A long long way from home

My friend ez tipped me off about acerfand, which effectively silences the very annoying fans on the aa1. Just follw the instructions in the README file and you are good to go!


Basic fan control for the Acer Aspire One
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P.S. The mail-notification .deb is prebuilt for ubuntu with SSL support enabled, unlike the one in the Ubuntu repository.


I have to excuse the poor quality of these shots, the Nokia 6300’s camera isn’t all that.

First, the MacBook Pro:

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Nettopp dette skjedde med meg i dag, då eg gjekk forbi Grensen Restaurant på sørsida i Halden. Diverre hadde dei berre vanleg traktekaffe i dag, men nettet fungerte utmerkt på min Acer Aspire One med Linux etter at eg fekk WPA Personal-nøkkelen deira.

På ein ordinær torsdag var det i tillegg heilt daudt der, så eg fekk den trivelege betjeninga for meg sjølv. Servicen var sjølvsagt upåklageleg, og kyllingsandwichen eg bestilte var heilt OK.

Av andre fasiliteter kan eg nemne godt med straumkontaktar ved alle vindaugsborda, bra nettverksdekning og bra musikk med behageleg lydnivå. Det var heller ikkje noko danskebåt-liknande ventilasjonsanlegg slik som på til dømes Dickens. Tappekranene ved bardisken hadde fine skilt der det stod “Borg” og”Coca Cola”, så det er råd å få seg kvalitetsdrikke der òg.

Det einaste som var litt under pari var faktisk kaffen, som var litt vel sterk og kanskje bar litt preg av å ha stått i kanna litt vel lenge. Snakka litt med innehavaren, og det er kaffemaskin undervegs ganske snart. Det gleder vi oss til.

Med kaffemaskin, nettverk, straum, bra lyd og triveleg betjening har Grensen Restaurant godt potensiale til å bli ny stamstad etter at studentkroa la inn årene. Det blir spanande å sjå korleis resten av menyen er, neste gong blir det å teste hovudrettane.

I finally decided what UMPC I really wanted, and the choice was the Acer Aspire One (aa1). One of the local telephone dealerships got some of the A110 Blue models in this week, and after a couple of trips there I finally whipped out the old VISA card.

First I had to test the Linpus operating system, which was OK for ordinary surf-mail-chat use, but I found it to be a bit limiting. Not least because it’s based on Fedora 8, and I really do prefer something Debianish for desktop use. So when I got home the first thing I did was to research how to install Ubuntu on it.

There is as always great tips to be found at the Ubuntu help site, and I followed that howto in almost all respects. The only thing I did different was to download the Ubuntu 8.04.1 desktop Live CD onto the running Linpus system, install UNetbootin and then push the iso onto a 1GB USB stick.

After a terribly long install I edited the fstab to mount the / file system as ext2 with the noatime option. A friend also sent me in the direction of this Geek Sheet, where I followed Tweak 2. This allowed me to get 9.1MB/s write speeds, where I would get only 7.1MB/s write speeds without the noop elevator. 9.1MB/s is not all that, but it was a noticeable speed gain

Another tweak was to disable Firefox’s cache. IO is a real bottleneck on the aa1, so disabling writing to disk is always a good thing.

After playing with Ubuntu on it for a while it became apparentthat the original 512 MB RAM was way too little. So I set out to add another 1GB of RAM to it. Following this video on Youtube I managed to accomplish this successfully. However, RAM upgrades is not for everyone, you have to pick the entire computer apart.

So, after a few tweaks I finally got a UMPC that I think will serve me well as a companion notebook for the small trips and uses where my MBP is a real overkill and major weight addition.

Only thing I am still not happy with is that the fans are always running. Guess I have to play around with powertop and hunt for more information around the interwebs.

WARNING – following any instructions here will have a severe impact on your system and may possibly cause a host of unknown problems. If you follow any instructions in this post and you have any problems PLEASE do NOT expect me to help you out, you are on your own. Following my instructions below are just plain stupid, do not do it!

So, you want the Mac OS X menu bar to automatically hide itself? So did I. One would think that this was a typical thing that you could enable by right-clicking the menu bar and then click the  “Autohide” option? Think again – this is Apple, and their Human Interface Guidelines probably says any such action is WRONG – as is a lot of other features I desire. Then, how to do it? A friend of mine suggested Menufela. This does not currently work with Leopard, AND it costs money. So I googled around a bit, and found out that one is able to disable the menu bar per application by tweaking the applications Info.plist.

Having to tweak every application on the system just to make the menu bar hide itself is really, really stupid. But whatever, I like to muck about with my system (which most probably is why it is soon ready for a reinstall) , so I thought I’d give it a shot. I edited the Info.plist of iTerm, and behold, the menu bar was gone. I moved the mouse to the upper edge of the screen – and voilá, there it was again! Fantastic, just what I wanted. Now what? Make a script that does this to all the applications in /Applications, of course!

Brilliant idea. This is very easy to do with a little mix of the cli programs find and defaults. So I started up iTerm – with no menu bar – and typed this command that will edit every Info.plist for all applications in /Applications:

find /Applications -type d -name “*.app” -exec defaults write “{}/Contents/Info” LSUIPresentationMode -int 4 \;

Away it went – it gave a lot of errors and took quite a while to complete, but when it was done all applications except Finder had no menu bar! I was happy as a kid eating his first ice cream cone.

Until I restarted Safari and went to a web page that required login. My password was gone! Suddenly being a little bit nervous I started up Keychain Access, only to discover that I was getting a “Access to this item is restricted” every time I tried revealing a password. Time to panic. I tried all the tricks I could find via google, including verifying and repairing my keychain from within Keychain Access. Nothing worked. Then I suddenly happened to find a thread on macnn.com describing how to re-sign modified applications….  I suddenly relized I had been an idiot, and started reading..

True enough, codesign -v  reported “code or signature modified.” – modifying the Info.plist file will break the programs signature, hence disallowing access to your keychain items! I then followed the howto and generated a new certificate for code signing, and re-signed Keychain Access. After resigning I had access to my passwords again!  So I tried the same for Safari, and lo – passwords started showing up for websites again. Really fantastic. So in order to “repair” all the broken applications in /Applications I did this:

find /Applications -type d -name “*.app” -exec codesign -f -s privateCertificate “{}” \;

Now all the applications using Keychains were able to get access to their password, albeit I have to press the “Always allow” button all the time, at least I do not have to start remembering passwords all over again All in all a fun little poke into the shadows behind the Apple.

And just to repeat myself: Don’t do this, it may have all kinds of weird side effects. Play with fire and you will get burned.