antiX-M8 on Lenovo S10

I’ve tried antiX before (I think it was 7.2?) on my desktop machine.  It was a great looking distro.  The one thing that kept me from installing it was I couldn’t get the installer to work.  Besides that, some of the stuff on it seemed to be a little out of date so I just sort of moved on.

Well, I just saw that the new version (M8) is out.  It’s based on Mepis, which is based on Debian (Lenny at the moment) but I did a little reading and it seems you can use the sid or sidux repos.  So, it seems like you may be able to get a really good looking, bleeding edge, lightweight OS from this.

I didn’t have a lot of time to work on it today and most of what I had was spent looking for how to make a USB install key.  I found a post in the antiX formus with a nice script that will put the iso on a usb stick for you.  It worked very well.

So far all I’ve really tested is wi-fi.  To my amazement, it works out of the box!!  I don’t expect that to happen with the sound though.  We’ll see.  Right now I’m just running off the live usb stick.  Haven’t installed to the hard drive yet but I think I may try this one out for a while.

Screenshots without a screenshot program?

Ran across this today and I think it may come in handy for taking screenshots.  I need to get some of those in here, I know.

Look at #19 here: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/linux-tips-every-geek-should-know

“There are plenty of screen-capture tools, but a lot of them are based on X. This leads to a problem when running an X application would interfere with the application you wanted to grab – perhaps a game or even a Linux installer. If you use the venerable ImageMagick import command though, you can grab from an X session via the console. Simply go to a virtual terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F1 for example) and enter the following:

chvt 7; sleep 2; import -display :0.0 -window root sshot1.png; chvt 1;

The chvt command changes the virtual terminal, and the sleep command gives it a while to redraw the screen. The import command then captures the whole display and saves it to a file before the final chvt command sticks you back in the virtual terminal again. Make sure you type the whole command on one line.

This can even work on Linux installers, many of which leave a console running in the background – just load up a floppy/CD with import and the few libraries it requires for a first-rate run-anywhere screen grabber.”

Looks like a cool hack to me and I’ll try it out to get some pics in here.

Lenovo S10 Arch Linux CPU Frequency Scaling

I started working on getting  Conky set up on my S10 and realized my CPU was running at max speed all the time.  Didn’t know Arch doesn’t enable CPU frequency scaling out of the box.  It’s easy to do though if you look at the wiki.  Hopefully this will give me some more battery life.  I’m getting a little over 2 hrs now so I’ll report back after I see what this does.

Lenovo S10 – Arch Linux

I’ve been trying out Arch on the S10 for the past few days.  I was pretty happy with Xubuntu on it but wanted to see if I could go even lighter to see what sort of difference it would make.

At first, the base install worked fine but only gets the wired NIC working.  There’s a driver for Broadcom-wl in the AUR so I tried that and got the wireless working pretty easily.  After editing rc.conf to start networking in the background (putting an @ in front), my S10 boots to a console prompt in less than 15 seconds.

After that I installed xorg, xf86-video-intel and fluxbox.  The documentation on all these things is good in the wiki so no need to rehash it here.

I tried Skype (which is in the repo) and the webcam and sound worked out of the box but the microphone…not so much.  It looks like the same problem as every other distro right now.  The kernel just hasn’t been updated with the latest alsa-drivers.  I even upgraded to the current testing version of the kernel which is 2.6.28-6 right now and it still doesn’t work.  I know with Ubuntu, upgrading alsa to 1.0.18a will fix it.  All the other alsa packages on Arch are at 1.0.19 now so I was hopeful that they had patched the kernel or something but I guess the alsa-drivers are still lagging a little.  I’m sure this could be fixed but a little Googling suggests that kernel 2.6.29 will have the latest alsa drivers in it so I may just wait a little while.

Anyway, I’m enjoying my minimalist S10 with almost nothing installed on it for now.  It forces you to go back and remember (or figure out) how to do things on the command line but it runs without the fan screaming all the time.  Ubuntu seemed to keep the processor at 30% even when you weren’t doing anything but Arch with Fluxbox and Conky shows the processor at 0% when you’re just looking at the screen.  Lighter definitely seems to be better with the S10.

Ubuntu Bootable USB Stick Creator

I’m not sure if everyone else has noticed this already but I’ve found it very useful on my new Lenovo S10, which doesn’t have a CD drive.  In Ubuntu Intrepid, if you look under System->Administration there’s a menu entry that says, “Create a USB Startup Disk”.  It will make a bootable USB stick from an iso image.  It looks like this only works with Ubuntu images (or its variants) but still very useful.  The USB Creator is not part of the Xubuntu default install but you can get it with Synaptic.  Just search for ‘usb-creator’.

Lenovo S10 – Getting the internal mic working

Thanks to Will for the tip on updating alsa.  I got 1.0.18a installed and the internal microphone works now.

There’s a great script in the Ubuntu forums that makes the update pretty painless.  I used it to update a new 8.10 Intrepid install and it worked perfectly.  You can use this script to update to the latest cvs build too but using the defaults to install the stable release (1.0.18a) worked fine for me.

Thanks again Will.

EDIT: Dec 2010 – I’ve noticed I’m still getting lots of hits on this but the issue has been fixed for me for at least a year and a half.  Alsa has been updated in all the distros I’ve used.  The only thing you should need to do is make sure you have the right settings in alsamixer.

Lenovo S10 – Out with Ubuntu, in with Xubuntu

In my last post I said I would look for ways to cut down Ubuntu’s boot time on the S10.  Well, I did that and found that Ubuntu’s boot is already pretty good.  I didn’t find any easy ways to cut significant time off of it.  There didn’t really seem to be any unnecessary things getting started that I could cut out.  I tried the concurrency=shell trick and it made no difference at all.

After using Ubuntu Jaunty Alpha for a few days, I was having some issues with screen artifacts that would eventually go away but the system was a bit sluggish even with the tweaking I did.  The weirdest thing was when I tried to shut it down.  It sometimes took a minute or more for the shutdown dialog box to come up.  It just seems Ubuntu is a little too heavy for this netbook.

I figured if Ubuntu wasn’t really optimal, I’d give Xubuntu a shot.  I just got it loaded last night and haven’t really played with it yet.  One thing I have noticed already is that Xubuntu hasn’t made the fan run any less on my S10.  The thing runs pretty much constantly, even when you’re not using it.

Just for fun, I booted the S10 from a Puppy Linux USB stick to see how that worked.  The fan runs less under Puppy.  Usually only while you’re using the computer and as soon as you stop, the fan does too.  Xubuntu may still be just a little heavy for this machine but I’ll try it for a little while.

Lenovo S10 Ubuntu – Removing unneeded packages

I was able to remove almost 300MB of unneeded software from my machine easily.  I’ll look at cutting a little deeper later but this is a good first step and it got rid of some unneeded running processes too.

I started by running System Monitor and checking what processes were running.  Right on top of the list was bluetooth and this machine doesn’t have it so that could go.  I also saw tracker was using 8 MB of RAM and I figured on a netbook with a small hard drive I probably don’t need it.

I also opened synaptic and looked through everything that was installed to see what could go.  Here’s what I got rid of:

bluetooth and everything that starts with bluez – removing bluez-gnome will also remove libmbca0 which is apparently for mobile broadband.

apparmor, libapparmor1, libapparmor-perl – hopefully deleting these wasn’t too bad an idea.

xserver-xorg-video-(all of them except intel and vesa)

ekiga – I use Skype

orca – luckily I don’t need it

brltty and brltty-X11 -I don’t need these

brasero, cdparanoia, cdrdao, dvd+rw-tools – don’t have a CD burner.  When I removed cdrdao, I had to also remove ubuntu-desktop which is a meta-package.  This won’t break your system, at least in the short term.  I suppose it could cause a problem if Canonical significantly reworks things and pushes an updated ubuntu-desktop meta-package to add things to your system.

compiz-(everything)

evolution, evolution-common, evolution-webcal, contact-lookup-applet – you won’t be able to remove evolution-data-server.  Gnome uses it for something.

gnome-mag, gnome-pilot

tracker, libtracker-gtk0

Once you remove all that, look at the sidebar to the left in synaptic.  Click on “Installed (local or obsolete)”.  You can delete any old kernels & headers if you want.  Then click on “Not installed (residual config)”.  You should be able to delete everything in there.

Next I rebooted and checked how long it took.  Startup to GDM login screen was the same but I cut about 5 seconds off Gnome startup.  My memory usage went down from 248MB to 188MB with only System Monitor running.  This could be nice on a machine with only 512MB.  I’d like to cut down boot time a little next so I’ll work on that.

Lenovo S10 Ubuntu customization

I mentioned in a previous post that it’s possible to tailor Ubuntu or any distro for that matter to your individual system.  I’m going to work on doing that with Jaunty Alpha on my Lenovo S10.  Getting rid of stuff I don’t need will hopefully make this thing run its best.

A couple things to note. I already replaced the hard drive with an OCZ Solid State drive.  Hopefully that’ll give me a little more battery life but it’s only a 30 GB model so space will be at a premium.  Getting rid of unneeded packages will help there.  Also getting rid of processes that I don’t need should help the low-powered Atom CPU.  (Update: You can see how it worked in this post.)

I also installed 2 GB RAM and I can confirm that is all you’ll get even though there’s still 512MB in there somewhere.  This is apparently an Intel chipset limitation.

My plan here is to go through the system trying to eliminate as many memory and CPU cycle eating processes as I can and also remove as many software packages as possible while keeping a good useable system (at least useable for me).  I already turned Compiz off since it made things a bit jerky.  This is defintely not a multi-tasking machine so I think there’s some definite room for improvement.

A few quick baselines – boot to a GDM login screen takes 30 seconds.  After logging in, Gnome is fully loaded and wireless is connected in 25 more seconds.  With System monitor running, I have 248 MB of RAM used and CPU usage varies quite a bit but System Monitor alone keeps it between 8-35%.  Starting Firefox pegs it until the page is loaded then it settles back down.  We’ll see how much we can improve on all these things.

New Lenovo IdeaPad S10

I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook for a while and my wife surprised me with one for Christmas.  Even better, she gave it to me early since we’re going out of town for Christmas.  She’s the best.

So last night I tried a feature I just noticed in Ubuntu to make a USB startup disk.  It’s under System->Administration on my Intrepid system.  I happened to have iso’s of Xubuntu 8.04.1 and Ubuntu Jaunty Alpha 1 already downloaded so I made an install stick for Xubuntu first.

For some reason the Xubuntu USB stick wouldn’t finish booting.  I tested it on a few different computers and same problem on all of them.  It just dumps you to a BusyBox prompt after about 5 or 10 seconds.  I suppose it could have been a problem with the USB drive but I used the same one to make the Jaunty install stick and had no problems with that.

Everything seems to work pretty well on the Lenovo S10 under Jaunty Alpha 1 and also after a full-upgrade.  The only thing that’s a bit annoying is the internal microphone is giving me some trouble.  It may be a hardware issue since I Googled it and found people complaining about it even under Windows.  Other than that, the wired ethernet connection works until you can install the wireless drivers (which is pretty automatic).  The webcam also works.  I haven’t tried the sd card, expresscard, external monitor and probably a couple other things.