A long long way from home

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.

Just so I remember it, here’s how: http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/howto/undelete_ext3.html

Dagbladet har endeleg oppdaga OLPC, og skriv faktisk ein ok artikkel om historien og tanken bak den. For oss som er litt meir vaksne er slike små ultramobile laptopar ganske så interessante å ha med når ein er på farten, og OLPC er bortsett frå den horrible fargen eit ganske bra alternativ. Det finnest dog ein annan liten røvar som heiter EEE PC, som er konkurransedyktig i pris (vi snakker USA-priser..).  Laptopmag.com har ei artig samanlikning mellom OLPC og EEE PC. Personleg tykkjer eg at EEE PC har ein stor fordel i at han har eit tastatur med tactile feedback, gummimatta til OLPC er ikkje spesielt god å skrive på IMHO. Og ein skulle vel tru at softwaren til OLPC (Linux) skulle klare å køyre på Linux-baserte EEE PC også?

If you want a good and thorough review of the MB Air, please go here. This blog post is mostly a load of BS.

In the MWFS ’08 keynote Steve Jobs presented Apples very much anticipated new Ultra-portable, the MacBook Air (MBA). And behold, a sleek, sexy, glossy, aluminium sheet of pure goodness!  Or is it really? In 2005 Dell came out with the ultraportable X1, and I was wondering how that three years old machine holds up to the newest and greatest from Cupertino.

Left: Apple MacBook Air. Picture from Apple.com.
Right: Dell X1. Picture from notebookreview.com

Size. Size matters, no matter what they say.  MBA  is boasting a thickness of 0.4 to 1.94 cm, while X1 is 2.5 cm all over.  Since it is a square world I use the thickest measurement when calculating volume. So, the MBA is 1.94×32.5×22.7 = 1431.235 cubic centimetres. X1 clocks in at 2.5×28.6×19.68 = 1407,12 cubic centimetres. Winner:  Dell X1.

Weight. Matter has it (yes, a phun). And since the MBA is 1.36 kg and the X1 is 200 grams less at 1.140 kg the winner must be the X1.

Screen resolution. MBA has 1024000 square pixels, while the X1 has only 983040. But, when you measure screen size vs number of pixels you get that the MBA has 1024000/13.3 = 76992.5 pixels/inch, while the X1 has 983040 /12.1 = 81243 pixels/inch. This means the MBA has a big screen with low pixel density, and since I really dislike it when hardware doesn’t fill it’s full potential (also look at the size of the edge around the screen on the MBA – it’s huge!) the winner is the X1 again.

Connecting extra peripherals and such. USB: X1 2, MBA 1. Ethernet: X1 1, MBA 0. Modem: X1 1, MBA 0. VGA: X1 1, MBA 1, DVI: X1 0, MBA 1. Audio jacks: X1 2, MBA 1.  Firewire: X1 1, MBA 0 (!).  SD and CompactFlash card reader: X1 1, MBA 0. The MBA’s lack of built in ethernet, VGA and only one usb connector plus it’s heavy reliance on extra dongles makes the X1 the winner once more.

Connectivity. X1 has wifi b/g, 1 gigabit ethernet, bluetooth and a modem. The MBA has a/b/g/n wifi and bluetooth. It must be mentioned that the MBA has 802.11n that is now becoming increasingly popular.  It also has EDR. But still, lacking a gigabit ethernet port is the reason the X1 is yet again victorious.

Drives. The MBA proudly toutes an optional 64GB SSD, which normally would be a “wow, omg, gimme!” – but as usual with Apple and upgrades I am betting that  getting a 64GB SSD for the X1 on the open market is much cheaper than upgrading the MBA to the SSD.  And talking about drives, the X1 comes bundled with a optical drive, while the external USB MacBook Air SuperDrive is an option. Because of the bundle and Apples over-pricing of upgrades the X1 come out on top.

Power. Intel core 2 duo 1.6GHz versus a Centrino mobile 1.1GHz? Come oon. MBA totally owns that. But in order to get CPU power you will need battery power. And the MBA battery is not easily replaceable. With the X1 you can bring a few six cell batteries with you and use your laptop all the way to where you are going, while when the MBA is dead it must be plugged into an electrical outlet. Replaceable batteries is a much more on-the-go feature than heavy CPU power, so the ultraportable power price goes to the X1.

Availability. The X1 is no longer manufactured. However, you can pay $535 for it by pressing the “buy it now”-button on ebay and have it shipped to you in less than a week.  The MBA has 2-3 weeks delivery time according to Apple, but I would not be surprised if it would take 6 weeks to get it in your frisky little hands. However, as the X1 has reached the end of it’s production life the MBA must be declared the winner by walkover.

Memory. The MBA wins this with it’s 2BG vs 1.25GB maximum capacity.  It looks like the memory chips on the MBA is onboard chips that are not replaceable, so when a RAM chip fail you must get the machine to the apple repair shop, while with the X1 you may just get a replacement RAM chip and pop it in. I said the MBA won, but it did not.

Ok. I guess I could go on and on with this. The key points are that the X1 is smaller, lighter and has a wider range of possibilities than the MBA. If I were to leave my 15″ MacBook Pro at home and go ultraportable and had to choose between a three years old design and a brand new super slick designer laptop I would choose the old one. Does not look that good, but is more practical. I am quite disappointed that Apple could not outcompete that three year old heap of silvery plastic, but they will probably sell quite good on their good looks and impressive thin-ness.