Final Mini Post

OK, now I’ve just fixed the sound and everything is working with free software on this system – awesome!

To get the sound working, add ‘options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=dell’ to /etc/modprobe.d/sound. Now I can enjoy the Barenaked Ladies Bathroom Sessions in full fidelity

To celebrate, and on Peter’s advice (sorry I don’t know surname) I’ve gone ahead and created a wiki page documenting everything you need to do, as well as joined the Fedora Mini SIG. I’ve already got some packages waiting to be sorted that would be appropriate for the SIG, so I’ll attach them to their tracker bug at some point in the near future.

I have to say, after testing the Ubuntu netbook remix stuff, I was extremely disappointed with the performance, and I don’t know if this is because of my packaging or the actual software: will contact their development team and see what experiences they’ve had with it.

Dell Mini Inspiron 9: Q & A

Some people asked questions about my last post, so I’m going to answer them here and let everyone benefit from my wisdom :p

What’s The Maximum Resolution?

I only have a 17inch monitor to hand, which I’ve got running off the Dell at 1280×1024 – the sreen resolution applet tells me that it will do 1400×1050 but I haven’t tried that yet… don’t really know why either. I can also tell you that it runs Compiz fairly reasonably at this resolution, which is pretty cool.

One thing to note is that I had a little trouble getting the monitor set to the correct resolution while the laptop’s screen was still enabled. I don’t know if this is a software bug or a hardware thing, but I’ll investigate further.

What’s The Battery Life Like?

Seems pretty good to me, working without wireless I’ve been getting around 4 hours, but I haven’t recorded it carefully or anything like that.

Replacing The Wifi Card

Not a question, but I wanted to let people know that it was dead easy. There’s an access plate on the bottom, which just needs two screws removing to access. Once you’ve got that off, the RAM, SSD and Wifi are all sitting there for you to swap in and out as you please. This is part of the reason I chose the Dell, as I think in a year or two when SSDs are cheaper, I’ll upgrade to something bigger, and maybe bump it up to 2Gb RAM too.

Big tip here though is to go out and buy the right tool for the job. I spent an extra £1.75 on a set of precision screw drivers and it made dealing with the tiny screws a lot easier!

Also, there’s a big empty space labelled WWAN – I’m guessing future models may include some kind of wireless mobile data connection, as there’s also a SIM card slot behind the battery too. Maybe an adventurous hardware hacker may be able to get this going on current models too.

Sound Blues

Another none question, but something that I think should be shared. The sound doesn’t work out of the box, and although I saw in another blog that all you need to do is add ‘options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=dell’ to /etc/modprobe.conf, that hasn’t seemed to work for me and I’m about to have a proper look for a fix now. The chipset, in case anybody is wondering, is a ‘Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family)’ – this isn’t really surprising though as I’ve yet to have a computer that’s worked with one of these High Definition Controller thingies out of the box

Dell Mini Inspiron 9

I’m living the dream, I tell you! I’ve swapped my MacBook for a Dell Mini and so far the experience has been pretty positive. For anybody wondering about whether to get one or not, below is a collection of my thoughts:

Customer Service – e.g. Buying From Dell

Great. Ordered over the phone, and after mentioning that I was a student in one part of the conversation, I got a discount in another – an extra year’s warranty for £12 seems like good value to me. Also, the sales rep asked me if I needed the machine by a certain date, which I did, so they gave me priority order status and got the machine to me in under 5 days, compared to the advertised 15!

The other nice touch when buying over the phone with Dell was that the sales rep gave me his own extension, so that if I had any problems I could talk to the same person.

The Machine & Fedora

Fedora 9 fails to boot on a standard install as the kernel doesn’t support the network adapter used on the Atom motherboards, but more recent Fedora 9 and Fedora 10 kernels do. This leaves you with three ways to get Fedora installed:

1. Install rawhide
2. Create a respin of Fedora with the latest kernel and Anaconda updates from Unity
3. Disable the ethernet in the bios for installation and update the kernel afterwards by downloading it from koji

Obviously, because there’s no optical drive you need to put your installation media onto a USB stick.

I opted for number three, and it worked perfectly.

The other major problem with the hardware is that the wireless chip is from Broadcom (bcm4310) and it doesn’t yet have a free driver, with the only support coming from ndiswrapper at the moment. Fortunately, wireless is provided by an easily accessible PCI-E slot, and I’ve just ordered an Intel 3945 from eBay for £7 which will work with free drivers.

Everything else seems to work perfectly: the webcam, the randomly placed function keys along the A – L row of key, bluetooth etc.

The Hardware Itself

Seems really well put together so far. It looks pretty nice, the hinge on the screen is extremely sturdy and the mouse buttons are placed exactly where you’d expect them to be, with a nice responsive mechanism underneath. The mouse pad is a little sticky feeling, but it seems to be getting better as I use it, so maybe that’s just because it’s new.

The keyboard is what concerns people most with these machines I think, but I’m happy to say that I could touch type on this almost straight away. The only keys that are giving me any trouble are the arrow keys and the right shift key, but I think I’ll get used to them soon. It’s not, however, a keyboard that I’d like to use as my primary system, and as I’m intending to use this as my primary machine, I’m buying a wireless keyboard and mouse.

I’m also buying an external monitor for use with it, as although the integrated screen is really nice, displaying everything I’ve thrown at it wonderfully, it is a little bit small for extended use.

All in all, I couldn’t be happier with it to be honest! I think it’s going to turn out to be far more practical, and make travelling a lot more pleasurable. I’ll post with more thoughts and feedback as I progress with the system, in what is admittedly a bit of an experiment to see how easy it is to live with a netbook as a primary machine.

To anyone who’s wondering about buying one (Max!), I’d definitely recomend it based on my experiences so far.

Large Hadron Collider (+ Politics)

This is probably the coolest experiment to happen in my life time, and seeing all the news reports about it has gone some way to rekindling the excitement I used to feel about science, and in particular physics, when I was younger. Tempered by my interests of the day, however, I can’t help but reflect on this, making comparisons between international projects like the LHC, like the International Space Station, like free software, and the world of politics. The contrast is marked, too.

In the former of these two spheres, we see people from all around the world working together for the love of what they do. The LHC involved over 111 nations in the design and construction of this project, and the research that they’re going to produce will be available to anyone who is interested. The ISS is the work of 7 seperate space agencies, drawing on many more countries through their involvement with each of the agencies. And then there is free software, the work of contributors from almost every country on the planet, working together to “get stuff done”.

In the latter, we see a very different picture. In the ten years that I’ve had enough awareness to think about events revolving around politics, and particularly international relations, I can’t help but think it doesn’t have to be this way. In the recent events involving Russia, it seems the EU and the US decided that the best way to resolve the issue was by threatening Russia with exclusion, rather than offerring to sit down and work with them and Georgia to find a solution to their problem. The same with Iran, where rather than sitting down and taking part in honest negotiations, we place conditions on Iran that they have to meet before we’ll meet with them. This isn’t an approach that gets stuff done; this is an approach that causes animosity and division, that benefits a few people and causes stress, fear and loathing in the majority of people.

It’s a depressing picture, but out of projects like the LHC, like the ISS and like free software, I take some hope that the world isn’t completely crazy and believe that there’s another way forward, just waiting to be discovered. The question is, who is going to step up and answer this challenge?

Airport

Half an hour until my flight home now, and I’m just sitting at the gate watching the queue build even before the gate has opened! I figure I’ll keep surfing the internet for a while until most other people are through, and then I’ll be able to pick up my stuff and walk straight through

Having free wifi access at an airport is pretty cool. Stansted only had paid for options, and they were pretty expensive too, at around £6 per hour. The only downside I can find to this is that I’m now mindlessly browsing the net, wondering about swapping my computer for an even more portable system, rather than reading my book.

Once again, FUDCon was great fun, and thanks to everyone else for making it so…

Goodbye Brno!

FUDCon Report

Before travelling on thursday (which was dull, but I guess nothing compared to David Cantrell’s flight from Hawaii!), I said that I would try and post regularly from FUDCon; it turns out that the three days are far busier than I ever imagined, and network access was a lot harder to come by than I thought it would be. I’m now sat in Red Hat’s Brno office, so will try and write something about what happened this weekend in the tme before I start travelling home.

Firstly, FUDCon is cool I had lots of fun this weekend, met loads of people who I’ve been working online with, and loads of people who I hadn’t worked with before too. I also learnt plenty, spending a fair amount of time on creating and reviewing packages with Hans de Goede and Jereon Van Meeuwen (thanks for all the help guys!). I’m going to start by helping to review some packages, and try and get a little more involved in Fedora packaging.

I didn’t get to spend as much time on marketing stuff as I’d hoped for, but I think it was still a worthwhile trip from this perspective for me: I had the chance to speak with people who were working on so many different things all around the project, got to hear their thoughts and opinions on what Fedora is and what’s important about the project to them. This has given me some thoughts on the way I want to develop my work in the marketing project, and also some thoughts about the way we can change how we do things to become more effective. I should have grabbed Greg and Max to talk about this stuff at some point, but they’re both busy and I didn’t want to interrupt them. I’m going to try and arrange an “off-beat” marketing meeting so we can talk about some things other than the list of tasks that we currently have.

The format of FUDCon is cool too: it seems to create a really relaxed atmosphere where people do what they want to do, form into groups with people who care about similar stuff, and just “get stuff done”. The BarCamp day in particular was interesting, just seeing people wandering around from meeting to meeting. Some people suggested that it would be good to have BarCamp before the hackfests so people can get an idea of what everyone else is working on and what they’d like to do with their own time – seems like a pretty good idea to me.

Besides the work in the day, the time spent getting food in the evening was great fun. Usually we’d finish up around 6 and head out with whoever you could find to get some food and drinks, before heading back to the hotel around 12. The funny thing is, people spend all day hacking on Fedora here, and then spend the evenings discussing it too (we did talk about other stuff too, of course)! Getting up in the mornings seemed to get harder as the week went on, but Fabian was always awake and that got me up too (Fabian, by the way, is a really nice guy – even offered to bring some chocolate or cheese from Switzerland before we travelled!)

Hopefully I’ll get to make it to some future events too, maybe even a FUDCon in the US so that I can meet a few of the Fedora team based out there, and see the people I’ve met here again too. A huge thanks to everyone for organising it and also to Max for helping me make it here as I couldn’t have come otherwise.

FUDCon Travel

I’ve just spent this evening getting ready to travel to FUDCon. Had a crazy 20 minutes where I couldn’t find my passport, but it showed up in the car so I now have everything that I’m going to need (I think I’ve got everything!) packed and ready to go.

Next on my todo list is to wake up on time to get to the airport tomorrow morning. I need to be there by 7 to get checked in, so leaving the house around 6.30. I’ll be stuck in Stansted for 4 hours or so, between 9 and 1, so if any one is around there at the same time drop a comment! After that, I’m arriving in Brno around 4pm local time and will make my way to the hotel. I plan to wear my Fedora t-shirt so I’m easily discoverable by others

I’ll be bringing some Open Rights Group swag for everyone, and also ORG Supporter sign-up forms for anybody who might be interested in supporting an awesome digital rights organisation.

Looking forward to seeing as many people as possible over the weekend, and like Max said already, I’ll try and blog plenty and hang out in #fudcon.