In his "failure of logic" post "K. Mandla" writes that the Linux Desktop is not getting faster even though all the hardware around it is getting faster, pointing to an article with the same argument 10 years ago. The ensueing discussion was much too abstract for my taste. ("Why are clouds?" "What clouds, where?") But if you split up the question you get answers:
Showing posts with label hardware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hardware. Show all posts
Mobile Internet with the Skypephone S2 in Ubuntu
It does not (yet) work out of the box. There is a little trick you need. You need to manually load the usbserial module supplying the vendor and product ID. You can find those IDs via the lsusb command. Just add an 0x at the beginning and then load the module:
sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1614 product=0x0407
The support should be automatic in one the next upcoming Linux kernels, though. You can of course automate the module load with an entry in /etc/modules:
usbserial vendor=0x1614 product=0x0407
Then the module is always loaded in the right way at boot time and you just need to plug in the mobile phone for it to pop up in Network Manager (with the help of Mobile Manager). Once that's the case in Gnome with nm-util you can use an easy wizard that should already include your settings. In Kubuntu 9.10 the KDE support for connecting was broken, though. But it's fixed now in Kubuntu 10.04. Too sad many of these changes are never backported...
And now: Enjoy mobile Internet! (And don't miss my next entry on how to save traffic and speed up your new mobile internet.)
If you're in the UK, order your next Three SIM via my agent link, please.
sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1614 product=0x0407
The support should be automatic in one the next upcoming Linux kernels, though. You can of course automate the module load with an entry in /etc/modules:
usbserial vendor=0x1614 product=0x0407
Then the module is always loaded in the right way at boot time and you just need to plug in the mobile phone for it to pop up in Network Manager (with the help of Mobile Manager). Once that's the case in Gnome with nm-util you can use an easy wizard that should already include your settings. In Kubuntu 9.10 the KDE support for connecting was broken, though. But it's fixed now in Kubuntu 10.04. Too sad many of these changes are never backported...
And now: Enjoy mobile Internet! (And don't miss my next entry on how to save traffic and speed up your new mobile internet.)
If you're in the UK, order your next Three SIM via my agent link, please.
The Devil's in the Bitrate - A Crazy Detail about Recording FullHD Video with the Canon EOS 500D
Okay. So the Canon EOS 500D does create FullHD video. Well, alright, it's just with 20 fps. But that's actually not as bad as I had feared. Yes, there are no options whatsoever. That's kind of weird. And then there's this tiny details related to the options...
First I thought my computer was suddenly too slow for playing even 720p movies. Then I tried streaming them to my netbook with hardware accelerated video playback. And guess what: the excellent 18 Mbit/s I got on my wifi are not enough.
The photo camera uses a bitrate of over 20 Mbit/s (720p) and over 30 Mbit/s (1080p) for video recordings in AVCHD. That's significantly (at least +100%) more than e.g. the Panasonic HDC-SX1 uses for recording 50 interlaced fps with FullHD in the high quality setting. Either the encoding chip is not too good with compressing. Or they just locked the birate on freaking high to make it bothersome to record with the photo camera and keep out competition from their own video cameras.
Sometimes x264 gives spikes with e.g. 24 Mbit/s, so I think it's not just the bitrate being locked in. Maybe they could just not be bother to write a VBR video codec. And the sounds is uncompressed pcm. But of course with 30 Mbit/s, 0.7 Mbit/s sound doesn't matter much.
I recoded a 720p video (also over 20Mbit/s) with x264 and a CRF (quality) value of 23 (rather high):
It's kind of like the videos are recorded in a raw-like mode. The only thing is that you can't change it to normal compression. And yes, now I know why the camera records only 20 fps and not 25 or 30 in FullHD. Because otherwise it would probably use over 40 Mbit/s...
It actually sounds worse than it is. It just means you should probably have a nice script to recode your videos to a less crazy quality after getting them from the camera chip. The good thing is actually that the original quality is so high that the losses of transcoding should not be too high. And you should make sure your SD card can handle at least a steady 5 MByte/s writing per second if you want to record videos with your Canon SLR photo camera.
I'd love to hear about your experiences! Maybe it's only my camera that uses as much? But it definitely does.
First I thought my computer was suddenly too slow for playing even 720p movies. Then I tried streaming them to my netbook with hardware accelerated video playback. And guess what: the excellent 18 Mbit/s I got on my wifi are not enough.
The photo camera uses a bitrate of over 20 Mbit/s (720p) and over 30 Mbit/s (1080p) for video recordings in AVCHD. That's significantly (at least +100%) more than e.g. the Panasonic HDC-SX1 uses for recording 50 interlaced fps with FullHD in the high quality setting. Either the encoding chip is not too good with compressing. Or they just locked the birate on freaking high to make it bothersome to record with the photo camera and keep out competition from their own video cameras.
Sometimes x264 gives spikes with e.g. 24 Mbit/s, so I think it's not just the bitrate being locked in. Maybe they could just not be bother to write a VBR video codec. And the sounds is uncompressed pcm. But of course with 30 Mbit/s, 0.7 Mbit/s sound doesn't matter much.
I recoded a 720p video (also over 20Mbit/s) with x264 and a CRF (quality) value of 23 (rather high):
ffmpeg -i "$IN" -acodec libmp3lame -vcodec libx264 -vpre normal -crf 23 "$IN small.mov"The result: roughly 4 Mbit/s. 1/6th of the original data rate for as far as I can see the same quality. The file size usually goes down to 10-30% (!) of the original file.
It's kind of like the videos are recorded in a raw-like mode. The only thing is that you can't change it to normal compression. And yes, now I know why the camera records only 20 fps and not 25 or 30 in FullHD. Because otherwise it would probably use over 40 Mbit/s...
It actually sounds worse than it is. It just means you should probably have a nice script to recode your videos to a less crazy quality after getting them from the camera chip. The good thing is actually that the original quality is so high that the losses of transcoding should not be too high. And you should make sure your SD card can handle at least a steady 5 MByte/s writing per second if you want to record videos with your Canon SLR photo camera.
I'd love to hear about your experiences! Maybe it's only my camera that uses as much? But it definitely does.
MSI Wind U110 Linux Review
The MSI Wind U110 netbook has an excellent basic design: The new generation Intel hardware is made for long battery life and the MSI can really make it over 9 hours under Windows. The MSI's are one of the few netbooks of this generation which include a nice and bright non-glossy display.
The keyboard is excellent and can from my experience be used immediately without any issues. I actually like it better than my external keyboard. The only problem here was the tiny "'" key. But that's only important for English text and I'm sure in the version they sell in English speaking countries the keyboard doesn't have that flaw.
So they only thing that might be seen as negative is the lower display resolution compared to some other new netbooks that have an 11.6" display. But their display is usually glossy and thus disqualified for really using it anywhere outside and also of course costs battery time.
But for Linux it looks much worse. While the Poulsbo chipset was already roughly supported in Ubuntu 8.04, which was released over a year ago, the support for Poulsbo is still at least flaky. It needs binary blobs to work anywhere near well as far as I have read.
And unfortunately it's not yet working on the MSI Wind U110 or U115 netbooks. You can normally get the chipset to work pretty well - with the appropriate resolution and at least some 2D acceleration, but no hardware video acceleration (aka VDPAU or VA-API).
But on the MSI's the support isn't working yet. You get the message that the there was a null pointer dereference when trying to load the psb kernel modules that is "necessary for the driver to work" as the Xorg driver tells you. Though I've read it might actually work on a certain SuSe distribution.
That unfortunately means that the netbook can not currently be used for Linux. A small display combined with a bad resolution will definitely lead to headaches. Linux users will either have to use Windows until sometime - hopefully - Intel fixes it's drivers (and maybe even includes a working VA-API support!).
What else I've checked worked fine: Sound, USB, Brightness Adjustments. I haven't tested standby enough yet, but I think there were still problems. But that may very well also be related to the graphics chipset. And as far as I've read the standby to ram works fine at least with certain BIOS versions.
The MSI U110 comes with one RAM slot, which held 1 GB ram in this case and is extensible to 2 GB. There is of course an internal card reader included. A microphone and a headset jack and a USB port, a VGA and a 100 Mbit LAN port are on the right side, two more USB ports, the energy plug, a kensington lock connection and a fan on the left side.
Summary: For now only for Linux experts who are either willing to debug and fix the kernel module or figure out how to get SuSe running on it or people who are willing to use Windows until the problems are fixed (supposedly that might happen by the end of this year). But it's a great netbook with lots of battery time, a nice display and a great keyboard. Perfect for writing blog entries or a large word document.
What works&What doesn't
I've run powertop on a full battery(half a year old) to test how low I can get the power usage in X with it.
I think the psb driver is not highly optimized for low power consumption yet, but the biggest problem is the pretty high number of "acpi" interrupts. We can see that with neither ethernet nor wifi active, the netbook can reach over 10 hours of run time. And this is with a battery that already lost 10% capacity. We should be able to get this down a lot more by finding the cause for the acpi interrupts and with some optimizations, mostly in psb.
The keyboard is excellent and can from my experience be used immediately without any issues. I actually like it better than my external keyboard. The only problem here was the tiny "'" key. But that's only important for English text and I'm sure in the version they sell in English speaking countries the keyboard doesn't have that flaw.
So they only thing that might be seen as negative is the lower display resolution compared to some other new netbooks that have an 11.6" display. But their display is usually glossy and thus disqualified for really using it anywhere outside and also of course costs battery time.
But for Linux it looks much worse. While the Poulsbo chipset was already roughly supported in Ubuntu 8.04, which was released over a year ago, the support for Poulsbo is still at least flaky. It needs binary blobs to work anywhere near well as far as I have read.
And unfortunately it's not yet working on the MSI Wind U110 or U115 netbooks. You can normally get the chipset to work pretty well - with the appropriate resolution and at least some 2D acceleration, but no hardware video acceleration (aka VDPAU or VA-API).
But on the MSI's the support isn't working yet. You get the message that the there was a null pointer dereference when trying to load the psb kernel modules that is "necessary for the driver to work" as the Xorg driver tells you. Though I've read it might actually work on a certain SuSe distribution.
That unfortunately means that the netbook can not currently be used for Linux. A small display combined with a bad resolution will definitely lead to headaches. Linux users will either have to use Windows until sometime - hopefully - Intel fixes it's drivers (and maybe even includes a working VA-API support!).
What else I've checked worked fine: Sound, USB, Brightness Adjustments. I haven't tested standby enough yet, but I think there were still problems. But that may very well also be related to the graphics chipset. And as far as I've read the standby to ram works fine at least with certain BIOS versions.
The MSI U110 comes with one RAM slot, which held 1 GB ram in this case and is extensible to 2 GB. There is of course an internal card reader included. A microphone and a headset jack and a USB port, a VGA and a 100 Mbit LAN port are on the right side, two more USB ports, the energy plug, a kensington lock connection and a fan on the left side.
Summary: For now only for Linux experts who are either willing to debug and fix the kernel module or figure out how to get SuSe running on it or people who are willing to use Windows until the problems are fixed (supposedly that might happen by the end of this year). But it's a great netbook with lots of battery time, a nice display and a great keyboard. Perfect for writing blog entries or a large word document.
Once the graphics work, I'll try installing and running Linux from an SDHC card to see it that saves even more power. But right now with the vesa driver the power savings aren't that good. I wonder if they are better with the real driver.
What works&What doesn't
- Grafics (works pretty well now!)
- Sounds works (needs a fix in Ubuntu 9.10)
- SD-Card Adapter works (it's generally not very fast, though)
- Standby (works in Ubuntu 9.10)
- CPU low power mode (works for me, reportedly doesn't work in certain configurations)
- Grafics low power mode (?)
- Sound low power mode (creates problems and had to be deactivated in 9.10)
- Webcam works with uvcvideo after pressing the short cut (Fn-F6).
- Ethernet works in 9.10 after plugging in the cable (ASIX AX88772 USB 2.0 Ethernet).
- Wifi works out of the box in 9.10. Needs additional drivers in 9.04.
If there are any questions feel free to ask.
UPDATE: X video works nicely now. Finally!!! :)
I created a special page for the fix: http://linux-tipps.blogspot.com/2009/12/x-video-finally-works-linux-on-msi-wind.html
I even managed to get to work vaapi hardware video decoding up to FullHD 1080i.
Sound does not always work without problems. In Karmic 9.10 you have to comment out
#options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf.
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1 bdl_pos_adj=64
instead helped me as well.
Suspend to RAM works fine with newer kernels from Ubuntu 9.10 and the psb module active. But I think it crashed when I tried to use vaapi after that. It did. But that's fixed with the newest BIOS version (the most current one on 01. June 2010) for me now.
I've run powertop on a full battery(half a year old) to test how low I can get the power usage in X with it.
PowerTOP version 1.11 (C) 2007 Intel Corporation
Cn Avg residency P-states (frequencies)C0 (cpu running) ( 1.8%) 1.60 Ghz 0.4%C0 0.0ms ( 0.0%) 1333 Mhz 0.2%C1 mwait 0.0ms ( 0.0%) 1067 Mhz 0.6%C2 mwait 0.2ms ( 0.0%) 800 Mhz 98.7%C4 mwait 0.3ms ( 0.0%)C6 mwait 9.6ms (98.1%)
Wakeups-from-idle per second : 103.4 interval: 15.0sPower usage (ACPI estimate): 5.6W (10.3 hours)
Top causes for wakeups:53.7% (126.9): acpi 26.4% ( 62.3): psb@pci:0000:00:02.0 11.2% ( 26.4): hrtimer_start_range_ns (tick_sched_timer) 2.3% ( 5.5): Rescheduling interrupts 1.8% ( 4.3): extra timer interrupt 1.3% ( 3.1): hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
I think the psb driver is not highly optimized for low power consumption yet, but the biggest problem is the pretty high number of "acpi" interrupts. We can see that with neither ethernet nor wifi active, the netbook can reach over 10 hours of run time. And this is with a battery that already lost 10% capacity. We should be able to get this down a lot more by finding the cause for the acpi interrupts and with some optimizations, mostly in psb.
A Netbook for Linux
While most netbooks use common intel chips, some use the GMA500, which is yet badly supported for linux. An open source driver "may" be there in Q4 2009. But as the video decoding acceleration benchmarks show, it might be worth waiting for it. It's not only good, but also energy-efficient at decoding even HD material. The bad thing is though - there's at the moment no yet any well working Linux driver available. And you can't even know for sure it will ever come. If you're still interested, check out the MSI Wind U110.
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