This brief howto is a right point to start for all who is planning to buy notebook and install there Linux. It’s not secret that Linux doesn’t support some hardware. But this is not a Linux fault. Some producers don’t want to develop drivers or even provide API for their hardware (I guess they have heavy arguments). So, it’d be better to investigate hardware included in the desire laptops. Spend some time before buying and save the time and nerves after.
Category: Linux
Linux stuff
Qtopia Greenphone
The well-known company Trolltech, which develops Qt, has announced his Qtopia Greenphone. This smartphone is unique because it’s open for development and upload new mobile applications. The specification is quit similar to others: quad band GSM/EDGE handset that boasts a QVGA touch screen display, 1.3-megapixel camera, 317MHz XScale processor, 128MB ROM, 64MB RAM, Bluetooth, and a miniSD card slot.
Greenphone will ship with source code for all the native phone applications in addition to development tools and the phone itself
It’s cool and geek smartphone but the price is also cool – $700! So, if you have this money and want to develop for mobile Linux phones go ahead! The Greenphone is expexted to sell on the middle of this September.
Updated: Trolltech announces pricing for Greenphone kits: from $695 to $890
Fedora Core 6 and Mactel
Fedora Core 6 will support Intel-based Macs. It’s good news espessially I need to boot Linux on Mac Mini to have possibility use it as Plutohome media director. But it should be Debian and Mini should boot from via network.
Anyway, you can find a short explanation how to make Dual Booting with OS/X and Fedora Core 6. Also, Jeremy Katz reports some problems with Apple hardware like wireless with Atheros chipset. So, let’s wait release of 6th Fedora to use it on Macs.
Flash Plugin and X.Org 7.0
After upgrate my work PC to Fedora Core 5 I found that Google Analytics didn’t display any text. I left it as it was (yes, yes, I know that it’s not characterize me good side). Today I lost my patience when tried to see SmartBlog statistic. The good article – “The flash plugin and X.Org 7.0 (X11R7) font problems” helped me resolve my problem. I made a symlink to X11 fonts configuration:
ln -s /etc/X11/fs/ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs
and restart Firefox. After that flash player found fonts and displayed text correctly.
Howto re-install Plutohome start scripts
Once I had a problem with my Plutohome installation. After setup a new Media Director all Pluto startup scripts disappeared from /etc/init.d. I didn’t have any special things in this installation. So, I decided to install Plutohome from the beginning. But later I found a simple way to recover the startup scripts. Here is a receipt:
- Write in /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://deb.plutohome.com/debian/ 20dev main - Run:
apt-get update
apt-get install pluto-install-scripts
/usr/pluto/install/Initial_Config.sh - Follow by installer
This solution can save your time and customizations.
First look at Vim 7
Vim 7 is out! There are following significant changes since version 6.4:
- Spell checking support for about 50 languages
- Intelligent completion for C, HTML, Ruby, Python, PHP, etc.
- Tab pages, each containing multiple windows
- Undo branches: never accidentally lose text again
- Vim script supports Lists and Dictionaries (similar to Python)
- Vim script profiling
- Improved Unicode support
- Highlighting of cursor line, cursor column and matching braces
- Translated manual pages support.
- Internal grep; works on all platforms, searches compressed files
- Browsing remote directories, zip and tar archives
- Printing multi-byte text
Have a look the article “First look at Vim 7” to get more details.
Mac Mini as Plutohome MD: part II
After about three weeks I continued my work with Mac Mini. It turned out, that this Mac is Intel-based not PPC. So, all found manuals explained a process of installation Linux on Mac are useless now. I dive into Intel Mac boot process deeper and deeper. As you can know Apple doesn’t use archaic BIOS. It use Open Firmware for PowerPC and Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) for Intel-based macintoshes. Computer vendors are going to replace BIOS by EFI soon because BIOS has many limitations and becomes obsolete. Here is a brief comparison BIOS and EFI. Well, I spent a lot of time to find how to control Mac boot process. Recently I found excellent post about OS X boot keys. I decided to re-post it here just to remember them:
Playing with Debian
Debian seems one of the most popular Linux distribution expessially for embedded systems like Plutohome, VDR etc. Usually I use RedHat/Fedora but I also works with both: Plutohome and VDR. So, I have to learn Debian a bit. It isn’t completely different from Fedora but it looks strange for me. When I installed additional packages to build Orbiter for Nokia770 I faced with following problem. apt-get gave me en error:
debconf: delaying package configuration, since apt-utils is not installed
(Reading database ... 20913 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libsdl1.2debian-oss (from .../libsdl1.2debian-oss_1.2.7+1.2.8cvs20041007-4.1_arm.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libsdl1.2debian-oss_1.2.7+1.2.8cvs20041007-4.1_arm.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0.7.1', which is also in package libsdl1.2
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/libsdl1.2debian-oss_1.2.7+1.2.8cvs20041007-4.1_arm.deb
E: Sub-process /scratchbox/devkits/debian/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
After Google search I found that running a following command:
dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/libsdl1.2debian-oss_1.2.7+1.2.8cvs20041007-4.1_arm.deb
resolved the problem.