colin@
colino.net

Finally, I’ve been able to upload our photos of my sister Fanny and William’s wedding.

Here they are, patiently Gimped by Clo to make them better :)

I’m happy to say “Welcome” to Elyos, my new (and first) nephew, from Clo’s brother and his girlfriend :-)

Congratulations to Laure and Antoine!

I received my new laptop, a Sony Vaio N21S. I chose this one because it had an Intel video card, which means free drivers…

After installing Ubuntu 7.04, I’m glad to say that most of the things work:

• CPU scaling,
• video (DRI and XV),
• sound (although the controls are weird, pluging headphones doesn’t cut the sound to the speaker),
• SD card reader
• Wifi (Atheros chipset)
• Wired network

What doesn’t work out of the box:

• Playing multimedia content (mp3s, DVDs). Not only the default media player is the total failure named Totem-gstreamer, but also, due to software patents (which are illegal in my country, last time I checked), I had to apt-get lots of stuff from the multiverse repository, and even run a script to get libdvdcss installed. Now, Totem still doesn’t play DVDs, because it “can’t find a mountpoint for /dev/scd0″ (!? since when does one need to mount video DVDs?), but I can’t care less, as I use MPlayer, Ogle and Rhythmbox for the mp3s.
• Sound keys (mute, down, up): I had to modify my .Xmodmap to add them.
• S3 sleep (aka Suspend to Ram): I had to modify the kernel boot options (add acpi_sleep=s3bios), modify the settings in /etc/default/acpi-support, and hack around /etc/acpi/**/* with a chainsaw. I can send a tar.gz to anyone who wants it, but I’m not publishing anything as they are ugly hacks. Unfortunately, after 4 hours of going to sleep/rebooting/ad nauseum, I’m not in the mood to clean the stuff and submit it. I know, that’s bad.

What still doesn’t work:

• Brightness keys, CRT/LCD key: They seem to be handled by ACPI as they don’t generate any event. Sadly, looking at the sony_acpi and sony_laptop kernel modules’ source reveals that they use GHKE to get these keys’ events, and in my disassembled DSDT, I can’t find any mention of GHKE. Probably Sony changed the method. I think I’ll try to hack on that from time to time…

Even if the Windows Vista Home Premium that came preinstalled only survived 5 minutes (the time for me to read and laugh at the perverse EULA and click “Hell, no!”), it’s a good thing that Vista exists. It has two advantages:

• It forces vendors to ship laptops, even low-cost ones, with at least 1GB of memory. So I can enjoy 1GB of memory, of which 850MB are free just after boot. Thanks to XFCE and Claws Mail ;)
• It forces vendors to make correct DSDT tables, as Microsoft decided “enough with stupid crashes due to stupid ACPI implementations”. It’s the first time I’ve seen iasl end up with “Compilation complete. 0 Errors, 1 Warnings, 0 Remarks, 33 Optimizations”. Previously the error count was around 50 with my ASUS…

I’ll let you guess what Sony replied to me when I asked for the refund of Vista and Microsoft Works. Some things change slowly…

A few rapid things :)

• 10 days ago I’ve been to Anne and Erwan’s wedding. Long trip, but great time, I was happy to share this moment with them and to meet half of #mandrivafr in the process :-)
• last week, holidays at Clo’s parents’ new place, where I helped her father with his move. Lots of real-world-hacking, lots of fun, and a good way to empty the mind…
• this week, Claws Mail 2.10.0 has been released, with lots of improvements. CVS already has new features that had been asked for a few times, tagging and sorting by thread date.
• this week-end, my little sister’s wedding with William :-)
• and next week, I should become the happy owner of a Nokia n800, thanks to Guido Rudolphi ! That will, hopefully, allow me to better test and improve Claws’ Maemo port…