I’m a Linux user so this post is about getting Fedora 16  running on it.

Updated: 26 Mar 2012 with more details

Updated: 28 Mar 2012 added mouse details and backlight adjustment

Booting from USB

First step of getting Linux installed is to boot from a USB stick.  This took me ages to get working – in particular you must disable “Fast BIOS Mode” in the BIOS setup (it’s on the “Advanced” tab).  Then you can alter the boot priority to USB first.  Thanks for this thread on Notebook Review for pointing that out.

My Fedora 16 x86_64 live USB stick booted fine and everything seemed to work ok.  So next step was to install it to disk.

Re-partitioning

In order to make space for Linux I shrunk the main partition (originally 90GB in size) down to 50GB using the Windows Disk Management tool.  This left 43GB of unallocated space to install Linux on.  I also had to delete the 5GB hibernation partition using gparted.  This has had no effect on how Windows runs.

Trackpad

The biggest problem I found in Fedora was that trackpad has didn’t work properly.  It worked fine in the original 3.1.0 kernel – but when I updated to 3.2.10 and 3.3.0 it started behaving erratically and the cursor not moving when I moved my finger.  Add the following to your xorg config (thanks to Guy Lunardi for this):

Option "FingerLow" "1" #sensitivity detection low
Option "FingerHigh" "1" #sensitivity detection high
Option "RTCornerButton" "3" #right-click to bottom right
#Option "MinSpeed" "0.7"
#Option "MaxSpeed" "1.7"
Option "TapAndDragGesture" "1" #tap&release then tap&drag
Option "PalmDetect" "1" #avoid bad track behavior
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1" #two-finger vertical scroll
Option "VertEdgeScroll" "0" #right edge vertical scroll
Option "TapButton1" "1" #one-finger tap = left-click
Option "TapButton2" "3" #two-finger tap = right-click1

There are still some problems – you can’t tap the touchpad to click and right click is broken.  But two finger multitouch works to scroll up and down pages.

Backlit Keyboard

The keyboard backlight keys (f9 and f10) don’t work as default.  However, there is a fix for first series 9 laptop (details here) that works on this laptop.

• Download https://github.com/iksaif/samsung-laptop-dkms
• Compile the code (you need to have kernel-devel, kernel-headers and gcc installed)
• Load the module with insmod
• Change the brightness (N=0 for off, N=8 for max) echo N > /sys/devices/platform/samsung/leds/samsung\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness

There is more work to automatically load this module and map the keys.

Suspend

I initially thought that the laptop would not resume from suspend/sleep.  But on further investigation it is just a screen brightness problem.  When it resumes the brightness is so low the screen looks like it is off.  But you can enter your password, hit enter and then sometimes the brightness comes back – or if not hit Fn+F3 and it works again.  I will get a bug raised for this.

External Monitors

The laptop has two external monitor ports – MicroHDMI and VGA (via a dongle.  Since I don’t have the VGA dongle I could only test microHDMI and it works fine under Linux.  I was able to drive 2048×1152 monitor as a second screen and drag windows between that and the laptop screen.

Wireless

Wireless worked out the box, connecting to my WPA2 home network.  I’ve had no problems with connectivity.

Sound

The sound works out the box (and the speakers sounds great for such a small laptop).  The headphone jack works too but I haven’t tested it with a microphone (it’s a dual headphone/microphone port).

Graphics

Again out the box graphics works perfectly.  Works in 3D acceleration perfectly – I’m running Gnome 3 shell.   glxgears (yes it’s basic) runs but there is some tearing when in fullscreen mode.

Battery Life

I haven’t done any tests on battery life, nor have I changed any settings.  From a full charge, Linux is estimating about 3 hours of time remaining (windows reports about 5).  This is my next item of things to check out – trying out powertop, Jupiter and tuned.

Ethernet

Ethernet is via a breakout dongle (code AA-AE2N12B and supplied in the original box).  This worked perfectly in Linux: plugin dongle, attach ethernet cable and good to go.  The only annoying thing is having to remember to carry around the dongle.

Webcam

Tried this out using Cheese and Skype and both the camera and internal microphone and work fine.

Conclusion

Overall Linux is working very well on this laptop.  There is some more work to do be done, but I am surprised how much worked on the default Linux installation.

If there is anything else anyone would like to me test out let me know in the comments.

I am also updating the LinLap entry for this laptop.

To be fair, the hack day was Nathan’s idea originally but I was immediately interested to help and organise it.  We have plans to run a larger hack day in the future, so we decided to start small and hold one in my flat.  We chose Python as a language to use since plenty of people we knew had a basic knowledge in it – plus Nathan and I have been using it side projects for a while now.

Before the day

So the first thing to do was to invite people.  We decided to just keep it to people we currently work with.  My first surprise was the number of people who initially said they were interested, but then pulled out because they weren’t sure they could write any Python code.  Seriously?  Professional software engineers should be able to pick up new languages – and IMHO be excited to do so.  The whole point of a hack day is to learn something new – and being around smart and fun people is surely the best way to do it.

In the end we had 5 people (including ourselves).

The other thing to sort before the day,  was to come up with some potential projects to work on.  There was generally a lack of ideas around, most people just wanted to come along and code something.

Start of the day

So we are good to go, 10am on a Saturday, most people have arrived and there is kitchen full of snacks.  First item is to decide what to work on. No one was really that bothered so we decided on a project that had the most scope – creating a photomosiac web app.  We decide that we would develop this on Google App Engine and split into two teams – one for the web front end and the other for the image processing backend.

The first thing we ended up doing was setup the development environments.  We must have spent the first 2 hours getting python, git, Python Imaging and the App Engine SDK working correctly on all our machines.

Once we started coding everything went smoothly, with plenty of code being written and pushed to our github repo. I had never used git before in a team environment before – only for my own projects where I have 1 developer and 2 branches. I was amazed at how easy it is to merge files and push your changes across the network to someone else.

Afternoon

Following our lunch of Pizza, we made good progress and was ready to start integrating and testing the algorithm in late afternoon.  Then it was time for intense pair debugging to get this working.  After discovering a few oddities with GAE Image functions, we finally got something basic working by 7pm and continued tweaking it further until 9.

Lessons Learnt

After the first hack day, I learnt quite a few things:

• A 9 hour day is actually quite short, so maximise the available time.  Next time, we will try and select an idea to work on using email, create a skeleton project and ensure everyone can compile and run the project.  And all this before they arrive on the day.
• Git and github rocks
• Even in a single day, 5 people can create code that becomes difficult to debug and test.

What’s Next

Nathan and I have plans for more hack days as they are brilliant fun.  Next up we are going to attend some else’s hackathon – Mark Pearson’s Hackathon London on 23-25th March 2012.

Then our other ideas are perhaps an Android one and, if can get hold of the hardware, Raspberry Pi.

Chair

As a tall person (6ft 3) I’ve always suffered with chairs and desks being the wrong height for me and suffering neck ache.  So first item up is a new chair that has a high seat and a head rest.  Where I used to work I had an amazing RH Logic 4 chair, but not having a spare £900, I opted for the £125 IKEA MARKUS.  It’s a very comfortable chair with plenty of back support and it reclines too.

Desk

Then to solve the next height related issue of mine: the desk.  So I added four IKEA VIKA KAJ legs that are adjustable between 60-90 cm.  I set them to 80cm which works well for me.  And while I was there I added a IKEA SIGNUM cable tidy to clear up the mess of cables behind the desk.

Monitors

My final update is to my dual monitor setup – a Dell 23″ and a Samsung 20″.  Again, getting the monitors to the correct height is important, and the cheapest option I found before was to use two Ergotron Neo-Flex LCD Stands. But these don’t go very high and they struggle with the weight of the 23″ monitor.  So I ordered an Allcam MDM05 Multi Screen Desk Mount Bracket from Amazon.  Was very impressed with the next day delivery and the couriers (DPD) texted me in the morning to give me an hour slot when the delivery would occur.

The screen mount was very easy to assemble but you have to tighten up all the bolts which makes it difficult to tilt and move the monitors.  This is fine for me as I want them fixed in position.

So here is my dual monitor setup on the stand.  It looks good and leaves the area under them clear.

Complete

So here is the final view with chair, desk and monitors.

What’s Next

I’m not done yet, but this is the first pass.  Having now raised the desk, it is a little unstable and does wobble when I’m typing.  So I need to get a more solid table top – probably an IKEA VIKA AMON.  I might also get some IKEA DIODER lights that change colour to light up behind the monitors.

And then it’s to computer hardware upgrades – a wireless keyboard & mouse and a new laptop.

SASS – Software As A Service

The top of the stack where the user interacts with an application which handles the processing and storage of data. Like a desktop application you access through a web browser.  The user is not usually developing code.

Examples: Google Docs, Dropbox, SalesForce.com

Typical Billing: on a monthly subscription

PAAS – Platform As A Service

A software platform is provided which abstracts away some of the elements of the cloud – normally the scalability elements. This allows a developer to write a piece of code that processes a job (e.g. output a page of a website) and not worry about how many concurrent instances there are. This is great for services that might have unpredictable demand or where there are bursts of activity – such as algorithm that runs for 5 minutes every hour.

Generally the platform makes restrictions on the type of languages of the software and the code must be written in a way so it can execute in parallel – think problems that would work under Map Reduce.

Examples: Google App Engine, PiCloud

Typical Billing: based on resource usage at a granular level – e.g. amount of bandwidth or number of CPU cycles used.

IAAS – Infrastructure As A Service

The renting of a piece of infrastructure for a short period (e.g. a server) in small increments (often hourly).   This reduces the need to keep spare servers to deal with load fluctuation - new servers can be rented on an hourly basis when required.  This provides full access of the instance server including shell access and installed libraries.

Examples: Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud

Typical Billing: per instance per hour

Undefined subroutine &Scalar::Util::weaken called at

This is caused by a version of Scalar::Util that is perl only and doesn’t implement the weaken function (ref).  To install the XS version of Scalar::Util use cpan and run:

force install Scalar::Util

Install the flash rpm

From http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Install the other required packages

yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper.x86_64 nspluginwrapper.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 libcurl.i686

Create the wrapped up plugins for x86_64

mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v

Create a symlink to the wrapped file:

cd /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins

ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so

Restart the browser and it should pickup the flash plugin.  I would also highly recommend using flashblock to load flash animations on demand – addons for Chrome and Firefox.

perl: symbol lookup error: /usr/local/lib64/perl5/auto/Crypt/Rijndael/Rijndael.so: undefined symbol: Perl_Gthr_key_ptr

Some research suggest this is caused by the shared library being built against a different version of perl.  This is mainly a problem because Fedora provides a number of prebuild perl libraries through yum.  The fix for this is to use cpan to rebuild the libraries. So as root start cpan:

cpan

Then reinstall the libraries causing problems.  In the above example I did:

force install Crypt::Rijndael

This will recreate the .so file against the correct perl version.

CPAN error with vxs.so

There may be problems with cpan failing due to:

perl: symbol lookup error: /usr/local/lib64/perl5/auto/version/vxs/vxs.so: undefined symbol: PerlGthrkey_ptr

I managed to fix this by just deleting the whole folder:

 /usr/local/lib64/perl5/auto/version/

Apache and selinux

If you are calling perl scripts from apache there might be further problems like:

failed to map segment from shared object: Permission denied at /usr/lib64/perl5/DynaLoader.pm

This is an SE linux issue and can be fixed with chcon:

find /usr/local/lib64/perl5/auto -name “*.so” | xargs -n 1 chcon unconfined_u:object_r:lib_t:s0

More details soon