Just send a thanks to author. Really.
Quick comment is also nice. For more knowledgeable users bug reports and suggestions are of course always welcomed. I think I never actually wrote about fabulous bug report from Samuel Gélineau that I got for svn2cvs. Sorry about that.
I wrote my thanks today. Did you?
I have been backing up whole disk image from Eee PC, and mounting it using loop file system to access partition in it. However, I have problems with GNU fdisk which reports 4Gb image as:
Disk /backup/eee/hda: 3 GB, 3997486080 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 486 cylinders, total 7807590 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytesDevice Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/backup/eee/hda1 63 4803435 2409718 83 Linux
/backup/eee/hda2 4819563 7759395 1469947 83 Linux
/backup/eee/hda3 7775523 7775460 0 c FAT32 LBA
/backup/eee/hda4 7791588 7791525 0 ef EFI FAT
For a start, disk size is wrong:
$ ls -al hda -rwxrwxrwx 1 dpavlin root 4001292288 2008-01-20 00:59 hda
And then, even more wrong, offsets of partition seem to be wrong. When same image is examined using fdisk from util-linux, sectors are reported like this:
Disk hda: 0 MB, 0 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x332b332aDevice Boot Start End Blocks Id System
hda1 63 4819499 2409718+ 83 Linux
hda2 4819500 7775459 1477980 83 Linux
hda3 7775460 7791524 8032+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
hda4 7791525 7807589 8032+ ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
And this is correct (let's ignore size for now). I can verify this by mounting second file system as:
sudo mount hda 1 -o loop,offset=`expr 4819500 \* 512`
This seems to be off-by-one error. There is bug reported against Debian package which seems related, but than again, in my case I'm examining same disk image.
So, I began looking for Eee PC last year (well, more than two weeks ago, anyway) and my original plan was to buy one while I'm in Berlin for new year. However, since there wasn't any Eees available in Germany until second week of 2008, I was in some disspair becuause we where leaving on 6th.
You can understand when I read Avian's blog post about his new Eee PC. He is in Slovenia, and I'm in Germany and he managed to buy it? How? Quick e-mail later, and he said that it's available in Building of Fun, some kind of on-line web shop in Ljubljana. Since Slovenia is so much closer to Croatia than Germany (in which I was at that time) I just postponed my purchase for better times. In meantime, Kost got interested also, and after return to Croatia he contacted them and we bought our units.
That would be happy part of story, if only one of them didn't have one constantly lit LCD pixel. Reviewing ASUS warranty, I found that I found one point:
2. TFT LCD defect policy -- Eee PC does not provide ZBD (Zero Bright Dot) warranty for TFT LCD screens.
Yes, it's in there, one you buy the unit, that is. Since we couldn't replace it today I guess I'm out of luck. I will try some of software solutions over the night in hope that it will go away, but some more drastic measures like rubbing LCD screen gently are just too much to ask from me...
Other than that, it's a great device: designed for wifi communication, quick browsing and occasional terminal session using ctrl+alt+t. It's not designed to be primary PC, but all features are so well integrated and working seamlessly that I will have hard time reinstalling it with Debian. Until I need dwm which I got used to so much. I can probably wait for a few more hours :-)
I can't say anything about battery life, other than fact that it got half-filled in two hours while I was working on it with wifi. I will do some monitoring to see how well is battery holding on this device (there isn't acpi command, but all /proc entries are there, so it shouldn't be problem).
Form-factor is just great. Yeah, keyboard is small, but I can type on it (with my big fingers) without any problems. We did try to boot few distribution from USB stick (including Puppy and some Slackware derivative) without any problems. Well, there shouldn't be any: this is basically a palm-top size Intel box (at last!) with strange screen size of 800*480.
After first day with my Eee PC, I'm very pleased with it. To make things a bit easier now that I'm back on ThnikPad, I wanted to access Eee PC using keyboard and mouse from ThinkPad, so on eeepc I edited /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc to remove -nolisten tcp, restarted X using ctrl+alt+backspace, typed xhost mylaptop.lan on eeepc and then started x2x -west -to eeepc.lan:0 on my laptop and now I can pass from laptop to eeepc sitting on left with just a mouse move. Sweet.
For a last week or so, we have been in Berlin (visiting 24th Chaos Communication Congress (24C3) among other things) and we stayed in Kastanienallee 77 which is really nice place.
Since we are geeks, and didn't move much out of the room (we actually covered it with various fun toys due to our excessive trips to local computer store) it seems like a logical idea to offer some of ours skills to setup audio streaming for salon bruit which is downstairs in K77. It was great fun, but setting up streaming half an hour before program, is well, optimistic :-)
Task is simple: use darkcast to encode and icecast2 to stream audio. We had know how: both Damjan and Marcell had experience with icecast streaming and Saša and me were eager to learn how to do it.
Andrea and I managed to duck-tape ethernet extension adapter between two peaces of network cable (3m and 4m) and connect it via switch to house network two floors down to street level where Cafe is, so we had network there. Problem was that stage is on the other part of the house, and setting up wireless from front (network cable limit) to stage seems like a logical solution (at that time).
Initial idea was to use Adrea's iBook (freshly re-installed with Debian unstable for powerpc) to do all the stuff. However, nasty bcm43xx wifi card first didn't want to work as access point (disabling our chance to use it as bridge between wired and wireless network using ipmasq Debian package) so we deiced to use it as darkice to catch audio, encode it to ogg and send it to server in Croatia where icecast2 server was located which streamed content to listeners.
What was the problem? iBook doesn't have audio import port! Yes, let's save 30 cents and not put audio input connector before microphone! Thanks Apple. Marcell somehow managed to find USB microphone as alternative, but at same time, Saša managed to install darkice on his ThinkPad (thanks IBM for audio input, eh...) and I used my script which just bridges ethernet and wifi connection. Somehow in same time bcm43xx driver again gave up, we decided to stick with ThinkPad for darkcast (conveniently located on top of speaker) and moved off the stage so that program can finally start.
Having done that (with just half of hour or so delay in program start because we where fiddling with stuff) we started streaming... silence. We had connected line out from mix panel to mic in on laptop, we could ssh into it and tweak alsa setting, but all we got out was silence (we even checked with arecord -F cd foo.wav on stage laptop and aplay foo.wav on local laptop to be sure that it wasn't darkice/icecast problem.
Then Damjan suggested to press space on Capture in alsamixer (we had Capture only on Mic up to that point) and magically sound appeared. So, we had working stream, and blog post above got written. Audio levels where sub-optimal (to use kind word), but first part was nearly over, so we had pause and Saša tweaked audio levels, and we changed compression setting to lower quality so we can push it through ADSL upstream more easily.
I even remembered to record stream using wget before second part started, so we'll have a listen to it after we get some sleep to see how good the quality was. We got a couple of listeners from Croatia via #razmjenavjestina IRC channel so we are hoping for some feedback also :-)
All in all, it was a lot of fun, but I will plan to write complete walk-through while installing icecast on bljak. I hope to leave one working darkice client here in K77 so that future streams can be made much more easily.
