Information & Communication Technology

Linux on a Laptop - Project Log

20 March 2016: The touch screen works in tablet and notebook mode. Touch screen scrolling works in PDF viewer.

19 March 2016: Installed Ubuntu 15.10 64bit version on a cloud white Acer Aspire R11 (R3-131T-P73T)
Intel(R) Pentium CPU N3700 @1.60GHz x 4 (1.6GHz, 2MB L2 Cache)
4GB DDR3L-1600 SDRAM
500GB 5400 rpm SATA
Intel HD Graphics
11.6" HD LCD-Backlit (1366 x 768) Display
1 x USB 3.0 Port
1 x USB 2.0 Port
1 x HDMI Port
SD Media Card Reader
4-Cell Battery
The big plus about this machine was the ethernet port
The 2-in-1 notebook/tablet is a bonus.

This video helped with the only tricky bit of changing the BIOS settings to allow a boot from the Ubuntu USB: How to install Ubuntu on Acer Aspire R3 Series (though I had to pause and replay it at each step)
25 November 2015: Publishing e-Books for Amazon's Kindle
14 March 2011: A new phone - Samsung Citrus (Metro, GT-C3520)
30 September 2011: Formatting an E-Book and Paper Back: Part 3 The Books
26 August 2011: Formatting an E-Book and Paper Back: Part 2 Interoperability - Formatting the PDF from the HTML source using Open Office Master Document
29 July 2011: Formatting an E-Book and Paper Back
24 June 2011: SLUG Lightning Talk: Organising Meetings in the Digital Age (Or hearding SLUGs)
2 June 2011: Collaboration on Meeting Agendas at https://github.com/marghanita/Meeting-Rundown/
1-6 June 2011: Meeting Agendas with Javascript Speaker Timer
27 May 2011: SLUG Talk Follow up on Mashup at the Mitchell - Sydney 1788 to 1938. Watch this Talk on youtube
26 May 2011: Signed up to github.com to contribue to github.com/mithro/timsvideo
July 2010: SLUG Talk Video Codecs in HTML5
October 2009: Upgraded to Kogan Agora Netbook
July 2009: The Motorolla U9 Just Works!
March 2009: Reducing E-Waste - Reusing an old Laptop for a Digital Picture Frame
16 February 2009: The Laser(R) pocket Multimedia video player (MVP1-1G) and Linux.

The only Video format this device supports is AMV. It comes with earphones, an AC adapter which connects to the device via the USB cable and MSWindows software to convert AVI clips to the AMV format.
When the device is connected to the linux laptop via a USB cable it just appears as another storage device and you can add JPG, video and presumeably audio files. The MVP1-1G screen's diagonal is 1.5inches (128x128 pixels). This 1GB device has been superseded by other Portable Multimedia Video Players, with more storage.

An Alpha release AMV codec, based on ffmpeg and instructions are available on the Google Code site. The command line should be modified to produce the correct size video clip, for example, -s 128x128. This code successfully converted Ogg clips made with Kino to AMV format, which could then be loaded and viewed/listened to on the MVP.
9 February 2009: The Epson C40UX printer only ships with software for MSWindows. However there is a Linux utility escputil which lets you do things like "clean the print head" - which you need to do after installing new ink cartridges. The command has to be run with superuser privileges and accesses the raw device.

Under Knoppix on the Laptop with the Printer attached via a USB port:
Step 1: Open a "Root Shell": KMenu/Knoppix/Root Shell
Step 2: Give yourself Super User privileges: type "su" at prompt
Step 3: Identify the device: type "ls /dev/usb" (should show lp0)
Step 4: Interrogate the device: type "escputil -d -r /dev/usb/lp0"
Step 5: Send instruction to clean head: "escputil -c -r /dev/usb/lp0"

For more information about the untilty type: "man escputil" at prompt.
21 January 2009: Edited and Created Video Clips of Green ICT Breakfast, in Ogg for publication on Youtube
14 November 2008: EeePC facilitates remote presentation to Green ICT Symposium using Skype
October 2008: Installed and used Skype
Once prerequisite libraries were downloaded and installed using Synaptic Package Manager, the downloaded debian etch version installed fine using KPackage Manager. The audio and text function works fine. However, I am still working on getting the firewire camcorder to be recognised by skype and to be available for video.
August 2008: Squeezing out the Inkpad of a C40UX printer.
The lights on the printer flashed alternately. Googling the symptom lead to the diagnosis that the ink pad was saturated. There were lots of useful sites and one provided a copy of the Service Manual, unfortunately the ones provided on the epson site are just the end user ones - but I eventually found the right manual.

It's a messy job. I chose to squeeze, rinse, dryout and reuse the little felt pad rather than try and find a replacement. Getting to the ink pad and then putting the printer back together was difficult but possible with the manual and a star screwdriver.

Then came the bad news - the lights were still flashing. The counter has to be reset using the Service Utility. For this you need a mate with Windows as the only program I could find to reset the counter ran on windows. I guess you could have tried running it under Wine.
After the reset the printer worked perfectly. Though I have never got the Epson Printer Maintenance utility to work. There seems to be a communication problem between the printer and the utility.
May-June 2008 - eeePC on an Aegean Odyssey
February 2008 - Language Problems with KDE (Knoppix 5.1).
Somehow the language settings in KDE got confused. As a result I ended up with the KDE menus in German. After much stuffing around I located the problem in /home/knoppix/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals" After I changed "Language=de" to "Language=en_US:en", see below, I could read my options again.

[Locale] Charset=iso8859-1
Country=au
Language=en_US:en
TimeFormat=%H:%M:%S
Review of Draft HTML5 Specification
August 2007: Video Editing on Linux with Kino
Slides from Talk to SLUG Monthly Meeting
May 2007: Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG) Bootcamp Lightning TalksTalks
- Switch to Linux
- Knoppix Update
- kino
- Video and Animation Editors
March 2007: Cleaning the Targa Laptop, after an Ink Spill
It finally happened! While refilling a printer cartridge, ink spilt onto the keyboard of the Targa Laptop. After a day of erratic behaviour by the computer and investigation of new computers, there was nothing to loose in trying to clean the laptop. So, I disconnected all the cables and removed the CDROM drive, the hard disk, battery and PCMCIA disk. Then held the keyboard under cold running water, which rinsed out the ink.

After ensuring the laptop WAS COMPLETELY DRY INSIDE and OUT, using an electric fan, dryer and the fresh air. I reassembled the laptop and was pleasantly suprised, that it was as though the ink spill had never happened.
December 2006: Greeting CDROM
August 2006: Entry to the Creative Commons and Fedora Project Open Video Contest
2006: Video Production using Linux, Open Source and Open Standards
A long term project is the production of a multi-media family history, which requires the development of a multimedia framework through which to communicate it. The issues are accessibility for a disparate group of people, encoding video in a suitable format. At this stage, while the video includes recordings in a range of languages, I haven't embarked on using other indian scripts - in particular Kanada and Devanagri used for Konkani, Marathi and Hindi.
July 2006: Open Source Video Editing and Publication
January 2006: Linux Log - Digital Video on Ubuntu
January 2006: Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger
August 2005: Linux Log2 - AV
August 2005: Support for Camcorder
The Canon MVx250i records video to mini-tape and stores photographs as jpg and avi to a card. It also has an Advanced Accessory Shoe, audio out, a microphone socket, USB and power sockets (grouped together to the right of the lens) s-video and firewire (below the lens). The USB cable was included with the camera and is required to download data (jpg and avi files) from the card. You need a firewire cable to download the video from the tape. The camera came with editing software (but not for linux), which I did install and use, and it worked fine - including providing a range of video compression options.
October 2003: Switch to Linux
The time had come to upgrade from a 1997 NEC Versa Laptop running MS Windows 95. The computer worked fine but did not burn CDs, had no USB ports and the clock battery had perished (requiring the time and date had to be set each time the system was powered up). More critical than the hardware problems, was the early version of Netscape Browser, did not provide the necessary encryption support required to access an increasing number of websites.

Coupled with the time and energy dealing with threats from viruses lead me to explore Linux and eventually to make the switch.