[blog...]

For half a year, I have a Jetway Nano-ITX Board (J8F9) running with Xubuntu 8.04 on a CF-card. This Board is very slow with an AMD Geode but 100% silent and consumes only about 3 Watt. It's the perfect internet client for my cafe.

One problem was the right setting for the display (quite cheap monitor with 1440x900 pixels). Before updating to 8.10 I had to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf manually and set:

Section "Device"
        Identifier    "Configured Video Device"
      #Option  "UseFBDev"  "true"
        Driver    "fbdev"
EndSection

Section "Screen"          
       Identifier   "Default Screen"          
       Monitor   "Configured Monitor"          
       Device  "Configured Video Device"          
       DefaultDepth  24          
       SubSection "Display"         
    # Virtual 1440 900          
       Modes  "1440x900" "1280x1024" "1024x768"          
      EndSubSection 
EndSection 

The Xorg-Version is:

X.Org X Server 1.4.0.90

Release Date: 5 September 2007

X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0

Build Operating System: Linux Ubuntu (xorg-server 2:1.4.1~git20080131-1ubuntu9.

Current Operating System: Linux cafepc 2.6.24-19-generic #1 SMP Wed Aug 20 22:5

Build Date: 13 June 2008  01:08:21AM

After 5 minutes download and about 6 hours (!) packages replacements, the system was ready to reboot. But... it ends up in a kernel panic! And before booting, the install-tool deinstalled the old kernel. Very stupid.

So I removed the CF-card and modified the boot/grub/menu.lst. Xubunto forgot to add the initrd-line below the kernel:

initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-14-generic

I recently wrote a German paper with kile and LaTeX.

In the header, I included the folowing line:

\usepackage[ngerman] {babel} 

But the hyphenation didn't work (or at least: it worked but made the hyphen elsewhere) and there came always one warning:

  No hyphenation patterns were loaded for(babel) the language `ngerman'(babel) I will use the patterns loaded for \language=0 instead.

Problem solved: The tetex-extra package was missing or maybe texlive-lang-german would have been sufficiant.

apt-get install tetex-extra

Every time starting a new project, I think about if Typo3 is really the best, easiest and fastest soltution. Ok, I managed to get it working which is not that easy for the first time. But still, I think the usability in the backend is far away from beeing called "user/admin friendly". Also the amazing amount of extensions doesn't mean a lot. Many extensions are quite old, not really maintained, too simple or too complexe and very often to difficult to understand in about one hour.

So I've started yesterday to do a small CMS contest on a quite slow VIA desktop PC. I installed the following CMS and "curled" some pages as fast as possible:

1. drupal 6.9
2. redaxo 4.2.0-RC
3. typolight 2.6.7

[...]

The result in short: Redaxo is the fastest and the others show no big differences. But... I don't like Redaxo so much, so I stay tuned on Typo3.

I'm using a Via Epia Mini-ITX board (EN1200) as simple office computer and music box. One of it's main tasks is to provide an internet access via 3G network. The USB-3G modem is a Huawei E620, sold in Germany as "O2 Surfstick".

The Huawei USB modem uses just the common option.c driver which works quite well. But from time to time, there occures some warning in the dmesg and the connection stops working:

------------[ cut here ]------------
WARNING: at drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c:324 serial_write_room+0x44/0x51 [usbserial]()
Modules linked in: nls_iso8859_1 nls_cp437 vfat fat iptable_nat nf_nat nf_conntrack_ipv4 nf_conntrack 
ip_tables x_tables sierra pl2303 tvaudio bttv videodev snd_via82xx v4l1_compat ir_common 
snd_ac97_codec compat_ioctl32 i2c_algo_bit ac97_bus v4l2_common videobuf_dma_sg snd_pcm 
ideobuf_core btcx_risc tveeprom snd_timer option snd_page_alloc snd_mpu401_uart snd_rawmidi 
snd_seq_device snd soundcore i2c_viapro usbserial i2c_core 8250_pnp 8250 serial_core button 
via_agp evdev dm_mirror dm_log dm_snapshot usbhid ide_cd_mod cdrom ohci1394 via_velocity 
ieee1394 thermal processor thermal_sys
Pid: 18450, comm: amarokapp Tainted: G W 2.6.27.2 #1
[<c0113736>] warn_on_slowpath+0x40/0x63
[<c011affe>] send_signal+0x1cf/0x1e4
[<c011b1fe>] __group_send_sig_info+0x7/0x9
[<f8ed44d7>] option_write+0x123/0x1aa [option]
[<f8e9a59e>] serial_write+0x6f/0x7a [usbserial]
[<f8e9a522>] serial_write_room+0x44/0x51 [usbserial]
[<c020fad4>] tty_write_room+0x15/0x16
[<c020e141>] opost+0x13/0x1ab
[<c020f62f>] n_tty_receive_buf+0x87b/0xc4b
[<c0287bf9>] sock_aio_write+0xe8/0xf5
[<c0152c8e>] core_sys_select+0x22c/0x27b
[<c010fd14>] place_entity+0x89/0xc2
[<c0110b2c>] check_preempt_wakeup+0xbf/0xf6
[<c020b80e>] flush_to_ldisc+0xd3/0x158
[<f8ed4b08>] option_indat_callback+0x89/0xd9 [option]
[<c0253982>] usb_hcd_giveback_urb+0x60/0x8a
[<c0264416>] uhci_giveback_urb+0xde/0x159
[<c0264a87>] uhci_scan_schedule+0x51c/0x761
[<c0266395>] uhci_irq+0xe3/0xed
[<c025370b>] usb_hcd_irq+0x24/0x58
[<c012cf7b>] handle_IRQ_event+0x1a/0x3f
[<c012dbde>] handle_level_irq+0x50/0x85
[<c01043a3>] do_IRQ+0x48/0x5d
[<c0102cb3>] common_interrupt+0x23/0x30
=======================
---[ end trace 251442a461df9b9e ]---

That's why I'm currently upgrade my linux kernel to current stable release 2.6.28.7. Maybe the driver got more stable? Let's see...

As usual, I do the following steps to compile and install the kernel:

• download the kernel from ftp.eu.kernel.org
• move the /usr/src and unpack
• cp last .config to current linux directory

• make menuconfig the build new .config-file

• make-kpkg -rev ab.1 kernel_image -init 
  

• install: dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.28.7_ab.1_i386.deb

• reboot

done :-)

Postscript two days later:

The kernel is working fine. But the warning in usb-serial still occures from time to time.