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Day 11.

 

Well it's saturday, I've spent most of the day outside in the garden (thank god) extending the lawn and building a new driveway. So not much time for messing around with the computer.

 

Tonight is also Eurovision night (heh) so as tradition goes I'll be watching it, if there's time left over after that I might play with the Ubuntu laptop.

 

ok back...

 

watched the Eurovision and it was crap, they've even changed the voting system !

 

oh well, back to ubuntu... when i came back to my docked laptop, the lcd was off (power saving) I moved the mouse and it came on (good) and logged in and all was fine

 

so thumbs up ! :)

 

here's todays' screenshot.

 

o_O man im missing days .. so lets see ;)

 

Day 7 - firefox crash, bah! sometimes when i overload firefox with mplayer windows it crashes, in all honesty i would prefer it to dump mplayer feed .. but i know it wont. saying that though, what browser hasn't crashed/frozen on me sometimes :P I find your issues with mplayer odd, I notice they continue to other days, so I will comment there... Automatix .. that looks kind of neat, might check it out at some point.

 

Day 8 - whilst I prefer simpler mail clients (mutt!!) I can appreciate evolution, it has a nice look about it, pop'in from gmail is nice but personally I prefer gmail's interface. :) Saying that though, it was just a couple of clicks, nothing difficult to setup.

 

Day 9 - weee empty day, I thought that ubuntu had a "no open port policy", did you not set anything on .. hrmm. odd. that isn't a good thing for obvious reasons, todays internet means dangerous crap flying around, a firewall is a must. I am sure someone like you had smoothwall between you and the world, so its ok in your circumstance.

 

Day 10 - the lack of support for video devices under linux is still a little annoying, there is a lot of support in more recent times but still. maybe someone will look your one up soon :)As for docking, you have learnt, power down, dock, power on.. simple enough :) would have been nicer just to dock and tick over oh well. still its working fine which is the important thing. strange about the audio loss, not getting transferred from laptop > dock, still its another minor niggle, not a complete loss. so far so good, whilst ubuntu isn't wowing us with anything massively new, it is still taking on most of what you are up to.

 

Now for mplayer/gmplayer, you can setup preference in ~/.mplayer/config with a vo=xv (for instance). I believe that gmplayer will honour that file too. Maybe that can overcome that issue?

 

Day 11 - oh joy .. eurovision .. [img]<___base_url___>/uploads/emoticons/default_dry.png[/img] im saying nothing .. good to see docking still working fine

Day 12.

 

I can't believe it, I clicked on yet another bbc news video only expecting to wonder why it didn't work (hasnt worked yet, and i've tried many times) when all of a sudden (after about 2 minutes) the video started to play....

 

First time for me, and it appears totem was managing it, but why the 2 minute delay ?

 



 

I've also noticed that the network icon to the left of the audio icon in the top system tray, never does anything. I presume this is because I'm using ndiswrapper for internet and that the network manager can't deal with it. The problem with this is I cannot see the strength of my wireless signal, so don't know if the problem above is related to this.

 

Yet again, I clicked on another link, and 2 or so minutes later, the video kicks in. This 2 or so minutes delay is weird and I plan to research it.

 

cheers

Day 12 - How deeply odd, normally something like that would buffer for a bit, then start working but 2mins!? but it is working, so i can only presume it is the buffering that is taking so long. oh well

Day 13

 

nothing to report.

 

Day 14.

 

Network issues

Having some strange network issues today, the internet keeps timing out on me all morning, not sure if it's wireless related but another box on the same network is working fine, and the network applet in ubuntu doesnt show me my wireless strength so i'm not sure what the issue is

 

lot's of packet loss though, see here

 

Quote:--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---1841 packets transmitted, 1460 received, 20% packet loss, time 1876296ms

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 30.939/34.221/169.541/11.629 ms

 

The network issues continued during the day on and off, and later while ssh'd in to my fedora server, I was typing something in vi and nothing would happen, but then, some seconds later the text mysteriously appeared. I will monitor this behaviour over the coming days.

 

Testing the Power applet

The power applet in the system tray seems to report correctly as long as I remain undocked, and has nice graphs too (see screenshot), however when in the docking station, the power applet didn't function at all.

 



 

While undocked, I have two choices, Suspend or Hibernate. For those of you that don't know, suspend means that it suspends it's current state into ram leaving enough flea power to keep ram alive, this though consumes battery power.

 

Hibernate on the other hand saves all the data in RAM to your hard disc, and once done, powers off the machine ready for you to turn it on later.

 

I will test both of those functions now.

 

Suspend

 

To be sure that I'm not going to lose anything, I save all open documents and press the power applet icon in the system tray, I then choose 'Suspend'. Immediately the screen starts to fade to black and after a bit of hard disc chugging the laptop enters suspend mode (which you can see by the power LED which flashes on/off slowly). After 30 seconds or so I pressed the power button to come out of standby and it worked beautifully. No issue at all.

 

Hibernate

 

Hibernate however was another story altogether. I selected 'hibernate' and as before the screen faded and then the hard disc chugged away, moreso than before because it had to write all 640MB of ram to a file, and when nearly done a black screen with some scrolling white text appeared, I didn't have time to note it all but what I did see was something along these lines

 

Quote:[138279.xxxxx] Ata1 ACPI get timing Mode failed

 

and that was repeated for Ata2 and so on for a few lines, but then it eventually shut the systen off (which is correct). Once off, I powered it back on, and this time I was presented with grub, then the Ubuntu XP like boot loader which scrolls across the screen from left to right, and just before the password prompt I saw another few lines of errors

 

Quote:BCM4300x Mac suspend failed.

 

Immediately after those errors popped up I was prompted in X with my password (as I was in suspend mode). I entered it and everything looked fine, but wasnt. Network connectivity was gone, no internet and a quick look at ifconfig showed me this

 







 

I then manually took eth1 down, and then up again and now I had an ip address and internet connectivity was restored.

Day 15.

 

More updates available

 

3 new updates available, all related to SMB, so I go and install them.

 



Time to change my desktop ?

 

I decide to experiment some more with the desktop, and I choose to install gdesklets and the avant dock. I start with gdesklets by opening Synpatic Package Manager (click on system/administration/synaptic package manager), then in the search field i type 'gdesktlets' it shows two results, so I select them. I apply those changes and gdesklets gets installed.

 



 

Installing Avant-dock is a bit harder, you have to add deb [/url][url=http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/]http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/ feisty avant-window-navigator to your sources, update and then apt-cache search avant

 

 

 

 

 

You can do this in synaptics package manager, by clicking on settings, repositories, and 'add' then paste this line

 





and then click Reload.

 



 



 

Once done, search for 'avant' without the quotes, then select the 'Avant-Window-Navigator-svn'

 



 

 

 

Apply your changes and you now have gdesklets and the avant-dock. Some of the gdesklets applets refused to work at all, and gave runtime errors, I believe this is because the whole gdesklets project itself is being re-written from scratch.

 



 

However, this is what it looks like now, groovy.