Archive for the ‘Errata’ Category

Keep the noise down!

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Another errata item for you. This one we will fix in an automatic update, but if you are impatient and like to fiddle then you can do the fix yourself in advance.

Basically the issue is that when you plug in headphones and listen to something the webbook speakers don’t get turned off automatically. This kind of defeats the point of plugging in the headphones and is not commuter train friendly. :-(

The problem is that the sound driver works for all sorts of different laptops and desktops with all sorts of different speaker/microphone/headphone/SPDIF configurations. It takes a guess as to what layout it should be using, but sometimes gets it wrong. We need to give the driver module a hint by telling it what the layout is. To do this we add a file in the /etc/modprobe.d directory and with a line of text in it. This is a sensitive area so we have to be the superuser to mess with files in that area.

OK, lets get started. Log in to the webbook as normal (as the primary user if you have set up multiple users)

Press Alt+F2 to bring up the run program dialog, in there type in gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options-webbook-audio

this will ask for your password and launch gedit, which is like notepad, but better. Now type in the following line:

options snd_hda_intel model=lenovo-101e

yep, thats right, we tell the sound driver(snd_hda_intel) this is a Lenovo laptop (eeepc-701 also seems to work but I think we should stick to lenovo-101e) save and exit and restart the webbook (it might just start working straight away without a reboot – probably depends on what the card is doing at the time of the change)

and finally, let me know if it works.

When the automatic update happens we will update /etc/modprobe.d/options-webbook and you will have two copies of the “options snd_hda_intel model=lenovo-101e” line in your modprobe.d directory. This does not appear to cause any problems, however do please remember that you did this just in case one day the driver changes and we might for example set the model to “webbook”

Posted in Errata | 20 Comments »

But I AM Online!

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

The webbook comes with the very very latest version of the Firefox web browser, version 3.0. This is a great broswer, but one of it’s fancy new features is a little less than helpful. Firefox can be put into “offline mode”, when in offline mode it won’t try to connect to websites, it will just display web pages stored in the cache. Pretty handy in principal, and this feature has been about for a while. The “great” new feature is that Firefox communicates with the network manager and can now detect when you are connected to the network with a wired or wifi connection. When you are not connected it automatically flips into offline mode. Still sounds like a good feature doesn’t it? Well the downside is that when you are connected to the internet on a 3G dongle (which is kind of the whole point of the webbook) Firefox has a chat with the network manager that goes a bit like this:

FF: “Hey, Network Manager, my user requested a page, am I connected to a wired network?”

NM: “nope, I have no wires plugged in”

FF: “how about wireless? Near any hotspots?”

NM: “nope, not associated with any hotspot right now.”

FF: “OK, I will go to offline mode”

The fact that there is a perfectly good mobile broadband connection sitting there online never comes into the conversation as the mobile broadband bit isn’t the responsibility of the network manager.

So how do we deal with this? Well we really really wanted to fix this before releasing the webbook, but all the fixes we found had nasty side effects that we couldn’t live with and a proper fix was promised in Firefox 3.0.1. Fortunately Firefox 3.0.1 was released to the Ubuntu repositories just a couple of days ago, so if you have done an automatic update recently you should have Firefox 3.0.1. Check by going to Help-About Mozilla Firefox and you should see the version number 3.0.1. If you still have 3.0 then look at the top of the screen for the red “updates available” icon. Click it and follow the prompts to install the available updates.

you might have to restart the webbook, or at least restart Firefox to get the update to take effect.

So now you have the updated firefox, that still doesn’t quite fix the problem. Firefox now has the ability to ignore the network manager, but we still need to tell it to do so. In the URL bar type “about:config”.

If Carlsberg made warning messages they would be like the Firefox one:

here be dragons

So if you promise to be careful, you will see a huge list of settings you can tweak. The one we are interested in is called toolkit.networkmanager.disable. To find this without scrolling through the big list just type “tool” in the filter box and the setting will leap into view.

Double click the setting and it will turn bold (to show it isn’t the default setting) and the value will change from false to true.
changing the property

Now when you start Firefox with the broadband dongle connected you won’t have to turn off offline mode any more.

Tags: ,
Posted in Errata, Mobile Networking | 19 Comments »

Video killed the Radio Star

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

We didn’t think watching videos was going to be a major use-case for the webbook, partly because it doesn’t have a DVD drive, and partly because we thought we were going to ship it with a 2GB solid state drive so not much room for big video files. As it turned out we have a very roomy 80GB hard disk and plenty of people watch video podcasts in MP4 format. As I mentioned before, the drivers for the graphics card don’t really show off it’s full potential and playing videos highlights one area that the teacher would put on the report as “could do better”

Fortunately for us, the webbook can indeed do better, with just a little guidance. This version of the OpenChrome driver doesn’t do a particularly good job of handling the X Video extension. The point of the X Video extension is to allow the main CPU to hand over all the complicated video decoding to the graphics card. Basically the CPU says to the graphics card, “Please do some video decoding, you can draw it in this rectangle here, the data is over there, get on with it whilst I go do some other stuff”. Well that is great in theory, but in practice the graphics card just isn’t pulling it’s weight at the moment. Luckily for us the CPU of the webbook is nippy enough to do all the decoding itself (although it would probably struggle on HD content). We just have to tell the media player not to attempt to hand off the drawing to the lazy graphics card. Press alt+F2 to bring up the run program dialog then type in

gstreamer-properties

This will bring up a settings tool as shown below. On the video tab change the plugin from automatic to X Window System (No Xv). Now try playing your video again and you should have it playing back in glorious technicolour.

There will be better graphics drivers for the webbook, probably in an automatic update at some stage.

Tags:
Posted in Errata | 20 Comments »

The Web Without Wires

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

Your webbook comes with a wireless card built in, it does 802.11b and 802.11g. I don’t think it does 802.11n but I am prepared to be proved wrong on that one.
The wireless radio circuit can be turned on and off by pressing Fn+F1. By default it is switched off. There is a bit of an issue on the early models, the wifi light on the front of the webbook does not get turned on when the wireless is activated, making it a bit tricky to tell whether wireless is on or off. Don’t worry, there is a fix for this.

press alt+F2 to get the run program dialog and type in

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options


gksudo means “I want to be superuser when I do this”
gedit is the name of the text editor (lke notepad.exe but lots better)
/etc/modprobe.d/options is a file where we can pass options to hardware drivers as they are loaded.

Because you asked to edit the file in the text editor as the superuser you will have to put your password in first.

Add a line at the end and type the following

options ipw2200 led=1


this tells the wireless driver that it is also responsible for turning on and off the LED on the front of the webbook. Normally this should flicker every few seconds when active, it will be on constantly when associated with a hotspot.

Later models will have this set by default, unfortunately the first batch escaped without it.

When you have wireless turned on you can click the little computer symbol at the top right of the screen to see a list of hotspots within range. Click on one to join it, you may need to enter a WEP or WPA key.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Errata, Networking | 83 Comments »