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Stuck at 600MHz

During this week I work on my Dell D400 laptop. It uses Pentium-M 1.6GHz processor which has few work frequencies available due to acpi-cpufreq kernel driver. The lowest one is 600MHz and normally this machine spends most of time with that speed but goes up when there is some work to do (due to ondemand governor which I mostly use).

But since yesterday it is not so nice… During boot CPU is often detected as 600MHz one:

[    0.693310] Detected 598.133 MHz processor.

instead of nominal speed:

[    0.693310] Detected 1594.845 MHz processor.

I tried rebooting but even if there was boot at nominal speed it sooner or later got stuck at lowest:

root@maluch:/var/log# cpufreq-info
cpufrequtils 002: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2006
Report errors and bugs to linux@brodo.de, please.
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: acpi-cpufreq
  CPUs which need to switch frequency at the same time: 0
  hardware limits: 600 MHz - 1.60 GHz
  available frequency steps: 1.60 GHz, 1.40 GHz, 1.20 GHz, 1000 MHz, 800 MHz, 600 MHz
  available cpufreq governors: powersave, userspace, conservative, ondemand, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 600 MHz and 600 MHz.
                  The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 600 MHz (asserted by call to hardware).

Weird it is… And this is not overheating because 44°C is nothing strange for this machine. Maybe CPU fan require replacing… but this also means splitting laptop into small parts to get access to it :(

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Battery replace time?

During GUADEC I decided that I need to buy new battery for my Dell D400 laptop. Current one is giving me 40-50 minutes of working only. According to ACPI informations it is really low charged:

11:44 hrw@maluch:BAT0$ cat info
present:                 yes
design capacity:         42000 mWh
last full capacity:      11530 mWh
battery technology:      rechargeable

So it does not get even half of nominal charge. I wonder how much time I will be able to get from 4400mAh battery (current one is 3800mAh when most of available ones are 3600mAh).

And this time I really need to buy one.

UPDATE: bought one — will get it in few days.

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17″ laptops are huge

Few days ago one of my friends asked me for help on choosing laptop. The idea was “I want to buy laptop to use instead of my 7 years old desktop”. We were discussing few options and he finally found Dell Inspiron 9400 for less then 1000 EUR. It is interesting machine:

• 17″ display with 1400×900 resolution
• Core 2 Duo cpu
• 2GB ram
• ATI X1400 gfx card
• 160GB Serial ATA disk

After checking who seller is we decided that I will go and buy that laptop (seller was from Poznań).

Yesterday I bought that beast and I have to say one thing — it is HUGE (bottom one on photo). I am used to my 12″ D400 (top one on photo) and sometimes I use Ania’s 15.4″ laptop (middle one) when I need MS Windows.

As usual it comes with MS Windows — this time it was Vista Home Premium. It was my first time with Vista — so now I can tell that I used all MS Windows versions (from 1.01 to Vista). What do I think of it? Hard to tell because I do not used it too much. Looks nice and takes some time to find things which were in XP.

Now when I used 17″ laptop I know that I do not want such one — 12-15.4″ are enough size for travelling. And for desktop I prefer desktop machine with big LCD then 17″ laptop.

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LVM is good thing

Some time ago I bought 320GB hard disk to my desktop machine (which also is my main developer box). I decided to try LVM on it and created one volume group which consists whole HDD. There is one partition on it: /home. It works good but I still had 104GB not used on older disk.

Today I finally found time to extend LVM to get use of old hdd space. Few commands later I have 400GB /home partition which use two discs and is easy to expand in future.

But desktop has easy configuration. When I bought Dell D400 I decided to remove Microsoft Windows XP from it (legal copy) and use this machine only under Linux.

Booted Debian ‘Etch’ installer via PXE/TFTP and split hdd into two parts: /boot partition and rest for crypted LVM. During start I am asked for passphrase and then rootfs is mounted, machine is booted into KDE. Swap partition is also crypted so even after suspend you can not check what was running.

So LVM is good solution if you have few hard disks in machine and does not want to think how to mount them to have them best used — simply join them into one big partition and mount (or few partitions but with easy resizing). It is also good when you want to crypt data — easy to configure and setup. The only minus is that it require initramfs if you have rootfs on LVM. But Debian makes this thing also easy to do :)

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WPA in Debian and Poky

During last week I switched my home WiFi from insecure WEP to WPA2.

Why not used WPA before? My x86 test machine was ProGear which use Orinoco PCMCIA card (no WPA support) and I also used Tosa with that crap called wlan-ng (also no WPA support). Now I have USB Ethernet card and PCMCIA->CF adapter so both can be connected via wire or with CF WiFi card (Prism2 with 1.8.4 firmware so WPA out-of-box).

But since I use Dell D400 as x86 test machine ProGear is not powered — I will probably put it on shelf to get some desk space free (there is no such thing as big enough desk — just ones that are not cluttered yet).

But how to get WPA working in Debian, Poky, Ångström, OpenZaurus or other distros? You basically need few things:

• WPA-Supplicant
• card with good driver (so no Orinoco or wlan-ng crap)
• proper configuration
• network with WPA

First I configured “maluch” (D400). Installed wpasupplicant package and discovered that it is not supported out-of-box. README propose two methods:

1. Use only one network and configure network in /etc/network/interfaces
2. Roaming networks with extra scripts

I decided to follow 3rd way where you need to edit /etc/network/interfaces just to tell wpa-supplicant which config it has to use and which driver:

iface eth1 inet dhcp
        wpa-driver wext
        wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/config

This way wpa-supplicant is started automatically with /etc/wpa_supplicant/config file as configuration. This file also contain all networks which you want to connect. It can be edited by hand or using external tools — wpa_cli or wpa_gui (QT3/QT4). Have to check does it works ok with other networks then my home one but it should work.

Then same configuration on Zaurus C760 running Poky — Prism2 card in CompactFlash slot. Connecting to network works out-of-box now. On Nokia 770 all I need to to was entering WPA-PSK key.

The worst part was MS Windows laptop — I had to remove all networks from list of preferred ones, reboot and then enter WPA-PSK key to get it working.

Now it should be harder to connect to my network ;)

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Dell D400 - installation report

OK, system (Debian ‘etch’) was installed and then upgraded to ’sid’. Everything is working with Linux (kernel 2.6.18 from Etch):

• ACPI reports battery status, battery is charging without problems.
• Dell Wireless 1450 card works — I only had to install bcm43xx firmware (which I took from Cafuego’s Sarge Backports repository). There is also other way — Debian contain package bcm43xx-fwcutter which extracts firmware from Windows drivers.
• Gigabit Ethernet works with tg3 kernel module (tested with 100Mbps Ethernet only).
• CPU Frequency scaling works with speedstep-centrino module and provides wide range: 1600MHz, 1400MHz, 1200MHz, 1000MHz, 800MHz, 600MHz so it is possible to extend battery life with it.
• Backlight control (via Fn+Up/Down buttons) works — it is handled by hardware/BIOS probably.
• Touchpad was wrongly recognized — it is not Synaptic but ALPS so edit of /etc/X11/xorg.conf was needed. All informations what to change are described in README.alps (part of xserver-xorg-input-synaptic package). Idea found on Ubuntu blog.
• Suspend to disk works, suspend to RAM also works.

In other words — no problems yet — everything works like it should.

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