Best Gateway Solo 1450 page … ever

OK, so the bar is fairly low when it comes to pages about how to deal with the Gateway Solo 1450 and Linux. This page is the only place I’ve seen a sane way to deal with the CPU fan (besides my mentions of it). Here at least you can find out how to set the trip points.

The page is fairly old (2004), and I reproduce the fan section here if only because I fear the page disappearing:

Turning off the Fan
If you were wondering why I made this page despite the fact that there are several already out there, it was for this section right here. The general solution to this problem is to make some stupid shell script that checks the temperature and manually activates/deactivates the fan. This is the wrong way to do it. You see, since you already went through the hassle of installing the latest ACPI patch, you can make use of the kernel’s ability to do this for you!

Add this to the earliest boot script you can find, like rc.sysinit under Redhat. The idea is that you want to turn off the fan before you start fsck’ing your disk so that you can squeeze the most out of your battery life.

echo 100:90:85:80:80 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points
echo 30 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency

# It’s safe to turn the fan off now.
echo -n 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

WARNING These numbers represent the temperature in Celsius at which each state should be triggered. The numbers you should inject into “/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points” may be different for your computer. Before you set these numbers, check what the current values are set to by using cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points. Note that while some fields may be omitted when you read this file (on my machine the Hot field is not shown), all fields must be set when you write to it. The correct order is Critical:Hot:Passive:Active0:Active1 (note colon seperation).

Alternatively, you can use this shell script which I wrote to do the same thing in a more user friendly manner. This script only changes the fields which you mean to change, and not any others. I highly recommend that you use this script (below) because it has the least chance of melting your processor.

function reset_trip_points
{
if [ -f /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points -a -f /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency ]
then

ifs=$IFS
IFS=”
”
for i in `cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points`
do
j=”${i%% C*}”
j=”${j##* }”
i=${i%%[ :]*}
i=${i//[][]/}
case “$i” in
critical|hot|passive|active0|active1)
eval “[ \”x\$$i\” = x0 ] && $i=\$j”
;;
esac
done
IFS=$ifs

echo $critical:$hot:$passive:$active0:$active1 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points

# Activate the kernel’s temperature control system
echo 30 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency

# It’s safe to turn the fan off now.
echo -n 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state
fi
}

# Set the new value for the temperature you would like to change, or leave it
# at zero to get the default.
critical=0
hot=0
passive=0
active0=0
active1=80

# Make the Kernel handle CPU temperature management.
# Do this before the filesystem checks so that the fan will turn off and stop
# draining the battery.
reset_trip_points

Ubuntu/GNOME: When laptop lid closes, suspend the computer

I’m giving this a try. Having the screen blank when I close the laptop lid in Ubuntu hasn’t worked out so well. That usually hangs the system with the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450).

I went into the Power Management settings in GNOME and changed them. Now when the lid is closed, the laptop should go into suspend.

So far that seems to be working. Upon opening the lid, I hit the power button to resume the computer.

I’m wondering if my freezing-cursor problem (from which I can only recover with a hard reboot) is somehow related to suspend/resume. That would be logical, since I don’t have suspend/resume turned on in Debian Lenny due to that feature not working in that distro.

Irrespective of the cursor-freezing issue, having the machine suspend with lid closing is better than having the screen blank. At least this way X doesn’t crash.

Ubuntu/GNOME: When laptop lid closes, suspend the computer

I’m giving this a try. Having the screen blank when I close the laptop lid in Ubuntu hasn’t worked out so well. That usually hangs the system with the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450).

I went into the Power Management settings in GNOME and changed them. Now when the lid is closed, the laptop should go into suspend.

So far that seems to be working. Upon opening the lid, I hit the power button to resume the computer.

I’m wondering if my freezing-cursor problem (from which I can only recover with a hard reboot) is somehow related to suspend/resume. That would be logical, since I don’t have suspend/resume turned on in Debian Lenny due to that feature not working in that distro.

Irrespective of the cursor-freezing issue, having the machine suspend with lid closing is better than having the screen blank. At least this way X doesn’t crash.

History of the Whole Earth Catalog

I’m among those profoundly affected by the Whole Earth Catalog, which oddly enough I encountered in not the ’70s but the ’80s, when a new edition (probably the last) was published. It was called “The Next Whole Earth Catalog,” and I pretty much wore it out over the years after I bought it.

If any book was a precursor to Google, Craigslist or the Web itself, it was “The Whole Earth Catalog.”

On BoingBoing, I found this link to an oral history of the WEC.

More information:

Wikipedia on “The Whole Earth Catalog”

Back in the Ubuntu saddle again

Long story short, I decided to wipe Ubuntu 8.04, which had been stalling during the boot process for an intolerable length of time, from the $0 Laptop’s (Gateway Solo 1450) hard drive.

The problem had something to do with the ATA controller, and I think I know what was “wrong.”

Back to that later.

I decided to throw Slackware 12.1 on first. I did this. X wouldn’t work, and none of my little tweaks to xorg.conf would work.

Solution: Run Wolvix Hunter as a live CD and copy that xorg.conf to the Slackware 12.1 install.

That worked.

I had the full Slackware desktop at my disposal.

If you’re going to use KDE, I really see no faster place (barring the cut-down PCLinuxOS spins) than in Slackware.

I’m still not crazy about KDE, but I did find a KDE text editor (can’t remember which one) that loaded in a second.

I had planned to stick with Slackware for a couple of weeks at least, but I started getting the same kind of screen artifacts that have been plaguing me in Debian Lenny.

So I turned back and reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04, this time with a separate /home partition to make reinstalls less painful.

It works great.

I think my previous problem had something to do with how Ubuntu recognizes drives, and when I deleted and changed partitions after the install, the UUID numbers were somehow screwed up. Not too technical, my explanation, but that’s what I suspect at the moment.

Trying everything to fix my Debian Lenny ‘screen artifacts’ problem

Now that I know what all the crap on my screen is called — “artifacts,” I’m getting closer to figuring out how to fix it.

I’m going deep in Google with: Debian Lenny screen artifacts xorg.conf i810

I’m using the Intel i810 video driver, hence that portion of the search.

Right now I’m trying the suggestion that I comment out this line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section “Module”
Load “i2c”
Load “bitmap”
Load “ddc”
# Load “dri”
Load “extmod”
Load “freetype”
Load “glx”
Load “int10”
Load “vbe”

I’m not sure what the DRI module is, let alone how it could work. I’ll report later.

Hours later: This didn’t work.

Trying everything to fix my Debian Lenny ‘screen artifacts’ problem

Now that I know what all the crap on my screen is called — “artifacts,” I’m getting closer to figuring out how to fix it.

I’m going deep in Google with: Debian Lenny screen artifacts xorg.conf i810

I’m using the Intel i810 video driver, hence that portion of the search.

Right now I’m trying the suggestion that I comment out this line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section “Module”
Load “i2c”
Load “bitmap”
Load “ddc”
# Load “dri”
Load “extmod”
Load “freetype”
Load “glx”
Load “int10”
Load “vbe”

I’m not sure what the DRI module is, let alone how it could work. I’ll report later.

Hours later: This didn’t work.

Practicing what I preach, I do a Debian Lenny install

I’ve been meaning to do a Debian Lenny install so I can see how X behaves in a fresh installation vs. my much-older Debian partition that began life as Etch and has seen many, many packages come and go.

First things first: The Desktop installation of Lenny will not fit in 3 GB. At least the download-and-install software portion wouldn’t work in that amount of space when I selected Desktop during the “task select” portion of the Lenny install.

I didn’t want to make my root partition any bigger than 3 GB, so I elected to do a Standard installation, which doesn’t include X or a desktop environment, although I did notice a few X11-related packages sneaking in.

After the install, I used aptitude to add X, Fluxbox and a few apps.

I started with:

aptitude install xorg fluxbox

With that line, I don’t think I would’ve needed to add xserver-xorg, which I believe is wholly contained in the xorg megapackage. (I’ll have to check this out).

I added a few items to get me going:

aptitude install iceweasel ted geany

Since then (it’s been 10 or so hours), I’ve removed X and Fluxbox, replaced X and brought in Xfce with:

# aptitude install xfce-desktop

I had plenty of space for that.

I’ve also pretty much found out that my problem with “ghosting” on the screen in X continues in this new installation. It’s specific to Lenny; I haven’t seen it in Etch or any other Linux distro. Sometimes running xrefresh in a terminal clears things up, usually not. I can’t figure out what’s going on (I’m no PC video or Xorg expert), and everything I’ve tried hasn’t worked.

I need to keep Googling until I find someone with the same problem who’s smarter than I am. Shouldn’t take long, I hope.

Click turns 1,000 (entries)

I meant to call attention to Click reaching the 1000-entry mark, except that Entry No. 1,000 appeared four days and about 10 entries ago.

There have been a few others posting on Click here and there, and I’d love to find somebody (or bodies) else to contribute to this blog from the Daily News, or even the vast Los Angeles Newspaper Group empire. (Hint: If you’re reading this, you work here, you want to write about technology your way, I’ll set you up.)

The Click blog began in August 2006 at the behest of now-former Daily News/LANG online guru Josh Kleinbaum. It was supposed to be a place for “cool things found on Web,” “viral video,” and stuff that would appeal to the average Web surfer.

Didn’t turn out that way. Not that such things don’t creep into here from time to time, but I quickly made Click about my technological journey, one borne by frugality, making old crap work as much like new as possible — not just because it’s there and it’s fun, but because I really don’t have a whole lot of discretionary income knocking around.

Hence hundreds of articles on a 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop (233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive) , a 2002 Maxspeed Maxterm thin client
(converted to PC use with 1 GHz VIA C3 Samuel processor that doesn’t always run that fast, 256 MB RAM, three swappable 14.4 GB hard drives), a 2002 Gateway Solo 1450 laptop (1.3 GHz Celeron Mobile, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB hard drive), a 2003-ish Palm Tungsten E PDA, and even a 1996 Apple Macintosh Powerbook 1400cs (116 MHz PowerPC with 48 MB RAM and a sub-1GB hard drive), which I’ve managed to use to log into modern Unix-like boxes with MacSSH. (The Holy Grail of this column still remains finding and installing the MacX program, which should bring X11 capability to Mac’s System 7 and allow me to run an X session over SSH on the Powerbook, making it look like it runs Linux or BSD, even if it’s just doing it as an X terminal).

How many other technology bloggers/columnists can get excited over a 22-inch HDTV? That’s our newest gear purchase, and it was a ponderous journey from thinking about it to spending $350. Ilene and I don’t have cable, satellite, we are still using the Motorola V180 cell phones that were made in 2004, and we have and use a landline telephone.

My entire discovery of Linux and BSD on the desktop unfolded in this blog, and that’s what most of its posts are about.

But lately things have been changing a bit. I started a print column about five months ago (available at the Daily News Web site) and have been focusing on broader (read: less geeky) issues.

That’s where columns about digital TV, cell phones and making backups have come into play.

And I’ve been ready to stabilize my PCs somewhat, to stick with the same Linux distribution (or, in the case of the Compaq, OpenBSD, which it’s still running, although it’s a bit slow on that ultra-secure system when compared to how it works with Puppy Linux on live CD).

After all, my work box, a 2003-ish Dell Optiplex, has run Windows XP continuously since the IT people set it up. Not that I have the power to change it, which I don’t. And I’m using the Mac more than ever, mostly for video editing, something I’m still pretty awful at, from a technical and creative standpoint. Hence my latest quest for a video-editing solution that runs in Linux. In case you haven’t been following my tale of woe (and really, why would you?), the state of Linux video editing is pretty sorry at this point, although I’ve heard that an app called Kdenlive should change that somewhat (and I will be trying it).

I’d like to thank the readers of Click, whoever you are, and especially those who have come here over the years as the result of links I’ve gotten from Distrowatch, LXer and elsewhere.

These entries do tend to ramble. When it comes to blogging, I’ve done a lot of things wrong. I tend to write way too long. I ramble. Blogging is supposed to be about the minutia of the writer, and there’s plenty of that here. My hope is that all I’ve “gone through” trying to get things to work might, in a small or even big way, help some of you out there, just as many other bloggers have helped (and continue to help) me.

Whether this blog can be deemed “successful,” or just “there,” is something still up for debate, but the key to blogging, successful or otherwise, is obsession and compulsion. I’m sure there’s another way to get to 1,000 entries, but if there is, I know nothing about it.

Different Linux distributions handle things very differently

Debian and Ubuntu are supposed to be so close when it comes to code, with one being derived from the other and all, but a look at the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /etc/fstab files of the two distributions shows that each has a different way of doing things.

When it comes to autoconfiguring hardware and mounting drives, there indeed are differences.

I can’t say yet whether one or the other is better, but it makes looking at one distro to figure out what’s going wrong with the other quite a bit more difficult.

I suppose I could call on a deep understanding of the Linux kernel, autoconfiguration, HAL, the X server and drive-labeling conventions.

Unfortunately I don’t really have any expertise in any of these areas. I’m pretty much an armchair hack (as opposed to hacker) who is just trying to get by on the desktop.

I have a certain amount of affection for Debian that spurs me on to figuring out how to make it run well on whatever systems I’m using. A good deal of this goodwill toward Debian is the fact that I just about always seem to be able to figure things out, sometimes quickly, oftentimes not so much, and usually with the help of many Debian users out there who know way more than I do.