alan doyle

I have to say I’ve been looking forward to this for a while now. I’m absolutely sick of Windows Vista SP1 on my laptop (an Acer Aspire 9303) (Camaxtli). I’ve already ranted about Vista on many, many, many occasions and as of tomorrow I can kiss goodbye to Windows forever. I plan on running Ubuntu 8.04 as my primary OS from here on in. I’ve been playing with the Alphas, Betas and RC releases and all I can say is “I love it”. I’ll be posting a full howto on installing and running Ubuntu 8.04 on my Acer Aspire 9303 laptop soon.

On another similar note my home server (Nyx) recently died. Its 10 year old CPU (Pentium III 450 Slot 1) burnt out so I’ve comissioned my Toshiba Portege 4000 laptop (Pentium III 750) to run as my new home server (Njord). It’s currently running Ubuntu Server 7.10 from a 4Gb Compact Flash, and 44pin CFIDE adapter, brilliantly and, more importantly, silently. The only thing I needed to change was to specify a different network card to use ( from a Realtek 8139 to an Intel E100 ) and everything else in Ubuntu just worked, couldn’t do that with Windows without a BSOD – INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE or some such nonsense. I’ll be upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 Server tomorrow.

Funny thing is I was never “Anti-Microsoft” until they released Vista. I always said “If it works don’t knock it”. In fact I still run a Windows XP Media Center 2005 box under my TV beacuse it just works, maybe MythTV is better under Ubuntu 8.04 so I’ll give it another go. But for me Vista is broken. So before you all flame me I’ve never subscribed to the “Down with Microsoft, Up with Linux”. Each side has its own positive and negative points. I just try to keep a balance and for me that balance means ditching Vista in favour of Ubuntu in order to get the best out of my laptop and help me remain productive in 2008.

Well I’ve finally finished modifying the WordPress template and launched the new Osmium Consortium website.

One down and two to go. Here goes to completing them before the year is out.

Today is a new day, a new year in fact, I don’t normally do “New Years Resolutions” and I’ve just realised that I’ve been working on new versions of my 3 websites ( Darkbyte, Osmium Consortium and My DVD Collection ) for over 2 years and still haven’t put anything on-line. I’ve reckon I’ve rewritten them 4 times during that time and still the old versions are on-line. So I’ve decided, seeing as its a new year and all, to complete each one this year, in fact I plan on taking my finger out and getting each one online over the next 12 months. 2008 is going to be the year I finally complete each project I’ve started.

So what gave me the motivation to do all this? Guilt? Partially. I’ve come to notice that over the past year or so I’ve become very lazy. My home server is currently lying in pieces under my desk waiting for me to rebuild it, it used to host My DVD Collection Website, hence it’s off-line, I’ve also got a couple of other Toshiba laptops, ( a Satellite Pro 4600 and a Portege 4000 ) still leaning up against the wall in need of a good re-prep *** SIGH *** But to be honest it was much, much simpler than that.

It was Windows Vista. Yep. I’ve been running Windows Vista on my laptop, an Acer Aspire 9303 since I bought it and I’ve been trying to like it but I can’t. I’ve used every other Microsoft operating system since Windows 3.11 and had been kind of happy with them, even though I thought WGA was a bit Orwellian. I had experimented with Ubuntu on my old Toshiba Satellite A30 and was able to get Beryl to run sweetly on the 32Mb (Shared Memory) Intel 852 graphics card, so I dual booted my Acer with Ubuntu but some software I needed to run at the time only ran well on Windows, unfortunately Wine couldn’t run it and I didn’t have time to work out why so I was stuck. Past tense.

Now with the new year I no longer need to use any Windows software so I’ll be wiping Windows Vista from my laptop and installing a variation of Ubuntu, probably Xubuntu instead. I honestly tried to like Windows Vista but it was incredibly slow, given it was running on an AMD x2 1.6 GHz Dual Core CPU with 2Gb of RAM, and Internet Explore constantly hung. It got to the point where I couldn’t work on it for more than a couple of hours before it hung and needed to be rebooted. So fair well Microsoft I’d like to say it was fun but it wasn’t. Roll on the Open Source experience.

UPDATE (30/04/08): This web camera is now supported natively in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), and above, which makes these instructions moot.

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I have an Acer Aspire 9300 ( 9303WSMi ) and I’ve finally managed to get the webcam working under Ubuntu with one caveat. The webcam in my Acer is also a USB2.0 WebCam. To confirm that you have the same webcam as I do type

lsusb

and look for one of the following

ID 5986:0100
ID 5986:0102
ID 5986:0200

Currently this webcam is supported by the Linux UVC driver however, and here is the caveat, it only supports V4L2 interface and most software which supports webcams only support V4L interface. Those which do support V4L2 don’t seem to support MJPEG decoding which is required by this webcam.

To test if the webcam is working. Open a Terminal and type in the following …

sudo apt-get install build-essential libsdl1.2-dev libpt-plugins-v4l2 subversion
svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk
cd trunk
make
sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo
sudo make install
sudo modprobe uvcvideo
cd ..
wget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Investigation/uvc/luvcview-20070512.tar.gz
tar -zxvf luvcview-20070512.tar.gz
cd luvcview-20070512/
make
./luvcview

All things going to plan the green light on the webcam will come on and a small window should open with a live preview.

Well I’ve gotten Windows Vista RC1 and well it fared no better than Pre-RC1.

Am I dissapointed? … Yes

Am I surprised? … No.

To be fair to Microsoft the problem is partly Toshibas fault but I can’t help but remember that I was at least able to install Windows Vista Beta 2 when it was released, so perhaps they both need to take their fingers out. Needless to say I’m no longer interested in Windows Vista and won’t be upgrading any of my systems to Vista for at least another year or two. Hopefully they’ll have sorted out their act or gone bust!