an intel rant

oy. again I’m regretting buying a laptop full of intel hardware.

since I replaced the wifi card I’m not getting any kernel panics… and I gave up on compositing long ago… no, today it’s *sound* that’s let me down.

see, I have this lovely HD TV that my dad left. it’s got lots of different ports on it. no computer audio input… but it does have hdmi, and I noticed the PS3 was sending audio over that hdmi cable just fine.

so I plugged my laptop into the hdmi, and the video Just Worked – two separate screens, and plasma even sent one of my containments over to the tv screen. :) it’s the first time I’ve seen that on my own computer – I’m used to plugging in a projector and seeing a copy of my laptop screen.

anyways, I played around with this dual-monitor setup for a minute, then went to play the show I was planning to watch. and the sound came out my crappy, horrible, useless laptop speakers. I played with phonon, I played with kmix… nothing could get that sound to go to the tv.

a few days later I went and googled the issue. and tried some things. and googled some more. what I found is that the problem was solved for my laptop in 2008 – but only for nvidia and ati hardware. not for intel. I kept googling, but that appears to be the end of the story. two years later, nothing has changed. with intel hardware, when the laptop thinks it’s sending sound to hdmi, it’s just getting dropped into the bit bucket. :P

I even thought to try it in another distro… I got the new plasma-netbook reference thing, which is based on opensuse. with *that* I had no wifi or sound at *all*, and the multi-monitor support was all kinds of buggy (although compositing seemed to work fairly well). sigh. intel simply does not do audio over hdmi in linux.

goddamnit intel. it’s 2010. how hard can it be to do something all your competitors did two years ago?

update: some guy in #intel-gfx has it working on a different dell laptop in ubuntu and fedora. still doesn’t work on my laptop with a kubuntu livecd. guh. so i guess they’ve implemented it for some hardware but not all.

dell is *fast*

so there was a bit of confusion on monday (some twit told me fedex would arrive that day and take the laptop, when actually it was purolator sometime in the next two days giving me a box and asking me to call back for pickup), but tuesday morning I had a box to put my laptop in and tuesday afternoon it was on its way to toronto. I was told 7-10 business days, but thursday morning the laptop was back. :) they just replaced all the faulty stuff, yay :)

all was not perfect… the dvd drive wouldn’t play movies, and I’m still not sure whether it was testing it in vista (my very first time using it! god it’s annoying) or upgrading libdvdread, but it works again now. the sound issues are reduced but not totally gone – I have to pull my headphones out a bit or the sound gets this weird underwater effect. the good speakers seem to go in further, though, past that weird spot. good enough for me. :)

so, yay! I have a laptop again! :) I’m quite impressed at the speed. maybe it helped that I had a post-it on the keyboard saying “thank you” ;)

now I just have to decide whether to spend nearly $300 on another year of support, or take my chances and put the money towards getting a new laptop when this one eventually dies…

temporarily away

so, I finally got tired of all the little hardware problems with my laptop. I called dell. I jumped through their hoops. I backed everything up. and tomorrow they’re sending a box for me to put my laptop in.
it’ll be back, without the hardware issues (I hope), in 7-10 business days.

this means no laptop for two weeks. :/ sucky, but it was the least painful time of year to do this. and the warranty is only good for another month anyways.

I do have my n810 and my ancient desktop machine, and pete says I can borrow his laptop if I need to – but getting a proper working environment set up always takes time. and effort. and I hate doing it. so I’m going to have to cut one or two plugins from my gsoc project. perhaps I can get them done after gsoc, or perhaps someone else can write them – they’re really not that hard. :)

it’s funny… I love packing and unpacking *things*. moving is fun for me. but moving to a new *computer* is something I hate. I just want my computer to stay the same and stay working, and there’s always a ton of little details that don’t Just Work or are different or something…

the xps m1330

I’m not awake today, so blog title creativity has reached a new low… anyways, peter asked me to blog about my laptop again, so here it is.

I’ve been using it for over 3 months now, so I suppose it’s safe to say is does work. :) hibernation and suspend have been great; only two or three hibernation failures since I got it, and I hibernate at least once a day. :)

I think I’ve ranted about most of the problems already, really… the keyboard gets some keys stuck if I press them at the exact wrong time, which is apparently a driver issue, but I can live with it. the bad wifi drivers are a real pain (while I’ve kinda gotten used to using wired ethernet at home, I’m concerned about running into openwrt routers at conferences) but there was a a time when I didn’t get panics, and I have a vague feeling that a kernel update may have been what changed things, so I should look into that.
I still have no composite… I must look into exactly what version of xorg is supposed to fix that, and try it out, even if it’s not stable yet. I also have to figure out how to get a monitor/projector to work when plugged in… I’ve never tried that on anything but kubuntu with my old laptop, and I found out it doesn’t work at all by default in arch, so I have to start by finding out what words I should even be googling…

oh, and the builtin speakers are fairly useless – very very quiet – but I never expect much from laptop speakers anyways. either I have headphones (and this laptop has two outputs, so my buying a splitter was a bit of a waste in the end) or I have real speakers at home. it’s a shame that the builtin mic doesn’t work at *all*, though. I do have a good mic of my own, but getting it untangled takes time ;)

the screen is good, so long as it doesn’t have direct sunlight on it… although really, I’d be happy with faded colours if I could have a daylight-readable screen. :P

other than that… well… it mostly just works. :) I haven’t tested bluetooth or the fingerprint reader, although the interwebs suggest they’ll work. I haven’t got around to making the multimedia keys work, either. I really wish someone would write a simple gui program for mapping those keys so that you don’t have to read man pages to learn how to do it… I can never remember the process and I have better things to do with my time, but I don’t want to have to trust it to distro “magic” (especially given the apparent state of distros that do such magic).

somehow I haven’t gotten around to putting stickers on the laptop, though. either I’m too busy using it, or I subconsciously don’t think of it as “mine” yet ;)

oh, and I love having a 4-hour battery. I can actually *use* my laptop unplugged, compiling and playing music, without constantly glancing at the battery meter. :) the slotload dvd drive is nice too, although I hardly ever use it – why don’t all laptops have that? it makes so much more sense… no silly tray to pop out and get damaged.

so… it may not be a perfect laptop, but that seems almost entirely to be driver issues, and driver issues can (hopefully) be resolved in time. :) perhaps I’ll finally put some stickers on it tonight. I’ll have to pick up kde stickers again at campkde…

more rambling about my laptop

well, the not-so-perfect aspects of this laptop are beginning to show.

last week I configured xorg… my synaptics touchpad worked right away, but composite… didn’t. there’s a known issue with my graphics card on techbase, but the workaround suggested didn’t work for me… someone said that xorg 1.5 worked for him (although it broke other things on his system), so I think I’ll be patient and wait for a stable release of that before trying anything else.

more disturbing are the hardware quirks… one night I got two kernel panics out of the blue – capslock and numlock flashing, not even the mouse would move. thankfully it hasn’t happened again, but stuff like that is unsettling. also, a few times a day one of my keys randomly sticks. sometimes *not* the one I was actually pressing. shoddy hardware there, I guess :/ the only other time I’ve seen anything like that is when my wireless keyboard would get low on batteries.
oh, and suspend-to-disk failed to resume once… but it had been through loads of suspend cycles, both to ram and to disk, so I forgive it ;)

oh, and while the webcam worked automagically with zero effort (all I installed was skype!) the builtin mic doesn’t seem to be working. not a big deal – using a real mic is better anyways – but mildly disappointing.

on the bright side, I *finally* compiled kde yesterday, and today I got it running properly. I’ll still use packages for the applications, but obviously I can’t write code for plasma without compiling it myself ;) oh, and my compiled kdesupport gave me phonon-xine, which makes phonon Just Work again, yaay :)

now I just have to go report a few extremely annoying konq bugs involving unnecessary modal dialogs I can’t disable… er.. waiit, I was supposed to be studing math :P
…oh hey, i triggered the keyboard thing again. if I hit y and u at the same time, u stays down until I hit any key. it’s very hard to trigger intentionally, though.

olpc and eee impressions

so I’ve had my XO for… over a week now. haven’t had much time to play with it, though. tonight there was a vanlug meeting specifically about the olpc, so I showed up and learnt quite a bit.

when I first got the olpc, I intentionally avoided looking anything up online. I wanted to play around on my own for a while and see how hard it was to figure things out. some things I got right away, some I still don’t get. just this evening I found out that turning the brightness all the way down puts it into black&white mode. I appear to have a “break my desktop” key (top row, second from the right) that often just does nothing… not sure what that’s about, but it isn’t on hte keyboard shortcuts page. I’ve certainly gotten over the size of the olpc; it seems big and heavy now. I swear the darn thing has *grown* :P

at the meeting there were about six other XOs, and one Eee. my most important discovery was that everyone else there had upgraded their xo: I was running old software, and most of my issues had already been fixed. :) yay. there was one XO running xfce there; the rest were all using the annoying sugar interface. (yes, it is annoying. it’s innovative and interesting, but still damn annoying. I want my right-click back!)

I was concerned about the lack of suspend/hibernate, and no apparent lid switch (when the laptop was closed I could see the screen’s light coming out the cracks) – but those seem to be fixed in the latest software. wireless strength isn’t as good as my lovely asus m5n, but nothing is as good as that laptop when it comes to wireless. I love the screen flipping, but the arrow buttons beside the screen don’t rotate with the screen, so left is down and it hurts my brain… but I expect that’s fixable, so I’ll have to report it.

the keyboard is a little… quirky. if you press keys left to right it works as expected, but right to left you have to release one key before hitting the next (sorta – it’s hard to explain without a demo in tamtamjam) so I keep typing “tset” instead of “test”. I don’t have much of an issue with the size, though – I have small hands. :) I just wish the fn key was on the right, so that I could pgup more easily… oh, but this evening someone showed me that the game buttons are actually pgup, pgdn, home and end – so maybe that won’t be so annoying after all. :) I do wish the touchpad had tapping and scrolling, though. I hope that’s something software can change. as for battery life, it seems to be a couple of hours – certainly better than this old laptop (lasts less than 45 minutes these days).

the only real concern that remained in my mind after the meeting was the durability. this thing has been advertised as being able to survive a fair amount of abuse and weather, but I see little cracks between the pieces of plastic that make up the case, and some of them kinda move a bit if I press on them. I love the rubber keyboard ’cause I won’t get crumbs or dog hair in it, but that rubber seems to have a tiny gap where it meets the rest of the case, so I think that it wouldn’t fare much better than any other laptop if a glass of juice were dropped on it. I certainly wouldn’t want my XO being caught out in the rain, or taken to the beach where sand could get in the cracks. it does at least look like it could survive being dropped on the floor – unlike the eee. :)

as for the Eee, I did get to spend a while looking at it… it was smaller and lighter than the XO. someone had installed xfce on that too (I thought it was gnome when I first saw it) because he didn’t like the xandros kde-based interface (I saw a glimpse of this interface, and it did look kinda lame). the speakers weren’t bad, the general design reminded me of my lovely m5n (I like asus design) and the feel of the keyboard was much better, even if it was doomed to collect crumbs. the guy showing it off told me that the reliability of the eee wasn’t great, though. the spacebar on the keyboard wasn’t quite straight, little things like that… and of course it’s more fragile.

so, in general the eee beat the XO at being shiny, and it has more resources for less weight, but the XO wins in terms of cool hardware. flipping the screen around is still fun, and that handle is useful given how often I walk around with a laptop balanced on my hand (hey, at least I’m not the one balancing it on my chin ;) now I just have to find the time to install kde4 on this thing so that I can actually do useful stuff with it…

back in china

loads of things I haven’t blogged about, eh?
for starters, I am a very *very* lucky girl. I replaced the thermal grease on the laptop, put it through some tests, and did not see a single problem. it actually appears to be undamaged! (now watch as a power surge kills it just to prove me wrong)

I’m back in china again, and classes start on monday. didn’t spend any time in shanghai on the way back, and it turns out that was good – me and pete reached the school tuesday night, and in the morning when we went to get breakfast, we found out there was all this registration stuff to be done, and new student cards to get, and so on. we were going to have to write a placement test as well, which would have no actual effect on our placement, but after waiting in line for a while, we were told not to do it. ahh, bureaucracy :P

my hatred for bureaucracy grew on thursday. we had some sheet of paper in chinese telling us that we were supposed to do various things, one of which was going to zijingang campus (a half hour bus ride away) for.. something to do with registration. me and ivan were the only ones actually awake in hte morning, and ivan told me that we were supposed to be there at 8:30 – we left school at about 8:20.
we decided to take a cab to get there faster. ha. the cab driver didn’t know where the campus was – we pointed it out to him on the map, and then he didn’t know how to *get* there. he made some phone calls, drove a bit, stopped to ask random bystanders, did some more driving and stopping to ask people… eventually we got there, later than we would have if we took the bus, and 27 kuai poorer :P (he did reduce the price by 2 kuai to make up for his incompetence, though).
we managed to find the right building – luckily it wasn’t far away, ’cause that campus is huge – but then it turned out that we weren’t supposed to be there until 1:30. it was about 9:20 by this point. :P so we went alll the way back home (by bus this time).
we went out again after lunch, and had to fill out some papers for yet another new piece of ID, and then wait a couple hours to watch a lecture about registration… in fast chinese. neither of us could understand it, so after half an hour we gave up and headed out (and on the way out, found out from a teacher that all the info in the lecture was repeated in one of the books we were given – still in chinese of course, but at least we can use a dictionary with that).
happily, I got back just in time to go out for dinner at the fancy vegetarian restaurant, and that was delicious. man that was a long day. now it’s friday, and I’m just messing around on the computer.

I was expecting to have to adjust to china’s pollution all over again when I got back, but it’s been a lot easier this time. just got a bit of a cough – much milder than the first time I was exposed to this air. the temperature is much nicer too – it was a cloudy wet day when we arrived in shanghai, and the temperature was only 25 or so :) it was almost as if we hadn’t left vancouver. the weather’s back to being sunny now, but it’s still a lot cooler than when I left hangzhou. I can actually have the air conditioning off and not be dripping sweat! :)

I’m feeling a lot better now – far more energy, probably from eating so well in canada, an interest in actually reading some of my many books, and even a little enthusiasm for learning chinese again :) yay vacation! I seem to feel best in the morning, though. maybe because the air is actually at a temperature that could be called ‘cool’ then.

I’ve been a bit behind on news, but it looks like things have been going well in the open source world – OOXML lost the vote (by a margin small enough to concern me, though) and AMD has promised not only opensource drivers, but documentation too! :) I had resigned myself to getting an intel system next, but with this news maybe I can have AMD (I’ve always preferred their processors).

I never did blog about all the fun stuff in canada, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get around to it… anyways, I’ve decided that it’s time I get kde4 up to date, so I’m going to go play with that now. :)

oops.

well, I was having far too much fun to think about my blog… until today.
I started off the morning by crashing my bike, hurting myself and damaging the brand new front wheel (although I think it’s minor enough that once the brakes are adjusted it won’t really matter). then when I got home in the afternoon, I dumped half a glass of fruit juice into my laptop (oh, and all over my clothes, of course). the rest of the day (after taking apart and cleaning the laptop as best I could) I got by with nothing more than minor injuries, like pinching my finger in my cellphone, and slamming my leg into the bike pedal a dozen times :P
then in the evening I decided my poor laptop should be dry, so I put it back together, wiped off a few bits of juice I’d missed (the stuff got *everywhere*), and tried to turn it on.

nothing.

it’s dead. :(

I spent months researching this laptop, I put it together myself, I had stickers all over it… and now it’s dead. :(
it was fairly old even when I bought it – I had trouble finding places that still had the parts – but it’s been incredibly reliable, and the most linux-friendly machine I’ve ever had. I don’t want it to be broken. wah. :(

and I’m going back to china on monday, and I *need* a laptop there ’cause it’s my only link to the outside world… and I am not fucking looking forward to trying to find a vaguely linux-friendly laptop in china, and making sure I’m being sold what I expect, and trying not to get too badly ripped off on the price…

I’ll try the laptop again in the morning, I suppose, just in case it wasn’t quite dry enough and I didn’t make things worse trying to turn it on too early.

[edit]
I am a very lucky girl. it *did* turn on again in the morning. I can’t test whether it can function completely, though, ’cause I had to take the heatsink off while I was cleaning it, so now I need to replace the thermal paste before I can leave it on for more than a few seconds. :)
this update would’ve been up earlier, but a power outage got in the way, and then I was on my way to the beach :)
strange that wordpress didn’t save a draft for me – maybe it doesn’t do that for edits?

laptop troubles

oh dear. my poor little laptop is getting sicker. :(
some months ago, probably back in winter sometime, I was silly enough to bring it out in a pub, while fairly drunk, and got a spoonful of ice cream on the edge of the keyboard. I cleaned it out the next day, and left it to dry, and it seemed to be okay – apart from the capslock key taking more effort to press, which was actually a good thing.

but a couple of months ago, it started acting up. the capslock would randomly turn itself on every once in a while. this was slowly getting more and more frequent, and about a week ago it got so annoying that I used xmodmap to switch it to a ctrl key (thinking that having ctrl bumped once in a while wouldn’t matter).
yesterday it got to the point where it was sticking ctrl down, not just hitting it for a split second. took me several minutes to figure out what was happening, since I’d already forgotten about remapping the key :) so I removed the mapping entirely. capslock now does nothing at all.

I thought this would solve things… but no.
today, my tab key has started having the same issue :( I can’t just turn off the tab, it’s such a useful key…
I’m considering taking the keyboard apart again and seeing if I can do anything, but it’s really fiddly and not easy to take apart, and I might just make things worse.
I can’t send it away to be fixed – don’t know where to send it, or if an old laptop like this would be accepted anywhere, don’t want to be without my darling laptop for months, don’t really trust other people to not make it worse somehow, and all my receipts are in a box in canada anyways.
so, I guess for now I’m living with a possessed laptop.