Comments on: Compiz Beta – Part 1

By: Alan Bell

Alan Bell — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:42:15 +0000

@Joe, the developers of the Wader mobile broadband client have some stuff in the pipeline for keeping track of the download limit cumulatively over a month, not sure when that will come as an update though. After you have been using it a while you can go to a terminal window and type ifconfig this will give you some stats on each network card, hso0 is the Orange network adapter. Unfortunately this resets each time you use it so it is almost entirely useless for your purposes! Here are the results for my wireless card, highlighting the received (RX) and sent (TX) data totals.

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:19:d2:17:92:0e
          inet addr:192.168.2.10  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::219:d2ff:fe17:920e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:1911691 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1227384 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:2536109858 (2.3 GB)  TX bytes:150913779 (143.9 MB)

By: Joe O'Halloran

Joe O'Halloran — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:13:54 +0000

Firstly I would like to take this brief opportunity to say that this blog site is brilliant! Well done and thank you.

However I am currently using a orange usb modem as an internet connection. I am worried about exceeding my prescribed download limit.

Is their currently a program that counts my download/upload usage that runs on Linux?

thank you,

Joe

By: Alan Bell

Alan Bell — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 05:59:06 +0000

@mebreek, yes a few people pointed that out. I updated the instructions above.

By: mebreek

mebreek — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:23:06 +0000

Hello,
the instructions/tips are great , thanks.

I have one issue following the steps of this tip, when I press CTRL ALT F1 … thru to F6 , I get a totally black screen with no prompt. I tried the CTRL ALT on the right hand side of the keyboard , no response at all, the same with F8 and F9.
Pressing CTRL ALT F7 will get me back to the normal GUI screen. any suggestions ? Thanks in advance.

By: Graham

Graham — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 09:59:07 +0000

Hi Alan big thanks for your clear instructions and getting my webbook up and running after I black screened it. Its a great machine and trying not to play around with Ubuntu is just to tempting. I look forward to your future posts.

Regards Graham

By: Alan Bell

Alan Bell — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:10:44 +0000

@Bran,
try plugging in an external monitor, then move on to part 2 and install the via drivers. Should work fine.

By: Bran

Bran — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:50:48 +0000

AAAAAAAAHH help i need help i have just bought the webbook and i was so hasty on wanting to get compiz rcunning i tried to get drivers installed but like others every time i pressed Ctrl+Alt+F1 all i got was a screen of differnt colours so i then restarted and went in to recovery mode from the grub menue there i tried xfix as alan said there was a problem with “if X had not started with the buggy OpenChrome drivers you would be fine!” which also led me to using dpkg i then started a normal boot but now the screen goes blank just as i get to the login screen while i still can login due to the sound effect i cant see nothing but on a bonus i now can open the console using the Ctrl+Alt+F1 but when i type in the text that alan had left i had a reply of files not found. pease could some one help

By: leroy

leroy — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:51:50 +0000

In search of some CLI experience I tried the steps above, not on a Webbook, but on an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.
After some initial hiccups (on my part ) “It did exactly as it said on the tin.” Ctrl+Alt+F1 through F7 worked just as indicated. I then proceeded to break then then repair the screen again. Excellent tutorial. The only problem (for me ) is that i’ve now got a message on boot up that says “Invalid & Damaged Bootable Partition” (nothing to do with the tutorial) I guess that I’ve got some more fixing to do. Nice tutorial all the same. Thanks Alan.

By: the webbook blog » Blog Archive » Compiz Beta - Part 2

the webbook blog » Blog Archive » Compiz Beta - Part 2 — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:25:01 +0000

[...] a reasonable chance you will boot to a black screen. If that happens go to the recovery console and copy back your xorg.conf for the openchrome drivers. So having downloaded the file start up a terminal window. I am assuming that you downloaded the [...]

By: Alan Rowe

Alan Rowe — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:41:42 +0000

Alan, thanks for the reply.

Regarding the Orange connection problems, I am on the verge of telling them to do something rude with their dongle. Before I signed up for the contract – I really wanted this webbook! – I checked on the Orange site for their 3G coverage, using my home postcode and the postcode where I use the dongle the most. According to the website, the coverage at work (where I use the dongle the most) should be in the 5 bars region, with a great big “Excellent” next to it.

‘Taint the case unfortunately, I am getting a 2 bar GPRS connection on it, with a max speed of 11kbps. The Three dongle just tested out at 1.4Mbps.

So far they have given me three different APN addresses to use, one of which got me to 11kbps, the rest of them were just pathetic.

Once again, I realise this isn’t your area and I apologise for cluttering up this brilliant blog with this, I was hoping you might know more about it. I think this is in Orange’s court though.

Thanks for the detail on the /tmp/wader log – I’ll fire up the Icon 225 and see what it says. I just looked at the lgs in there from the Three connection and its very interesting what has been stored.

Alan