Few days ago was my wife’s birthday. As a gift I gave her new laptop — Acer Aspire One 722. With last released version of Ubuntu on it (with XFCE desktop).

As I got device two weeks earlier I had some time to play with it and do setup. Installed full XFCE desktop (xubuntu-desktop), LibreOffice, XBMC with set of plugins for Polish VOD services, VLC etc. No games as requested. Firefox + Thunderbird as default browser and MUA.

And then there was a day. I gave Ania laptop box with some Belgium chocolates inside (instead of computer) and when we stopped laughing I gave her new notebook in useful case. After coffee I started to migrate her configuration from Dell D400 she used before (with Microsoft Windows XP). Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and then documents etc. Easy stuff.

Configuration phase was funny — I connected our printer/scanner and before I found where to add printer I got notification “EPSON Stylus DX4000 printer configured”. OK, so maybe scanner needs configuration… Nope — Simple Scan just started scanning instead of complaining (which it did when I bought it few years ago).

Connected netbook to TV and Meta-p gave me choice which display I want to run on (my 42″ Panasonic does not like 1366×768 so cloning does not work).

There are few things which I still have to find out:

1. How to remove “something has crashed” notifications. My wife will rather not report bugs directly.
2. How to make audio switching automatically to HDMI when on cable insertion.
3. How to make internal microphone working.

But other than those I did not have problems. And it is a strange feeling when you take new device, boot Linux on it and it just works.

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My wife has a new laptop was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Some time passed since my earlier post. I had to think about few things and made some decisions.

I will write an installation instruction for Samsung Chromebook users — about installing other operating system on internal storage. Targeted at advanced users but with more or less exact steps. If you do not know how to enable “developer” mode in Chromium then sorry…

And in meantime I worked on packaging. Few minutes ago I pushed kernel to my PPA and once it get built I will offer it in Chromebook hackers PPA so users will be able to use it instead of Chromium OS one. It will need signing and putting on proper partition but, like I wrote above, my packages are not only for novice level users.

Thanks to work started by Antonio Terceiro we have preliminary version of vboot utilities package. I cleaned it a bit and got to state when “cgpt” and “vbutil_kernel” are provided so playing with partitioning will not need files from Chromium OS. Will upload it into PPA as well.

Left speaker in my Chromebook died totally so I decided to spend some time on getting UCM profiles available in “quantal” and “precise” releases of Ubuntu as well. SRU process in progress…

Also got 32GB microSD card so one step closer to having other distributions running. Thinking of Debian here of course. But it is in deep freeze now so harder to get new packages there.

How can you help? Test, file bugs, attach fixes to bugs. And can also replace speaker in my Chromebook so I will not have to use headphones ;D

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I did not finished with Chromebook was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Lot of people asked me how I managed to fry left speaker in my Chromebook. There are also few which said that it is Ubuntu fault.

So today I used recovery to wipe out my installation of Ubuntu from device and decided to check under Chromium OS. And yes, I got nice smell of burnt plastic etc coming from left speaker area.

Why? Because it is kernel bug. Not Ubuntu, ALSA or user. Ok, it is a bit of user’s fault cause you should not have to play with ALSA mixer. But you can — all binaries are part of Chromium OS stable.

So let me give you needed steps:

1. Boot Samsung Chromebook (ARM one) to Chromium OS
2. Login or use guest session
3. Run terminal (Ctrl+Alt+t)
4. Run “alsamixer -c0″
5. Set “Lineout” to highest value
6. Unmute everything what starts with “Left” or “Right” (depends which speaker you do not like)
7. Touch speakers (but better not for long)
8. Hold “Power” button to shut down before it will burn though your desk.

In normal situation I would assume that sound driver will take care of combinations which may break your hardware. But looks like Chromebook developers did had such idea.

Is this howto useful? I think it is. Cause if you have device broken in some way and you want to get it replaced you can just run it and hope for replacement instead of repair.

And when next time someone will write me “go and fix ubuntu rather than putting blame on samsung. Its Ubuntu which is the cause” like I got in recent comment I will just ban such person from commenting.

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How to fry speakers in your Chromebook was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Somewhere in 2010/11 I decided to clean up mess of naming machines at home and decided to go with character names from “Winnie the Pooh” books (Polish edition). Today I got new developer board and had to spend a moment to get a name for it.

So “klapouchy” (Eyeore) will be new name for DragonBoard. Maybe not best one but most of the names are already taken:

• krzys (Christopher Robin) is my router (because Chris decides who can enter Hundred Acre Wood which is the name of my WiFi network)
• puchatek (Winnie the Pooh) is main desktop
• lumpek (Lumpy) is conference laptop (it was lucek before because it got Ubuntu Lucid as first system)
• gofer (Gopher) is Efika MX Smartbook
• krolik (Rabbit) is Samsung Chromebook
• malenstwo (Roo) is Pandaboard (there were malenstwo-a1 and malenstwo-ea1 when I had two boards)
• prosiaczek (Piglet) was MX53 Quickstart
• kangurzyca (Kanga) is my wife laptop (she chosen the name)
• sowa (Owl) is another router
• tygrysek (Tigger) is my VPS (at beginning it was up/down/up/down all the time)

So most of the names from books are already taken. There are also Disney movies which adds few new ones (like Gopher and Lumpy) and cartoons (which I am not fan of). In worst case one day I will start re-using names or add names from other story.

What I used before? Desktop was “home” or “hrw”, Dell laptop (now “kangurzyca”) was “maluch” (small) due to 12″ size, “lumpek” was “lucek” due to Ubuntu Lucid installed and rest was named by hardware name (which is a default in OpenEmbedded).

How you are naming your machines?

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I am running out of names for computers was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

When I bought Samsung Chromebook friend started “nbench” on it. So I did same on my conference laptop. None of devices won…

Idea of testing cpu power was sitting somewhere at back of my head and finally I decided to just run one simple command available on nearly every GNU/Linux based system: “openssl speed”. Sure, on some systems it will use hardware accelerators, on others (or not) some options enabled to get more speed (like ARM assembly version which is not enabled in Debian/Ubuntu systems). But it is something what anyone can run at home.

Table may be hard to decipher so I also give it as Google Docs. It also has few more devices listed and whole tables (one below is for 8192 size samples).

Devices in table are:

• my Intel Core i7-2600K desktop
• my Intel U7300 (ultra low voltage) conference laptop
• Exynos5 Dual powered Samsung ARM Chromebook
• Exynos4 Dual powered Tizen development platform (got rid of it today)
• i.mx515 powered Efika MX Smartbook
• Beaglebone with AM335x cpu
• Sheevaplug (as only armv5te device which can compare with other entries)

Devices were running different versions of OpenSSL under different systems. It is listed in Google Docs document.

Most interesting columns are U7300 and Exynos 5250 ones — 3 years old laptop which I bought for conferences compared to Chromebook. Looks like for next conferences/events I will rather go with Chromebook not UL30A. This will give me one or two hours of battery life less but it is much lighter device at same time. But have to test it first for few days to check is it comfortable enough for daily use.

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Let’s compare some cpu ;) was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Some days ago I got Chromebook and have to say that device is amazing. Light, small and fast enough for conference laptop. During Linaro Connect I did some hacking on it with help from Olof Johansson and Andrew Wafaa (he brought Chromebook for me from Cambridge). I also used script from Jay Lee to get all information required to resize STATE partition and fit Ubuntu on internal storage.

Now I am running Ubuntu ‘raring’ on my Chromebook with XFCE as a desktop — all running from internal storage (16GB eMMC from SanDisk). So far I did not remove original Chromium from device as I keep it as a reference system to be able to compare what I got with how it works with system from Google.

So what works? Most of things — suspend/resume, wifi, bluetooth, sound, touchpad, usb ports, sd storage, camera. But why they should not work when I am using same kernel binary as Chromium OS does ;) So far did not yet came to rebuilding kernel — there were more important things to do first.

During Wednesday hacking evening I updated xf86-video-armsoc driver to X11 ABI 13 used by packages in ‘raring’ so I got 2D accelerated environment. Tried to find all sources required to build xf86-input-cmt driver but then got hint from Olof that “evdev” driver is enough — all it needs is small snippet of X11 configuration. And yes — it works but is not precise. Andrew told that he will try to build “cmt” driver for OpenSUSE so we will know how better it is.

What next? I have to create package for “cgpt” (GPT manipulation tool with support for Chromium OS extensions), tools and keys needed to sign kernel and kernel itself. Then some work would be needed for OpenGLES stuff but this can wait. I plan to upload everything needed into Debian and then request syncs to Ubuntu. From yesterday’s discussions I know which mailing lists I should go.

But I do not plan to cover everything. There will be no installation support from me. Users have to do it on their own cause there are several ways of getting other operating systems on Chromebook:

• boot from SD card
• boot from USB storage
• resizing STATE partition to put system on internal eMMC (I did that)
• removing Chromium OS completely to get more space for own system

Then there are also systems when user has developer firmware installed (that’s different that developer mode) or even setup where normal U-Boot is used as bootloader.

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Used Chromebook for few days was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Sometimes it is good to take a look at IRC channel in the evening. There will be new chromebook from Samsung. Someone may say “So what? It’s just yet another chromebook not worth looking at.” but I will disagree.

What is special in this device? Specification of course ;) Exynos5 Dual (5250) which has 2 Cortex-A15 cores, 2GB of memory, 16GB of eMMC (a bit small but 64GB sd cards exist) and all that in 11.6″ netbook case. There is no ARM device on a market which could be compared and run open source operating system.

I hope to get one soon — online stores will sell it on Monday. From what I know there will be a way to run other operating system than ChromeOS — I will switch to Ubuntu or Debian on first day probably.

And finally will replace Efika MX Smartbook.

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New thing to buy: Samsung Chromebook was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Yesterday Konstantinos Margaritis from Genesi USA was giving out about 40 Efika MX Smartbooks and few Efika MX Smarttops. I had that luck to became owner of one of those Smartbooks.

That’s nice device. Powered by 800MHz Freescale i.MX515 cpu with 512MB ram has enough juice to be used as web/email netbook. After charging I got nice message from kernel’s power supply subsystem: 427 minutes of battery life — nice value for just 3-cell battery (6-cell is an option according to box informations and website). What else inside:

• 10.1″ TFT-LCD, 16:9 with LED backlight, 1024 x 600 resolution
• 3D Graphics Processing Unit
• Multi-format HD video decoder and D1 video encoder
• 16GB Nand Flash
• External MMC / SD card slot (up to SD v2.0 and MMC v4.2)
• Internal MicroSD slot
• 802.11 b/g/n WiFi (with on/off switch) – Ralink chipset
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• 2 x USB 2.0 ports
• Phone jack for headset (audio in / out)
• Built-in 1.3MP video camera
• Built-in microphone
• Built-in stereo speaker

That “16GB Nand Flash” in reality is 15GB Flash-on-module connected to PATA controller. According to “hdparm” tests it makes 22-24MB/s which is quite for this type of devices. My class 10 SD card managed to get 14MB/s (compare it with 5.3MB/s in BeagleBoard) so storage options are nice. Ah… there is also MicroSD slot behind the battery but I did not tested how fast it is.

Note one thing: by default Smartbook boots from internal PATA drive but if there is SD card in slot then it is used for booting. This allows to test development kernels without need of getting to U-Boot. I got hit once by that because card which I used to transfer some data had OMAP3 kernels on it… As you can imagine it did not booted properly…

After I think hour or two I got it upgraded from Ubuntu 10.10 “maverick” to “natty” and got hit by some modifications done by Genesi. After copying “/boot/” from other Efika MX I got it working again. Next days will bring me working KDE 4.5.2 desktop (will have to rebuild some packages for it).

My plans for it? Mobile ARM test platform + laptop replacement for events where I do not need more then email + web + IM.

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I got Efika MX Smartbook from Genesi was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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