fatvegan

As per Ubuntu Hardy. Even makes the little indicator LED work, which I've never seen work before.

I bought a totally sweet Acer TravelMate 8200 for $330 from GraysOnline. It's got 2GB RAM with an Intel Core Duo 2GHZ. It's super quick. Even has a dual layer DVD burner and a 256MB ATI video card.

I just put Hardy Heron on it and it all worked fine. Except for the wireless, which required me to apt-get install linux-ubuntu-modules-.... The wireless light still doesn't come on with the wireless button, but it does turn the wireless on and off.

I'm not even going to bother dual-booting Windows XP on this laptop. That's partly because I'm so amazingly elite, but mostly because all I do on Windows is play Rome: Total War and it's hurting my social/love life.

I get this problem a lot.

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "en_AU.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

I think possibly this solves it.

$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall language-pack-en

It says comforting things like...

Generating locales...
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
  en_BW.UTF-8... done

Update: Except it didn't work. But maybe this will.

$ sudo localedef -i en_AU -f UTF8 en_AU.utf8

It took me a while to figure this one out, because I'm totally unelite.

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier    "Dell 2408WFP"
  Option        "DPMS"
  HorizSync 30-83
  VertRefresh 56-75
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier    "Default Screen"
  Device        "ATI Technologies Inc RV380 [Radeon X600 (PCIE)]"
  Monitor       "Dell 2408WFP"
  Defaultdepth  24
  SubSection "Display"
    Modes       "1920x1200" "1280x1024" "1152x864"  "1024x768"  "832x624"   "800x600"   "640x480"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

xorg.conf

PHP is been pretty slow for me since I left Apache 2 and the PHP code caching behind. I tried turck mmcache with PHP4 and it worked pretty badly. It sped things up, but lighttpd started freezing up every few hours. It was probably FastCGI screwing up and it might have been fixed with FastCGI since then. But I'm all PHP5 now, so I needed to use something else. The Lighttpd guys suggested (and maybe created) XCache so I tried it. It only took a few minutes to install and it's working sweet. WordPress page loads are down from 300ms to 50ms. I just hope it doesn't screw other things up.

I used the XCache installation instructions but had to do things a bit differently.

1. Downloaded the XCache source from http://xcache.lighttpd.net/

   ~/src $ wget http://... (the release url)
   ~/src $ tar -zxf xcache-*.tar.gz
   ~/src $ cd xcache
   

2. You have to install php5-dev and make if you haven't got them

   ~/src $ sudo apt-get install php5-dev make
   

3. Run the PHP/XCache installation stuff

   ~/src/xcache $ phpize
   ~/src/xcache $ ./configure --enable-xcache
   ~/src/xcache $ make
   ~/src/xcache $ sudo make install
   

4. Edit the php.ini file to tell it where the xcache.so file is located. Mine was at /usr/lib/php5/20051025/xcache.so. You need to edit the xcache.size setting (I used 32M, but others use 64M) and the extension (or zend_extension) setting.

   ~/src/xcache $ find /usr -name xcache.so
   ~/src/xcache $ sudo vi /etc/php5/php.ini
   

5. Check that it's working

   ~/src/xcache $ php-cgi -v
   

6. Restart lighttpd

   ~/src/xcache $ sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
   

I've installed Beatrix on my laptop and it's fully noice. I've always had problems getting Ubuntu to run happily because 256MB just doesn't cut it anymore. Beatrix is part Knoppix, part Ubuntu, part custom-Beatrix fun. It's very fast. From the command line vi now opens in a snap. Opening vi had become a little ridiculous on Dapper.

So I get all the niceness and convenience of special, modern things like Ubuntu, and the speediness of those other distros like arch and Gentoo, that rather frighten me. Yay for that Watsky fellow.

There are issues with lighttpd1.4.11-3ubuntu1 and I'm guessing lighttpd1.4.11-3 in general. I had some weird experiences with PHP CGI, and the FastCGI instances freezing up and the webserver becoming unusable. Overall lighty is tops, but I've had odd instability problems with both Ruby and PHP on it now. Although it may be because FastCGI is still a bit fresh, and not a problem with lighty itself.

To create the bug I hit a WordPress homepage with ab -n50 -c10 http://tumble.rocks/. It would reliably fail, although -c1 (no concurrency) seemed to work. Restarting always fixed the problem. I used top to monitor the php4-cgi processes, and they'd start out with activity and then every one would drop to zero CPU activity. Eventually ab would timeout.

I'm running Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy. The lighttpd package that failed was an Ubuntu package, but the hoary package I have now (1.4.8-4hoary1) seems to be stable.

Update: It wasn't that stable. So I upgraded to a specially compiled breezy package. It was less stable. So I have gone back again. I'd go back to Apache, but I've become seriously addicted to lighttpd's configuration and speediness. So much better.

This could apply to the Samsung ML-1710, ML-1740 and ML-1750. It could possibly apply to others as well.

I'm running Ubuntu Breezy 5.10, and have had the ML-1740 working on that and on Hoary. I believe it also works on Dapper.

I had problems using the Samsung Linux drivers.

You'll be having problems printing, and problems administering it. Initially I was unable to print, although administration worked OK. Despite being unable to print (I got distracted), I attempted to share it using a combination of this and this. The sharing didn't work, but it did break the administration. At first when I tried to add a printer it simply didn't work. No new printer was installed after the "New printer" process had been completed. Returning to backups didn't solve the problem. I removed and reinstalled all the cups-related packages, but that didn't work either. I'm still not sure what actually changed to break the administration.

I got this error when running System > Administration > Printing:

CUPS server could not be contacted.

And this error when running gnome-cups-manager from the command line:

Removing the Allow from x.x.x.x for IPs other than 127.0.0.1 in the <Location /></Location> part of /etc/cups/cupsd.conf fixed the administration problem.

This process let me print.

editing /etc/cups/mime.types and uncommenting the line application/octet-stream also editing /etc/cups/mime.convs and uncommenting the line application/octet-stream application/vnd.cups-raw 0 -

From myhandyrestaurant