PCs and Laptops

A couple of weeks ago I was on holidays, tried to access the Internet on the laptop using my mobile phone as a modem and nothing worked. It had previously worked fine, but turned out my "upgrade" to Ubuntu 9.10 actually downgraded the capabilitys of the Ubuntu Network Manager to connect. Finally, I have found a work around. This is what I did.

Install wvdial and the corresponding Gnome GUI for it, gnome-ppp. You can install via the Synaptic Package Manager or the command line:

sudo apt-get install wvdial gnome-ppp

These will be used to create the point-to-point (PPP) connection via the modem (i.e. the mobile phone) instead of the default Ubuntu NetworkManager. So delete your existing Mobile Broadband connection that you may have already created (right click on the network icon in the top desktop menu, select Edit Connections..., go to the Mobile Broadband tab and then delete your connection).

Now configure wvdial and gnome-ppp:

gnome-ppp

Select the Setup button and then Detect you modem (make sure your mobile phone is plugged in to the laptop). It may take some time or multiple attempts to detect - mine eventually found the modem at device: /dev/ttyACM0. Yours may be slightly different.

Close the Setup window and you are returned to the main Gnome PPP window. For my service provided (AIS - see the details) I require the information:

• Username: internet
• Password: internet (in fact, I think the password doesn't matter)
• Phone number: *99#

Then Connect and after some time the connection is established. Open your web browser and you should have Internet connectivity!

At work we have a new Canon LBP3370 laser printer. Most of our other printers have been HP, and printing from Ubuntu Linux has been relatively straightforward. HP have very good support for printing in Linux through the HPLIP software. My HP multi function printer (including scanning) at home works fine with Ubuntu. However I had some problems with the Canon printer, especially printing PDF. Below is the original configuration in Ubuntu of using the Canon driver, and then the way I fixed the problems by using a HP driver.

Using the Canon Driver

When adding a printer in Ubuntu 9.10, I followed the steps of selecting 'Canon' and then 'LBP-3360' (the LBP-3370 is not listed) which gives the option of four drivers:

Canon LBP-3360 Foomatic/pxlmono [en] (recommended)
Canon LBP-3360 Foomatic/lj4dith [en]
Canon LBP-3360 Foomatic/ljet4 [en]
Canon LBP-3360 Foomatic/ljet4d [en]

As was suggested, I choose the pxlmono driver. Note that the LBP-3370 uses direct sockets printing (the device URI is 'socket://IP'). Unfortunately I had several problems when printing (mostly PDF - not sure if it also applied to other formats). Firstly, sometimes the first page of the PDF would print and then an error message would be printed (on the paper):

PCL XL Error
  SubSystem: IMAGE
  Error: MissingData
  Operator: ReadImage
  Position: 8644

And then some documents were taking a loooong time to print (5-10 minutes per page).

Fixing with the HP Driver

A quick search at OpenPrinting indicated that the driver I selected may not be reliable. It suggested using the hpijis-pcl5e driver instead (surprise, surprise - a HPLIP driver). So I downloaded the driver directly, saved it in /etc/cups/ppd/ and selected it from the printer Properties (under "Make and Model" select "Change" and then "Provide PPD file"). The result is shown below (note the "Make and Model").

For the past few weeks printing to the Canon printer using the HP driver has been trouble free. Nice job HP!

Wan was in search of a netbook for use at home and work, so after a couple of days online and wandering around Zeer Rangsit IT Plaza, she finally settled on the Samsung NC 10. It looks good, has a nice sized keyboard, received good reviews online, and was priced well against other netbooks (Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Dell, etc.).

The specs are about the same as equivalent class netbooks from other companies:

• Atom N270 processor
• 1GB RAM, easily upgradeable to 2GB if needed
• 10.1inch screen
• 160GB hard drive
• IEEE 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, 100Mb/s Ethernet

The final price was 12400 Baht, which included an external DVDRW drive (which has yet to arrive).

As Wan has been using Ubuntu on my home PC for a while, the first thing I did with the netbook was install Ubuntu Desktop 9.04. I overwrote the existing Windows XP Home install, which I didn't think there would be any use for (However, I latter regretted this - I should've left it dual-boot. It turns out to update the laptop BIOS, Samsung software must run under Windows. Oh well, if an update is really needed it won't be too hard to backup Ubuntu and install Windows from the recovery CD).

I've had a few hours of setting it up and using it, and so far it seems like a good buy. The main thing I need to learn about is the Ubuntu power management features, where some fine-tuning is needed to conserve battery but also give reasonable (and constant) brightness settings.

Some sites with info on the Samsung NC10 and Ubuntu include:

• Samsung NC10 at Wikipedia
• SammyNetbook
• Ubuntu NC10 Community page
• Ubuntu on the Samsung NC10

After buying a new Video Card for my PC, I still had some serious problems. When starting my computer, fans, the CPU, hard drive and other devices seemed to start, but nothing was displayed on the monitor. This was similar to what triggered me to buy a new video card - maybe I wasted 3000 Baht!

Over the past couple of weeks I had a very crude fix to this problem: when booting, it seemed if I continually pressed Escape (maybe also other keys), the computer would start, that is POST would complete and the operating system start. However this didn't always work. It seemed every day I had to try 5 or 6 times to get the computer to boot. Not good!

Today I tried a bit harder to fix the problem. After checking all the cables and connections, and checking a bit on the web, I think I narrowed it down to two possible problems:

1. The internal battery and/or CMOS RAM were faulty (I had noticed about 1 week ago that the system time was incorrect one day). I followed the ASUS motherboard instructions of resetting the RAM. Unplug the power from the PC; remove the battery; change the jumper from default to RESET for 10 seconds; change back to default; put the battery back in; and start the computer.
2. One of the RAM DIMM slots was faulty. At the same time as doing the internal battery check, I also removed a new stick of 1GB RAM that I bought at the same time as the video card.

Restarted after these two changes and the computer booted immediately, without any input from the keyboard. This looked good. I put the second 1GB stick of RAM back in and the old problems occurred (this points to the RAM/DIMM being the problem, not the battery/CMOS - but my gut feeling says it was wise to reset the CMOS as well). So then after trying the second (new) 1GB of RAM by itself in the first slot (this worked), and concluded the second slot may be faulty. Now I have both 1GB sticks in the two second (black) DIMM slots, rather than the two first (yellow) DIMM slots. Everything seems to be working ok, but lets wait and see after a few days...

Lets hope this is the last of my computer problems for a few months.

Here are some notes from my installation and usage of Fedora Core 4 on a Dell Latitude D410 laptop.

Installation

My Dell Latitude D410 laptop already had Windows XP Professional installed on one partition, and a second partition was already created (when ordered through Dell).

Here you can find a brief description of my PC in Bangkok, my Web Server in Bangkok and the computer setup I used to have in Adelaide. You can also find some notes to some installation and configuration issues using Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora) and other software (e.g. NS2).

PC in Bangkok

A couple of days after I arrived in Bangkok and got my room I purchased the following PC which also acts as my TV and sound system. Total price: 38000 Baht (approx $AU1350).