Enable XvMC on Intel Chipsets

All you need is any current distribution (Ubuntu 9.10+). Then you need to enable it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "intel"
Option "XvMC" "true"
EndSection

. Then play an MPEG2 file with /usr/bin/mplayer -vc ffmpeg12mc -vo xvmc and Enjoy\!

Which e-book readers *don't* use Linux?

If you have a look at the Wikipedia page comparing e-book readers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_readers) right now you find almost only Linux variants including Android. The more efficiency you need, the more Windows will no longer be able to compete, as it can't be adjusted to the circumstances. I wonder when Microsoft will start to partially open source parts of Windows...

New version of Compcache - ZRam

A new version was just uploaded writes the main developer. Now you can use it to mount /tmp there, too:

hg clone https://compcache.googlecode.com/hg/ compcache

The README file in the source root contains information on how to use it. Some of its features include (see Changelog for details):
- Devices are now called /dev/zram ( = 0, 1, 2 ...) instead of ramzswap since they can now handle any kind of I/O and not limited to use as swap.
- Replaced ioctls with sysfs interface. So no need for separate tool like rzscontrol.
- Percpu stats and buffers for improved scalability
- Lots of other cleanups, minor fixes.

(quote from http://code.google.com/p/compcache/issues/detail?id=68)

Speed up your system for free with the -ck patches

Well, okay, unfortunately it does take quite some time to compile your kernel, so really it's not for free. But you don't need new hardware to get a system that responds much quicker and more fluently - without using more power on battery thanks to dynticks. I've always wondered why in my impression the kernel had become less responsive some time after the beginning of the 2.6 era. Con Kolivas has fixed this - again. I just wish there was a Ubuntu ppa for his kernels.

Internal PDF Reader in Chromium

Chrome and Chromium are really that similar. All you need to do is:
sudo ln -s /opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/libpdf.so

Then you can read PDFs directly in Chromium. But be warned, this may interfere with Chrome's License as well as future Chromium Updates.

Thank you, GParted LiveCD\!

I've just used GParted for the first time. It worked fabulously for me. Resizing a partition by 14 GB and moving the other one out of the way in below 10 minutes and without any problems. The biggest problem was that the current version was not working with the Ubuntu USB boot disk creator. There was some kind of problem with isolinux or syslinux. So I just replaced it with the much preferred GRUB. (grub-install /dev/sdb1). Then I entered the settings manually and the rest was easy. I'm normally not a GNOME user, but I really love how (once booted) it just works\!

Bash CLI TCP Access

Have you ever been in the situation that you are on an absolutely minimally equipped system, yet you want to access TCP? Than BASH can be your savior. Simply use /dev/tcp to access a remote server, e.g. cat /dev/tcp/10.0.0.1/1234 and nc -l 1234 > test.tar.bz2 on the other side...

Linux Heavy IO Latency Issues Fixed?

A new patch was just published (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODQ3Mw) that might very well fix the latency issues many desktop users have noticed during heavy transfers to and from disk. You can get the patch here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/8/1/40. The patch changes vmscan.c and I wonder when it will enter mainline so it can easily be tested via Ubuntu's kernel ppa (kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/).

New Low Power Record - Power Management Progress in 2.6.35

I just wanted to test how low the system can go in it's power usage with the power management framework of kernel 2.6.35 and the results amaze me. A test just showed that the system can save an additional 0.8 watts with the new kernel. Before the minimum battery usage without wifi was 5.6 W. Now in kernel 2.6.35 this has gone down another 0.8 W to 4.8 W - or 8.3 hours with just over 70 % battery. This is amazing. Even with wifi active the system now goes down to about 6 W - significantly increasing the amount of time you can be online surfing on battery. I wonder how much energy recent kernels save on other systems.

Easy Posting with Blogger from the Command Line

Posting with Blogger is now really easy just using the command line. An example command looks like this
google blogger --blog="Linux Tipps & More" --title="Some title" post "Here comes the content"

You can of course put all this into a script so it becomes even easier to post new blog entries:
google blogger --blog="Linux Tipps & More" --title="$1" --tags=$2 post "$3".

Ubuntu 10.04 working with the MSI Wind U110

I finally managed to get it to work. All I needed to do it go to /etc/default/acpi-support and set DOUBLE_CONSOLE_SWITCH to true. Now I can resume from standby in Ubuntu 10.04. For now I've only done this on my test system, but soon I will upgrade the main system - finally.

Update: Actually it's still a bit buggy then. I still get a blue flickering after resume until I manually switch to X with Alt-F7 and back a few times.

Fixing Suspend for the MSI Wind U110 in 2.6.34 and 2.6.35

The MSI Wind U110 suddenly stopped going into suspend more in newer kernels starting at 2.6.34. A kernel developed found where the issue is located. Actually the system did go into suspend mode, but it came right back immediately.

The issue is very easy and quickly solved, though, with a single simple command:
echo LID | sudo tee /proc/acpi/wakeup

Now I can go into suspend again, and the system still comes back from suspend as expected, nice! :)

Unfortunately for some reasons this does still not mean that suspend is working in Ubuntu 10.04 for me. Probably an issue related to the updated Xserver in 10.04. Though I can suspend and resume now, X crashes and restarts after resume.

Fun with Compcache/RamZSwap

If you run a netbook, a system with few memory, or just for the fun of it. Using RamZSwap helps your performance and is included since 2.6.33 and really easy:

1. Get and compile a current version of rzscontrol in the compcache package sub-projects folder.
2. sudo swapoff -a
3. sudo modprobe ramzswap
4. sudo rzscontrol /dev/ramzswap0 --verbose --init
5. sudo swapon /dev/ramzswap0

Enjoy! Check out lwn's tech info about it.

Update: Actually it does work for me in 2.6.33, but in 2.6.35 it does not work at all and the --backing_swap /dev/your-current-swap-partition support was removed.

Update2: You can make it work with a bit of source code modification. The author writes, though, that he will soon release a new version of both his kernel module and command line tool that can be installed and run in 2.6.35.

Comparing Kernel Dmesgs: Remove Timing Info and Diff Side by Side

I often wanted to compare what new messages appear or disappear in a new kernel so check out what might have changed, esp. when debugging. The problem is that diff is confused by the timing information that is by default prepended to dmesg information in Ubuntu kernels.

Here's how to remove the timing information to have a clean, diff-compatible dmesg log:

sed 's/^...............//'

The command basically removes the first (number of dots ".") characters of every line.

Then you can use diff to compare the dmesg files side by side:

diff -y -w -B --suppress-common-lines dmesg-A dmesg-B

Of course this is still not magic, but at least now diff can filter out a lot of similarities for you.

Standby-Strom des Edision Avantage DVB-T Receiver - Energiespar-Tipps

Ich habe gerade mal ein bisschen rumprobiert, um zu sehen wieviel das Teil an Standby-Strom verbraucht. Normal, ohne USB oder SD-Karte, verbraucht es recht gute 1,5 Watt (Conrad Voltkraft 3000 Energy Meter, ist recht exakt, Herstellerangabe < 2 Watt). Mit USB-Festplatte, die offenbar nicht ausgeht: 3,5 Watt.

Normal:    1,5 Watt
Stick:        1,5 Watt
USB-HD:  3,5 Watt
SDHC:      4,4 Watt

Es empfiehlt sich also aus Stromkostengründen einen USB-Stick dafür zu kaufen und keine Festplatte, auch wenn letztere weniger Kostet pro MB. Sonst zahlt man das Geld über die Stromkosten wieder zurück (1 Watt sind bei 22 cent pro kWh ca 2 € im Jahr). Auf jeden Fall sollte man auf eine SDHC verzichten, die jährlich ca. 6 € an Strom zusätzlich kosten würde. Wenn man ihn vom Strom trennt, spart man ca. 3 € pro Jahr, muss dann aber natürlich auf zeitgesteuerte Videoaufnahmen verzichten.

Insgesamt bin ich mit dem Gerät sehr zufrieden, vor allem für den günstigen Preis. Es lohnt aber, noch in einen möglichst kleinen/kurzen USB-Stick (da nur vorderseitiger USB-Anschluss) und ein besseres SCART-Kabel zu investieren (das mitgelieferte macht ein sehr schlechtes Bild!).

Die Videorekorderfunktion mit Timer muss ich noch testen. Sofortaufnahme und "Pause", also "Time Shifting", haben bereits gut funktioniert.

Fast, Cheap, Reliable VPN for Linux

I did some research into VPN services because even if I'm not in the US or UK for a while I don't want to be prevented from accessing certain websites there and signing up for services there.

You can sign up to the PureVPN shared IP services here. I have good experience (hulu with maximum quality streaming, iplayer work fine) with the cheapest version.

I recommend chosing the Monthly or Quarterly plan for tests ($14), but there is a three day test account ($3) available as well. It seems there is a bandwith limit now, and without you pay more.

Payment processing can take a few hours so be aware you can't start you fun and tests directly. Settings for network manager (gnome) can be found here. It works fine for me after installing network-manager-pptp-kde. Let me know in the comments if you need help. The most important part is to deselect everything in that one list except CHAP in the advanced settings and dselect MPPE. You can also try the nm-applet from Gnome, which you can of course also use in KDE. In my experience it often works better than the KDE version anyway unfortunately.

You may run into problems if your router doesn't support pptp forwarding. Then you either get a better router, or - in the long term probably the cheaper and better option for your speed - get a better router.

By signing up via a link from this blog you support the author.

The Story of the VP8 Encoder and Decoder

An x264 developer blogs about the work on writing a decoder for ffmpeg and how the code is not really perfect and the spec not really existing:

For example, Google’s decoder will, if told to “swap the ALT and GOLDEN reference frames”, overwrite both with GOLDEN, because it first sets GOLDEN = ALT, and then sets ALT = GOLDEN. Is this a bug? Or is this how it’s supposed to work? It’s hard to tell — there isn’t a spec to say so.

-- x264dev

Interesting to see the story of the great new universally accepted web video codec from his view. I bet developers at Firefox, Opera, and last but not least Google think similarly...

Check the Strength of your Passwords

There's a great new website which tells you roughly how long it would take
to brute force crack your passwords, giving you a good indication of how
good your passwords are. Of course you should not input any of your real
passwords for security reasons, but you can just replace any small
character with any other and any special character with any other to get a
good idea of how long it would take. It's just a rough calculation.

http://www.hammerofgod.com/passwordcheck.aspx

Increase Speed and Save Traffic with Opera Turbo

If you have a traffic limitation I have some great advice: Install Opera.
Starting with Opera 10, there is the integrated "Opera Turbo". With the
help of that proxy you not only speed up the loading of websites by 4x and
more, but you also decrease the amount of data transfered, which makes
your volume last much longer.

After a whole day of 3G web surfing, Opera Turbo had saved me 2 GB of
traffic! (Only about 100 MB were left, that 20x less!) So the first thing
after setting up 3G should be setting up Opera with Opera Turbo!

Oh and you'll probably also want to put this list into your Opera urlfilter.ini. This stops Opera from loading ads, saving you even more traffic. But you can't use save as, you must use copy & paste to get rid of the html elements in the file.

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.