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!

I was discussing this with my friend Jason and he recommended playing with the font sizes. Sure enough, that did the trick! It seems that the reason everything is so big is that the default font sizes are 10pt. I shrank them down and MAN does it look nice now!

You can edit these values one ways; via gconf-editor or via gconftool-2 on the command line. I won’t post the gconf-editor direction since, if you know your way around it, you can extrapolate the parts you want to edit via the gconftool-2 commands. The following settings worked extremely well for me, but you can adjust the font faces and sizes as you see fit.

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/titlebar_font "Sans Bold 8"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/font_name "Sans 9"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/monospace_font_name "Monospace 9"

This will adjust the title bar, all normal window text and all monospace text, respectively. Again, these numbers looked the best to me, but you can make them even smaller (or bigger) to fit your needs. I did these adjustments on my 1680×1050 display as well, and it looks amazing. Then again, I love small text!

Another way to free up screen space is to auto-hide the panel(s) you have. Now, I know this is cumbersome with the default settings because it’s slow to respond and expand, but you can tweak that stuff too. Here’s what I have set:

gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/auto_hide 1
gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/enable_animations 1
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/animation_speed fast
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/hide_delay 500
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/unhide_delay 100

Now, it opens much faster, animates much faster and goes away much faster. the hide_delay is fast enough that if I’m sloppy with the pointer, it still doesn’t disappear when I don’t want it to. Still annoying? play around with the hide and unhide delays until it works for you. Still too slow to pop in? Set enable_animations to 0 and it’ll come on the screen instantly.

As an added piece of advice, if your panel is over-crowded with junk, you can add another panel (or 2 or 3…) to separate out tasks. For example, I have a small, hidden, non-expanding panel I keep in the bottom left of the screen on which I have my timer-applet and my hamster-applet. Additionally, if you have something on your panel that you always want to see on your screen, add it to another panel that you don’t hide.

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!

I had this happen in both Firefox and Opera. As it turns out, the problem is related to the machine running a 32-bit version of flash with a 64-bit version of the browser. There are 2 ways to fix this: run a 32-bit browser or run 64-bit flash. But, why would you run a 32-bit browser on your sweet 64-bit machine? Well, because there isn’t a 64-bit version of flash… or at least, there wasn’t until recently.

I was tired of this problem so I hit Google and looked for a solution. Sure enough, I found one! Now, I will warn you that the 64-bit Flash is still in Alpha, but i’ve been running it for a few weeks now without any problems. Here’s how you can too.

Before we begin, CLOSE FIREFOX!! That guide will tell you the same thing. I had a friend who borked his entire Flash setup and I have a feeling this is why that happened. Grab the files, write down the instructions, close Firefox and go for it. Personally, I just opened the instructions in Opera and everything worked out just fine.

Start by removing the existing 32-bit version of Flash. If you haven’t yet installed it, you can skip to the next part. To uninstall it, fire up the Synaptic Package Manager, search for nsplugin and select Mark for Complete Removal. It will confirm that you also want to remove flashplugin-nonfree, click Mark and then Apply.

Next, download the alpha 64-bit Flash 10 player from Adobe. One last warning: this is alpha software, and I make no guarantees that it will work, or even not ruin everything, nor does Adobe. Note the filename; in my case, it was libflashplayer-10.0.22.87.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz, so that’s what I’ll use in the console instructions below.

Finally, we need to extract the files and put them in the proper places. The guide will tell you to do this through the X interface, but that’s not my style. Here’s how to do it from a terminal, assuming you downloaded the flash tarball to your Desktop.

$ cd ~/Desktop
$ tar zxvf libflashplayer-10.0.22.87.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
$ mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins
$ mv libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins

That’s it. Now start Firefox back up and you’re good to go! As I said, this fixed my problem completely, so hopefully it’ll fix yours as well. While we’re on the topic, I also highly recommend using FlashBlock so cut down on flash ads, useless video loading and just generally enhance your browsing experience. And don’t worry, you can whitelist whatever sites you want so you won’t have to keep making extra clicks to watch videos.

Of course, their webpage kept kicking me off the album I was trying to buy and I had to keep pulling it back in from my history. And the album page lacked a way to purchase the WHOLE thing, I had to hunt that down from the band’s album list page. How any normal person (ie. my parents, or, GASP, my grandparents) is supposed to buy mp3s from Amazon is beyond me!

Despite all these problems, I finally had a “Buy MP3 Album” link and I was ready to go. I clicked on it and it verified that I would be purchasing the album. “Awesome, here we go,” I thought, thinking I would be taken to the checkout process and be given this magical file which would download the album through the download software I just installed. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, I was greeted with a page saying that the order failed and that I had to do one of the following:

• Verify or update your 1-click billing address in the “Payment Settings” section of Your Account. (with a link)
• Retry with the existing credit card. (no idea what this means, I tried 3 times and got the same errors)
• Choose a different payment method from your account. (the one useful tip, with no indication of HOW i would do that!)
• Enter a new payment method. (Again, no link, no idea how!!!!)

They did have a link to their Help pages, which had all kinds of information on the Kindle 2, tracking my shipment, etc. No indication of how I buy mp3s without 1-click billing enabled or “[c]hoose a different payment method.” Needless to say, this crap is unusable! I’ve uninstalled their software, vowed to never buy mp3s from their site (not that I could if I wanted to, which I did) and I’ll no go out of my way to buy the physical discs from some other site, whether they’re available on Amazon or not.

This is exactly how NOT to sell mp3s. With processes like this, it’s no wonder at all why nobody can cut in to Apple’s market, no matter how over-priced and under-featured their players are and how terrible their iTunes software is!

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!

But, I’ve been aware for a while that regardless of how much I back up, I still have everything in one place. If there were a fire or a robbery, I’d be completely SOL. This fact has prompted me to look for some free or very low cost online file storage services. Most of the ones I found required you to run their software for them to work. This wasn’t very desirable for several reasons, the most important being that I run Linux and most of the services didn’t have a Linux client to use. But even more than that, I wanted to be the one in change of the backups, something that would allow me to just set up a cron job that would encrypt my data and ideally use rsync (via this script) to send that data. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found that, but I did find service that is both cheap and easy to use; Amazon’s Simple Storage Service!

To be fair, I didn’t find it, I was tipped off to it by Jason. I had heard of it, but never even considered using it for backups. Looking at the prices though, I couldn’t resist. For just $0.15/month per GB stored and $0.10 per GB transfered, I would theoretically keep weekly incremental backups of 2GB worth of data for $0.70/month or less!

Jay also tipped me off to some pretty handy Firefox extensions s3:// and S3Fox. S3Fox is much cooler than s3://, but using it on my machine was causing X to use 100% of the cpu for some reason, so it wasn’t really usable for me. s3:// suited me just fine, allowing me to create “buckets” and browse, upload and remove my files from those buckets. It also saved the login info so all I need to do is slap the full S3 path in the address bar (like s3://mybucket/) and I was off. Now that was convenient!

Next up, I needed a way to script my backups. I was planning to use the s3fs Fuse library but I thought that might be overkill. Plus, for whatever reason, I’m just not ready to play with Fuse; it’s super cool, but I just didn’t feel like setting it up. Plus, I found s3cmd. Like s3://, it stores your login info to ease login and access of your files, but it offers one more step that is vital (at least to me); encryption!

s3cmd -e put myfile s3://mybucket

This will upload the myfile to my bucket on s3 and encrypt it on the fly. s3cmd uses symetric gpg and stores the password when you configure your AWS login information. Best of all, it transparently decrypts the file(s) when you download them from your s3 account. You don’t even have to tell s3cmd that the file is encrypted, it automatically knows. Amazing!

So, while I wish I had rsync access to the s3 service, I can make it meet my needs with a little tar magic. Since tar has an option to only grab files that have been changed since a specific date, I can leave my huge, base archive up there and just create a weekly tar file of all of the changed files since the last weekly tar file. So, I have my backup from today (2/9) and in a week (2/16) I’ll create a backup of all files that have changed since today (2/9). A week from then (2/23), I’ll create an archive of all the files that have changed since previous week (2/16) and so on. When the incremental backups start to get too large, I’ll simply create a new base backup and start the process all over again. Should work out swimmingly!

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.

A quick search on Ubuntu Forums yielded this post. Following the link posted, here’s how I got it working from the command line:

$ sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d medibuntu.list
$ wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs w32codecs

After that, the videos fired right up without a hitch. Brilliant! One thing to note: these codecs may be illegal in the US. I’ve read warning about them in the past anyway, though I didn’t happen to see any this time around. It’s kind of a legal gray area I guess, and while you’re not likely to get in trouble for using them, it’s something you should probably know. In any event, if you’re having problems playing videos in Linux (especially rm files), give this a shot.