HTC Hero

I recently got am HTC Hero. This is not a review, but a note to say that I’m likely to be posting a more short posts as and when I think of stuff. I’m not gonna write 500-word posts on my mobile; but I often want to say more than I can fit on Twitter or identica posts, so here it is.
This was written using an android app called WpToGo.

New IceWM theme

I’ve created my own theme for IceWM. Well actually I just edited someone elses… but I think it looks pretty nice. Here’s a screenshot:

You can download this theme for yourself by clicking on this link.

Enjoy.

 

KDE for a week: part 2

If you’re looking for feedback on my experiences with KDE then you can find it in previous posts and comments below. It may (or may not) be obvious that my KDE saga ended after about 24 hours. I got really pissed off with things (bluetooth mainly) just not working and on top of that I couldn’t find equivalent applications for some of the things I use, gPodder and Chromium for example. I liked choqok for posting to identi.ca and twitter.

Interestingly the 3D effects worked really well on KDE4 and as of yet I still haven’t had compiz functioning on Archlinux at all.

Anyway… for the last few days I’ve been using IceWM, but I’ll write about that when I have more time.

The curious affair of the missing core: Part 2

Last night was the first time I met with B1ackcr0w in Weston to dicuss the starting of the Weston/Burnham-on-Sea/North Somerset Linux User’s Group. We’ve written a [somewhat brief] action plan to get the LUG going, I really hope it’s a success. Even sitting in a pub with a stranger talking Linux was really fun.

One of the things we discussed was my missing processor and KDE for a week project. In short, we came to two conclusions:

1. KDE is shite (all the good apps are written in GTK is actually the conclusion we came to)
2. The missing core is a total mystery!!

The last thing we did before leaving was check out my BIOS settings and guess what we found… *Nothing*

When I got home I took another look and decided to see what the default settings were. I pressed the <Default Settings> button (that’s probably not what it looked like…. probably more like this –> <F9> ) and guess what happened… *Nothing* The BIOS settings available to me did not change at all; not one bit; and yet when I booted up everything was back to normal… that is… Two cores now detected and functioning. It’s bizarre and slightly annoying, but at least it’s solved.

Meh…

Sleep sleep sleep: part 4 (finale)

I just noticed that I haven’t mentioned that this is not a problem with Archlinux… I don’t know if they’ve just put in a quick work-around to unload the module before sleep/hibernate, or if it’s just that the problem has been solved. Either way: it just works now.

The curious affair of the missing core…

Fairly recently I noticed a change in the information that my computer gives about its cpu, by which I mean that rather than displaying my dual core processor as having two cores it now only appears to detect one. In terms of time scale I really cannot be sure, but I’m pretty convinced that it’s been this way at least as long as I’ve had Archlinux running on it. The crazy thing is that I haven’t noticed any drop in performance; my computer is as snappy as ever…

I first noticed the issue when playing with various gui-based system monitors such as gkrellm and the Gnome system monitor. They quite clearly display 1 CPU and how hard it is working and for a while I never thought much of it. Of course, being the way I am, every now and again I would check to see if this has changed (when new kernels are installed or I’ve put on some power management tool… times like that) and it is apparent that the issue is still there…

Well yesterday I decided that this is now officially a problem that I need to solve and off I go to google and to see if I can find other people with the same problem. Short answer: not really… Now I can’t help thinking that this is because most people wouldn’t think to check or care if they did find this issue. Here are links to two things I found, if you care to read… one unsolved forum conversation that has died and an unconfirmed launchpad report: Launchpad (not the same processor!) Arch Forums (the apparent “solution” of activating acpid mentioned here solves nothing for me, as I had it activated already…)

The next course of action I’ve taken is to try and prove that there is actually a problem and the first thing I tried is the benchmark using crafty that I mentioned in an earlier post. When I first bought this computer it did this benchmark in about 30 seconds and clocked at 2.44 million calculated moves per second. Today and yesterday it took no less than 6 minutes (!!!) and clocked at ~260,000 calculated moves per second. Excuse me for being a little surprised but WTF is that about?! I ran this benchmark a few times at it’s been the same every time. Now I am perfectly aware that this could just be a different version of crafty, different disto, different kernel and it’s just the way it comes out… but that is still a seriously bad result.

After this I moved on to a more serious benchmarking tool called hardinfo. This is a nice cli or gui tool that runs loads of tests and benchmarks then outputs them to an html page. And guess what… : 1 CPU core detected. Thankfully it is running at full speed and results are still quite impressive, however, I’m not convinced until I can get this machine detecting the processor as it should….

I’ll get back to you on this one.

KDE for a week

I figured I needed something to inspire me to get writing on here again so I’ve set myself a challenge. I have to admit there’s nothing particularly challenging about it, but it’s just an excuse anyway! I’ve been using GNOME exclusively for at least 6 months now and my current Archlinux set up has only ever had GTK-based desktops installed (GNOME, XFCE & LXDE).

Today I am uninstalling my GTK-based desktops and installing KDEmod, partly to see if I like it and partly to see if I can stick it out, but mostly just as an excuse to get on here writing again.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Break

To anyone who regularly reads my blog.

You may or may not have noticed that I have not posted in a while.

I will resume writing in future, when I have more time/motivation.

For now you can keep up with me on identi.ca or twitter. I am called “arfab” on both.

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.