Author: Dan

Today I offered to help a friend with their new Lenovo Ideapad S205 which they’d bought a year or so previously, but not got round to using. It had come pre-installed with both Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10 but wasn’t quite behaving properly.

I thought the easiest option would be to start again, with a nice clean install of Ubuntu 12.04.04 LTS. I attached my trusty USB flash drive, and…

…corrupted display, and no boot.

It turns out you can’t press F12 at boot time, and choose to boot from the USB media in the list that appears. No. You have to go into the boot settings proper, and put the USB media at the top of the list. That was Bug number 1.

So, off goes the install of Ubuntu. All looks good, Wi-Fi working, hotkeys etc… time to reboot and…

….nope. PXE boot ROM kicks in instead. Check the boot settings. Yep, hard drive set to boot before other things, but doesn’t.

Back to booting from USB…. Fiddle with grub settings. No go. OK, re-install with manual choice of partitions… still no go… fiddle fiddle… hours pass…

Finally, I noticed the drive has an MS-DOS type partition table, despite it booting EFI-style to the previous Ubuntu installs, so I decide to delete it and create a GPT one instead. Still nothing… Add an *empty* EFI partition… re-install… nope… delete all partitions again… re-install… Voila! (I’ve no idea which step was the magic one either. Bug number 2.)

So, now Ubuntu booted quite happily, but without working Wi-Fi. No worries, I’ll attach an Ethernet cable and let it pull down latest drivers…

…but hang on, it has them all.

Poke about in the terminal for a while and realise the wireless is ‘hard’ blocked. But the wireless switch on the side is in the on position. Moving it disables Bluetooth. Moving it back enables Bluetooth. Still no Wi-Fi, but at least I know the switch works! Everything driver wise seems to check out. The laptop is adamant that Wi-Fi is disabled by hardware switch. I turn to many Google searches in desperation…

What? Seriously?

Yup. On the Lenovo Ideapad S205, the Wi-Fi will not function properly unless….

…the hard disk is the first entry in the boot menu!

Bug number 3, and I hit it because of Bug number 1…

Still, all’s well that ends well, but I never want to see another Lenovo S205 again!

I bought my significant other an HP Chromebook 11 for their birthday this week. I’ll admit that part of the reason for my choice of gift was my own curiosity. I wanted to see how good a Chromebook was, and whether it would be a better choice to use in schools than the current (expensive) i-tablet craze that seems to be going on…

First impressions are that the device is the perfect size and weight. The keyboard is great to type on (I’m using it now), with well spaced keys that have a responsive travel and good tactile feedback. Error-free typing without looking is definitely easy on these things, so anyone who needs to write a lot would find an HP Chromebook 11 very nice. The screen is much better than I expected at this price point, with a very bright and crisp display with excellent viewing angles. ChromeOS is easy to use without training, and of course it plays very nicely with the Google Apps stuff. If you’re a heavy user of Google Apps, I’d highly recommend carrying a Chromebook around with you!

The only snag was the inability to print. Sure, you can collect your docs from Google Drive on another machine with a printer, but that’s a bit clunky. Also, given that we have a networked printer at home I wanted to be able to use that. This is another of those Linux-to-the-rescue stories, so with a bit of tinkering all is well. Here’s my solution:

• Install CUPS onto my HP Proliant Microserver and add our network printer to it
• Connect CUPS to Google CloudPrint with some python magic from Jason: https://github.com/armooo/cloudprint
• Set up an application specific-password to use in my Google Account (For better security, just in case…)
• Give CloudPrint the account details
• In my Google account, share the new Google Cloud Print printer with my better half, so they can use it too.

I still need to tweak things so that the CloudPrint connector will start automatically, but I very rarely reboot the server, so I’m not sure when I’ll be bothered to get around to that!

It’s Christmas time, and family are coming to stay. I realised that they would probably want a TV in their room. There isn’t much choice for TV retailers on the Isle of Man, but I figured that if I was buying a TV at the end of 2013 it should have at least an LED backlight, DVB-T2 HD capability, and built in Wi-Fi for connectivity. I found an LG model that ticked all of these boxes.

With the onslaught of the Christmas festivities, I only had time to hook it to my wireless network, update the firmware and set up the TV tuner. The LG Smart TV software looks fairly comprehensive at first glance, with options for streaming media from the internet and also accessing content from my HP Proliant NAS box that I blogged about earlier. It looks like you can control the TV from a tablet or smartphone too, so I’ll have to explore when I have a bit more time.

Of course, I’ll also be having a bit of a dig inside the software internals to see how it all works. Already I think it’s probably a Linux + BusyBox affair, so there will be some options to tinker. I’ll also have a think about how the TV stands from a security and privacy point of view.

I’ll blog here if I find anything of note, but for now have a great Christmas and New Year!

While I was in the UK recently, I took advantage of an Argos store to acquire a USB Wireless dongle. I bought the TP-Link TL-WN725N because it was cheap, and very small. The plan was to use it with my Raspberry Pi, and a quick Google search suggested the TL-WN725N would run directly from the Raspberry Pi without needing external power, and that the driver software was already baked into the kernel.

Of course, nothing in life is ever simple. It turns out that TP-Link have recently changed the chip inside the adapter, and are now selling version 2.0 of the device. This would be great (newer hardware is always better, right?) apart from the fact that the kernel in the Raspian Linux I use on my Raspberry Pi does not have the correct driver for this new chip.

Luckily, the new chip is manufactured by Realtek who are such a great company that they release driver source code for their devices. So, on my to-do list now is to compile the new wireless driver for my Raspberry Pi kernel. I suspect compiling from source will take quite a while on the humble ARM processor in the Raspberry Pi…

My Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop is a lovely machine. It’s slim and light, very very fast and has a beautiful screen. It also came from the manufacturer with Ubuntu linux pre-installed and ready to go. I do wish more manufacturers would sell their computers without Microsoft Windows.

However, it did have a tendency to drop the wireless connection randomly which is surprisingly frustrating. Having never bought a ‘proper’ laptop before I thought I’d make use of the 12 months pro-support that came with it. Sadly, Dell’s representative was asking me Windows related things, so I politely gave up on them. Maybe if I’d persevered they would have put me through to an Ubuntu specialist, maybe not. I suppose the leaflet in the laptop packaging about getting started with Windows 8 should have made me suspicious of what to expect!

Anyway, it turns out that the Atheros Killer Wi-Fi card in the machine wasn’t being supported very well by the Linux kernel that was shipped with the machine. That doesn’t say much for Dell’s quality assurance testing. All that was needed was for me to install a newer kernel, and the wifi now works perfectly.

I’d like to think that this minor issue will be addressed by Dell, but just in case you’ve got yourself a shiny new XPS 13 Developer Edition with flaky Wi-Fi, here’s how to get a newer kernel that works:

Open a terminal (press CTRL+ALT+T) and type:

sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-quantal

Then reboot your laptop.

I bought a 300 GB NAS box about 10 years ago, and although it still works fine it had finally filled up.  The thought that it has all my digital life on one spinning disk was also making me feel uneasy – especially given that it has been spinning for a decade. So, I was looking for something bigger to replace it but I knew that I wanted something with some redundancy against physical hard drive failures.

Now, these types of redundant NAS boxes don’t come cheap and they only do one job, so I was finding the costs hard to justify. Perfect timing then that I came across a great deal from HP on their Proliant Microserver. They were offering £100 cash back, which meant that I could by the server for a little over £100. I also bought two 2 TB hard drives at the same time, so the total cost was about £250. This compared very well to the NAS boxes I had been looking at that were nearer the £500 mark.

Of course there was the added bonus that I would get to install the operating system, and configure everything myself. Some people will see that as a hassle, but I love it when I know how all my computer bits work on the inside! Naturally, I opted for an open source solution and decided to install Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS.

The HP Proliant literature claimed it had RAID built in, but I soon realised that this is handled in software by the BIOS and takes some processor cycles. A few quick tests convinced me that I wouldn’t use the built in RAID and instead opted for Ubuntu’s software RAID instead. This was more configurable, and seemed to perform faster than the built in solution! Having never built a RAID array before, I opted for RAID 1 which means that each of the 2 TB drives is a perfect copy of the other. This means that if one drive fails, my data is safe on the other.

The install was very easy (hooray for Ubuntu!) and with the addition of some Samba packages, it didn’t take long before I had a working NAS. It performs very well, and is much faster than the old NAS box it replaces.

So, was it worth the marginal extra effort over a ready-made-off-the-shelf NAS? Definitely. I now have a small, relatively cheap to run machine that currently provides:

• Two terabytes of redundant storage to all the devices on my network
• A 24/7 solution for uploading data from my Fitbit activity tracker, using the libfitbit software library by Kyle Machulis
• USB power for my Raspberry Pi

Future plans include adding a streaming webcam server, and an AllStar link node for amateur radio.

If you’re looking for a small home server, then I’d recommend the HP Proliant range. Especially if you can get it with a cash back offer like I did.