The following is what I did to get Ubuntu 10.04 x86(32-bit) running properly on a Sony VAIO VPCF121GX PCG-81114L. This laptop is currently sold at Costco but shares the same body with many other VPCF12***X models. Sony has an annoying way of putting two model numbers on their laptops. I had more luck once I used the one on the bottom (PCG) rather than the one on the screen bezel(VPC).

I’m not sure if these instructions will work for other models but please comment if it works for you. When booting from a 10.04.1 livecd or a default install I wasn’t hearing any sound, couldn’t use the touchpad, could not resume from suspend. I’ve solved 2.5 of 3 problems so far(mic still doesn’t work).

Sound

To fix the sound not working, alsa needs to be updated via a backported package. This package is for my current kernel of 2.6.32-24 though you’ll want to make sure you get the corresponding version for your kernel.

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-`uname -r`

I wrote mostly above because the microphone still doesn’t work on the laptop. I’ve not tried any external mics or usb headsets yet but will update this article if I do find a solution.

Touchpad

This laptop uses and Alps Synaptics touchpad which is fairly common so I don’t really understand why Ubuntu doesn’t support it. The problem appears to be with the auto-detection of the touchpad(lots of Macintosh messages show in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log). To get the touchpad working:

1. Run: sudo vi /etc/default/grub and modify it so the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line looks like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”i8042.nopnp”
2. Run: sudo update-grub
3. Reboot.

Suspend

I wasn’t able to resume from suspend until I loaded the latest Nvidia driver. This laptop has an Nvidia GeForce 310M and I found the driver on a forum post. I still cannot switch to other consoles with Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6] so hopefully a future version of their driver will fix that. You can get the driver via ftp from:

ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/256.44/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44.run

This is a shell script(a 24mb one at that) so you’ll need to open a terminal and cd to wherever you save it and then:

chmod a+x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44.run

At this point you need to switch to root at runlevel 3. As root at the console I did this by typing:

init 3

Then I was able to login, sudo su to root again and run the driver installation script with:

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44.run

Now my suspend works!

After 22 comics and graphics released, I’ve decided to name this webcomic Simple Pen Art. It’s a pretty general title because I like the freedom to do comics on whatever without format contraints. Hopefully you find them thought-provoking, interesting, or sometimes just funny.

This new webcomic is here:

http://www.davidsterry.com/webcomic http://www.simplepenart.com

If and when it gets a name and it’s own domain, I’ll update this post. For now, I’m building the webcomic and the back-end to support it in php/mysql right here. My model for this endeavour, at least starting out, is xkcd. It’s early yet, so I don’t expect much feedback but if you feel strongly about something, this is the place to comment.

Most laptops that don’t have a CD drive can boot from USB but not all. This I found out with the Toshiba Portege 3500 Tablet that I recently was tasked to get up and running with a new operating system. I chose Fedora 12 after having seen some compelling footage of Fedora on a tablet. The problem was, I could not boot from CD and a flash drive prepared with fUSBi didn’t work.

What did? I used another laptop that had a built-in CD drive to install Fedora to the hard drive. Then I put the hard drive back into the Portege. When I attempted to boot, I was dropped to an administrative shell because the partition /dev/sda2 was dirty or needed to be fsck’d. I did that a couple of times and voila, I was up and running with F12 on the Toshiba.

After doing this, the maximum screen resolution I could get was 800×600 but adding a line to a newly created xorg.conf solved that.

Moral of the story: You can install GNU/Linux to a hard drive and move that hard drive to your target system.

If there’s any reason this should not work, please leave a comment. So far, I’ve not seen any adverse impact. Since mainstream distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora use a single generic kernel for many different hardward configurations, I would expect a hard drive swap of this sort to work in general.

One other thought I had is about the non-booting flash drive. I recently had an incident where a fUSBi-prepared flash drive wasn’t bootable and this was fixed by running the HP Drive Key Boot Utility.

I recently ran into a problem where the backup software that came with a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent external usb drive wasn’t working. When I looked at the backup logs I saw many files(possibly all) that the program tried to backup said Error 2013 next to them. After a bit of searching, I found the problem to be related to simple Windows file permissions.

To fix this, all you have to do is:

1. Open the Seagate drive from My Computer(or Computer for you Vista/7 users).

2. Right click on the backup folder(e.g. Seagate Backup) and go to properties.

3. Uncheck read only in the attributes and apply this change. Windows may ask you if you want to apply this to all subfolders and files and you definitely want to. It may take a few minutes to an hour to complete depending on how many files you have.

Once this is complete, your backup should proceed as normal. As always make sure you test any kind of backup periodically by retrieving and opening a file from it. Remember, you  might be doing backup but you really want RESTORE!

Update: After revisiting the backup on the same machine, Seagate backup is still saying backup filed and its icon is glowing red. Looking into the logs this time, I only see system and hidden files that it refuses to backup which is ok for my purposes. For the time being, this appears to be as good as it gets with this program. For a more reliable, yet less user friendly option, I have to recommend cwRsync (rsync bundled with necessary files from cygwin) scheduled using the Windows Task Scheduler.

Over the last few years, small form-factor solid state usb storage devices have become ubiquitous. They have replaced floppies, CDs and even larger usb hard drives with spinning disks for many backup, file transfer, and utility purposes. The question still remains though, what do we call them? To solve this problem, I turned to Google. For each name I had heard used, I got the number of results returned.

There you have it, the most popular term is clearly flash drive. Go forth and be confident when you ask someone to pass the flash drive!

Some other observations:

This kind of survey is only a cursory examination of the question. Further research could refine results by trying to weed out SSDs that don’t fit the flash drive form factor. I also didn’t use quotes in this examination.

One thing I find odd is that ‘thumb drive’ has so few hits when ‘flash drive’ has so many. Especially when you consider that ‘usb thumb drive’ is more popular than ‘usb flash drive’. This leads me to believe that thumb feels too ambiguous to let it be written without the usb.

If you’re looking for something interesting to do with a spare flash drive, why not try fUSBi to boot up your computer with gNewSense. Another interesting thing to do is try something like PenDriveLinux so you can save your operating system, prefernces, and files to a flash drive.

I deleted my Facebook account a few days ago. It’s not really an earth-shattering event for me: I spent less than 15 minutes a month on the site. What was really interesting about my account there was just how many of my friends and relatives were my “Friends” on the site. I never sought out a single one of them. Just having my name listed in their database meant that I got request after request. I accepted 29 requests by the end.

As I debated deleting the account, I was amazed by how much time it took to actually make the decision. For a site that I spent nearly no time on, I felt forced to weigh the social implications. In the end, I know my relations on facebook can always look me up. A simple google search will find me.

From a privacy standpoint, the picture was a whole lot clearer. Facebook doesn’t care about my privacy so long as I don’t delete my account. It might seem ironic that I’m concerned about privacy and yet I have a blog but of course privacy comes in many forms, the most important of which being my list of friends and relatives. Facebook had amassed the most such information of any system I’m aware of and no longer let me hide it easily. If it did let me limit it, I had no confidence that they wouldn’t flip a switch someday and expose every piece of information I had entrusted to them.

My account on Facebook is deleted. That’s not to say I’ve disappeared. I just disagree with their business model and furthermore, I am looking forward to a future where we can each run or choose a competitive host of our own Facebook-like web application. For now, this is my blog. You can comment on it to contact me or subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates in your feed reader.

I have a dog and his name his Art
He likes to answer questions and i have to say he’s pretty smart
I asked him, what do you call that thing on top of a house? he said
Roof roof roof
And the dog says roof roof roof all day

I have a cat named mrs. b a born and bred aristrocrat she’s always having friends to tea
Once she burner her tongue and she said to me
Me-ow me-ow
And the cat says meow meow meow
And the dog says roof roof roof
All day

I have a bird named Tweedle dee,
She likes to answer riddles like this one
Why did the chicken cross the kitchen? she said
To-eat tweet tweet ahhi get it

And the bird says tweet tweet tweet
And the cat says meow meow meow
And the dog says roof roof roof
All day

Now i have a goat named Geraldine
Ahe’s a music critic goat for a magazine
I asked her don’t you think this song is clever
She said naah naah naah
And the goat says naah naah naah
And the bird says tweet tweet tweet
And the cat says meow meow meow
And the dog says roof roof roof
All day