Sleep sleep sleep: part 3

A quick update… this is also noted as Bug 491235 on Red Hat Bugzilla, which points out that it’s also known as bug 11887 on the Kernel.org

Apparently there is work in process, which is positive

Sleep sleep sleep: part 2

Well as it happens I’ve now discovered exactly what it was that has been causing my suspend problems since I bought my laptop. It was the wireless card. All this time I was thinking that it was a power management problem and that meant my system wouldn’t suspend. Well, since believing that it was having installed the new version of ubuntu that had solved the problem I had actually overlooked the fact that I had turned off my wireless card to save power and that everything has been dandy ever since. I only noticed a few days ago when I tried to suspend with the wireless still turned on that it behaved how it had before. So… for now at least it looks as though I need to just turn my wireless card off before suspending… it’s annoying when I forget though.

I’ve noticed that it’s been filed as Bug #279798 on launchpad.net … which is nice… Anyway… now I can work around the not suspending problem I may do a little more distro-hopping… course I need to be careful not to end up with the graphics crash problem I was having before… maybe I should just sit tight now I have a system that works.

Screenshot

Time for another screenshot… I haven’t done one of these for a while and the
other day I was browsing through my collection and found this:

Previous to taking this screenshot I had wasted about 2 days compiling KDE 3.3 from source,
which at the time was about 2 years out of date, because I though that it would run
faster than KDE 3.5.X. (and it did… considerably…) I was using Zenwalk, and as far as I can remember I uninstalled
it very shortly after because there were quite a few big features I missed from later releases.
I don’t know why I have these crazy ideas really.

Sleep sleep sleep…

Last week I updated my laptop to use packages from the Ubuntu 9.04 repositories. Since then my laptop now has the ability to suspend (hibernate isn’t quite there yet, but with some tweaking it’ll come…). This ticks the final box for me and I’ve now got a fully functioning laptop. Woo!!

I’ve also been playing with KDE 4.2 recently… I’m kind of overdue a long post about KDE 4, so I’ll probably do that at some point soon.

Posts updated…

I just noticed that some of my more recent posts that feature screenshots weren’t allowing you to view the full size image. I have just been through and fixed that so now; for example, if you wish; you could go back to the post I wrote when I installed Windows 2000 on Virtualbox and view all of those images in full size glory!!

On the subject of Virtualbox, I don’t think I mentioned that I’m now running WinXPSP3 on there too and I fixed usb support so that I can plug in flash drives and things like iPods (yuk!) directly into my virtual machine. Nice.

And finally… This blog is now over a year old! Woo! It is actually the first blog I’ve ever kept going for that long… bring on year 2!

Thunderbird tray icon follow-up

Sorted, I found another add-on called moztraybiff. Unfortunately if disables the new mail notification, but should change the icon when I get new mail. Let’s just see eh?

Not available for Linux…

I just had a quick look to find a nicer theme for Thunderbird and maybe an add-on to minimise to tray. I was quite annoyed to find, as I have in the past with certain themes and that, this:

“MinimizeToTray is not available for Linux.”

I’ve seen Firefox/Thunderbird criticised in the past because although it’s an open source project the developers seem more interested in M$ end users… I don’t really know if this is actually the case, but minimise to system tray is surely quite a simple feature to impliment… Sort it out guys!

3 week project – part 5 – #!CrunchBang

About two days ago I installed CrunchBang Linux and I am pretty much amazed. I haven’t really investigated why yet, but it runs SO fast. By that I mean considerably faster than anything else I’ve tried on this computer.

CrunchBang has conky running by default, which is a nice touch and also means that I can keep watching how stuff pulls on system resources as it goes. Generally speaking the processors average at about 5% each… which is nothing(!) and means that it responds very quickly when told to run a program. My RAM seems to sit at around 100-200 MB, which helps too. I guess that’s because there’s no hefty desktop environment running and eating resources. The desktop running by default is based around Openbox, and uses the file manager, panel and theme switcher from LXDE.

I haven’t had any crashes (yet) and I’ve updated the xorg-video-intel package as mentioned in part 4. I’m going to update the rest of the system tonight, so I’ll post again if that screws anything up. Webcam is up and running with a quick compile of the development driver.

Back on the subject of speed, boot time is down to 45 seconds from off to desktop. This isn’t outstanding, but it’s a full 15 seconds quicker than when I was using Fedora 10. Further advantages of this low memory and processor footprint are that the fan isn’t working half as hard as it was before, battery life is improved by about 20 minutes and Virtual Machines appear to be running a fair bit snappier, which are all really nice things.

The only thing left for me to comment on is the keyboard shortcuts. 10 minutes is and I was thinking “how did I ever use a computer without them?!”. I know, it sounds stupid… but the desktop is all rigged with two-button shortcuts for frequently used programs, screenshots and even system update. This is one of those things that I really could do myself but never would have spent the time doing…

Crunch, Bang, Brilliant.

3 week project – part 4

So I’ve been using Slackware for about a week now… As I approach the end of week two I have to admit that I’m not all that satisfied with progress on this experiment.

Slackware is definately faster than Ubuntu was. Though the same could be said for Fedora 10. I now know that to make the webcam work I just need to compile the latest kernel module for uvcvideo. VirtualBox is the same with each distro and that guarentees that I can get all of my work done. I have determined that the improvement in performance from my wireless card comes from using a 32-bit OS rather than 64-bit, and so that makes the choice of distro less relevent provided I stick to 32-bit. So… what now?

Well… as it happens I was running some updates on my desktop computer, which runs LinuxMint and I noticed that there is an update for the xorg-video-intel package. I read through the changelog and happened to notice that this included two patches that combat and fix the blank-screen-hard-crash issue that is associated with Intel G45 or x4500 graphics cards. As far as I can tell one is the one that happens at boot (which has happened a few times with Slackware and did happen a lot with Ubuntu) and the other is during normal use, which is the trouble I was having in Fedora that prevented me from using Compiz.

I don’t have a problem making the decision of whether or not to wipe what I’ve built so far using Slackware because that’s what this week is about, and I’ve learnt a bit about my system in the last week with the work I’ve done. However, what I don’t want to do on a whim is install Ubuntu or LinuxMint straight away because I know that Ubuntu isn’t quite as responsive as some other distros and I probably wont have the system I want.

I’m going to consider CrunchBang… and I’m also going to siphon through some ArchLinux package updates and see if they’re up to speed on these new patches….

3 week project – part 3

Well shortly after my last post I realised that there may infact be a pre-compiled binary for VirtualBox on the sun site… there is… and it works just fine! That’s that one in the bag…

Last night I updated my whole system to Slackware-current, which I’ve not tried before. It was a very smooth process and so far I haven’t had any problems… I’ll keep you posted.