I recently upgraded my Dell E6410 with NVS 3100m GPU laptop from Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) to 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), and I can’t shake this feeling that the distribution has taken a few steps back. I’m not even referring to the new Unity desktop, but to some super-irritating annoyances I had to fix or work around before being able to use the system. These annoyances were not present in 10.10, it had a whole different collection. 🙂

I wanted to read the web preview of the Django Book’s second edition on my Kindle. Besides the fact that all image links are broken on that website and have apparently been so for some time, I prefer to have these things in the DRM-free MobiPocket / Kindle format. Of course I couldn’t find this anywhere, so I rolled my own based on the book’s SVN repository.

On this page you can download the MobiPocket version of the book and the HTML source files I generated to make it. You can also read on for the skinny on how you can do this yourself.

(Post summary: The real-world throughput of current generation Homeplug AV 200 Mbit/s powerline ethernet adapters in a modern house is woefully inadequate. Even wireless is much to be preferred, and can be had for cheaper. Read below for why.)

Based on the superb price / performance ratio of the MSI ePower 200AV II kit as extolled by this comparative review (32 powerline adapters were tested), and especially the fact that in the test setup these adapters managed to attain 32 Mbit/s even in the bad case scenario (two different circuits, 100 metres of cable separating the two adapters), I purchased the MSI ePower 200AV+ II kit to replace a wireless link I currently have in my house between the second and third floors. Based on iperf measurements, the wireless link currently manages around 22Mbit/s of throughput. Because the two power sockets I was planning to use are on the same circuit, I thought that I could improve on this existing connection with the two powerline adapters. Little did I know…

After recently spending some hours configuring my new Cisco SPA3102 Voice Gateway with a Betamax SIP provider (voipbuster / voipstunt / voipcheap / and so forth, see http://www.backsla.sh/betamax for a full list of all Betamax providers) and the Dutch PSTN system, I thought I’d try and make your life easier by documenting the most important of the settings.

I’m typing this up because it took me far too long to find, probably because I wasn’t using the right search terms, or because I was trying stupid key combinations…

In any case, if you want to make international characters (that is, characters with accent marks, diacritics, trema (plural tremata), umlauts, eat that google!) such as ë, é, ê or even ö or ï and so forth on the HTC Desire Z hardware keyboard, you simply long press the base character. A menu pops up and you get to choose the accented character that you would prefer to insert at that moment.

This review differs from other HTC Desire Z reviews because I’ve actually been using this phone as my only smartphone quite intensively, and because I’m writing up, in great depth, my iopinion as a gadget-toting ex-Linux-zealot computer science nerd. Take that engadget!

As many of you know, I was completely in love with my previous smartphone. Not surprising, seeing as the Nokia e71 is perfect, at least hardware-wise. However, partly due to Symbian (Nokia’s operating system) really dragging its heels (Nokia, does your mobile OS really have to feel like it teleported in from 1970?) and partly due to Android (Google’s mobile operating system) doing the exact opposite, I’d been not-so-patiently waiting for the right Android-running telephone to come along so I could start drinking the Google Kool-Aid.

Well howdy hoo! This is the fastest and most painless guide to installing Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) x86_64 on your Dell E6410 laptop with NVS 3100m GPU.

More specifically, installing Ubuntu 10.10 on this specific hardware configuration poses two problems:

1. Blank (black, no backlight) display when booting with the install media, or, if you manage to get Linux on the machine, with the installation itself.
2. Blank (black, no backlight) display when resuming from suspend to ram after having installed Ubuntu.

Solving problem 1

• Boot with the normal Ubuntu 10.10 x86_64 Desktop live disc. I usually do this from USB memory.
• When you get to the first boot menu (“Try Ubuntu without installing”, “Install Ubuntu”, etc.), press F6 for other options, then ESC to kill the menu that appears. Move the menubar to “Try Ubuntu without installing”.
• You can now edit the boot command-line. Replace “quiet splash” with “nouveau.modeset=0”
• Press enter to boot into the live desktop, then install the whole business as per usual.
• At the first boot after installation, press ‘e’ at the grub boot screen to edit the command line and again replace “splash quiet” with “nouveau.modeset=0”.
• You should get all the way to the Ubuntu desktop.
• Activate the NVidia drivers via System | Administration | Additional Drivers
• Now edit /etc/default/grub, and replace “splash quiet” in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT with, you guessed it, “nouveau.modeset=0”.
• Run “sudo update-grub” at the command-line.
• Problem solved.

Solving problem 2

• Edit the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable /etc/default/grub again. When you’re done, it should read (we’ve added the acpi_sleep bit at the end):

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“nouveau.modeset=0 acpi_sleep=nonvs”