FSCA16xx & Ubuntu 8.10

One week from the official release and Ubuntu 8.10 support was added to the fsca16xx script.

One bump though:
Currently there is a bug and yet another bug in Ubuntu 8.10 that causes it to load 2 different drivers (ath_pci && ath5k) for the Atheros wireless adapter. This causes the wireless not to work.

The script update does not handle this as it affects most of the people that use a wireless Atheros adapter and not just FSC laptops. It should be delt with by the Ubuntu Kernel team.

acer_acpi & seg faults

In my attempts to modify acer_acpi and add it the required key pooling, I bumped into a problem...

Segmentation faults, lots of them...

I tried the latest acer_acpi code and had similar results.

Reason for seg faults:
kernel 2.6.27 - at least the one in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex.

Reverting to 2.6.26 made the seg faults go away but the modified module still has not shown signs of doing what I told it to do... :S

fscamiloa16xx deprecation

Finally after a year and a half the patch I made is now available in Ubuntu Intrepid and its derivatives.

That means that starting Ubuntu 8.10 the script will no longer be necessary.

Fujitsu Amilo A1650g is supposed to work out of the box upon installation - LI1718 users please contact me ASAP I need some details.

This is good news. I cleared the time line I had imagined for this script as it was supposed to evolve into version 1.0, and instead I returned to my old attempt to add hotkeys support for acer_acpi.

acer_acpi has many benefits over acerhk:
1) It will be fully working on 64bit systems
2) Newer code and closer to the latest kernel
3) Works with ACPI calls as opposed to Assembler calls
...

As I have recently finished my BSc degree, I became a full time employee for BMC Software. For that reason it is important for me to mention (for the record) that I am doing this little project on my own free time and I receive no benefits from Fujitsu-Seimens corporation.

N810 joy

I finally received my own Nokia N810.

Beautiful piece of work. I have been playing with it for the past week:
1) Hacking the hardware keyboard to support Hebrew and English simultaneously (ctrl+chr to switch).
2) Move parts of the rootfs to the internal card - I'm having problems with this one).
3) Setting it with the proper set of applications - There are *too* many applications out there... :(

The GPS is somewhat troublesome as:
1) It take ages to get a fix.
2) No Israel maps - this can be solved through integration with http://freemap.co.il ... but I'm still working on it.

I'm also lacking video support on skype... Or a video recording application...

fsca16xx project timeline

Finally, I am about to finish my BSc in CS.

This gave me the opportunity to make a list of the changes I would like to make to the fsca16xx project.

The changes can be viewed at the project's wiki: http://code.google.com/p/fscamiloa16xx/wiki/ProjectTimeline

acerhk compile fixed!

Finally I have solved the compile issues of acerhk.

Solution - Makefile changes:
1) turn 'CFLAGS=' to 'EXTRA_CFLAGS='
2) add 'V ?= 0'
3) add the following to the acerhk.ko compile line:
M=$(CURDIR) V=$(V)

That means that for the latest version of fsca16xx.sh, when pressing the wireless button, the Activate/De-Activate notifications work again (been broken for a little less then a year).

I also published it on launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/53953/comments/25

acer_acpi fork state

The acer_acpi fork I made which has the framework for key pulling through ACPI, have worked on Gutsy but stopped working in Hardy. I am in the midst of my investigation.

Hopefully I will find out why soon.

Hardy & ATI

I finally achieved 3D with the open-source radeon driver on my Amilo (which have the Xpress 200M). I've been using it for the last two weeks with full compiz and by now only came upon several minor issues:
1) After resume from hibernation, the window shadows become garbled with green and red lines.
2) When starting Firefox, it will start full screened. Pressing F11 twice while in the address bar return Firefox to it's normal size.
3) Flash is slow. Solved by installing the Flash 10 beta, still consumes a lot of cpu, but works better.

I've used Ubuntu Hardy with the following repositories:
1) 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tormodvolden/ubuntu hardy main' - supplied the git ATI driver.
2) 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ubuntu hardy main' - supplied the git libdrm2. don't use the mesa from there as it does not works with compiz (white screen).
3) 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stikonas/ubuntu hardy main' - supplied the git mesa.

Beside the packages I added to the device section in xorg.conf:

Option "EnablePageFlip" "1"
Option "ColorTiling" "1"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "DynamicClocks" "on"
Option "EXANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"


Hardy Beta is now supported - fsca16xx

Last night I've pushed Ubuntu Hardy beta support to the installation script.

For those of you that use hibernation -

Currently, the wireless will not resume correctly, so after resuming, you should run the following lines to make it work:

sudo rmmod ath_pci ath_rate_sample ath_hal
sudo modprobe ath_pci


In the following weeks I'll make the script do that automagically on resume.

some updates for the fujitsu script

I've just made some updates to the fujitsu auto installation script. Its not "the" update I wanted to do, just some fixes.

Changes:

* use of newest atheros instead of ndiswrapper (should support AR5007).


I did not had time to get into the "add the missing bits to acerhk so that it will properly read the wireless led state".