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I finally tried the EEECTL tool. Really nice hack - and since the CPU and chipset are actually specked at 900MHz, you aren’t technically overclocking them; one could make the argument, though, that the thermal management of the EeePC is not designed for that clock speed, so you are doing this at your own risk.

The tool is brilliantly easy to use and just as the benchmarks predicted, this does make a nice difference when doing kernel compiles and things like that.

So the way I use this is to increase the clock when I do compiles or other activities where I want a little more performance, but reduce the clock when I’m just blogging or surfing the net (like right now) in order to save battery life and reduce the risk of overheating.

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I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?

Today Nikon has released an update to the D300 firmware.

Looking at the changes this might not be a critical update for everyone. The only modification listed is “An issue that, in rare cases, caused vertical bands (lines) to appear in images captured at shutter speeds slower than 8s has been resolved.”

Still, it might not hurt to upgrade.

We’re getting there… for those of us running EeeDora - the latest official Fedora 8 kernel (kernel-2.6.23.15-137.fc8) now supports the Atheros L2 fast Ethernet (atl2) chip and includes an ASUS Eeepc ACPI hotkey driver. One less thing to patch and to worry about (the wireless and webcam still aren’t supported by default, though).

Lots of chatter on the web about upscaling the resolution of your EeePC in software (while we are all waiting for the higher resolution second generation EeePC from Asus). Actually, what people are doing is downscaling a larger resolution like 960×576 or 1024×600 onto the 800×480 display in the EeePC.

The first one I saw was the Windows XP driver hack a few days ago. And now there’s a pretty cruel way to do the same under Linux, using vnc.

Why do I call it cruel? Well, it’s really slow, it’s really wasteful of the meager resources of the EeePC and it does un-intuitive things. Ctrl-Alt-T no longer pops up a terminal on the screen that you see (it pops it up on the unscaled screen “behind” the scaled one that you see). Quite a few things simply don’t work right anymore. And did I mention how brutally slow it was?

I talked to Keith Packard (one of the masterminds behind X.org) and he has a good idea how to do this cleanly in the X server with very nice performance; but he doesn’t have the time to implement it right now (and I doubt that I will, either - and the days since I have written X code are long long gone… maybe this could be the thing to start with again?). Anyway, if anyone is interested working on this, drop me a line (or comment here) and maybe we can form a team to work on this?

As the Kyro38 links to at VR-Zone, there’s an article at Rise Security that the default Xandros install on an EeePC has a security flaw (thanks to _Q_R_ for pointing out that I wasn’t referencing the original news). The smbd version installed is 3.0.24 which has a known vulnerability which could allow an attacker to issue file system commands as root.

What he fails to point out is an easy workaround. Simply disable smbd (why would you need this on a mobile client in the first place)? At least until Asus / Xandros issue an update.

Open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) and edit the /etc/default/samba file (this has to be done as superuser):
sudo vi /etc/default/samba
Go to the last line and change the RUN_MODE to “inetd”.

After the next reboot your EeePC should be secure again.

Here’s the next step to a truly ultra mobile PC. Get the EeePC to support EVDO! At CES Asus announced that they’d add WIMAX support to the EeePC, but for now you have to make things work with a USB EVDO adapter.

I happen to have the Sprint U727 USB adapter (more precisely it’s a Novatel U727 sold through Sprint), but I’m sure something similar can be done with other USB adapters. And I am now mostly running EeeDora (I tried this briefly on the default Xandros install on the eeePC but couldn’t get the usbserial module to detect the card). So these instructions are based on the 20080115 version of EeeDora, all updated to the latest versions, except for the kernel in order not to have to mess with the EeePC specific kernel modules.

As Sprint points out in their instructions, the adapter needs to have been activated on a Windows machine (or in my case, a Mac). Once that is done, it can be used under Linux just fine!

• All this needs to be run as superuser: open a terminal (Ctlr-Alt-T) and type su - and type in your root password
• Get the gnome-ppp package: yum install gnome-ppp
• Plug the adapter into a USB port on your EeePC
• Run modprobe usbserial vendor=0×1410 product=0×4100
• Start gnome-ppp
• Click on Setup
• On the Modem tab click on Detect
• It will find the ttyUSB devices and select /dev/ttyUSB0 by default
• Select Type USB Modem and set the Speed to 460800. Phone Line is Tone and Volume can be set to Off.
• On the Options tab select Ignore terminal strings (stupid mode)
• Click Close and return to the gnome-ppp window
• Pick any Username and Password (like: user and none), type #777 as Phone number
• Click Connect

After a few seconds you should be connected via the EVDO adapter!

Yeah, I know. There is no hard drive. So there’s no way you can hand the defective drive to a recovery service in order to have them recover your data in case of a catastrophic failure. This may seem irrelevant on an eeePC (after all, the SSD in the eeePC is far less likely to break than a regular hard drive). Yet to me this turned into an interesting question when my 8G SDHC card suddenly died and I was trying to figure out how to recover the data that was on this “hard drive”…

The symptoms were very similar to what you get with a defective hard drive. Some sectors can’t be read, access times out, the file system is corrupted, things come to a halt. e2fsck didn’t help at all. Linux simply refused to mount the file system.

Thankfully the amount of irreplaceable data on the drive was small (an encrypted file with passwords and a few keys for my VPN). Linearly reading the partition and walking the directory tree by hand (I love having the source code to my OS - that made it really easy to figure out where to look) quickly got me to the right blocks and they were all intact - no data lost after all. But it was an interesting reminder that data loss is extremely annoying and can create a lot of extra work. I’ll promise myself to be better about backing up my laptop drives from now one - even those that aren’t spinning.

Here’s an interesting observation. Under otherwise identical settings, autofocus feels much faster and reliable with a faster lens. Sounds embarrassingly obvious, right? But I think it’s something a lot of people do not take into account when buying lenses!

I did some experiments with the Nikon D300 (which has a very fast and accurate autofocus system - 51 points, different tracking modes, the works) and two great lenses of different maximum aperture (which is conversationally called “speed” for lenses). The f/2.8 lens not only allows you faster shutter speeds compared to an f/5.6, it also does a better job at quickly acquiring correct focus.

I used a Nikon AF-S 80-200mm f/2.8D and a Nikon AF-S DX VR 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED for comparison. Both are AF-S lenses with fast focus motor built into the lens. I used both at 200mm, focussing on the same sequence of subjects from about 10 feet away to several hundred feet away in otherwise identical circumstances. Lighting was reasonable but not extremely bright (ISO 200, f/2.8, 1/60s-1/125s, depending on the subject).

While I wasn’t able to use a stop watch to get absolute times (not enough hands, I guess), there’s a noticeable difference in the time it took the camera to be in focus. It’s hard to put a ratio to it, but my guess would be somewhere between 50% and 200% slower on the f/5.6, depending on the subject. There’s also a more than twice as high likelihood that the first attempt at focus is incorrect (the camera thinks it acquired focus, but it actually didn’t). I did 20 attempts switching between subjects close by and further away; I twice had to refocus with the f/2.8 lens, five times(!) with the f/5.6 lens.

The explanation seems easy enough. Focus acquisition is always at maximum aperture - so the f/2.8 lens gets four times the amount of light to the sensor than the f/5.6 lens. And that clearly makes a lot of difference.

Don’t get me wrong, the 18-200 is a wonderful all-round lens (I bought it explicitly to take with me when going to a park or doing something else in bright sunlight); I was simply curious to see if there was a downside to the reduced amount of light available when focusing. And it turns out there is.

It’s fun to be misquoted and misunderstood. Trust me, I know - in my SuSE days I had the 50 percent rule… if 50 percent of the interviews in a week got 50 percent of what I said right, I considered that success. But especially Linus’ quote on Mac OS X last week at linux.conf.au has quite a few people upset.

Here’s what he said:

On the other hand, (I’ve found) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary. I think OS X is nicer than Windows in many ways, but neither can hold a candle to my own (Linux). It’s a race to second place.

Ok, let’s ignore the obvious flame bait comment on the “race to second place” and focus on the file system issue. HFS really is crap. Here’s why.

First, by default it doesn’t distinguish upper and lower case. Yes, there’s an option to turn this on (mind you, it requires reformatting your file system), but that causes all kinds of pain with software that assumes that case doesn’t matter, including the OS itself; so turning this on on your boot device is not recommended.

Secondly (and far worse), it doesn’t deal correctly with umlauts in file names. Instead of dealing with them based on their UTF-8 encoding and the locale setting that a user is running (like other file systems do) it uses Apple’s own proprietary transliteration. That’s not cross platform compatible. And it breaks simple things like locale based sorting of file names. Swedish sorts ä after z. German sorts ä with a. English sorts it according to its UTF-8 encoding after all letters. The Mac always sorts it after a. That’s broken.

In a way it’s fun to see how much attention the quotes get. And sad how many people get it wrong when trying to parse what he was trying to say.

Simple answer: lots of fun.

Actually, even more so than I thought it would be. The solid state drive in the eeePC clearly isn’t there to improve performance (depending on the design, flash drives can seriously outperform traditional hard disks). It’s much more a matter of size (flash is tiny) and robustness. And the ability to simply move the eeePC without a second thought is really useful when at a conference. You can walk around with the computer while it’s running, you can tilt it, drop it (oops, stupid me) and there’s no risk to your data. Pretty amazing.

I don’t think I can make an argument that going to an SSD-based laptop is worth the amazing one thousand dollar price difference that you pay with Apple’s MacBook Air (compared to the regular disk). But from what I understand outrageous price deltas will soon be a thing of the past, anyway. Prices for flash are coming down fast and more and more SSDs are being offered. And more and more SSD-based laptops are coming to the mainstream market. For example the Toshiba R500, the Fujitsu P1620 or the yet-to-be-officially-announced Lenovo Thinkpad X300. And in the case of the Toshiba and the Fujitsu, the price delta is much more reasonable (though still a little steep for my liking). Certainly in both cases more than the price for an eeePC…

Oh and the other thing that I noticed with the eeePC? It’s really easy to live with 12G of “disk” space. I use the internal 4G and an 8G SDHC card and have yet to get even close to filling up the space - even though I have two OSs installed in a dual boot setup. So I wouldn’t be too worried that the mainstream ultra portable notebooks I mention above come with “only” 32G or 64G of SSD.