Archive for October, 2008

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Webbook FAQ

Friday, October 31st, 2008

The support team have asked me to put together some flowchart questions and answers for diagnosing and solving common problems folk have with the webbook. I figured it would be best to post them here to help people solve their own problems and chip in with corrections and other suggestions

I keep getting prompted for a keyring password when connecting to my wireless network

Something is wrong with your gnome keyring file, try deleting the keyring file. Open a terminal and type rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring

My webbook shows the Ubuntu logo on bootup but then goes to a black screen

This has happened to a few people, I am not sure why.

When precisely does it go black? Before login or after login? Do you hear the drums at the login page and the startup sound after the login page?

Try plugging in an external monitor and see if that works (obviously not a solution, but it would tell us something about what is going on) if the external monitor works, what resolution is it running at? 1024×768 or 1024×600?

Go to the recovery root shell from the grub menu and edit or replace the xorg.conf file.

cd /etc/X11
sudo mv xorg.conf xorg.broken
sudo wget http://webbookblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/xorg.conf

If that fixes things then I would be quite interested in seeing what the xorg.broken file looks like.

I can’t connect to my mobile broadband connection

What dongle are you using? The E160 does not work so well on Hardy Heron, but it does work much better on Intrepid.

What network?

Prepay or Pay as you go?

If it is pay as you go do you have any credit? (try browsing to three.co.uk, if that is the only site that works then you need a topup)

Have you upgraded to Wader 2.3? Open the mobile broadband application and go to help-about and look at the version number. If it is not 2.3 then do an update and restart the webbook.

Check the profile. If you have connected to a different network in the past it is probably using the wrong profile and trying to roam onto a network for which you don’t have roaming privileges. You should never roam on mobile broadband, if you are abroad buy a local pre-pay SIM card – make sure the thousand pound bills happen to other people. The only exception to this is if you have a Three SIM card you can roam onto Orange GPRS as three don’t have their own GPRS network)

If you do have the wrong profile simply delete it and try to connect, it will pop up a new profile with all the correct details filled in.

For more in depth diagnosis start the mobile broadband client and open a terminal window. Type tail -f /tmp/wader.log now plug in the dongle and watch the messages go by as you connect. The messages do actually mean something although they can be a bit cryptic. If someone has an interesting connection issue I would want to see the contents of /tmp/wader.log.

Please totally ignore and do not use the Windows drivers that are on the pseudo CDROM on the dongle. The installer might sort of run under WINE, but it is not going to connect or do anything productive. Just use the Wader mobile broadband client.

Gcompris doesn’t work

start it with alt-F2 gcompris -x we need to get a patch out to fix this.

I have messed up lots of things

Deleting your home directory and starting again might fix things if you have got corrupted firefox/thunderbird/gnome profiles (you can delete them individually, but it can be simplest to just start again)

I have totally hosed my webbook/I accidentally bought one with XP on it

Ask for a USB webbook Linux restore wristvault. This is a 1GB USB drive with a partition image of a clean webbook build. You need to go into the BIOS to change the hard drive order to boot from it, then back into the BIOS when it is finished to re-enable the SATA hard drive.

So what other FAQs should I add to this list? Any problems I have missed?

Posted in Howto, Mobile Networking | 83 Comments »

Some updates and an update

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

We took the webbooks and some other Elonex laptops, the ONEt and ONE to the Linux Expo Live event in Olympia last week. I should be getting some photos soon, better than the one from my phone at the Woking event. It was not the busiest show but that was OK because we could have a nice long chat with all sorts of interesting people. I had the pleasure of hosting the speaking sessions on the Friday afternoon and Alan Lord hosted the Saturday sessions. All my speakers were great, but a particular highlight was the talk from David Axmark, one of the co-founders of MySQL telling us the story of MySQL and why he left SUN (in short: he doesn’t like working big companies). Lots of people were interested in the webbook but the star attraction for the geek audience was the ONEt with it’s MIPS architecture processor. The software on the ONEt is all very pretty, but not at all how I would have arranged it. With a Debian based system and the apt/dpkg package manager the ONEt could become a really great little computer.

Coming up soon (tomorrow actually) is the Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid launch party, this will be at Waxy O’Connors in the Dargle bar tomorrow evening, please feel free to join us there.

The other update is a software update to the Wader mobile broadband client. This was released a couple of days ago, if you start the mobile broadband client and go to help-about it should be version 2.3, if it isn’t then do an update and reboot (it should work without the reboot, but just in case . . .). The update adds a cancel button to allow you to interupt it during a connection and also includes a fix mostly for Orange where some SIM cards can take a long time to initialise, this version waits more patiently for the SIM card and network to get it’s act together.

Update:

The party was great, very well attended and my head hurts now.

Posted in Geeky, Mobile Networking | 50 Comments »

Be careful of the kernel update if you installed the VIA drivers

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Just as I predicted, a kernel update has been pushed out and if you installed the VIA drivers to get Compiz working then you will boot up to a black screen after letting the update process run and install kernel 2.26.21-generic. You can still boot up from the old kernel by pressing escape just after the bios and selecting the 2.26.19-generic kernel from the GRUB menu. I have asked VIA to compile a new one for us and come up with a more useable long term solution.

Posted in Compiz | 9 Comments »

Pretty fonts with sub-pixel rendering

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Here is a little tip for subtly improved font rendering. Go to a terminal window (Applications-Accessories-Terminal) and type sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config.
From the options select Autohinter, Always, and No. If you look carefully the curves of letters should now be just a fraction smoother.
nope, don’t do that! go to System-Preferences-Appearance and click the fonts tab, then select subpixes smoothing from the Fonts tab. Same thing as above really, but no need to go to the command line for it.

Posted in Howto | 3 Comments »

Flash 10 from Adobe

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Adobe released the next version of Flash today, it works just fine on the webbook. If you go to http://www.adobe.com/go/getflash it will detect you are running Linux and you can download the .deb for Ubuntu 8.04+ from the menu. Restart Firefox and you are good to go with Flash 10. I think it might be a bit smoother when playing videos full screen but I have not done any scientific tests. Let me know how you get on.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Ibex update

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex is the next version of the operating system on the webbook, it should be released at the end of this month and I have been testing it out. Right now it would not be a good idea to upgrade. The screen goes black and fixing it is an interesting challenge. The external VGA port works fine so you can plug in a monitor, but getting the LCD panel up and running required me to compile the latest OpenChrome drivers and make a little change to one of the source files. I am still talking to the OpenChrome folk about improving the fix, but right now, don’t be in a hurry to upgrade!

Posted in Geeky | 11 Comments »

webbooks in Woking

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Yesterday was the Woking Means Business trade show, we had a stand there so we could show local businesses how they could save money by using Free and Open Source software. Here is a (bad) photo of our computer laden stand. (Alan Bell on the right, Alan Lord is on the left)

on the stand from left to right is a Novatec laptop (they are one of the few suppliers who will sell you a computer without operating system), an Elonex webbook, an OLPC XO laptop, the pink Elonex ONE and on the shelf is a monitor attached to another Novatec laptop and a little Elonex ONEt. All running Free and Open Source software.

We had internet access on all the computers, thanks to another webbook hidden in the cupboard below. The other webbook had an Orange 3G dongle plugged in and was connected to a standard wireless ADSL router (not plugged in to ADSL of course). With a bit of messing about with the settings we got the webbook to act as a NAT router and internet gateway for all the others. We were connected for about 8 hours doing all sorts of things, demonstrating updates and installation of software and using our web based vtiger CRM system. It worked flawlessly and is a really great setup for anyone who wants internet access for a bunch of computers.

To get it working there are a couple of magical incantations required on the webbook, specifically,
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
to allow it to forward packets from the wireless interface to the mobile broadband interface, and then
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/16 -o hso0 -j MASQUERADE
to set up a firewall rule to do network address translation (NAT) for the 192.168.0.0 subnet (the local network) with the external interface being called hso0 (if you have the Orange dongle the network card is called hso0, if it is 3 or T Mobile then substitute hso0 for ppp0). Finally on all the other computers we had to set their default route to point to the IP address of the webbook with the dongle and also edit their /etc/resolv.conf dns settings to point to the Orange DNS servers, if I had set the webbook up as a DHCP server this could all have been automatic.

Posted in Action Shots, Geeky | 6 Comments »

Other webbook bloggers

Friday, October 10th, 2008

I have noticed a few others providing information and doing interesting projects with the webbook, John Voisy is blogging his experiences with Arch Linux on the webbook, Craig Jump has a page of useful webbook resources and the geeksquad have a wiki with quite a lot of information about the webbook. I will try to find room for a blogroll, are there other interesting webbook related sites I should be linking to?

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Booting the webbook from USB or SD cards

Friday, October 10th, 2008

There is a trick in the BIOS to booting from USB or SD cards, it is a bit counter-intuitive, but it can be done.

Plug in the USB/SD card and power up the webbook,  press del straight away to enter the BIOS.

On the Boot tab don’t go into the tempting looking Boot Device Priority section, go to the Hard Disk Drives bit.

Swap the order so that the USB device is the 1st drive and the SATA drive is the 2nd drive.

F10 to save and exit

now it will boot from the USB.

When you are done, remove the USB and power down.

If you switch on and try to boot now it won’t do it, you will get a scary sounding error message saying Base-code ROM ID structure was not found., reboot and select proper Boot device.

Don’t Panic!

Power down and up and go back into the BIOS and back to the Hard Disk Drives bit. For some reason the 1st drive is listed as disabled, change that to enable the SATA drive and then you will be able to boot from it again.

That error message was because it was attempting to do a network boot, but the network boot ROM was turned off. If you want to boot from the network you have to go back into the Boot section of the bios and enable the PXE Configuration Execute bit. If you don’t know what PXE and TFTP are then you don’t need to worry too much about this!

Posted in Geeky, Howto | 7 Comments »

Keystroke guide to a factory reinstall

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Some people have been asking about the exact factory configuration of the webbook, so here it is, keystroke by keystroke guide to building a webbook.

Insert the Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.04.1 Alternate CD into a USB CDROM drive

return (to select English)

F4, down cursor, return (to select OEM mode)

return (to select English)

up, return to select United Kingdom

right, return to not detect the keyboard

return, return to select UK keyboard

down to select eth1 the wired network card

return to cancel the search

return to continue

down return to not configure the network at this time

change the host name to webbook (not sure this was always done for every batch – some probably  have ubuntu as the hostname)

select guided-use entire disk

return to do the partitioning

left return to write the partion to disk

oem return, oem return to set the password of the oem user

make a cup of coffee.

return, to finish the installation

return to select UTC

return to reboot

remove CDrom

let the system boot up.

Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a console

oem, oem to log in

wget http://webbookblog.com/buildscript.sh

chmod +x buildscript.sh

sudo ./buildscript.sh

oem (the password for the oem user)

y to download a load of updates

y to install the ppa stuff without verification

agree to the SUN Java license

now it goes through another bunch of updates

oem-config-prepare

halt

Now it should restart with the first user wizard. The only difference is that Virtual Box is not installed, this is because there seems to be a problem right now with the version of the VirtualBox kernel module so it won’t install without errors. After doing the above procedure I ran <code>apt-get clean</code> to save some space used partimage to take a compressed image of the drive, this just about fits on a 1GB USB wristvault which should end up being the recovery media which you will be able to get from Elonex. We could do recovery media for different operating systems too, so you plug in the USB key and boot from it to reimage the drive as OpenSuse/Fedora/Debian/Gentoo etc. Would you be interested in that?

Posted in Geeky, Howto | 19 Comments »

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