Google will give you a plethora of guides for compiling the drivers (this one is probably the best), but I just couldn’t get things to load. It was also never clear what version of the drivers I should be trying to run. Most tutorials made reference to 1.0.0.9, some to 1.0.0.10, but the current version (at the time of this writing) is 1.0.1.9. In the end, though, that’s the version I did manage to get working. Here’s how I did it:

• Grab the driver from the Atheros site Dead link, copy is here
• Locate the file on your computer, then make a new directory (name it anything, AR8131 will work) and move that file there
• Decompress the file
• Enter the resulting src directory

Once you’re in there, it’s time to start that terminal magic! One note; if you’ve already added another network card to your machine, the Atheros card may be eth1, not eth0. This was the case for me, and I’ll treat all the instructions here as though that’s the case for you too. If it’s not, just change eth1 to eth0.
make && sudo make install
sudo modprobe atl1e
sudo ifconfig eth1 up
sudo dhclient eth1


At this point, the machine will try to assign an IP address for the card. This may or may not work; for me, it did not. To get mine working, I simply restarted the networking init script. Before that though, let’s add the following to /etc/network/interfaces
# The secondary network interface
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp

And lastly, restart the network on the machine (you CAN reboot, but there’s no need).
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

At this point, you should have your network card up and running with an IP address assigned by your DHCP server or router. If not, keep hunting I guess, but you should at least be very close!

When I got it back, I immediately installed Ubuntu’s most current version, 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I was really impressed with it; even more-so than with 9.04 in fact. But I ran in to a problem when I was setting it all up; I couldn’t get the backlight adjustment to work.

I resorted to the original Ubuntu Forums article on it but I quickly found that it no longer worked. LVDS and VGA had been replaced with LVDA1 and VGA1, and changing the command still didn’t work; it complained about something which I no longer remember. But, that error (as well as replies to that thread) lead me to this Launchpad comment about disabling KMS.

Seems KMS is enabled by default for a certain chipset, specifically the Intel i915 chipset. My next questions, of course, were “what is KMS” and “how do I disable it”? Looking around, I found out that KMS, or Kernel Modesetting, could be disabled like so:

Edit: /etc/default/grub
Change: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
To: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset"

Then run

sudo update-grub

Now, reboot and KMS will be disabled. We can now refer back to the original post here, adding the following to the startup applications (or just running it from the command line each time, you’re call I guess).

xrandr --output LVDS --set BACKLIGHT 102 --set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL legacy --output VGA --auto

This still won’t make the brightness buttons on the keyboard work, but it WILL make xbacklight work. As the article points out, you can then set hotkeys for xbacklight commands.

So what do you lose by disabling KMS? Well, according to this article, KMS offloads the graphics initialization from X to the kernel, which has some benefits. But, the fact remains that it doesn’t work on a lot of machines (the Samsung X360, The MacBook and possible MacBook Pro, MSI’s U90, U100, and U120 netbooks and the Asus EeePC, to name a handful), so for users with this hardware, you don’t lose anything ;). I’ve read about some people having success with KMS in newer kernels, but it didn’t work for me so I’m not going to bother posting it. I’m hopeful that this will be fixed when 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) is released, but I haven’t yet tried the beta release to see.

• Toss some laundry in the machine
• Start my lunch and work while it cooks
• Sign for packages when they are delivered

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. However, to make telecommuting possible, there are some technologies I simply MST have working. VPN is a big one, so I can get at the computers back in the office. SSH and FTP access is important to manage servers and files. And of course, I need to communicate with people; for that, we use AIM and Skype. Up until recently, it’s been enough for me to use my Nokia N800 to make my calls back to the office. It’s no good for chatting with video though, so I needed to set it up on my desktop with my camera and, preferably, my headset.

Simple enough task really; both my Logitech webcam and Plantronics headset work out of the box with Ubuntu (at least in 9.04) with nearly zero configuration required. I just plug them in, tweak Skype quickly and I’m up and running. However, with the addition of PulseAudio in the more recent version of Ubuntu, this became a little trickier.

You see, in the new version of Skype, the ONLY option I have for ANY audio, input or output, is simpley PulseAudio. No control for which device to use for different tasks. Enter padevchooser, short for PulseAudio Device Chooser.

It’s a pretty sweet application, and you should have no problem installing it since it’s in the repository (note: I’ve added the Medibunutu repo, and it’s possible it came from there). Once installed, you simply run it, from the command line, the run dialog, gnome-do or whatever method you choose, and you’ll get an icon in the notification area. Click on that, choose Volume Control, and you’re off and running. There are tabs for Playback, Recording, Output Devices, and Input Devices. Any current audio stream will show up in the list in the appropriate tab and you can move them around to different devices.

The easiest way to configure Skype is to place a test call. As soon as you start that call it will show up in the list. Move the “Skype: Output” stream to your headset in the Playback tab, do the same for “Skype: Input” in the Recording tab and you’re off and running. All Skype audio is now sent to your headset for easy chatting. I still haven’t figured out how to make it ring through the speakers and still use the headset for chatting, but this is good enough for now. Padevchooser made living with PulseAudio that much better!

Ultimately, I just wanted a machine that was light, had a long-lasting battery and had a full-size keyboard. The 10-inch netbooks looked like a good buy, but it was difficult to find one that was worth buying. I had been considering the Lenovo S10, and came close to picking one up about a month ago when I found one for just under $300. What stopped me was reading about overheating problems with the machine. I’ve wanted the MSI Wind since it was announced, but it was always over the $400 mark, which I don’t think is a reasonable price for that class of machine. All of the other offerings were either overpriced, lacked some key features or had batteries that just weren’t going to cut it. In most cases, all of these were true.

I had also been interested in many of the 13-inch laptops but was often thrown off by their price. They were usually well over the $1,000 mark (sometimes even breaking the $2,000 mark) and I just wasn’t willing to drop that kind of cash. One fateful day last week, Monday to be exact, Aaron tipped me off to the reduced price of the Samsung X360 on Amazon’s Gold Box. It was marked down to $1049 and included a $300 rebate. $749 was a little more than I wanted to spend, but for a laptop of this caliber, it seemed worth considering. Turns out, I wasn’t alone in that thought. In the end, I jumped on it, as did Aaron and Jason.

The machine arrived this past Friday, but sadly, I didn’t have time to play with it until Sunday. I did have time to open it up and take some pictures though, and man was I happy I went for this deal! The machine looks great and it’s so small and light that you really have to handle it to believe it.

The first thing I did was boot up the Xubuntu Live CD image from a USB drive and wipe out the copy of vista that came with the machine. I swore to never touch vista when it was first released, and I wasn’t about to go back on my word. So I blew away the partition the machine came with and set it up to install both XP (in the event I ever NEED windows) and Xubuntu.

The only downside was that many of the things that needed to be tweaked to run on the machine I didn’t know how to do in Xubuntu, so I tried Kubuntu since I read everything worked out of the box on it. In the end, even that turned out to be too much hassle for the moment, so I opted for Ubuntu as I wanted to be using the machine that Monday. I had also planned to install the 64-bit version of XP, but the thing didn’t want to run properly once installed so I ended opting for the 32-bit version. After all, I wasn’t really going to be using it that often (if at all) and I was running the 64-bit version of Linux, so I was OK with the decision.

As you can see, I also pulled all the stickers off the front of the machine (relocating all but the vista sticker to the bottom) for a sleeker look. You can also see a size comparison of the new machine with my old 15-incher. Considerably more portable, to say the least.

So far, I’ve used Skype to make video calls, I’m running all kinds of flashy Compiz goodies and even with constant use I get just over 4 hours of battery life. It’s not the perfect machine, but it’s really, really close, and for the price, I’ve got no regrets. I’ll leave the post at that for now until I have some more time to tweak the machine, but so far it’s running beautifully!

A short while ago, I had a drive that started clicking every time I would transfer large amounts of data to of from the box. Since all of the drives are mounted on the same bracket, it was nearly impossible to tell which drive was actually doing the clicking. I had a spare that I picked up a while back, so I figured I would wait for the drive to fail and then simply replace it. The problem was, when the drive finally did fail, another drive also failed with it, and if you know anything about RAID-5, you know it can only handle 1 drive failing at a time. Things were looking bad.

I noticed, however, that both of the drives failed at the same time, which made me think that only the first drive was an actual failure and that either mdadm, the drive controller or something else cause the system to think that the other drive also failed. This was my only hope, so I set forth re-adding the second failed drive to the array and crossing my fingers.

In my case, /dev/sdc1 and /dev/sdd1 were the 2 drives that failed. /dev/sdc went first, so I suspected that /dev/sdd was still ok. After some prodding of the PLUG mailing list and a little poking around on Google, I was able to solve my problem. First, I needed to see if I could verify that /dev/sdc was really the drive that failed; I did this with mdadm’s –examine function.

sudo mdadm --examine /dev/sda1
sudo mdadm --examine /dev/sdb1
sudo mdadm --examine /dev/sdc1
sudo mdadm --examine /dev/sdd1

Why do all of the drives? Well, I was looking for a sign of inconsistency or other problems. Sure enough, the superblock data on /dev/sdc was different from the other 3 drives, leaving me pretty confident that my plan would work. All I had to do now was replace the drive and figure out how to tell mdadm to use /dev/sdd1 even though it thought the drive was a goner.

Since I use 4 of the same drives and for whatever reason the /dev label don’t match up with the controller labels (ie. /dev/sda is not on port 1 of the card), I needed to find out the serial numbers of the drives. There are a couple ways to do this, but for whatever reason, only smartctl worked for me. Here’s a couple ways to look it up (where /dev/sdX is the device you are trying to find information about, like /dev/sdc in my case):

sudo hdparm -i /dev/sdX
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX

Once I knew the serial number, I shut the box down, replaced the drive and booted back up. Now I just needed to format /dev/sdc1, add /dev/sdd1 back to the array, add /dev/sdc1 as a new device to the array.

sudo fdisk /dev/sdc (set up 100% of the drive as a Linux-raid Autodetect)
sudo mdadm --assemble --force /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdd1
sudo mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdc1
cat /proc/mdstat

That last line shows the status of all mdadm arrays running. When I ran it, it told me that all 4 drives were online and that the array was rebuilding/resyncing all of the information. 9 hours later, I was up and running.

As an aside, I’ve had terrible experiences with 500GB drives. I the past year I’ve had 2 of them fail on me (both Seagate). I’ve also had about 3 160GB drives fail on me (2 Seagate, 1 Western Digital) within the past 3 years. In nearly every case, the drives were still under warranty. Because of the rapidly declining quality of hard drives today, I’ve been keeping my data spread across a number of sources, some even in triplicate. Since this last failure, I’ve switched from 500GB Seagate drives to 1TB Western Digital drives and I’ll have to see how that decision plays out in the long run.

For now, I’m backing up the entire array on to another 1TB drive and I plan to replace the array with a simple RAID-1 array made of 2 1TB drives while still keeping another backup on a 3rd, external 1TB drive. I have a daily cron job that pulls data from all of my machines and even my web server and backs them up in various locations. The moral of the story I guess is that it’s good to know how to fix your equipment, but you need to be ready for a catastrophic failure by keeping meticulous backups of your most crucial information.

I have some ideas for the normal automated plant watering, temperature-based fan controls and email and chat LED alerts, but I don’t have any revolutionary plans for the device. Talking to Jason, he gave me the idea of controlling motors with the unit which got me thinking back to the Assembly-based cars we coded for in college. I can see putting together a little car that can sense and route around obstacles and he suggested mounting some IR transmitters to turn TVs in the area on and off at random, which would be pretty fun too. I caught this “Large scale DOT Matric printer” on Hackaday too, which made me think about feeding images into the device and having it drive motors to actually create them on a large scale either like a DOT Matrix printer or a planer.

Anyway, we’ll see how much I do with this thing and how far I get. If nothing else, it’s an excuse to get back into hardware hacking. And if things go well, I can actually start posting projects up here. If you have any ideas for cool things to try out or questions about the unit, please post in the comments.