Uber Geeky!

So I got myself a Popcorn Hour 110. The PCH is a Network Media Player, and the name says it all it play all sort of digital media. It is equipped with a 500Gb HD and it can also stream content across the network, and it does a hell of a good job too.

The only if is the User Interface, it is shockingly unusable…If you just want the PCH to browse and watch your video collection is not so bad, but when you want to use it to listen to your music collection you enter a world of pain. So far I couldn’t see an easy way to use playlists or even simple features like shuffle, there are some Jukebox mods that you can install, but browsing through the solutions they are not that user friendly either.

Another feature that I need from my PCH is the ability to be remote controlled due to the setup of my house. No easy way to do this too…So I dropped the PCH for music altogether and even started preparing a box that I had lying around (matter for another post) with something called Music Player Deamon , MPD is a remote controlled media player, basically is a daemon service that accepts requests to control media files on the host computer. It is opensource and has a large community of developers that  have developed a number of clients for it for platforms including Windows, Linux, MacOsx, Android, Iphone, you name it. Perfect for my requirements.

So I had my box all setup and running with MPD when I came across this post about installing MPD on the PCH…I couldn’t believe it, yes the Popcorn hour runs Linux and these two guys managed a way to fit MPD into it…awesome.

Since the documentation on the mentioned post is a bit convoluted due to updates along the time I will document here step by step the process that I followed to install the MDP on my PCH:

You need to setup your PCH to talk with your network, easiest way is to allow automatic IP address and let your DHCP server do the rest. The PCH will automatically acquire an IP address that you will need later to connect to it.

On another PC in your network you need to install the NMT Community Installer, this utility is nothing less than a bundle of applications that you can install in your PCH provided by the community, it features Themes, mods to the original graphics, and also several tools and applications like bit torrent clients, a replacement for the default http server, etc. The one we are interested for the MPD install is telnet, this will provide a way to access a command line for our PCH. So go ahead and install it.

Once telnet is installed you can connect to it by using a telnet client. I used putty, any other telnet client will do.

After you connect to your PCH you will be sitting in the share folder, this is the root folder for all your content. In the command line issue the following commands:

cd /mnt/syb8634/etc
wget http://nmt.explore.nl/mpd-nmt-20090504.tar.gz -qO - | tar xvz
cd mpd
pwd
./installmpd.sh
./startmpd.sh

And that’s it, now every time the PCH reboots it will scan your music folder and rebuild its internal database. Pick an MPD client from the Client List and off you go.

My favourite client is Music Player Mininon which is a Firefox plugin.

This may not be a problem for people who live in huge cities, but Australia is a big place, I’m sure most of it has no mobile phone tower coverage. So what do you do when travelling 100′s of kilometres from one town to another and you don’t know exactly where to turn?

You could try scrolling across the route using Google Maps and hope that the maps stay cached until you need them. This works some of the time. If you just want to know roughly when to turn, getting the blue directions line is usually good enough to keep you on track. I think I found sometimes even that gets lost if you use the phone for anything other than google maps or perhaps just leaving it idle for a long time.

I don’t know about you, but in such situations I want to leave little up to fate. On my old Nokia I used to have MGMaps installed. At the time Google had pressured them into stopping support for Google Maps images, but it was still possible with a little hackery pokery to get their scripts to slurp them down. Despite the occasional bum steer I’ve had asking Google Maps for direction (driving for an hour down an increasingly poor quality dirt road in New Zealand which Google had marked as a highway, only to end up nearly bogged in the middle of a forest on a track that had foot long grass growing on it comes to mind), I still find Google has the best maps. So I wasn’t prepared to settle for MapDroyd too quickly. But that is the easy option.

Skip that and go for RMaps. If you see the comments, lots of people have trouble figuring out the offline maps features. Taranfx blog post to the rescue!! Follow those simple steps to get your Google Maps goodness when you are out of range of the Google hive mind.

But wait! SQLite library for Ubuntu is not included with Mobile Atlas Creator . In the included README.HTM it says that you can download the required Java SQLite libraries from sourceforge. But it seems to me all those links are currently broken.

To compile it, I installed a whole bunch of packages:

• openjdk-6-jdk
• sqlite
• libsqlite0-dev
• libsqliteodbc
• sqlite3
• libsqlite3-dev

I’m not certain that all of these are required. Of course you’ll also need the regular build-essential packages required to compile stuff. Now you can follow the steps in the README.HTM, although you should download the latest version of javasqlite package (changes highlighted).

wget http://www.ch-werner.de/javasqlite/javasqlite-20100727.tar.gz
tar xzvf javasqlite-20100727.tar.gz
cd javasqlite-20100727/
./configure --with-jdk=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk
make
cp .libs/lib* /[MOBAC installation path]

If you can’t find your java home, you may need to add --with-jdk=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk to the end of the configure command (this is the path for Ubuntu 10.04 anyway).

Now return to Taranfx blog post and then enjoy RMaps with offline Google Maps.

Update August 30, 2010:
You can migrate your tracks and markers from Google Maps too! The current version only displays 1 track at a time, but it does route lines along roads. For some reason it wont show any markers until you are at least zoom level 14. I wish this was configurable as my markers are sometimes 50kms apart, so it would be good to see them when zoomed right out. I may have to go and flag all the turn offs for my upcoming holiday, as I’m worried I could miss a few from the looks of things now.

To import them firstly export KML file from google maps either by following this post from Gmaps Tips group or using the GMapToGPX javascript. Once you have the KML file downloaded, copy it to /sdcard/rmaps/import/ on the phone. Then go into the Track and POI menus and import it (import once in POI and once in track). You might notice that it has horrible div tags around all the text, you’ll have to clean that up from the KML file manually if it bothers you too much (how’s your regular expression skills?).

All in all this has been sufficiently geeky for my liking, and the end result is exactly what I wanted! Now I have an offline GPS totally compatible with my Google Maps “My Maps” (if that makes sense).

I’ve noticed that on battery power the hard disk makes a clicking sound every 20 seconds or so. This symptom has been reported particularly by laptop and netbook users, including those that use Windows (though I gather it’s much less of a problem with Windows users).

A quick summary of the situation. If your Eee PC has a SATA hard disk, chances are you’ve noticed this problem. The simple solution is just to disable Advanced Power Management on the hard disk all together and then get on with your life. There are plenty of other power saving features that work, but it seems that the APM is not well suited to Lucid Lynx (or vice versa).

Ubuntu is telling the hard disk to take it easy and not to chew too much power. But this is really just to lull it into a false sense of security as it doesn’t actually cut the drive any slack. In fact, Lucid has some services which appear to be very demanding on the hard disk. The hard disk keeps trying to take a break but Lucid keeps accessing it. The result is a drive that constantly sleeps and wakes up again (causing the click to be heard, as the disk heads park and then move back into working position again). Luckily this action was actually audible, otherwise I’d have been none the wiser, oblivious to the performance hits until my hard disk finally died from excess wear.

A quick search revealed the following command to instantly stop the clicking:

$ sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda

Where “sda” is your SATA hard disk device of course. That command will buy you some time to figure out what’s really happening. Unless you are feeling adventurous, you’ll probably reach the same conclusion that I have. But lets work through this anyway for the sake of actually understanding a little more about what’s actually going on here.

The following command will tell you lots of stuff about your hard drive that you probably don’t want to have to care about:

$ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda

You can find just the line we are interested in with this one:

$ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep "Advanced power management"

Which should yield this, since we ran hdparm with the -B 254 option…

Advanced power management level: 254

This is what we want. But if you reboot and run that command you will see it reverts back to level 128. In fact, if you plug the power back in and then remove it, theoretically it should revert to APM level 128.

To find out what the hard drive has been up to, install the smartmontools package using synaptic or sudo apt-get install smartmontools. Then you can run this command (make sure your terminal window is nice and wide or maximised):

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

Cool huh? More stuff you don’t want to have to care about. But just have a look at the section titled “Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds”. On my Eee PC I had very high “RAW_VALUE” for “Load_Cycle_Count” row.

“Load_Cycle_Count” was 3150 and “Power_On_Hours” was only 56. So I’m assuming this means the drive has averaged one “load cycle” per minute of it’s life. Which is about right, since the clicking only happens on battery power and then it happens about every 20 seconds during this time. So if the clicks coincide with these “load cycle” thingamajigs, this would suggest it’s lived on batteries less than 1/3rd of it’s life, which is about right.

If you don’t like my science, or you have a different interpretation of your own threshold table then you might want to have a look at the SATA known issues wiki page. Meanwhile, on with the show…

With a default Lucid Lynx installation, the APM level 128 setting is triggered by a htparm power management script that lives here… /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/95hdparm-apm. If you have another power management package installed such as laptop-mode-tools then your on your own.

The configuration for this and possibly other power management tools lives in /etc/hdparm.conf. To basically disable APM when running on battery power, add the following to the end of the config file…

/dev/sda {
	apm = 254
	apm_battery = 254
}

This tells hdparm to keep the drive at APM level 254 even when it’s running on battery power. Unfortunately, this seems to be the simplest option when running Lucid Lynx on an Eee PC. Apparently Lucid Lynx just doesn’t want to stop molesting the hard disk. Just disable APM for now. Hopefully future UNE releases will address this rather major issue.

I’m planning to test the battery life of the OEM Windows 7 and then compare it with Lucid Lynx without APM. I expect it to be a bit of a hit, but I get the impression it’s not worth the effort to make Lucid Lynx APM friendly. If you are feeling masochistic though, perhaps you can pick up from where this guy left off.. http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=85230

I see this as an unfortunate trade off between power consumption and performance. The performance improvement of Ubuntu still far out weighs this issue. To be fair, I first found out how to fix this problem from Windows users. Someone has ported a lot of the functionality of hdparm to a tool called quietHDD to solve this for the Windows platform. At least our solution is supported and bundled with the operating system. I found it interesting anyway to know a bit more about how power management works in Ubuntu.

References:
man hdparm.conf

Looks like ASUS finally realised the Eee PC forums were dead, so they have quietly removed them. Well sort of. You can still visit the forums if you know the URL. From there it seems you can reply to posts, but you can’t start new threads.

Not such a big deal since you will get much better support from the EeeUser forums anyway. As long as this isn’t a reflection of their long term support plans for the Eee Family in general.

I’ve done a few of these dual boot installations with impressive results from the latest Ubuntu Netbook Edition. The OEM hard drive layout seems to be quite common across models. Here I’ll document a general approach to take to get your Eee PC set up with dual boot Windows and Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

Make sure you have updated the firmware using the little ASUS updater tool that comes with the OEM Windows. You can find it in the start menu. Here’s the screen shot from the 1005P model…

Incidentally, this was the first time I’ve touched Windows 7. Nice to know it’s possible to get the classic theme happening, but that didn’t seem to speed it up much. I must admit it seemed to perform a little better than Windows XP. The browser didn’t just hang like it did on my Windows XP Eee Top when I visited some flash intensive sites. Still, it was far less responsive than Ubuntu.

The BIOS update tool is very straight forward. Just be patient while it finds your latest BIOS, downloads and installs it. Having the latest BIOS image generally results in better device support from Ubuntu out of the box.

The next thing to do, follow steps 1 & 2 from here… http://www.Ubuntu.com/netbook/get-ubuntu/download

Once you have a USB device with an Ubuntu image on it, insert the USB drive and reboot. During the boot process, usually while Eee PC logo is displayed, press and hold the ESC button. A blue boot menu will eventually be displayed. Select the USB device and press “Enter” to boot the Ubuntu installer image. Once it starts up, click “Try Ubuntu-Netbook 10.04″ and wait for the desktop to load.

Now you need to run Gnome Partition Editor. You can either find it under the System menu, or press Alt+F2 and type “gparted” and hit “Enter”. The screenshot below may be of some assistance in confirming your actions are correct.

Now if you wait a moment you will see a graphical representation of the partitions on your hard disk. It will vaguely resemble something like this.

There are two partitions you’ll want to hang on to. The first one contains OEM Windows (the “C:” drive), the second one is a handy recovery image. If you use Windows to browse the net, you’ll be needing that recovery image to clean out all the root kits and trojans from time to time. Otherwise you might want to keep it in case you ever want to sell the Eee PC to a Windows user who wants a clean image.

Ubuntu needs you to add two new partitions minimum, a swap partition and one for the root directory. Unfortunately, you can only have 4 partitions on the drive, so the last two just have to go.

Optionally, the Windows partition can be reduced in size, this is especially useful if you don’t plan to use it very often. I tend to shrink it to about twice the size of the currently used space. After resizing the Windows partition you’ll need to move the recovery partition so it’s flush against the Windows partition. You can use Gnome Partition Editor to do all these things, so have a play. If you do the wrong thing click the undo button in the tool bar. Once you have something that looks similar to below, press the Apply button (the big tick). It will take some time to perform the operations. Be patient and make sure the netbook it not running on battery power at the time as these operations could be destructive if they fail.

If you have resized the Windows partition, Windows will perform a disk check the next time you boot it. This is to be expected, just be patient and let it do it’s thing. It will eventually complete the check and reboot. Windows will start fine.

The next step is to install Ubuntu. From the menu, click “Install Ubuntu-Netbook 10.04″ from the favourites menu. The Wizard will firstly prompt you for your language, timezone and keyboard layout. When you get to step 4, Partitions, select the last option as seen here.

On the next screen all you need to do is set the EXT4 partition as the root as seen below.

Then just follow the bouncing ball to begin the installation process. Sit back and enjoy the progress bar and obligatory forced advertising as it completes.

Once it’s installed, reboot. You will notice a 10 second menu to select between Ubuntu and Windows. Firstly, some notes about the GRUB menu. The last Windows entry is usually the Windows recovery tool. Don’t use this tool unless you really need to recover your Windows installation. Recovering Windows will lock you out of this boot menu, and you will have to use the USB boot image to recover it in order to regain access to Ubuntu (see Recovering Ubuntu After Installing Windows). I’ve also noticed on the Eee Top that the Windows partition becomes hidden and Windows will not boot after recovery. You can easily use gparted to remove the hidden flag from the partition if this is the case. But enough about Windows.

Boot into Ubuntu (just wait 10 seconds, or press “Enter”). Now visit the HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks page and find the model of your Eee PC. Here you will find useful information about getting better device support for your particular model. Or if your model is not listed, add an entry with notes about how perfectly it works.

Enjoy the superior performance of an Ubuntu Eee PC.

Update June 17, 2010: Please ensure you do have a look at the hardware support page linked above. There are some important changes to make to the grub config you’ll need to perform to get hotkeys working correctly. On top of this, check out my recent post on clicking noises and disabling APM. You may need this too if you have a clicking SATA hard drive.

Well it’s been a while, but I once again have a useful nugget of information for the world. I bought a cheap Eee Top last year, and installed Ubuntu on it. It did have a few minor dramas. I wasted days trying to get the touchscreen working, with limited and unreliable results. I actually suspect Ubuntu was having issues with the USB bus since I was getting spammed with dmsg log entries in the terminal window. Sometimes my USB keyboard or mouse would stop working.

Anyway it was depressing and I don’t want to go into it too much now I’ve got my mojo back on the latest version of Ubuntu, which is working awesomely. This time it took me only 30 minutes to find some working instructions to get the touchscreen up and running. No package compiling required this time, though there was xorg config file hacking involved.

Here’s the procedure on an out of the box Lucid Lynx install. Install the evtouch driver.

$ sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-evtouch

Tell udev to create us the symlink for the touchscreen device.

$ echo 'echo KERNEL==\"event*\", SUBSYSTEM==\"input\", ATTRS{idVendor}==\"1bfd\", ATTRS{idProduct}==\"1688\", SYMLINK+=\"input/evtouch\" > /etc/udev/rules.d/69-touchscreen.rules' | sudo sh

Now I was surprised to discover I didn’t have an xorg.conf file. I found you can generate one with “X -configure” command. The catch is you need to kill GDM before you do so. So here’s the drill:

Ctrl+Alt+F1 and login to the terminal

$ sudo killall gdm-binary

$ sudo X -configure

Now copy the generated xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Edit xorg.conf so it looks similar to mine (changes highlighted):

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "X.org Configured"
	Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
	InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
	InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
	InputDevice    "Touch0"
EndSection

Section "Files"
	ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi"
	FontPath     "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
	FontPath     "built-ins"
EndSection

Section "Module"
	Load  "extmod"
	Load  "dbe"
	Load  "dri"
	Load  "dri2"
	Load  "glx"
	Load  "record"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Keyboard0"
	Driver      "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Mouse0"
	Driver      "mouse"
	Option	    "Protocol" "auto"
	Option	    "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
	Option	    "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Touch0"
	Driver		"evtouch"
	Option		"device"	"/dev/input/evtouch"
	Option		"MinX"	"1"
	Option		"MinY"	"1"
	Option		"MaxX"	"4096"
	Option		"MaxY"	"4096"
	Option		"ReportingMode" "Raw"
	Option	"Emulate3Buttons" "false"
	Option	"Emulate3Timeout" "50"
	Option	"SendCoreEvents" "on"
	Option	"MoveLimit" "0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "Monitor0"
	VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
	ModelName    "Monitor Model"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: : integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
        ### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "NoAccel"            	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "SWcursor"           	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "ColorKey"           	# 
        #Option     "CacheLines"         	# 
        #Option     "Dac6Bit"            	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "DRI"                	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "NoDDC"              	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "ShowCache"          	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "XvMCSurfaces"       	# 
        #Option     "PageFlip"           	# [<bool>]
	Identifier  "Card0"
	Driver      "intel"
	VendorName  "Intel Corporation"
	BoardName   "Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller"
	BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Card0"
	Monitor    "Monitor0"
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     1
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     4
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     8
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     15
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     16
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
	EndSubSection
EndSection