Colin Charles Agenda

Deciding to spend my credit note immediately at CPL earlier today, I picked up a 2GB stick of 667MHz DDR2 SODIMM, for laptops. Getting home, I popped open the Eee (breaking the warranty void if seal broken sticker), took out the 512MB stick, and replaced it with the 2GB of RAM.

Booted it up, and the Eee is going faster than ever. XFce4 with 2GB RAM is just fabulous. Best $69 that was spent today.

I was looking for RAM sometime last month, even in Kuala Lumpur, and was told that it was all out of stock, so I’m generally thrilled I managed to grab it here, today.

After writing my impressions on Eeedora, it seemed only natural to write about the hardware. There are definitely some issues that I found with the Eee PC that I am not too happy about (and some that are just great).

For starters, who makes a laptop these days, without integrated Bluetooth? It just seems daft. This is a tiny sub-notebook, and how can I get on the Internet if I’m sitting in a train or a bus? The most natural thing would be for me to enable Bluetooth on my mobile phone, and use it as a modem. Oh wait, the Eee PC is missing Bluetooth, and its a WiFi only device. Sure, I can stick a USB Bluetooth dongle on it, but thats an external contraption, that I’ll have to make do with.

I was going through the fine print, and while ASUS provides a 2-year warranty on these laptops, the warranties themselves, seem to be limited to the country of purchase. These warranties, are not international. Who makes a laptop these days, that doesn’t expect the user to travel much? I can imagine that when travelling, the Eee PC can’t be my only laptop - I’m the kind of person that finds Dell’s next-day-onsite-business warranty pretty darn useful.

The keyboard, is tiny, but its expected for such a tiny laptop. I’m wondering why so much space is reserved for the speakers, and why not just give us a larger screen? I have a feeling its got to do with cost, and this can only get better in the future. I’ve noticed that the keyboard requires you to occasionally “jab” it harder, to get the key press that you want. Or its just that my fingers aren’t nimble enough, on this small thing.

The location of the left Shift key, is silly. In VIM, you occasionally tend to press the Up Arrow key, as opposed to the Shift key. I’ve seen people hack their Eee, to ensure that this stupidity is reversed. However, I’m not into moving keys around, to satisfy my needs at this stage.

The one button mouse, that does both right and left clicking is a very nifty feature. How do I middle-click? This is a very crucial feature in Unix land, and especially useful in Firefox (tabbed browsing).

The battery life, for something this tiny, sucks. It sucks even worse, when the WiFi is enabled (quite naturally). My dreams of it being used daily during a conference, or at a meeting, has clearly been shattered. To fix this, I might have to order an external battery pack, that outputs between 9-12V (apparently, 9V is too little to power this 9.5V device, but 12V is just fine).

I’m pretty happy with the performance of the SSD:

[root@Eee ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:

 Timing cached reads:   566 MB in  2.00 seconds = 283.05 MB/sec

 Timing buffered disk reads:    4 MB in  4.39 seconds = 932.40 kB/sec

[root@Eee ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:

 Timing cached reads:   566 MB in  2.00 seconds = 282.50 MB/sec

 Timing buffered disk reads:   66 MB in  3.07 seconds =  21.50 MB/sec

/dev/sda being the internal SSD, while /dev/sdc being a USB thumb drive (2GB, Sandisk Cruzer Micro).

The built-in video-camera, is pretty standard. Its resolution isn’t great, but it suffices for a video chat.

Sound, is OK. I installed VLC, to allow me to play video/audio, and realised that it was going to set me back, in total, about 21M, with all its dependencies. Hardly appealing, but I was going to have a more interesting time, bringing in Totem, for instance. I have managed to watch a DivX movie, without too much trouble. Will I be able to watch one, entirely, say, while on a plane (or train), I don’t know.

Yes, video, and DivX decoding, works fine on a 630MHz processor. Why has ASUS under-clocked the Eee, giving it a 300MHz performance slack? Did the difference, really save battery life?

There are many ways to hack an Eee. The many guides online, showing how and what one can do (from simple Bluetooth, to a GPS or a touch screen) is just amazing. I don’t plan on hacking my Eee (yet, anyway), and the most I’m going to do, is go get more memory- RAM is always a good thing.

Its small. I spent this week using the train and tram system quite a bit, and realised that even though the trips themselves were short, I was getting some work done (like finding time to write blog entries, and some code - I haven’t gone as far as installing a toolchain on the Eee yet, but if you can find some Internet access later, committing code is easy). Its OK that its cramped. And its OK that it works on top of my huge backpack. These are clear benefits of its size, and hopeful durability.

Its cheap. I had a colleague who’s laptop (a Macbook) died the night before he was about to give a talk. He could head a few blocks down, buy an Eee, and immediately start re-writing his talk again. I saw him deliver his talk, using the Eee and the stock Xandros that was installed on it. In the old day, if your laptop died, you just started to walk around with a notebook and pen,and you gave your talk informally, without slides :)

Anyway, enough rambling (I’m about to reach my stop). Next up, what powertop thinks of the Eeedora install, and re-spinning it.

Technorati Tags: eeepc, asus eeepc, asus, asus eee pc, review, 7c, linux

Being the long-time Linux user that I am, there was no way I was going to be satisfied with Xandros, which is the stock Linux that ASUS ships with the Eee PC. I was stuck for choice between Ubuntu and Fedora, and after some careful evaluation, I decided that Fedora, was right for me.

Getting Eeedora, was pretty straight-forward. The installation wiki is pretty accurate when it comes to the “how” of installing Eeedora. For me, it was made easier that I had a Fedora system already, so I could run the tool to create Live CDs from the livecd-tool package.

One snag I noticed, and this is more with the Live CD script, is that when you don’t have a bootable USB thumb drive, it tells you that, but doesn’t quite tell you it didn’t make an installation on the thumb drive. I guess the script could be more idiot-proof. Anyways, making the drive bootable is easy.

Now, once that was done, it was on to installing on the Eee. I ensured that in the BIOS (accessed via pressing F2), the first boot device was the USB thumb drive attached to the system at boot-up. However, it was never booting into Eeedora, and I only managed to see the Xandros start up. Highly disappointing.

Turns out, that hitting the Esc key was the magic sauce, during boot-up. Only when doing that, was I given a boot menu, and then I could choose if I’d like to boot off the internal SSD, or the USB thumb drive. Once that was sorted, I was pretty happy to see a familiar Fedora-looking screen (sure, it said Eeedora, for legal reasons, but I think its a pretty darn good spin :P).

The installation process went on pretty smoothly. During partitioning, I was pretty much rid of Xandros - the chosen default was actually the most sensible. Just one / partition, filling up the entire disk, with no swap. As usual, anaconda (the Fedora installer) will warn you that not having a swap partition will be detrimental to performance - I wonder how many newbies might decide to create a swap partition (kind of a big no-no, on these SSD based devices).

One thing I did notice was the use of ext2 partitioning as opposed to a journalled filesystem like ext3. The natural question then comes to mind, as to why not just use jffs2?

Once the filesystem partitioning was sorted, and GRUB was chosen as the default bootloader, anaconda proceeded to install packages. This was a fairly speedy process, and once that was complete, it was a simple reboot, and I was booting off the SSD before I knew it.

You’re logged in by default as the eeedora user. You get a stock XFCE4 environment (or stock, that I would think anyway), and it comes with the basic utilities you need to get working (Firefox, wireless, etc.).

There were some things I obviously did not like, so decided to poke a little further. First up, was creating a user, that was not”eeedora”.

Dissecting the .bash_profile of the eeedora user, I noticed some things:

• pulseaudio -D - pulseaudio as a daemon for the user? Why, sound seems to work just fine on my Eee without it
• xsetroot -solid steelblue - seems OK, but not actually required anyway
• startxfce4 - if you want a GUI the moment you login, this is useful. But it only really works out well, because of the hack in /etc/inittab that says c7:12345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty –autologin=eeedora tty7. Seeing that I disabled autologin for the eeedora user, I pretty much see a login screen, and startxfce4 manually. Sometimes, I can actually get away with working in just a shell… However, I can see this from a usability point of view, I guess. Of course, the other issue is that the eeedora user, does not actually have a password!
• Logging out of XFCE4 and going back to the console, immediately triggers a machine shutdown. This seemed counterintuitive.

Needless to say, I disabled all this, in my new user account, as well as disabled autologin in the inittab.

Why XCFE4? Its a 900MHz Mobile Celeron processor, deliberately underclocked to 600MHz, with 512MB of RAM. This is the kind of environment, that can run GNOME. And when we notice problems with GNOME, its time we fixed it. Heck, I have an almost similarly configured IBM laptop, without PAE, that runs GNOME just fine!

I must commend WiFi Radar - this is something that pretty much, just works. And its small. It looks unmaintained, sadly, so its probably time to take an interest in it. Fn+F2 enables and disables wireless very well. I do however notice that even with the wireless disabled, the WiFi light (in blue), remains turned on. I find this to be rather quaint, and must prod it further.

Brightness control (Fn+F3/Fn+F4) seem to work well in Xandros, but I can’t seem to replicate such joy in Fedora. There is absolutely no reason why this shouldn’t work. It does annoy me, because its sucking precious battery life, from my usage of the Eee, by keeping it nice and brightly lit, when I’m on the battery.

Suspend and resume, just work. And because we’re dealing with an SSD, it just works, really fast as well. Sure, when I open up the screen of my Eee, I actually need to press the power button to get it to resume, but this kind of behaviour is perfect for me.

Do I like recompiling all the magic in /root/eee-setup, everytime I get a new kernel? No. Speaking with Dave Jones though, there is an expectation that all the drivers will be available in F9. Kudos.

Webcam? Works fine when I run lucview. Doesn’t work with the Skype beta that I get from the Skype download site. No idea what is missing, I just feel a bit bummed that I’ve got to find the solution to this issue at some stage soon.

As an install report, I think this does, just fine. Its now just time to hack on the distribution, to get it to the way I want it to work.

I’ve been very excited seeing that we announced the Maria Engine Preview. Giuseppe and I were trying to setup a demo, for Maria, at the lightning talks happening later today, towards the end of the MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2008. It involved MySQL with Maria, and an Asus Eee PC. For the demo, we wanted to show pulling the plug, which can be done either via a kill -9 `pgrep mysqld` or pulling out the battery of the Eee.

However, we failed to get MyISAM to reliably crash! Yes, imagine that, we actually want it to crash - pity that it might have only happened about 1/3rd of the time we tested it. The magic we were looking for:

check table t1;
+---------+-------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+
| Table   | Op    | Msg_type | Msg_text                                                |
+---------+-------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+
| test.t1 | check | warning  | 1 client is using or hasn't closed the table properly   |
| test.t1 | check | warning  | Size of datafile is: 23998464       Should be: 16000256 |
| test.t1 | check | error    | Recordlink that points outside datafile at 23000368     |
| test.t1 | check | error    | Corrupt                                                 |
+---------+-------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+
4 rows in set (0.09 sec)

What we got instead was just a warning mentioning a client is using or hasn’t closed the table properly. Clearly, not so good for a demonstration.

When the magic of set storage_engine=maria; was run, and you crashed (either via pulling out the battery or doing a kill operation), Maria would survive the crash. At worst, you’ll see:

check table t1;
+---------+-------+----------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Table   | Op    | Msg_type | Msg_text                                                   |
+---------+-------+----------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| test.t1 | check | warning  | Auto-increment value: 0 is smaller than max used value: 32 |
| test.t1 | check | status   | OK                                                         |
+---------+-------+----------+------------------------------------------------------------+
2 rows in set (0.20 sec)

So, Maria is clearly tough, as Giuseppe puts it. Give it a twirl (binaries, sources), and hop on over to the Maria Forums if you have questions. And if you’re checking out/building from source, you might find the Building MySQL from source guide handy

Alas, only a demo in a VM today . It seems more reliable inside a VM, not quite on the Eee. Besides, the poor SSD has been through quite a number of fsck’s now. BTW, one other thing to note: Maria log files seem to be pretty huge. Running it on a SSD that has about 1.5GB of free space (total, 4GB), is harsh.

For reference, the test (generally, wait for count to reach 128, switch terminals, and kill mysqld/pop battery off):

drop table if exists t1;

create table t1 (id int not null auto_increment primary key, b longblob) ;
select table_schema,table_name,engine
     from information_schema.tables
     where table_schema=schema() and table_name='t1';
insert into t1 values (1, repeat('a',1000000));
insert into t1 select null,b from t1; select count(*) from t1;
insert into t1 select null,b from t1; select count(*) from t1;
insert into t1 select null,b from t1; select count(*) from t1;
insert into t1 select null,b from t1; select count(*) from t1;
insert into t1 select null,b from t1; select count(*) from t1;
insert into t1 select null,b from t1; select count(*) from t1;
insert into t1 select null,b from t1; select count(*) from t1;
insert into t1 select null,b from t1; select count(*) from t1;
insert into t1 select null,b from t1; select count(*) from t1;

Technorati Tags: mysql, maria, myisam, demo, storage engine

I bit the bullet, and picked up an Asus Eee PC today, while I failed at an attempt to get a rack. Its a 4GB model, with the webcam, and its on its 3rd run, i.e. I’ve got a model without a mini-PCIe connector. The slot is there, but the connector itself is missing - really, silly of them (can you actually save that much money, on a connector?). This batch arrived at OfficeWorks around 27/12/2007 from what I can tell (that’s whats written on the box), and its a 7C model (basically, the only model you get the mini-PCIe connector was the 7A one).

For what it’s worth, OfficeWorks and The Good Guys are price-matched for the Eee PC, while JB-HiFi comes next, with Myer holding the top retail price. Of course, all this is pending you actually getting to a store with stock of the item - I picked mine up from OfficeWorks, in Prahan (South Melbourne for instance, was out of stock).

Now, on to the machine.

Pros:

• You pop the battery in, and the boot-up process is near instantaneous, because its booting from a SSD.
• Standard applications ship with it: Pidgin for IM, Skype for
  video-chat, OpenOffice.org for all your office needs, Acrobat Reader
  for PDFs (why not just evince?) and a whole bunch more.
• The trackpad works perfectly, and even though
  there is only “one” mouse button, it provides a 2-button interface.
• Its nice to have a laptop where suspend and resume work out of
  the box.
• The external display, just works (adjusting to the size
  of the external display, as opposed to mirroring for instance).
• The power supply is very smart. You can remove the Australian plug, and
  see a US-based plug beneath. Either way, it can be used on most modern
  airlines now, even in economy (if you’re on a quality airline, like
  Singapore Airlines, for instance).
• There’s a carrying case that comes in the box, which I’m sure will be handy when I’m about to throw it into my backpack.

Cons:

• The child-like interface, that is almost comparable to, if not worse, than what Sugar will offer you.
• You might be tempted to then say, “Computer Web”, to then hear the voice of a lady then say “Web” fairly softly, and launch Firefox. Not too impressive - for example, I had the Red Hot Chilli Peppers playing in the background, and in my limited use of voice control, I managed to even open up the Clock when I wanted the web browser.
• I tried the dictionary. Its nice to know there actually is an offline dictionary, but its really not too usable. The Longman dictionary is probably ideal if you were speaking/reading/writing Chinese, but I’d have taken an Oxford, or even a Webster’s anyday.
• The keyboard itself, is a tad small, but one will be able to get used
  to it. The positioning of the right Shift key, is not optimal, and I’ve
  seen hacks of people replacing the keys (physically!) and then making
  use of Xmodmap to fix it.
• 800×480 is a tough resolution to get used to. Sure, you’ve got a 7″ screen, but its an odd resolution, and some websites tend not to render properly at this resolution any longer (which is sad).

I wanted a lot more than Xandros could offer me. About the only time I felt at home, was when I hit Ctrl+Alt+T (for the Terminal). At this point, I thought of either installing Ubuntu or Fedora; naturally, I went with the latter, something called Eeedora. More about this, in another post.

What do I think of the machine? Overall, I like it. Its a great sub-notebook. Haven’t tried the battery out yet, but I hear I’ll get about 3 hours of juice from it.

I definitely need to upgrade the RAM - 512MB just doesn’t cut it in this modern world, and a 2GB chip is pretty affordable these days. While I’m there, I might as well get a nice big USB thumb drive, as well as a huge SD card (the slot does SDHC, so maybe some 8GB will be nice?).

Happy to have supported yet another vendor, doing good things with Linux. Go Asus! (similarly, go Nokia for all your beta-quality tablet devices, Dell for Linux laptops [that still haven't reached the APAC region], and I’m sure I’m missing some vendors, but I’ve not purchased from them.)

Technorati Tags: asus, eeepc, eee, asus eee pc, review, 7c, linux