tensixtyone

For quite a while now, commuters on the heavily loaded Liverpool to Norwich service have suffered with cramped conditions and late trains. Personally, I’ve been travelling this service for nearly four years and seen the highs and lows.

Originally the service was handled by Central Trains, who at their best used to run a terrible service, many people complained and nothing happened. November 2007 gave new hope, Central Trains were finally pushed to the sidelines and a new franchise took over the running of this critical route for Liverpool-Manchester commuters. At first many rejoiced at the sight of four carriages and a return to the level of service we expect. Trains ran on time, fully formed, and working well. Six months later, it’s a different story. What we saw was a reduction in service back to the good old Central Trains days. The issue now is that this service is worse than Central Trains ever was; four carriages are the oddity of the service, not the norm.

So enter Train Sardine, a new website for the disgruntled commuters who have to put up with this service. This group aims to give one voice for the the route and hopefully give some marked improvement, only time will tell but if your interested in helping out then check out the website.

People who use their Huawei E160G on Three will know that in the Windows client you can send and receive SMS, this will come at some minor cost of £0.10 per SMS, and you can add bundles onto your mobile broadband account to make this cheaper.

Similar functionality can be achieved in Linux, and it’s very useful if your like me and want to drop someone a message when you don’t have your phone around.

For this we’ll be using Gammu, which is a toolset for managing phones via the AT GSM command set. It was originally forked from Gnokii, which was a similar toolset for Nokia handsets. As the E160G opens a serial port with access to the AT command set this is a relatively easy tool to setup.

First of all, we need to grab the packages. As these are standard Debian packages you should have no issues.

# sudo apt-get install gammu

Next, we need to configure Gammu to pickup the correct device. Check your dmesg for the serial port:

$ dmesg|grep tty
[12321.308078] usb 5-3: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[12321.308275] usb 5-3: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1

Edit ~/.gammurc, or run gammu-config to change the device settings. Your ~/.gammurc file should look similar to:

[gammu]
port = /dev/ttyUSB0
model =
connection = at19200
synchronizetime = yes
logfile =
logformat = nothing
use_locking =
gammuloc =

Give it a test by getting all the SMS from the device:

# gammu getallsms

This should bring back all the SMS currently stored on the stick, which should include your login details for the Three website (unless you’ve deleted them). To send a SMS use the “sendsms” command:

$ gammu sendsms text 07874454543
Enter message text and press ^D:
Test Message!!!!!1!
Sending SMS 1/1....waiting for network answer..OK, message reference=2

Gammu has a lot more tools and options to explore, now you have the basic config you can setup a SMSD, which can expose the ability to send SMS to a network. Also, Gammu has a python interface so you can possibly build your own frontend client for sending SMS. For more details explore the Gammu Wiki.

My grand idea of experimenting with various distributions for the EeePC went wrong, by quite a bit as well. As mentioned in the last post I decided to have a play around with some of the distributions specifically built for the Asus EeePC 701, I was wondering if something out there can beat Debian on this little work horse.

Oh boy was I wrong.

First I attempted to install Zeee (Zenwalk for the EeePC), the installation “media” came as a compressed disk image, nothing that unusual as most of the distros come in their own little installation media package. It turns out that this image is a raw dump of a file system, so I had to create the installation media on a USB stick with the various handy tools, mke2fs, grub, you get the idea. After about 45 minutes of fiddling I called it a day, for some reason the GRUB installation wasn’t detecting the ext2 partition on the USB stick, and couldn’t find the menu.lst file. While this is probably a simple issue it’s a bit more than I could be arsed with, the Zeee guys are doing well but the installation method need a little work, maybe a prepackaged ext2 dump.

After the kerfuffle with Zeee I moved onto the latest Foresight Linux Mobile Edition, I’ve heard Dan & Fab mention Foresight on the Linux Outlaws podcast and I have downloaded a live CD previously, so I decided to get the image and have a go. This installation went a lot easier, the image was a precompiled usb installation so no hassle there, the installation took time but I put t hat down to the quality of the USB stick I was using. After about 30 minutes I had a working Foresight Linux install, and everything seemed to work out of the box, including the WIFI (which is the usual sticking point for most distros).

Foresight Mobile uses the clutter based launcher you can also find in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the mainstream applications are pre-installed and are usable. Within a few minutes I hit my all time pet hate, touchpad clicking, ever since i’ve owned a laptop I’ve never been able to use touchpad click to any degree of success and I don’t see any reason why it should be enabled by default. In previous distribution I know the way to fix this issue is to simply changing the settings in gsynaptics or modify the Xorg config, as I was trying to operate from a user perspective I went the simple route of using gsynaptics. It wasn’t installed. I went digging around in the package manager (conary) and didn’t find a related package. After about ten minutes searching I found the “synaptics” package, which proved useless as I had no idea of what it does.

Three hours in and my experiment with Foresight was over, people may complain that it’s a simple issue but having the option enabled by default and then hiding the configuration in a non standard package doesn’t help matters. I have to give Foresight kudos for being one of the first distributions to have a full “netbook” version, but it still needs a little refinement.

So, now I’m back on Debian, tried and tested. This time I installed using the updated Lenny installation media for the EeePC and it was a breeze, and since I’ve done this “fresh install” a lot more of the features work consistently. In the process of configuring my machine again I’ve noticed that the older guide for the E160G using Network Manager is a little wrong, so I’ll have to update that sometime. For now I’ll be sticking on ol’ faithful. Maybe when the “next big distro” gets released I’ll give it a try.

I’ve been using Debian on my EeePC 701 since I got it, I think the original Xandros lasted a whole two hours or so. Over the last few days i’ve been bugged by 2.6.26 issues and various XServer issues, time for a change.

Over the next few weeks it’s my plan to experiment with a few EeePC tailored distributions, much in the same way Dan did. My first distro of choice is Zeee, which is a customised version of Zenwalk. I’ve heard good things about Zenwalk, so now is my time to experience it.

So, I’ll post a follow-up tomorrow.

I posted a few days ago about the creation of a adminstration list for all those who are interested in putting a helping hand into the LUG. The idea seems to have gone down well so I’ve took the next step and setup the list on our new hosting server; Ringo.

If your interested in helping out, signup for the mailing list. It’s currently on moderated signup as I want to keep an eye on who signs up, as that way I’ll know who they are and be able to prod them if they go idle. Please remember, the admin list is for LUG administration only, the banter will still remain on the main LUG list.

On a side note, I just want to bring people up to speed with what we’re able to offer as a LUG, we can offer some personal hosting, @livlug.org.uk email address and shell access. If your interested just drop a mail to sysadmin@livlug.org.uk.

I’ve got my new Moo.com cards, replacing the incorrect details I had on my old ones. Also, had to get a new set as my GPG key went missing.

Dropbox is out of closed beta and is open for the public, but what is more interesting is that they now have a client for Linux. I’ve had a beta email sat in my inbox for about 3-4 months, but I’ve never got round to signing up as I couldn’t get a client for Linux.

Dropbox is one of the new wave of online storage, sort of a cross between WebDAV and SVN, in fact, I’d say its almost exactly like SVN, just with a nice GUI. I guess all it would need to take the “value-added” part of this product is for someone to develop a nice front end for Amazon S3, and by looking at their future prices it could be cheaper.

Anyway, picking out the bits of the service is not what I’m here to do. At the moment I run a Debian Testing/Unstable desktop machine, I was quite disappointed to not see a specific Debian package for their software on the website. I realised after a few dumb minutes that I could use the Ubuntu packages.

In sources.list, I referenced their Gusty archive

deb http://www.getdropbox.com/static/ubuntu gutsy main

Then in /etc/apt/preferences I set some basic package pinning to make sure that any packages didn’t collide with the existing Debian repository, not likely but you never know.

Package: *
Pin: release a=gutsy
Pin-Priority: 400

Do a “apt-get update” and you should have the “nautilus-dropbox” package available to install. Simple!

Remember, you’ll need to restart nautilus by either killing it (killall -9 nautilus) or restarting your Gnome session.

[edit: Fixed the first URL]

I’m a little late, but as the event is just under a year away I guess I’m ok.

Hacking At Random has been announced, and is currently in the planning stages. HAR is described as “four days of techno-anarchism, ideological debates, hands-on tinkering, and lots of fun.”, for the uninitated you could probably compare it to a Burning Man for techies (but many would disagree with me). The general themes that has run through the previous events are:

• Camping
• Massive on-site network
• Massive amounts of bandwidth
• New and interesting things

For a more detailed explanation of what goes on, check out the What The Hack Wiki. If your available in July-August 2009 then I suggest you sign up to the annoucement list and keep an eye on whats going on, It’ll be worth the trip.

It might of happened a while ago, but i’ve only noticed today! Folly have posted the video and audio for the various gigs that happened as part of Open Source City. As I missed the gigs it’s nice for me to listen to these artists for the first time, and also your helping (a little) to support Open Source!

After initally setting up my EeePC to run Debian Lenny I quickly encountered a issue were the madwifi drivers wouldn’t resume correctly. The card would be unable to operate as it has lost sync with the kernel drivers, removing and reloading the related modules solved the issue.

Some people on the EeeUser forums ripped out the existing script from the default Xandros install, a simple acpi script that jumped through some hoops to disable the modules and clear everything down. The script worked as part of the existing acpi-support package and worked when using the acpi suspend options, now i’ve got GNOME and HAL installed it turns out these are no longer used, therefore still causing the issue.

After a little research it seems that the suspend support within Debian is currently in a state of flux, and a few bug tickets have been raised about the various issues. This provided my first hint of how to resolve it, a quick script in pm-utils, much like the acpi one, will fix this for good.

Simply, place this script into your /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/ folder, I’ve got it as 45eee-wifi that way if the script fails for some reason at least your video will be resumed.

#!/bin/bash

PWR=$(cat /proc/acpi/asus/wlan)

load_modules() {
   modprobe ath_pci
   modprobe wlan_wep
   modprobe wlan_tkip
   modprobe wlan_ccmp
}

unload_modules() {
   rmmod ath_pci
   rmmod wlan_scan_sta
   rmmod wlan_tkip
   rmmod wlan_wep
   rmmod wlan_ccmp
   rmmod ath_rate_sample
   rmmod wlan_acl
   rmmod wlan
   rmmod ath_hal
}

wifi_on() {

   if [ "$PWR" = "0" ]; then
      modprobe pciehp pciehp_force=1
      sleep 3
      echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/wlan
      sleep 2
      load_modules
      sleep 1
   fi
}

wifi_off() {
   if [ "$PWR" = "1" ]; then
      unload_modules

      echo 0 > /proc/acpi/asus/wlan
      sleep 1
      rmmod pciehp
      rmmod pci_hotplug
   fi
}

case "$1" in
        hibernate|suspend)
                wifi_off
                ;;
        thaw|resume)
                wifi_on
                ;;
        *)
                ;;
esac

The scripts in the “Arch acpi-eee” package provided the basis for this script, and it also works alot better than the existing scripts provided on eeeuser.com.