Monday, November 27. 2006
 My new work machine arrived last week, a Dell Latitude D820. Let's take a look at the adventures of setting it up for work (Windows, Linux, Windows running on linux (thanks to Xen), and assorted other fu).
- Why the Dell?
- There were several machines the specs of which appealed (although not that many when your specs for a laptop include a resolution of at least 1600 pixels screen-width, a hypervisor-CPU, and at least 2GB of RAM, among other things). I'm not entirely specs-driven though — before I ever get that far, the UI needs to be right. First and foremost, the display needs to be right — none of those mirror-shades displays they put in the Sony Vaios for a while. The keyboard is another matter, although I'm prepared to compromise to a degree since I expect to work with an external keyboard most of the time. A close contender was the big AlienTech machine (somewhat ironically, AT is owned by Dell), more a stationary machine at 17" than a portable one, it's true, but think of the large display you'd get. In the end though, I've worked on the D810, and on the Inspiron 8200, and I knew I was happy with the Dell displays, and I simply decided to take no chances. (A bit similar to my answers to,
What linux should I pick? (If you were a guru, you wouldn't have to ask me, so since you're not, pick whatever your local guru has, so you can get support. ) and Yeah, but which distribution is the best? (They're all broken. Find one that's broken in the parts you're not using anyway. ) — that is, tinged by a healthy pragmatism. Those who know me however (or have read some previous articles) will know that even if something works, I still like to know why. This week, that luxury was not always available to me, for lack of time, so I'm afraid it works was good enough in some cases, making this write-up more of a log and less of a how-to. I wish it weren't so.
- So, what is it like?
- It lost 1/2 cm in height from the D810. The media bay is the same (and it's still on the right hand side, where most people mouse, duh), the main battery isn't. The case's colour scheme has changed, and the speakers are the crap you'd expect from a laptop (which wouldn't be worthy of note but for the stark contrast to the D810's celestial choir) — sound worked out of the box, at least. The joystick seems a little nicer on the D820, but that's a subjective first impression. It also seems a bit lighter than both of the other machines, which is always a plus, "especially when you're a girl." The display is just lovely. Many people asked me,
Won't things be just too small, at 1920x1200 pixels on a 15" display? Well, you pick bigger fonts, obviously, and man, are they ever crisp! At 145 DPI, fonts look ever so nice. I'll readily admit that I dread the time when I first visit a webshop that doesn't have mid-resolution images of its merchandise — only then do I expect "things to be too small." Other than that it's nice though — contents of web-browsers, terminals, and text-editors — anything that you look at for a prolonged time — are nice, large, and crisp. Menu-text, panels, displays like gkrellm, anything that you look at only briefly or just need a general idea of, are small, and don't use as much screen estate as they used to do. So, on the main applications, you do not gain screen estate (you use larger fonts, so you get more pixels to the same-size app, but the window will likely be the same size you use on any other display — you gain crispness, not screen estate), but you gain readability. On the other applications, you actually gain a little screen estate. Not that much, admittedly, so if you do it, do it for the lovelier fonts, I suppose.
- Installation
- Ah, the fun we had. Windows came preinstalled, but I reinstalled that after putting Linux on the box, both to verify the Windows media that came with the machine, and because the linux install failed to properly resize the Windows partition (and I'd neglected to order with correct partitioning). This wiped the partition table entirely at one point, but I managed to bring it back without losing actual data — that would come later. This left me with a 20 GB Windows partition, 2 GB of swap (also for suspend-to-disk), a generous 2 GB encrypted partition for my setup and passwords, and the rest taken up by linux.
- What was that about encryption?
- My keys and passwords live on an encrypted partition that needs to be unlocked at boot-up. My linux is a SuSE, so all I can say here is that yast set it up for me, and it worked out of the box. I have directories for everything that lives on there, with symlinks (/home/azundris/.ssh symlinks to /crypt/azundris/.ssh, /etc/foo/bar symlinks to /crypt/etc/foo/bar). If you do something like that, note that some programs do not like symlinked configurations and need some fiddling with (export FETCHMAILHOME=/crypt/azundris/fetchmailrc etc.).
- Windows-on-linux? XEN?
- Ah, that's the sexy bit, isn't it? Running Windows on your linux without VMWare. If you haven't been keeping up, yes, Xen used to paravirtualize, meaning, it needed specifically modified guest OSs to work, but nowadays, it supports hardware virtual machines (HVM, not to be confused with HMV), meaning, pretty much any guest operating system will do. Including in my case Windows XP. As long as your hardware supports virtualization (the latest Intel and AMD CPUs do), that is. This is a feature that is usually disabled in the machine's BIOS, so enabling it is your first stop. Then, you install and boot a special Xen kernel.
You can then create virtual machines; paravirtualised ones or, in our case, HVMs.
You also have the choice of getting a viewport on your guest OS via SDL or via VNC. SDL is a little faster, but if you close the viewport, the guest goes. VNC lets you close the viewport, or open several of them, or open them from another machine, and makes the experience a lot more like screen for terminal sessions. The rub?
In SDL, the mouse would reset to the right border of the guest window every couple of seconds. Whether this is the long-standing SDL issue I vaguely seem to remember or the problem with some guests taking a shortcut with interrupt handling that doesn't quite work in the HVM that is noted in the Novell bugzilla I didn't have time to investigate; the latter however is supposedly more prevalent with certain hardware, so you might not even run into the issue on other hardware for all I know.
The VNC on the other hand suffered from the problem that the guest OS's mouse-pointer would move with about 2/3 of the X cursor's speed. Which of course means that your X cursor will leave the guest window before the guest cursor ever reaches the guest screen's border. And once the X cursor leaves the guest window, the guest no longer gets mouse events. Meaning in real terms that you never reach, say, Windows' start menu. The immediate work-around is pressing the left Control and Alt keys so you can reposition the X mouse without moving the Windows mouse. That's awkward enough, but its enough to install the real work-around, which is installing a graphics tablet driver. (The issue being that the standard emulation emulates a PS2-mouse (no matter what physical mouse you have), which uses deltas rather than absolute positioning, and it desyncs pretty quickly. The graphics tablet uses absolute positioning.) This is actually in the manual, as long as you have a sufficiently new one. :-/ Proceed as described, and you have a working mouse in the VNC guest.
Net for the guest is bridged and worked out of the box for me. I believe sound is under development, but didn't check, since I don't expect to spend time in the Windows installation outside of work. Windows still insists on believing my international 105-key is a US 101/102-key keyboard which leads to some annoyance, but I haven't had time to fix that yet. Otherwise, it works nicely.
As a side-note, if creating VMs with yast, it seems like you have to make the SDL/VNC choice at creation time, and then be stuck with it. Not so. You can edit the VM setup file at any time (in /etc/xen/vm on SuSE); they will become effective next time you start the VM.
Lastly, you have the choice between installing the guest into a virtual disk (that is, it looks like a hard-drive to Windows or whatever guest, but like a file to the linux), or a physical partition. The vdisk worked nicely for me, I expect installing to block device to be painless as well, but had no luck so far booting the already-present Windows from the primary partition (which you need to umount first in linux by the way — I found it easiest to comment out the relevant line in /etc/fstab). It pretends to be booting, but just sits there. I haven't had time to investigate yet; there may be updates on this unless I decide that I'm fine with the disk image solution. (The appeal of the physical partition being that I could presumably also boot into Windows, should the need arise, like if I should need sound for once after all.)
- Suspend-to-disk, Suspend-to-RAM
- I killed at least two hours on this before realising both worked out of the box. More precisely, so you don't think I'm a complete moron, they work out of the box iff you use a non-Xen kernel (in my case, the SMP kernel). They simply did not work under Xen.
- Wifi/WLAN
- Worked after installing not just the driver, but the firmware also. (apt get ipw-firmware) Note that there's a switch on the left of the laptop that lets you disable all wireless communication, as long as that's off, don't expect anything to work. : )
- Bluetooth
- With the drivers installed and bluetooth set up, I still had to enable the device manually (hciconfig hci0 up) before being able to do anything with it (before kbluetooth sees it, for one thing, and before I could use hcitool scan etc.). I can see other bt devices, but I haven't been able to OBEX-transfer yet, will probably investigate. (BT and gnome-obex-server / gnome-obex-send worked pretty much out of the box on my desktop machine, all it took was was the yast setup). I know many people had trouble with BT on this deck, and some didn't, so I haven't given up on it, but it's not exactly a priority either.
- Funky buttons
- Lineak sees volume-up, volume-down, and pause. Fn-Esc (Stand-by) works. I don't see the others (battery etc.) yet, but it doesn't particularly bother me at this point.
- More pain to share?
- Aside from losing the partition-table (see above), I saw some minor reiser3.6 corruption along the way, which I'd only seen twice before (once on a machine where the RAM had gone bad, and once on one where the nVidia-drivers made the graphics card to bad things). I presume this happened at the one point where X came down hard; I lost permissions on about a dozen files that way. Lost permissions as in, I couldn't even list their names while being able to with the other files in that directory. reiserfsck --rebuild-tree brought back the file-system, and re-installing the affected packages ended those troubles.
For "some reason," the GNOME-browser galeon also stopped working. So did the related epiphany browser, which I managed to get to work with some "clever" updating. galeon however would stay dead. Since galeon isn't exactly under active development anymore and I resented the eternal upgrade pains (galeon needs a matching mozilla/seamonkey, and that sounds simpler than it is, regularly resulting in rebuilding the whole lot), I figured I'd bite the bullet and switch to KDE entirely, for laughs (still not sure the laugh isn't on me, but we'll get to that in a moment). Transferring the bookmarks was easier than I expected (galeon has an export feature, alternatively, konqueror has an import feature); the passwords are stored by the Mozilla component and consequently can be displayed using either Mozilla/seamonkey or firefox with a suitable FF-extension. There, that was easy enough, but I'll miss galeon. And I almost feel a little guilty for leaving it behind.
KDE, though? Sometimes, KDE outright ignores what I set in kcontrol. Likewise, if I create several panels of the same type, there seems no way to set them up individually? kcontrol isn't as byzantine as it used to be, but it's still not exactly clearly arranged.
konqueror has different view profiles for web, files, etc. which actually is a feature, but it's still a bit confusing at first when you set a window size etc. and then next time you open a konqueror, it comes up with a different size. :) With tabbed browsing, the tabs get too small to read before you get scroll arrows; I presume that's a theme thing rather than a konqueror one. The flash plugin started working once I convinced it not to try to use artsd for output. I also seem to get a lot of context-menus for things that "just work" in galeon. Also, my imported bookmarklets (bookmarks containing some JavaScript ("remove all embedded objects from page" etc.) rather than an URL) no longer work, I haven't investigated whether konquie just uses a different format, or doesn't support the notion per se.
I've also switched from xmms to amarok because I liked the amarok-display in the universal sidebar for a little while (since destalled; I ended up accidentally opening the sidebar a lot of the time and found that you can also open the display within konqueror so if amarok temporarily freezes, konquie does too, true to the spirit of desktop integration), but it seems much less responsive a lot of the time. Also I get weirdness like, I close the window, it opens again, I close it a second time, it remains closed.
Lastly, I'm trying to run screen from within konsole at the moment. apt didn't have Eterm. There's an Eterm RPM on eterm.org, but apparently, no libast? So, loving Eterm, I got it from CVS (that's enlightenment-CVS, not Eterm-CVS, mind you), and built it from source, but then, it having been a long night, I just got frustrated with setting up the fonts for the new display. It's the naughties, the new millenium, I'm just not sure I can be bothered with xfontsel anymore (which I've hated forever). I have to speak to KainX sometime, Kundalini wants his Eterm back. Be a shame to give it up over something like this.
Speaking of which, setting up the fonts for xemacs was, perhaps unsurprisingly, also the expected bit of an annoyance.
- What's with the article's title, though?
- If you have to ask … no, seriously. One of my previous machines, a Sun Ultra 5, was called sin. Mostly because it seemed a cool name that worked in the context of my naming scheme. (It also would turn out that it was slow as sin, and so the next machine was salvation from the sin's slowness.) Since this machine is a Dell, I figured I'd recycle the long-gone Sun's name though. (Sin Dell, get it? If you don't, you've probably never played Mortal Kombat, which I guess is entirely forgiveable.)
That's all, folks! — or at least all I can remember off the top of my head. Haven't used the card-reader or the firewire yet; not sure I expect to. My USB-mice worked out of the box, unsurprisingly. Oh, and for all the ports the Dell does have, it doesn't have PS/2, so I need to replace my beloved logitech ergo-keyboard (that sexy black-and-white deal); possibly with the SafeType upright keyboard while I'm at it. Stay tuned! ;)
Intel Core Duo 2, two cores like so:
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7200 @ 2.00GHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 1995.055
cache size : 4096 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr mca cmov pat pse36
clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm
constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr
lahf_lm
bogomips : 4989.53
1920x1200 display
2 GB RAM
100 GB HD @ 7,200 RPM
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