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[148]  0.0-10.0 sec  11.2 MBytes  9.41 Mbits/sec

C:\Users\cpbotha\Downloads>iperf -c 192.168.1.126
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.126, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[148] local 192.168.1.38 port 49988 connected with 192.168.1.126 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[148]  0.0-10.0 sec  10.4 MBytes  8.70 Mbits/sec

Yes ladies and gentlemen, that’s an absolutely miserable 9 Mbit/s (think 1 Mbyte/s…) between two MSI ePower 200AV+ II adapters on the same circuit, on different floors in a house that was built 5 years ago. For your reference, my wireless link (two Sitecom 300N X2 access points in Wireless Distribution Mode) easily manages 22 Mbit/s effective throughput right through a reinforced concrete floor.

MSI’s own utility claimed the following (I’ve cut out things that you don’t need to see):

Rate 18/39
Vendor Atheros
Firmware INT6400-MAC-4-0-4011-00-3430-20090501-FINAL-C
Übertragungsrate hoch 174.00
Übertragungsrate niedrig 15.00

… with its reported link speed varying between 17 and 35 Mbit/s.

I tried the third floor PLC adapter on various different sockets, the results were similarly depressing.

As if the miserable throughput was not reason enough to avoid powerline adapters, note the following mechanical issue:

When the adapter sits in a double socket, the only thing that'll fit in the free socket is a really thin plug as the upper part of the adapter is flush with the socket and covers a fair part of the other hole.

As you can see in the caption, although the PLC has a socket of its own, it covers the neighbouring socket in a double-socket setup to such an extent that you can only fit a really thin plug in the neighbouring socket.

To conclude: Homeplugs perform really well in a test environment, even when different circuits are introduced and metres of extra cable are inserted. However, what the tests often fail to take into account, is the fact that people actually make use of other electrical devices besides homeplugs (!!) and that these all introduce noise into the home grid that apparently severely affect powerline ethernet performance. Perhaps in your house things work out differently, but my advice would be to steer clear of powerline adapters (unless you can borrow a pair to test with), opting of course for ethernet cables whenever this is possible and for wireless otherwise.

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With this box you can stick it to the man!

The SPA3102 is connected to an existing router, so I have the Lan Setup set to Bridge, and have configured the Internet port (on the Router | Wan tab) with a suitable static IP. To be clear, in this configuration, one only connects up the Internet port and NOT the Ethernet port.

Voice | Regional

For the Voice | Regional tab I found the following Call Progress Tone settings on a voxilla forum page by users PJH and edokter:

Dial Tone: 425@-10;20(*/0/1)
Second Dial Tone: 425@-10;20(*/0/1)
Outside Dial Tone: 350@-19;440@-19;20(*/0/1+2)
Busy Tone: 425@-10;10(.5/.5/1)
Reorder Tone: 425@-10;10(.25/.25/1)
Off Hook Warning Tone: 1000@0;*(0/9.5/0,.1/.1/1,.1/.1/1,.1/0/1)
Ring Back Tone: 440@-19,480@-19;*(2/4/1+2)
Confirm Tone: 425@-10;1(.1/.1/1)
SIT1 Tone: 950@-19,1400@-19,1800@-19;30(.333/0/1,.333/0/2,.333/1/3)
MWI Dial Tone: 425@-10;1(.1/.1/1);20(*/0/1)
Cfwd Dial Tone: 425@-10;20(.5/.05/1)


On the same tab and from the same forum page, the following Distinctive Ring Patterns and Distinctive Call Waiting Tone Patterns:

Ring1 Cadence: 90(1/4)
Ring2 Cadence: 90(.3/.4,.3/4)
CWT1 Cadence: 60(.5/9.5)
CWT Frequency: 425@-16

To get caller ID working, I made the following changes (still on the Voice | Regional tab):

Caller ID Method: ETSI FSK
Caller ID FSK Standard: bell 202


Finally on this tab, set:

FXS Port Impedance: 270+750||150nF

(according to the Cisco admin manual, this is the standard for The Netherlands)

Voice | Line 1

This is the tab where you get to do most of the SIP configuration.

I have my primary betamax provider (12voip.com) setup under Proxy and Registration and Subscriber Information:

Proxy: name of your sip server e.g. sip.voipbuster.com
Display name: 0031xxxxxxxxx (number that you have verified and configured as callerid with the voipbuster software)
User ID: 0031xxxxxxxxx (same as above)
Password: hard to figure this one out
Use Auth ID: yes
Auth ID: your betamax (voipbuster etc.) username


My dialplan looks as follows:

(112S0<:@gw0>|0800x.<:@gw0>|090x.<:@gw0>|<#9:>xx.<:@gw0>|<1601:>xx.|<0:0031>[1-7]xxxxxxxxS0|xxxxxxxxxxxxxS0|xx.|*xx)


Here is the commented version for your edification:

(112S0<:@gw0>| # emergency number goes through PSTN
0800x.<:@gw0>| # 0800 numbers go through PSTN
090x.<:@gw0>| # 090x numbers go through PSTN
<#9:>xx.<:@gw0>| # prefix number with #9 to force dialing through PSTN
<1601:>xx.| # throw away 1601 preselect still in some handset phonebooks. you won't need this.
<0:0031>[1-7]xxxxxxxxS0| # numbers without 0031 country code will get it added
xxxxxxxxxxxxxS0| # stock standard 00CCRRxxx 13 digit international telephone number
xx.| # all other numbers
*xx) # linksys codes

This is a concise howto (in Dutch) on writing dialplans. You can use other betamax providers in the Gateway Accounts and integrate them in your dialplan. The betamax providers don’t require registration.

Voice | PSTN Line

In order for your SPA3102 to realise that the call has been ended, you need to setup PSTN Disconnect Detection correctly:

Detect CPC: yes
Detect Polarity Reversal: no
Detect Disconnect Tone: yes
Disconnect Tone: 425@-30,425@-30; 2(0.5/0.5/1+2)


When I had “Detect Polarity Reversal” set to yes, I’d get immediate disconnects on incoming calls with my new Ziggo cable PSTN connection.

On the same tab, make sure your FXO Port Impedance is also set to 270+750||150nF (the Dutch standard).

Later I discovered that if we took longer than 10 seconds to answer the phone, the call would be lost. To fix this, set the “PSTN Answer Delay” to 60 seconds or something reasonable.

Conclusion

Please let me know in the comments if this worked for you, or if you have any questions on the instructions above!

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In any case, if you want to make international characters (that is, characters with accent marks, diacritics, trema (plural tremata), umlauts, eat that google!) such as ë, é, ê or even ö or ï and so forth on the HTC Desire Z hardware keyboard, you simply long press the base character. A menu pops up and you get to choose the accented character that you would prefer to insert at that moment.

I sincerely apologise for interrupting your usual high IQ programming with this. If however you stumble upon this post and it helps you, why don’t you leave a comment just for laughs?

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