Change 'n' stuff...

The ignorance with which I confront this project is limitless. Which is a pompous way of saying that I made some mistakes and have changed some stuff and accepted some limits.

First, though, I received my 1GB chip today, so the little thing is now at its maximum 2GB potential. Switching the modules the other day made today a 2-minute job. Nice! Now what to do with the leftover 256MB module? Anyone want to trade it for an original blank SD filler card?

All I'm really feeling the need for now is a bracket to make my own custom case, and looking forward to the arrival of my eraser-enabled OEM pen. I think the only other physical upgrade I can do would be the Bluetooth module -- I believe it's Bluetooth 1.1 as-is... Oh, and I could add a PCMCIA card, either a 32-bit card-reader or a GPS module.

Open Office

Lot of notes to get to: lets start with what I did first -- I uninstalled Open Office. It was associated with text files, like the sources.list file -- which when opened were blank, but should have displayed text. And for some reason there is no gui text editor included with the xfce4 metapackage. Just weird. I actually had to edit some text files in nano! Which is not horrible, but isn't fun either.

So, OO.O -- gone. If I find I need it, I can install it. About the only thing I think I might need from that set is the Presenter package. If I need a word processor, there's always Abiword.

Xfce

For text, I installed mousepad, which is the standard Xfce editor. I'm familiar with it, it's just about useful, and it's something one needs in any sort of Linux setup. Text files are ubiquitous. Which is why I'm surprised that the metapackage didn't include it.

On the flip side, xfce4 did include orage, which is nice enough I guess, but is not as basic as a text editor. And I don't really like it -- it uses Evolution's database, so really, who needs it? Evolution is a disaster as an app. I could never get it to sync both to my Palm and my Google calendar. Plus it's just ugly. Which makes me dislike Orage by extension. Sorry, little calendar package, you are gone. In the future, I'll be looking at Sunbird.

When you remove orage Synaptic will ask to remove xfce4. Go ahead -- it's just a metapackage, none of the things that it installed will be uninstalled. It's like a big basket -- now that all the stuff is in the cupboard, you can get rid of it.

The repositories hold quite a few nifty Xfce-specific apps. The ones I installed are as follows:

• xfce4-notifyd (notification popups -- install libnotify-bin too, for scriptable notifications, and python-notify for wicd notifications.)
• xfce4-battery-plugin (for power monitoring, but redundant with the power-manager one)
• xfce4-power-manager (this is a portable, after all)
• xfce4-power-manager-plugins (could probably remove xfce4-battery plugin)
• xfce4-sensors-plugin (when it complains about the HDD daemon, do what it says to do)
• xfce4-terminal (xterm is adequate, but this one is tabbed, and better looking)
• xfce4-verve-plugin (a must-have mini-command-line for the panel)
• xfce4-weather-plugin (sweet and simple!)
• xfce4-places-plugin (I also installed catfish for searching from this menu, or any folder)
• thunar-media-tags-plugin (view/edit mp3 tags)
• thunar-archive-plugin (extract archives here, or there, or...)
• thunar-thumbnailers (preview images, movies, etc.)
  

There are a lot of other plugins for the panel (right-click the panel to customize it). And I well may install xfprint4 at some future point. I'm sure I'll have to print something.

I was going to install xfce4-mixer too, but it sucked in an absolutely massive amount of dependencies, for what is essentially a volume control. I may have a replacement. More in a near-future post.

Note that there is a bug in the libnotify1 package on Karmic, which affects the notification popups. You can work around it by installing the Jaunty package (bottom of the page, the i386 version.) Download it, and open a terminal wherever you saved it. Type

sudo dpkg -i ./lib*.deb

Then open Synaptic, find libnotify1, highlight it with a single click. Go to Packages | Lock from the menu. This will keep it from being updated. Try to remember why it's locked, or make a note in your notebook like I did.

You can set up Catfish in the Places plugin properties dialog (assuming you add it to your panel). Here's what I used:

catfish --large-icons --thumbnails --fileman=Thunar --path=$HOME --method=locate --hidden

This has the nice effect of allowing you to right-click on, or in, folders in Thunar (the file manager) and search from there. Catfish is a pretty nice search utility.

Synaptic, apt-get, etc.

While playing with Synaptic, I noticed that it looked a little less friendly than I'm used to: no Quick Search, and the repository screen was very basic. I knew that Quick Search had something to do with Xapian-something-or-other, primarily because of a bug in an earlier version of Ubuntu. Using Synaptic, I right-clicked on synaptic in the packages list, and selected the following recommendations/suggestions: menu, deborphan, and apt-xapian-index. Also, to get the nice software repositories dialog I needed to install software-properties-gtk. Restarted Synaptic after the install, and it was the much friendlier, more familiar Synaptic.

menu updates the master menu when you install a package, apt-xapian-index updates the database, and deborphan finds orphaned packages. Synaptic can run these after installation/removal.

It turns out that gdebi really, really loves Gnome -- so I pulled it. I'll deal with installing DEBs when I get to it. Maybe some sort of Zenity script using dpkg will do the basic job. Don't forget to pull gdebi-core.

But gksu I simply could not work around. Too many other packages, including Synaptic, require it. So I pulled ktsuss -- no reason to keep two utilities with the same purpose.

Web Browser

I went with Midori. I'm sure the TC1100 could handle Firefox (especially now that it has 2GB memory), but for now I'm going to try the lighter browser out. It has an AdBlock plugin, and it can use the standard Ubuntu flash install (which I installed -- flashplugin-installer). Once I installed sound, everything just worked. It's pretty nice, and renders very quickly.

Midori is 10 packages at 24.3 MB, Firefox is 83 packages at 116 MB.

Sound
Installed alsa-base, alsa-oss and alsa-utils. Done. Don't waste your time with PulseAudio. It's complicated, and has an awkward interface. Alsa just works. Make sure that you install a mixer of some sort -- I'll have more on this later.

BTW, the speakers in this device are excellently loud, unlike most laptops.

Video Driver

The next thing, but far more important, was to install the nVidia driver for the GeForce4 Go chipset. Remember the big deal I made previously about installing jockey-gtk so that it would do the hard work of adding the driver for us? Well, it didn't work. There must be some sort of magic involved in the regular Ubuntu install. Even after searching around a bit and checking and installing the recommends in Synaptic (jockey needs at least fglrx-modaliases, bcmwl-modaliases and nvidia-common) it was still blank. A quick search on the ubuntuforums.org led to this page. At the bottom of the first post is a link to the necessary driver. I uninstalled Jockey and all its dependencies.

Downloaded the driver, which is an executable binary/script file (remember to make it executable: chmod +x filename). Tried to install in an xterm. Installer no like. Had to leave X (log out, hit CTRL+ALT+F4, log into the console, type sudo killall xdm). Then started the install again, whereupon it told me no! you have to install binutils! I logged back into X where networking is easy, installed it, logged out, etc. and tried to install again: no! you have to install gcc! It's a petulant little driver. One more go-round and back to the console, where it installed and politely asked to change my configuration so that X would always use the driver. I said yes, thank you.

So, to summarize:

1. download the driver
2. make it executable
3. install binutils
4. install gcc
5. log out of X, make sure it's not running
6. run the script
7. answer yes when it asks to change the configuration
8. done

When you log back into X, it looks great. You also have a nice GUI for configuring the display, or displays, under System in the main menu. It'll make adding an external display a breeze.

One drawback to doing it this way: I may have to do it again every time the kernel is upgraded. It's not using the automated driver compilation tools (DKMS) that Ubuntu has enabled. Price you pay for control and speed, I guess. So don't delete the driver script, put it somewhere safe. I always make a folder called install in my home directory where I put important, non-repository applications and such.

Of course, it's only now as I type all this that I'm realizing that I could have simply installed the nvidia-glx-96 driver. Give me a second, and I'll type sudo nvidia-uninstall and tell you what happens...

Yeah, that worked. So, don't waste your time doing all that malarkey above -- just install the nvidia-glx-96 driver and all the stuff it asks you to install, and reboot. Exactly the same result, only now it will auto-compile the driver whenever you upgrade the kernel.

ScreenSaver

I already installed xscreensaver. Today I installed xscreensaver-gl, xscreensaver-gl-extras and xscreensaver-data-extra. There are quite a few dependencies here, but not particularly Gnomic, and it includes things like ghostscript which will surely be useful to other apps later. Plus, screensavers are pretty!

Don't forget to set the daemon to start at bootup. In Settings | Sessions and Startup add an entry under Application Autostart that has the command xscreensaver -no-splash and save it. You can name and describe it how you like.

(This reminds me to do a post on cleaning up the system and user autostart folders.)

Finally, after all the installing and uninstalling I did today, there were a bunch of orphaned packages. I opened a terminal and entered sudo apt-get autoremove which removed all the extras that were dependencies of packages that had been uninstalled.

I'm going to do a separate, short post summarizing what I should have done as my first apt-get package installation after installing the OS originally.