I installed a couple of Gnome applets that I find real useful today. The first one is music-applet , which got me hooked to using Rhythmbox, which got me hooked to using Last.fm and its neat recommendation feature. I love that the Cover Art is also automatically displayed, even for songs that you can get off Amie.st like State Radio’s music. It’s in the repositories, so a simple sudo aptitude install music-applet from the administrator user gets it.

The other cool applet I got is the timer applet, sudo aptitude install timer-applet which gives you a timer that you can set to various tasks. Being one of those unofficial ADD sufferers I lose track of time when I get on the internet and it’s useful to be reminded that I need to do some stuff now and then. It has a neat pie chart that gives you an idea of roughly how much time has been used up since you started out, useful to tell you how much you’ve slacked off.

I just set up one of my old computers up in the corner of the living room so that there’s nothing but the bare necessities there. I SSH into it and do my stuff and then get out. It’s a lot of fun, really. While setting up SSH, I discovered that you could login to that SSH server without using a password if you used a pair of keys to handle the login. I’ve already been using Seahorse for a while now to handle my GPG keys and I noticed it could create a pair of SSH keys too. So I went through the process and it was super simple. All I had to do was:

1. Go to Key » Create New Key…
2. Choose SSH key
3. Enter a description and go to the next step
4. Enter a passphrase twice
5. Allow it to set up the other computer by supplying my login details

That was all, and now I have paired-key authentication and don’t have to enter the password every time I log in to that computer. Hurray!

If you have a default install of Ubuntu and you enabled Desktop Effects you’ll have trouble when you try to play a video. The video itself will play just fine normally, but if you try to combine that with a couple of Compiz effects, like trying to make it a bit transparent or trying to move the video while it’s playing, or rotating the cube while the video is on you’ll get a blank screen, sometimes green, sometimes grey. The way to fix this is:

Totem:

The inbuilt player. Open a Terminal and copy paste the following command:
gstreamer-properties
Then change the default output plugin to X Window System (no xv)

mplayer:

The process is essentially the same, you change the output plugin to x11. It’ll be okay so long as you’re not using xv. If you’re using the command line interface just add -vo x11 to the end. So a command to play abc.avi would be:
mplayer abc.avi -vo x11
If you’re using the GUI, you can change the settings there.

If you’ve played around with installing a lot of distributions you’ve made a mistake atleast once, and broken your partition table. Or atleast I hope so, because I’ve done it more than my fair share of times. The most recent was when I was installing Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit and I crashed GPartEd while partitioning. My problem was that I already had four partitions [1] on the hard drive and I also wanted a swap partition but I made a mistake somewhere along the line and ended up with a logical partition outside of an extended partition. This is very bad stuff.

What happened next was terrifying, both GPartEd and Ubuntu’s ubiquity installer claimed the entire drive was empty. Now this is very bad, because there are files on this computer that I adore and would hate losing. I was just about ready to kill myself when I found a forum thread on the Ubuntu Forums[2] that mentioned testdisk. It’s in the universe repositories and you can get it by enabling Universe in System » Administration » Software Sources and then running:
sudo aptitude install testdisk
It also creates a backup of your partition table if you want. I had a broken one but I wanted more than one shot at it so I emailed myself the backup and got ready to put my hope to the test. When it happened it was almost anticlimactic, three menus later (all in a simple user friendly style) I had my partition table back! And all the data stored on the drive was accessible once more. I was incredibly happy about that, and made a small donation to the software author. The single most useful piece of software I’ve ever used on Linux.

[1] Ankit Chaturvedi on Partitions
[2] My Forum Thread with the problem.

The laptop works perfectly with Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit.

The same model number sometimes has different processors and RAM configuration, so the one I have has
1. An Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2Ghz processor.
2. 1GB of RAM
and is straight from HP.

Connectivity:

1. Wireless - It worked right off the bat. All I had to do was select the network and enter my WEP key. Very simple, and really nice. Intel 3945 PRO Wireless.
2. Bluetooth: Bluetooth worked perfectly and pairing/bonding works straight off. However you’ll have to install the gnome-vfs-obexftp package to be able to transfer files by obexftp. I hope this is fixed in the next release. You can find the bug here: 131530. Until then, open a terminal and type in:
   sudo aptitude install gnome-vfs-obexftp
3. Ethernet: Broadcom card, works perfectly out of the box.
4. Firewire: I don’t have a firewire device, but they’re rumoured to be compatible.
5. USB: All ports work.
6. Modem: I no longer have a dialup line so I can’t test this. However the modem is recognised.

Input:

1. Touchpad: It’s a Synaptics touchpad and works perfectly. You can even enable a horizontal scroll option even though the touchpad doesn’t have such a place marked. I like to turn off tap-to-click. It’s annoying while typing.
2. Keyboard and buttons: All the buttons work perfectly including the volume controls and the bluetooth/wireless button. Power button brings up the ‘Shut down, Restart,…’ screen by default.

Display:

1. Graphics work well. 1280×800 out of the box. Desktop Effects work perfectly (except for Blur - which you shouldn’t turn on. It nearly freezes the desktop, supposedly a bug in the Intel driver. The driver itself isn’t great but it works just fine unless you want to play something like Spring). There is one bug, there are 2 or 3 flashes before GDM hits the right resolution and starts up. I’m not sure how to fix this but I don’t think it’s hurting the monitor.
2. Dual monitors are still a pain. If I remember right they were easier to set up on the 32-bit version of Gutsy and that makes no sense. Anyway, if you boot up with another monitor connected it will be recognised and your laptop screen will be set to that monitor’s resolution and one will mirror the other. In this setting you can use Desktop Effects. It’s a lot of trouble getting the two monitors to be separate screens and I don’t think you can get Direct Rendering then, so Compiz is out of the question.
3. If you use the Fast User Switcher tool to switch users, or if you switch users any other way, the second user will not have hardware acceleration. If you have Compiz enabled you’ll get a grey screen or a white screen. Some people have suggested increasing the VideoRAM through an xorg.conf setting but it hasn’t worked for me at all. I believe it’s a limitation of the Intel driver.
4. The dimming-when-off-battery works, and you can also set the brightness using the Fn key and the brightness keys, but I think that’s a hardware setting anyway.

Processor:

1. CPU scaling works. If you want to scale the cpu yourself (instead of letting the computer automatically shift) you will need to reconfigure the CPU scaling applet for the Gnome Panel to be root.
2. The CPU allows Virtualisation, but you will have to enable it in the BIOS. Hit F8 while the boot screen with HP logo is showing and then go to the advanced settings (I forget what they’re called, it’s one of the right most menu items) and enable VT or virtualisation technology or whatever it’s called in your firmware version.

Sound:

1. Output works fine, I don’t have a mic or headphones to test though I suppose they’d be fine.

Power-saving:

1. As above, frequency scaling works just fine.
2. Suspend works perfectly.
3. Hibernate works but it’s slow, take around 20-30 seconds to return from hibernate. It also displays a lot of text (errors?) before hibernating, but restores just fine.

It worked nice and neat out of the box. But then, this laptop has always worked fine with Ubuntu (and probably with other distros too)

Part of choosing hardware to add to a linux enthusiast’s computer has always involved eliminating all of ATI’s products from the list because of their notoriously bad support for non-Windows operating systems. Until recently ATI was despised by the Linux crowd because not only did the drivers suck but ATI kept promising to make better ones and never delivered. The past month has been wonderful though, first the ATI drivers became phenomenally better with increases in performance upto 90% and then AMD (who now owns ATI) announced that they would open up the graphics chip documentation so that open source drivers can be written.

In Madras atleast, the ATI line seems slightly cheaper, so I’m looking forward to this news though I won’t buy anything until I can be sure that the new drivers will support the card I want. However if they do deliver on their latest promise then ATI will be up over nVidia simply over the open drivers issue. It’s important because that way upgrading my distribution won’t include a painful experience with the graphics drivers. Go AMD!

Update: And it’s confirmed! ATI will help with open-source Linux drivers.

I noticed that I’d gotten a couple of search requests on how to clear up the menus in Gnome. After you install a lot of applications you can get quite a lot of entries in your System » Preferences menu, and because of Gnome’s guidelines of only having two levels of menus (except for Accessibility, strangely) you get to have a cluttered Preferences menu.

The easy way is to right click on System and click Edit Menus. Then you just uncheck the entries you don’t want in the menus. You can always enable them later, if you so wish.

Okay, so that may not be the goal of Fyre, but it does serve that purpose well for those interested. It’s really simple to do get a fancy looking image with Fyre, by running through a bunch of random parameters (Ctrl-R) and changing the background and foreground colours all over the place.

Fyre renders Peter De Jong maps, and since I don’t precisely understand what those are you had better read their about page. Basically, the image is a map of the probability that the point lies at the pixel, and the probability is defined by a funny equation. You change the parameters in the equation and you get many different looking chaotic graphs. It’s actually pretty cool to play with.

Fyre also has a nifty animation feature which animates the difference between two maps. It’s fascinating to watch the images morph into each other, but the animation produces an uncompressed .avi, so you might want to try ffmpeg to encode it into a reasonably sized file.

HDR Images allow you to show a larger range in the colours and intensity of different areas in your subject. Done well, they can yield some really beautiful pictures that showcase a large number of colours. To get a HDR image, you need to have a camera that can take shots at different exposure settings. You’ll also need a steady enough hand to get the shots properly, unless you have a tripod. Once you’ve taken the different shots (bracketing makes this much easier) you just need to transfer them to your computer and fire up qtpfsgui.

There, you just import the files and (if you’ve got some slight movement of the camera) activate the anti-ghosting feature. Don’t set the number of iterations too high or it’ll take way too long. Also, if the pictures have all been jerked around, then the anti-ghosting feature will not work very well, and you’ll get some double images. Once you’ve got the composite image, hit Tonemap, and play around with the settings. Some of the choices will be good for skies, and some others for vehicles and roads. The best way to find the nicest tonemapping operator is to set a low size for the preview and to try each of the operators, move the sliders around a little bit until you’re satisfied and remember there’s only so much a program can do, the rest is up to you

Spring (formerly TA:Spring) is a full 3D RTS. The game is played by getting one or more mods for the engine (which is completely GPL). The original goal was to run all Total Annihilation mods and 3rd party stuff. It seems to have passed that long ago and is now a damn complete game.

The best part of the game is the ability to control specific units from an FPS perspective. Selecting the unit and pressing ‘C’ puts you into FPS mode and you can control that unit directly. This is really cool when you try it out on aircraft in fierce dogfights and adds a really clever element to the gameplay, especially since full 3d air combat means you can fly underneath and above other aircraft (unlike most other RTS games) . There can be thousands of units in the game at the same time, but micromanaging isn’t a problem because some units have a rudimentary AI inbuilt which you can set. The terrain is great and deforms with sufficient damage causing craters and the like.

There are units in every medium and with the BA and other similar mods you’ll have units on sea, air, and land. The mods are usually well constructed and the sides balanced, so the multiplayer aspect of Spring (which is the most important part) is rarely neglected.

Getting the AIs to work seems to be non-trivial, so single player missions may not be extremely easy to setup, but the Random Enemies scripts should keep you busy while you learn. The Setup Guide is well written and easy to follow and they even have a Debian package repository to make installation of the binaries simple. There’s also a section for Ubuntu in the Setup Guide, so things can’t be much simpler.