[blog...]

Last week, I read again some forum posts about the Compulab Trim-Slice and.... Yes, I ordered one Trim-Slice Pro directly from Compulab in Israel! It costs $370 including shipping to Germany.

It was quite fast with UPS Saver in Dresden. Compulab shipped it on Sunday, 31th July and it arrived today on Tuesday, 2th August. Yesterday, UPS from Cologne called me to get my customs-tariff-number. I have never heard about this but I applied for one and this was enough for UPS and the customs. I only had to pay the import VAT (19%) but this will be refunded later.

Puh, it was quite easy to start the Trim-Slice. I just connected my monitor with an DVI-HDMI-cable, plugged the power and after approximately 2 minutes the Ubuntu desktop was seen. There is no boot-logo, splash-screen or text console to follow. I don't know yet, howto edit e.g. the u-boot parameters. I will see later.

The system works, even wireless seemed to work at the first glance. But later I noticed that it is quite unstable with my WPA2 protected network. I'm not sure why, but I started to compile the trimslice-kernel and to replace the included rt2800usb driver with the rt2870sta from RaLink. With no success until now :-(

At the moment, the Trim-Slice seems to be slower than my Fit-PC2 and it's getting hot because the power management is not working yet. Unfortunately, I cannot measure the power consumption at the moment. This and many other details will follow in this blog.

So stay tuned!

Update:

Accessing the u-boot is so easy. That's why the Trim-Slice has an ordinary serial port! Connected with a null-modem-cable and an USB-serial-converter, you can access the console with minicom. There you follow the boot process and you login automatically as root user. Great! My own, native compiled kernel is working now.

I just realized that kernel 3.0.0 is available since friday. So I just compiled it with my config from 2.6.39 and... trara: it's working! Here you can find my new config-3.0.0 for the fit-pc2.

Compared to the last kernel upgrade, this one was quite easy. The psb_gfx driver comes still from the psb-dkms package.

What's new in kernel 3.0.0? First: the version numbering. After 2.6.39 follows now 3.0.0. Ok, if Linus like so, why not. We are working to long with 2.6. But I hope, the linux kernel is not following now the version numbering inflation like chrome and firefox...

There is a quite good site where the changes are explaned: http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges

"Could you please add a simple image gallery to the website!"

This requirement of customers sounds easy but with TYPO3 the developer gets nervose and starts to search the TER if there is any new, maybe perfect image gallery. But there is ... none :-(

With wordpress you need maximum 5 minutes to install e.g. ?NextGEN Gallery where you have everything you like: gallery, albums, categories, lightbox, sorting...

Back to TYPO3 you first have to decide: Do I use DAM (Digital Asset Management) or is it necessary to install the whole DAM for a simple gallery? With DAM, I use e.g. ce_gallery. Of course, I had to patch it to make it work, like I want, but you have to patch all TYPO3 galleries to fit your needs.

But now, I wanted to avoid DAM. And I tried the following three galleries:

• YAG (Yet Another Gallery)
• chgallery
• wt_gallery

YAG is for sure the most impressive extension in development and uses all modern programming technologies. But it is HUGE. Why do I need >50 classes and 10 MB of source code for showing some images? And that's not all. Some more extensions are necessary: of course fluid and extbase and pt_tools and pt_extbase.

My main problem was the flash uploader which seems to make stupid file permissions on one of the servers. That's why I dropped this solution. Also the plenty of exceptions in the logfile made no impression of a trustable pice of software. Lets wait some months and have a look again!

What is quite nice: YAG comes with its own lightbox. And you can install themes, other lightbox and configure a lot.

chgallery still uses the ereg()-function in the wizard for the image titles. That's why I deleted it immediately an tried wt_gallery.

With wt_gallery, you have to install wt_doorman and you're done. But... currently I forgot why I didn't like it.

At the end, I choose chgallery with pmkshadowbox. The configuration is easy if you don't make the mistake to check "?Use Single view" in the Gallery view. In this case the lightbox-code is removed and you have to add another plugin to the same page with the Single view inside. It took some hours to figure this out and finally, I debugged the source code to understand the configuration.

My template setup-configuration for chgallery is now the following:

# enable lightbox (pmks-shadowbox) in gallery view of chgallery
plugin.tx_chgallery_pi1.gallery.image {
 file {
 width = 100c
 height = 100c
 }
 imageLinkWrap = 1
 imageLinkWrap {
 enable = 1

 typolink {
 title.field= tx_chgalleryTitle

 parameter.override.cObject = IMG_RESOURCE
 parameter.override.cObject {
 file.import.data = TSFE:lastImageInfo|origFile
 file.maxW = 800
 file.maxH = 600

 stdWrap.postUserFunc = user_replaceSpaces
 }

 # used lightbox is pmkslimbox
 ATagParams = rel="lightbox"
 ATagParams.override = rel="lightbox[presentlb{field:uid}]"
 ATagParams.insertData = 1


 }
 }
}

plugin.tx_chgallery_pi1.single.image < plugin.tx_chgallery_pi1.gallery.image


Now you can add perfectlightbox or any other lightbox-clone as extension to your site. Usually you have to include the static template of the choosen extension. I choose pmkshadowbox.

Since my update to Ubuntu 11.04 I missed a very, very useful and important feature for people like me, working most of the time on the console.

I don't care which window-manager-system-style I'm using. GNOME, KDE, LXDE or whatever as long as the terminal is starting fast.

In Ubuntu 11.04 is a bug with the bash_completion. This helps you completing the filenames with the TAB-key. Especially with filenames and directories with spaces or German "Umlaute".

Right now, I spent half an hour to google for a solution and it's so simple. There is only an error in /etc/bash_completion (line 1587):

# makeinfo and texi2dvi are defined elsewhere. 
for i in a2ps awk bash bc bison cat colordiff cp csplit \     
curl cut date df diff dir du enscript env expand fmt fold gperf gprof \     
grep grub head indent irb ld ldd less ln ls m4 md5sum mkdir mkfifo mknod \     
mv netstat nl nm objcopy objdump od paste patch pr ptx readelf rm rmdir \      
sed seq sha{,1,224,256,384,512}sum shar sort split strip tac tail tee \        
texindex touch tr uname unexpand uniq units vdir wc wget who; do     
have $i && complete -F _longopt -o filenames $i 
done 

This bug has been discussed on the bugtracker at launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bash-completion/+bug/769866

This week I started using Piwik - an open source web analytic tool on some of my websites. And I am really impressed!

I've never used Google Analytics because I find it a stupid and dangerous idea to send data of my visitors to external servers somewhere in the world. I like Google but this idea seems to me quite strange.

A web analytic tool knows more of the visitors as a pure apache webalyzer may know. Cookies and fancy Javascript do the job.

Of course there are some alternative OpenSource projects. But I always thought, that you need your own server for tools like this. But no! Piwik runs with a MySQL database and needs only PHP. So basics, every hoster offers. So I installed Piwik on my shared hosting account and the user data will stay on my sites.

Now, It's easier for me to get overview of the different websites I have online. I see browser versions the visitors are looking on my site even with the screen resolution. A nice world map shows the users around the globe and much more.

I activated the AnoymizeIP plugin. So the visitor IP address is truncated before writing it to the database. And If you really don't like to get tracked: Just disable the tracking on the imprint page!