Archive for the ‘laptop’ Category

Nokia E-Serie – Schein oder Sein?

Montag, Juni 15th, 2009

Ich habe mir zum Vergleich ein Nokia E71 und ein Nokia E75 geholt.
Das E75 kam zuerst an – Tastaturbeleuchtung defekt, direkt wieder eingeschickt. Der große Gewinner hierbei: DHL. Ansonsten fühlte es sich aber ganz gut an, zumindest soweit ich das in 10 Minuten beurteilen konnte.

Dann bekam ich mein E71. Weil es ja schon was älter ist, habe ich es erstmal an den Nokia Software Updater angeschlossen. Eine neue Firmware war tatsächlich verfügbar, also runtergeladen, installiert. Daten gehen dabei verloren, macht aber ja nix, ist ja noch nichts drauf. (Wieso braucht man für ein Firmware-Update eigentlich eine SIM-Karte?) Update wird laut Anzeige erfolgreich abgeschlossen, das Telefon startet neu – und verlangt die Eingabe des Sperrcodes. Hm, Handbuch angeschaut – 12345. „Fehlerhafter Code“. WTF? Nochmal – wieder falsch. Google angeschmissen – ich bin nicht allein: http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/discussions/board/message?board.id=swupdate&thread.id=48243

[UPDATE]

Der korrekte Sperrcode lautet 0000

Die Eingabe ist nur nicht ganz so einfach, da nach Eingabe der vierten Null im Display nur noch 000 angezeigt wird, denn das scheint in einigen Ländern eine Notrufnummer zu sein. Zur Lösung muss man einmal die Löschen-Taste drücken, dann kann man die vierte Null normal eingeben, das wird dann vom Handy akzeptiert.

Trotz gefundener Lösung ein inakzeptables Verhalten!

[UPDATE ENDE]

Bilanz: Zweimal Nokia E-Serie, zweimal keine 30 Minuten Funktionalität genießen können. Mein Sony Ericsson K800i läuft übrigens seit über drei Jahren problemlos …

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Posted in computer, handy, laptop, linux, nokia | No Comments »

Good news in linux-land

Samstag, Juni 7th, 2008

I have already mentioned earlier, that my new laptop and Fedora (back then in version 8) work quite flawlessly together. Things are always on a move, and since that other post, Fedora has been moving forward and it was released in version 9, codename Sulphur.

The change delivered several improvements. For me particularily useful are the new error-message-system of evolution (no annoying pop-ups anymore), Firefox 3 (still in beta/rc, though) and the better suspend/resume stuff. There is no more need for any quirks and the overall suspend/hibernate/resume-feeling is way better than it was ever before. In addition with another new Sulphur-feature, namely packageKit, it gave me an absolute astonishing, albeit small experience:

I usually only use the hibernate or suspend functionality and do not shut down the computer. This works without any problems – except when you install a new kernel and put the laptop to sleep afterwards. While rebooting, the latest kernel is chosen. The laptop tries to boot and sees, that there is a suspend-image which it tries to load. As the suspend image was created by the old kernel, the boot process might (and for me it did) fail. This messup may result in an undefined state and destroy data (well, again, that is what happened to me).

Say hello to PackageKit. After installing a new kernel, the suspend will fail. Although there is no notice of why it fails, it must be due to the new kernel. Small detail, but this little feature protects the user and its data because the inconsistency I described above can not happen (so easily)!

Linux on the desktop, way to go!

Posted in acpi, computer, fedora, laptop, linux, suspend | No Comments »

Acer 8204 and Fedora

Montag, Februar 4th, 2008

As some of you may have read or somehow learnt, I do own a new laptop now. Well, actually it’s only used-new, but as good as new and still with warranty. Anyway, first thing I did: Put in the Fedora 8 Live-CD, booted, enjoyed. Almost everything worked out of the box. Exceptions were the graphics (ATI Mobility Radeon x1300) and the webcam, at least everything else I checked worked, including wireless (most important!) and the CPU-throttling, which cools the laptop quite down a lot. So, next logical step: Install Fedora. After doing so, I activated the additional repositories, livna, freshrpms and atrpms. Following the guidelines from this tutorial, I got almost my previous installation. Only one really bothering thing was still there: Graphics not working!

The laptop does have the already mentioned ATI Mobility x1300 graphics chipset and there is the proprietary fglrx driver for it.  BUT: the version available until some time ago (7.12) did not support the native resolution of the screen, which is 1680×1050. I want that resolution, badly, that’s what I spent the money for! So, what are the alternatives? I don’t use the 3D-effects of the desktop, so any driver would be fine. That’s how I found out about the radeonhd driver. It’s a free, though yet incomplete driver for ATI graphic cards. At least, with it I got my 1680×1050 resolution. Too bad though, that it doesn’t allow me to use my webcam, at least it’s not working within skype and cheese but it worked when I used the fglrx driver for testing. Lately, a new version of that driver was released and it promises to fix my resolution problem. I will give it a try, as soon as it is in the livna-repo. And yes, I am too lazy to circumvent my package manager!

What would be the overall conclusion, regarding the Acer Travelmate 8204 and Fedora? Well, it is a pleasure. I barely, if ever reboot, as Suspend and Hibernate are working as well and I can say for sure, that this is the most productive and fastest laptop I’ve ever worked with. Well done, Acer! Not so well done, ATI!

Posted in acer, computer, fedora, laptop, linux | No Comments »

Fedora 7 and problems with the laptop fan

Dienstag, Mai 29th, 2007

Maybe this also concerns others, despite me.
I have Fedora running on my Acer Laptop, which is a Travelmate 661 LCi (now running flawlessly for almost four years!). Since I upgraded to Fedora 7 with its Kernel 2.6.21 I had problems with the fan of the laptop: When it started spinning, the laptop froze. Under X, it froze the whole computer, the num lock led was blinking. When using the console solely, the computer just froze and sometimes threw some acpi error messages on the console.

Well, after a while I found out, that it is a regression in the Linux kernel, bug #8385 in kernel’s bugzilla, to be more precise.

So, what to do about that? I want to use Fedora 7 and its kernels. Just patch them with the patch supplied in Comment #50 of the above mentioned bugzilla report. And for those new to building kernels, here is a short howto on how to do so (hence the name „howto“…)

  1. Install the fedora-devtools package: yum install fedora-rpmdevtools unifdef
  2. Create your rpmbuild-directory: fedora-buildrpmtree
  3. cd ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS
  4. wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/updates/7/SRPMS/kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7.src.rpm (or whatever kernel you would like to install)
  5. rpm -ivh ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7.src.rpm
  6. cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS; rpmbuild -bp kernel-2.6.spec
  7. cd ~/rpmbuild/BUILD/kernel-2.6.21/linux-2.6.21.i386 ; vi Makefile (your actual directory may differ)
  8. Change the string behing EXTRAVERSION to something sensible, let’s say -own.kernel
  9. Download the patch:
    wget -O p1.patch „http://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=11684“
  10. Apply the patch:
    patch -p1 < p1.patch
  11. make oldconfig (we will not customize the kernel in any way, so no make menuconfig or similar done now)
  12. make; su -c „make modules_install && make install“
  13. reboot
  14. When rebooting make sure to chose the new kernel in grub. The default choice can be selected by editing /etc/grub.conf

I hope, this mini-howto helps anyone out there to get Fedora 7 turned back into a usable system again.

Update: edited to include the recent development / updates / better patches

Posted in acer, acpi, fan, fedora, kernel, laptop, linux | No Comments »

FC6 und Suspend-to-disk und Acer Travelmate 661

Dienstag, Dezember 12th, 2006

Ich habe es endlich (zugegeben, vorher nie intensiv probiert…) geschafft, suspend to disk auf meinem Acer Travelmate 661 LCi unter Fedora Core 6 zum Laufen zu kriegen. Im Nachhinein war es gaaaanz einfach…

  1. Füge

    [atrpms]
    name=Fedora Core $releasever – $basearch – ATrpms
    baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/fc$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable

    zur yum.conf bzw. als Datei in /etc/yum.repos.d hinzu

  2. installiere
    • hibernate-suspend2
    • kernel-suspend2-2.6.18-1.2849_1.fc6.cubbi_suspend2

    Die Kernelversion kann sich natürlich ändern, außerdem sollten alle zugehörigen Module installiert werden

  3. Ändert in der /etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf die Zeile

    SuspendDevice swap:/dev/EuerSwapDevice

  4. Editiert die /etc/grub.conf:

    kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2849_1.fc6.cubbi_suspend2 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/RootVol000 resume2=/dev/EuerSwapDevice quiet

  5. Fügt in /etc/hibernate/common.conf hinzu:

    OnResume 20 /usr/sbin/855resolution 4d 1400 1050

  6. Startet einmal neu und bootet den suspend-kernel

Diese „Anleitung“ ist kein HowTo und kein Handbuch, nur eine kurze schriftliche Niederlegung meiner Schritte, damit andere und auch ich etwas zum Nachlesen haben.

Mein Dank geht vor allem an diese Seite, mit deren Hilfe ich das 1400×1050-Auflösungs-Problem behoben habe.

Posted in fedora, laptop, linux, suspend | No Comments »