Personally speaking, part of the reason I lost it/don’t maintain it is because I find the icon selections on Linux are no longer lacking in any way. In fact, I think some of the best icons on any platform are for GNOME and KDE.

If you’re interested in taking over this code, let me know. I’ll be happy to refer people to an updated version of the software.

While trolling the unRAID forums today, I ran across an app called Hard Disk Sentinel. They have a range of applications available for a variety of hard disk monitoring, but their free Linux app is the one I’m writing about today. You simply download the binary and run it on a system as root, and you’ll get output like this:

HDD Device  0: /dev/sda
HDD Model ID : WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0
HDD Serial No: WD-WMAVU1631157
HDD Revision : 01.00A01
HDD Size     : 1430799 MB
Interface    : S-ATA II
Temperature  : 24 °C
Health       : 100 %
Performance  : 100 %
Power on time: 8 days, 22 hours
Est. lifetime: more than 1000 days

Pretty handy, and much more readable. Mind you this is an “at a glance” view of your disk, but it can point out a number of useful things, like which disks are oldest in your system, which are running hot, etc.

I’ve added the QR codes to my site here, such that you can navigate to them using said programs. The application “Barcode Scanner” for the Android phones does this and is really quite cool.

Unfortunately, the current release of Ubuntu, 9.04, is currently using kernel 2.6.28, which isn’t new enough to have working wireless drivers for the chipset in the LT3103u. Fortunately, Ubuntu has a very clean way to upgrade to their “testing” release:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

After having done this, wireless works perfectly. The beta of 9.09 Karmic Koala includes kernel 2.6.30. Other devices seem to work well, so far, with one exception: video.

Video was working fine until I closed the lid, at which point it never recovered. So, based on some data I read elsewhere, I disabled DRI using the following in xorg.conf:

Option “DRI” “off”

This is highly suboptimal, as DRI dramatically increases X11 performance. However, this does seem to have fixed the problem. I’ll do some more research to see if I can figure out a better solution. But in short, Ubuntu works well if you’re willing to run pre-release software. If I figure out anything else of note, I’ll be sure and update this post.

I just finished installing Fedora 11 using the Install DVD. Unfortunately, I failed to get the OS to install using the Net Install CD. It would fail halfway through, though I have a suspicion that it was my external DVD drive, and not necessarily the netbook.

After the initial install, the wireless sees networks but can’t connect to my WPA network. I’m doing a yum update now (453 packages!) and once that’s done, I’ll take a deeper look. There’s a post somewhere that says you need the latest ath9k driver and a patch for the synaptics touchpad to make scrolling work, but so far my scrolling is working fine, so perhaps that’s been patched already.

I’ll update this post once I get further along in making all the hardware work well. Then I’ll go on to do the same thing with Ubuntu.

I just picked up a Gateway LT3103u which comes with Vista. Reports say that Windows 7 runs far better on netbooks than Vista, and I had a shiny new Windows 7 RC DVD that I got from the NECC 2009 trade show.

Upon installing, everything worked except for the wireless network card, and trying to find drivers seemed hopeless. Gateway has nothing on their site at all. The machine appears to be a rebranded Acer of sorts, but the drivers from their site didn’t work either.

So, in the original Vista installer, there’s a Gateway Recovery Application which allows you to burn a driver DVD as well as system restore DVD’s. I’d recommend doing both, in case you ever want to revert, but for Windows 7, you will need to burn the driver DVD at a minimum.

Once you have said DVD, install Windows 7. After you are booted up, put in the driver DVD, and let it run the Autorun application. From there, select “Contents” and then scroll down to the Atheros Wireless LAN HB95 driver, and install it. Note that there’s also an HB63 driver, as well as a Broadcom driver. Neither of those is what you want.

After installing, your card should be working. After allowing Windows to update itself a bit, the ATI graphics driver will also be installed, providing for proper screen resolution.

So now I have Windows 7 on the machine, and Device Manager shows all hardware as working properly with drivers installed.

If I find other things that should be mentioned here, I’ll add them as they come up.

Update: I also needed to install the Synaptics Touchpad driver from the Driver DVD in order to get scrolling to work, as well as the multitouch gestures.

Update: I have had several requests for the wireless driver from that DVD. It’s located at the following URL: Atheros HB95 Vista/Win7 Driver. I assume that this is free to publish, as it comes with every Gateway, but if I receive a request to remove the link, I will do so.

Update: Gateway now appears to have a full set of Windows 7 drivers on their Support site, both for 32 and 64 bit Windows 7.

Turns out, Andrew Smith has written an app called ISO Master. I guess it was originally Linux only, but he now offers a Windows port as well. Editing the ISO image using his application is a piece of cake. You can even edit text files inside the ISO on the fly (great for poking at the syslinux.cfg, for example). It’s the perfect open source app; it work well, does what it advertises, and doesn’t try to do a bunch of other things.

According to his web site, he charges $20 for the Windows version, but the Linux version is free of charge. If you’re in the market to muck around with ISO’s (putting your serial number on a CD, for example) I’d highly suggest you check ISO Master out.

So in short, I highly recommend the Eye-Fi. It’s really not terribly expensive, and has some nice features.

I for one welcome our new overlord monitoring services. While I will probably not switch immediately over to Icinga in our production environment, you can be sure I’ll try it at home and keep a close eye on their progress.