Within the past couple of days, the alternatives system for debian/wheezy has been updated to support nvidia again. That means it’s once again possible to graphics switch on the 1015PN. There are a few changes as packages have changed names and dependencies have changed as well. Details after the jump.
UPDATE 7/21/2011:
Except for the xorg.conf files, this post is outdated. I’ve written an update here.
This thread shows how to accomplish graphics switching for ubuntu on the 1015PN. I’ve managed to apply it to the debian/wheezy install on my 1015PN. After the jump are the scripts I created as well as some simple directions.
I’ve been keeping my eye on the soon to be released EEE Transformer from Asus. It looks like it could be the best of both worlds for me- a simple tablet for when I’m just hanging around or a netbook-ish computer I could do a little work on.
Unfortunately, my main hangup is one of its big selling points- Android. It’ll be outfitted with the Android Honeycomb release, so I don’t know how well it will fit into my style of computing. Pricewise, the tablet itself looks to be at a good target of $400, but the added cost of the docking station ($150 according to the link) pushes the price out there a bit.
I also wonder about these docking stations- how likely is it to be forward compatible with future versions of the tablet? I’d think that a Bluetooth version would be a better long term buy, but then perhaps the device is meant to be “disposable,” with only a 2 or 3 year expected service life. If that’s the case, then I think the price point may need to come down farther.
I doubt I’ll be an early adopter, but I’ll be interested to see if the device gets hacked by Debian or Ubuntu somewhere along the way. Having a package based OS on a tablet could be damn near irresistible.
The current window manager I’m using, awesome, is a fork off another window manager named dwm- dynamic window manager. It’s supposed to be smaller and faster than most WM’s. I felt like awesome was becoming sluggish with some of the recent changes. Most noticably on my EEE.
So, I’ve decided to go backwards a second time and try dwm on my EEE for a bit. So far, the most interesting exercise was converting the mercurial repository to a git repository. Fortunately, there’s hg-fast-export which was easy enough to get and use. I didn’t want to get cluttered up learning another DVCS, this saved me from having to do that.
My dwm impressions later.
Oh for F!@#$%’s sake.
Another update to the xserver and my touchpad is broken. After googling for about 10 minutes, I come up with this thread from just a few days ago. Apparently udev configuration is out and the xorg.conf is back in.
This is definitely a weak point in open source stuff. Changes like this should be documented better or some kind of warning or explanation that current configuration techniques are about to be broken should be available.
I suppose this is what I get for using the ‘testing’ distro.
UPDATE:
Here’s the relevant section to add to xorg.conf:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Synaptics"
driver "synaptics"
MatchProduct "ETPS/2"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event9"
Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.05"
Option "TapButton1" "1"
Option "TapButton2" "2"
Option "TapButton3" "3"
EndSection
See the InputClass section of the xorg.conf man page.
UPDATE II:
The two Match lines can be replaced with a MatchIsTouchpad "1" line. I don’t know if this is better or not- but it seems like it might be preferrable since InputClass sections are applied to anything that matches according to the man page. At least it’s limited to touchpads this way.
I spent a little time and finally came up with a fairly simple start to integrating Awesome with uzbl. I created a file called favorites and put it in a suitably obscure location. The file format is simply 2 double-quoted fields per line. The first field is a site name, the second is the url. The fields are space separated. For example:
"Mutt" "www.mutt.org"
Lua pattern matching is fairly restrictive, so this was the simplest way to get a lot of possibilities for the name and the url fields.
I’ve been searching for a decent blog client for Linux. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a go to client that everyone is fired up about. Scribefire seems to be the closest, but I don’t like Firefox on my system- it’s sluggish compared to Opera. From my poking around, it looks like Linux people tend to role their own in many cases which obviously reduces the demand. That said, I’ve downloaded and run QTM but it’s too temperamental. It gives me a lot of trouble posting and I haven’t taken the time to figure out why. I saw that BloGTK2 was available now, so I downloaded BloGTK2 last night and decided to try it.
First impression- holy crap there are TON of dependencies. I put it on my EEE and it seemed like I was installing Gnome in order to get it to run. But now that it’s up and running I’d say it has a lot going for it. The interface is intuitive enough that I didn’t have to refer to documentation. I did run into a bug using the account “auto-detect settings.” After I had setup my first account, the app crashed when I tried to use it to setup the second account. The feature worked when setting up my first account. I just manually setup the second account and I was able to post and refresh both accounts without issue. Which was good- I was expecting it to give me fits posting after the setup problems.
I’ve had Touchfreeze working on my EEE for a little while, but lately I noticed it had stopped working. I never really figured out why it stopped working, but it did prompt me to make some config changes and learn some new stuff Linux related. For instance, did you know that you don’t even need your xorg.conf (well, almost)?
Yep. Apparently HAL is what takes care of a lot of that stuff. From my reading, it seems to be the direction things are headed. There’s an excellent primer article here on it. There’s also a bunch of links at the bottom that are informative. I point them out because they led me to resolving my touchpad problems on my EEE.