April 2006 Archives
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April 20, 2006
The Other Half of the Sprint Samsung MM-A920 Update
So, I decided that I'd finally get around to doing the rest of the update. So, I went to the upgrade menu option and selected it. The first time I did this, it sent me back to the home (idle) screen. The second time I did this, it crashed the phone. Finally, the third time I did this it brought up the same interface and messages as before. But this time, there were more details on what this update fixes:
Description: Priority: High*yawn* OK, so things should be better. And it'll be good for the BMW folks. But that's all? I was hoping, you know, for something new and cool to play with.
Picturemail stuck in pending queue and other picturemail and related data communications errors fixed. BMW Bluetooth pairing crash fixed. VoiceSMS icon display issue fixed.
This one is taking quite a bit longer to finish updated, too. Interesting.
[Update] So, after all of this was done, data service wasn't available from any application until launching the browser directly from the menu. Strange.
April 18, 2006
Samsung MM-A920 - Software Upgrade
So I reset my phone just now for the first time in a long time. When it booted up, it said:
Information: A new software version is available for your phone. Would you like to continue? (Yes/No)
Would I like to continue booting my phone? Or would I like to download the software? I'm not sure which, actually. Well, pressing yes then prompts with:
Warning: Once the update has started, it will proceed until completed. You will not be able to use your phone during this process, even for emergency calls. The process will take 10 minutes to complete. (Next/Cancel)OK, why not? Let's do it!
Next leads to:
Information: Please select from the 3 options below?The UI is starting to look silly. Of course, I had to go with #1 first. That gives this:
1. More Details
2. Update Phone SW
3. Cancel
(Yes)
Description: Priority: HighYes, it was missing the period. This is good, though. That means I get to do this twice. Pressing #2 gives a progress bar and a "please wait". Then it goes into what looks like text mode and shows another progress bar with an "initializing" and a % complete.
Part 1 of 2 software update. Please proceed to Update Phone Software again after this part is complete (OK)
Then it switched to, "Your phone is being optimized, please wait..." and another progress bar. This part is taking longer.
After resetting it says:
Information: Update Complete! (OK)Then it goes in to a "reporting status" progress bar and then, finally, we're back in to the phone. No notice or reminder that there is another half of this upgrade to go...
April 16, 2006
Getting WiFi Working on the Averatec AV4155-EH1 and More
Well, it took a little while to get the WiFi working and I still don't feel like DHCP is working for it. At the two places we've been commonly using the laptop, we've set up scripts to start the WiFi. Which is the other annoying part: The WiFi isn't being controlled by the system-config-network from the GUI.
It seems most of the Averatec laptops have Ralink RT2500 WiFi chipsets in them. Ralink actually provides source for compiling on Linux. However, this source won't compile under Fedora Core 5 (FC5) yet. So, in comes the open source driver from the guys at rt2x00.serialmonkey.com. Well, their older, but stable, driver also doesn't compile under FC5. They have a newer code base under source control that does compile, but just a couple of months ago they switched to a new core code base and so it's still very expiremental. In fact, you have to edit a file before it'll compile under FC5.
However, once I had all of that done, some commands figured out, and compiled a couple of tools that they provide, I had working WiFi. Unfortunately, my experience has mirrored a couple of others' experience. This driver has a packet loss in the 10-20% range, on average. Over a long enough ping session, I've seen as low as 8%. That's still pretty high, though. Many applications don't work very well at that level of loss. Even with Firefox it's often easier to hit stop and click a link again if it seems to be taking a while.
Performance wise, though, I'm getting around the rates I would expect at home. That is, I transferred the Ubuntu AMD64 live CD at about 580 KBps. (On a side note, burning that ISO worked perfectly from FC5 on the Averatec.)
Now why would I get the Ubuntu Live CD, you might be wondering? Well, as it turns out, it supports the Ralink RT2500 directly. I figure that I can either use it to see how to get the driver working with the system a bit more naturally or I can switch to Ubuntu instead of FC5.
It doesn't really matter too much which distribution I use. The Ubuntu 5.1 CD was running on a bit older version of the 2.6 kernel. I think it was 2.6.8 or something like that. This installation of FC5 is running on 2.6.16. They both run Gnome, so many of the tools are exactly the same, but just themed differently.
However, the Live CD didn't have any laptop or power management support, from what I could tell. This meant I couldn't determine if it would really work all that better. Right now, I can't suspend the system. I rely on suspend to turn on and off a laptop much faster than is possible with shutting it down and turning it back on. This is very important with battery life, too, because the boot cycle is pretty intensive on the system and tends to eat batteries faster than at times when it's just idling while you're typing.
Between the lack of suspend working and the lack of WiFi working with DHCP or even in some sort of automated fashion, this doesn't yet make a good "Starbucks" machine, if that makes sense. That is, I can't just take it out, select a particular access point, and be up and running. Without DHCP working, I can really only get on to known networks where I know safe static IP addresses that I can assign while configuring the card.
The power management does seem to slow the CPU down. Right now, it's running at 800MHz, according to /proc/cpuinfo. I just have it set to blank the screen when I close the lide because of the suspend issue. I manually have to reduce the screen brightness to help save power. That, alone, makes a big difference in the power. Sometimes the little power management icon won't even try to guess how much time is left.
rt2x00.serialmonkey.com :: View Forum - rt2x00 BETA Testing
rt2x00.serialmonkey.com :: View topic - congratulation
Linux on the Averatec AV3250HX
3250 Ubuntu Live - Unofficial Averatec Support Forums
So Amazingly Busy
Since it's Easter weekend (actually, Easter as I type this) we're up at my grandma's and thus, I have some time to draft up some blog posts.
Work has, of course, been the biggest time sink lately. I've worked a couple of weekends straight -- both after having work 12+ hours days. This has been a change from what it was for a while with my projects. However, lately a number of things have gotten much more critical so I've had to work more.
We've also had a lot of stuff going on at home. This has moved to keep me up past midnight more than a couple of times lately. When you get up at 6:15am, spend an hour and half commuting (the rain hasn't helped any, either), another 12 or so hours working, and the proceed to be up late, you start getting a bit exhausted. It makes you want to have a vacation.
Well, as it turns out, we'll be heading off to Hawai'i in just about a week exactly. I haven't been there yet, so that should be fun. We'll be doing a lot of snorkling, of course. I'm looking forward to it, but with some apprehension. I get motion sickness very easily. In fact, I got sick on most of our diving trips. We're actually using the snorkling as a test run for our planning for Africa. If I do alright, we may do more snorkling while we're over there.
The timing couldn't be better, though, since I could really use a vacation. Of course, this year is heavy on the vacations. I also have some time off for our wedding and will be taking about a month of to go to African at the end of the summer.
April 10, 2006
Averatec AV4155-EH1 Experiences with Fedora Core 5 (FC5)
So, we picked up an Averatec AV4155-EH1 from Costco the other day. It's a 4.7 pound laptop with a 13.3" widescreen display and a 1.6GHz AMD Turion 64 processor. It also has an 80GB hard disk, WiFiG, 512MB RAM, SD/MS card reader, DVD burner, and other usual things. We got it as a satellite machine. That is, it isn't a primary machine for either of us. Rather, it's a nice machine for the couch or Starbucks.
The screen is only 1280x800 resolution, so it doesn't make the best of work machines. However, for browsing, blogging, or various other light tasks it works great. In fact, one observation we both agree on is that because it is lower and less work like it's more relaxing to view and use.
Now, the one thing that we've done that is a little difference is to install Fedora Core 5. Now, Fedora Core 5 just recently came out but with the way Fedora Core works, that doesn't really matter -- it's a continous development project. In any case, it hasn't been without it's problems.
The first problem was getting the wireless to work. That was trouble enough that I'll make an exclusive post about it.
The next problem I've been facing is that there is no trackpad control in Fedora Core 5, natively. Now, I have found some drivers around that should fix that. But it would be nice if it was built-in and I'm not really sure why it's not.
The core of a lot of these problems is that Averatec doesn't list the actual hardware used for each piece of equipment that makes up the laptop. For instance, I don't know if the trackpad is a Synaptics one or what. Figuring out what the wireless card was also had it's difficulties. Some others had similars problems and with that I was able to determine what driver to try to use.
Most things just worked, though. Regular ethernet worked fine. The screen, the video card, the DVD drive, USB mice, and such all worked fine. This is also particularly interesting because it's running the x86_64 version of FC5.
The machine speed is just fine. It's not terribly fast, but nor is it terribly slow. Since it doesn't do much of any heavy lifting, it's hard to judge its speed.
I've installed FC4 and FC5 recently on servers and so I haven't really had a chance to play around with any of the consumer and desktop level software such as OpenOffice. From what I've seen so far, they'll do just fine. I'm sure I'll write more about my experiences with them later.
And finally, of course, this post is being written in Firefox on the machine. Why not, right? That's what the machine is for, afterall...
Installing Perforce on Linux
Installing Perforce on Linux is a strange one. The first strange thing you'll notice is that when you download the server all you're downloading is a binary. One binary. No tar, no rpm, no readme, no configuration files. Just the single p4d binary.
After that, you'll want to copy this binary into your typical binary server directory. On my systems, that's /usr/sbin. Then you'll want to make it executable. (e.g. "chmod +x /usr/sbin/p4d") Finally, you'll want to actually set it so it launches at startup and you'll probably want it to launch right away.
To do this you must ... (alright, I haven't done this yet).
Another important, but optional, item is to configure a cron task to backup the database regularly.
To do this, you can ... (yeah, this hasn't been done yet, either).
Migration from Windows to Linux is another problem. Windows is case-insensitive but Perforce stores the names in it's database with case. Under Linux, it'll try to find the names assuming the case it stored. Unfortunately, it also stores the names on the Windows system in lower case. When you run a p4 verify command, it'll list any file with uppercase in it's name or path as missing. This output is ripe for a script...
The first thing you must do is finish the migration. When you've run the "p4 verify //..." and you see some "MISSING!" files, the following script may serve as a good starting point for fixing up the naming of the files. Of course, you've backed up and know what you are doing and understand perl and all the other disclaimers. The output from the "p4 verify //..." needs to go in the text file that is being opened (e.g. "p4vout.txt" in this script).
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
open (my $fh, "p4vout.txt") or die "No file.\n";
my @lines = <$fh>;
my $num = 0;
my $fatals = 0;
foreach my $line (@lines)
{
# only the first instance of a file is needed
# only ones that are MISSING! are needed
if ($line =~ m/^\/\/(.*)\#1.*MISSING\!/)
{
print ++$num.": [". $line . "]\n";
# $1 now contains the depot path withhout the leading "//"
print "orig: $1\n";
my $src = "./".lc($1);
my $dst = "./".$1;
my @fparts = split("/", $dst);
my $name = pop @fparts;
my $path = join("/", @fparts);
print "name [$name] -- path [$path]\n";
print "mkdir -p \"$path\"\n";
system ("mkdir","-p", "$path") == 0 or die("Failed to mkdir!");
if (-e "$src,v" || -e "$src,d")
{
print "mv: $src $dst\n";
rename ("$src,v", "$dst,v" ) or rename("$src,d", "$dst,d") or die("Failed to rename!!");
# undo
#rename ("$dst,v", "$src,v") or rename("$dst,d", "$src,v") or die ("Didn't undo!!");
}
elsif (-e "$dst,v" || -e "$dst,d")
{
#print "[$src,v] or [$src,d] does not exist\n";
print "File already moved.\n";
}
else
{
print "Oops\nline=[$line].\n";
print "Possible fatal errors: ".++$fatals."\n";
}
}
}
print "Fatals: $fatals\n";
The formatting didn't carry through all that well. In any case, it should be explanatory with the comments. The "fatals" are files that never appeared to exist in the source. This is not meant to be super efficient, but it is meant to provide error checking and a parsable output. In the end, it didn't take long to run over 10,000 files.
This was used Perforce 2005.2. Use at your own risk. That said, I hope this will help someone out.
