Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

My new MSI Wind U110 Netbook or how to get headaches from Intel Poulsbo

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Yes, I now got one of those nice new netbooks with a Z-Series Atom CPU (2 GB Ram, 160 GB HDD, Draft N Wlan (needs rt2860sta)). Eventhough the machine is really great the linux support for the Intel graphicscard – Intel Poulsbo/GMA500/PSB – really is a mess (to stay polite). Framebuffer only supports 800×600 which gives you a blury display (with native resolution of 1024×600) and usual intel x driver does not work here. Well, there is a partly opensource driver (which needs several binary blobs), but its nearly unsupported and far far from really usable. But Alexander Graf did a great job packaging it for openSUSE 11.1 (here). Eventhoug this driver originally was made for Ubuntu (they delivere it for Dell Mini 12 with same gfxcard) i never got it working there.

Nearly everything else works great. LAN support is a bit funny. The ethernetcard sits on the usb bus and only activates itself as soon as a cable got plugged in. Then a usb asix device pops up and works great (with the asix module).
Sound needed “options snd_hda_intel model=5stack-digout” in /etc/modprobe.d/sound to work under 11.1.
WLAN is a Ralink RT2860 which works with the module rt2860sta. For 11.1 there are kmps in the buildservice, but they never worked for me. I compiled the sources from the ralink homepage and noticed that the driver works well until udev renames the device from (originally) ra0 to wlan0. Afterwards it does not respond anymore.
The fix that worked best for me was to compile the rt2860sta version from kernel 2.6.30 (in staging tree) for openSUSE 11.1. To make it easier to use this i put it here (yes, i’m too lazy to build a kmp ;-) .

P.S.: Actually to make wlan work with the packages from above repository from alex you have to blacklist rt2800pci.

P.P.S.: I also recommend to update this machine to the latest BIOS version available from MSI (currently Version 1.0D). As only with this i get fully low-power C-States correctly. To install it i used the package UpdateFirmwareKit and a normal USB-Stick.
P.P.P.S: No, you better don’t update your BIOS to Version 1.0D. It seems this version totally breaks suspend on this machine. I couldn’t find a s2ram parameter combination still working (before just -f worked). Not even with current 2.6.30 it works. I contacted MSI about this and hope they provide a solution for this problem. … Meanwhile as a first response they sent me BIOS Version 1.0C, but that also has the suspend problem. Hopefully they either fixup their BIOS or provide me the working 0.9 Version.

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Geocaching with Garmin eTrex H and Linux

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

Since my wife gave me a Garmin eTrex H (small but really nice) gps unit on last christmas, we both enjoy making use of this thing whenever there is time (which sadfully wasn’t that much the last weeks). For her its mostly the geocaching that makes fun, doing some intersting puzzles while taking walks in the nature or nice parts of the city. For me it became additionally interesting since my RS232-Cable for this unit arrived :-)

Thankfully there are already a lot of nice Linux applications for it (geocaching and my garmin), but the best of it – QLandkarte, a Qt4 application – didn’t have a driver for my eTrex H back then. Of course this gave me the nice chance to step in and write one for it :-) .. which i did immediately. In the meantime the support for my unit is one of the best in QLandkarte. I added support for waypoint up- and downloading, track-downloading, route-uploading and Display/Screenshot-downloading, which is already all available via the upstream svn .. while the last feature (screencapturing) isn’t even supported by garmins windows tool, i’m still working on the last possible feature to add: realtime-logging support. Fortunately QLandkarte has a really nice and open community. I also made sure QLandkarte is now also available in openSuSE Factory (although not with the latest and greatest features from svn, but I’ll definitely update it for 11.0). Until then i’ll probably also have the realtime-logging feature ready. Additionally i did quite some rework of QLandkartes “serial-access-layer” (its CSerial class) which now greatly improved and speeded up the access to all units using a serial interface.
To make best use of QLandkarte you’ll also need a Garmin Map File (*.img), but there are a lot of free ones available and of course you can make use of OSM and convert it (with Mkgmap) to one.

Screenshot of QLandkarte

(Screenshot of QLandkarte showing my way from home to the office with activated track info)

On the commandline there is gpsbabel which is kind of a “swiss army knife” in this area. The openSuSE Buildservice of course also has a prebuilt package for it in the Application:Geo project. E.g. a simple “gpsbabel -w -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o gpx -F waypoints.gpx” transfers all saved waypoints (from the garmin gps unit connected to ttyUSB0) to the waypoints.gpx file (a very common fileformat for a lot of geo usecases).

To organize your geocaches (you already did or plan to do) there is e.g. CacheWolf (eventhough its a java app its quite ok).

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