NSLU2 in a Tux Case //at 02:46 //by abe

It started harmless when Thomas asked on Linux User Group Switzerland mailing list if someone knows a tux-shaped alarm clock. But the topic of that thread quickly moved to two other things in tux shape: the Tux Droid, a device similar to the Nabaztag, but needs a Linux host with USB, and ACME Systems’ Tux-Server, a ETRAX CRIS based Foxboard inside a tux-shaped case.

We found out that Telion, the Swiss importer for Foxboards, also imports ACME Systems’ Tux Case — although the Tux Case is not mentioned on their website. Even better: They had a few old Tux Cases in stock which don’t fit anymore on current Foxboards since the position of the power socket changed. (So only one hole in the case was missing.) And they wanted to get rid of them quite fast: They offered us the Tux Cases for 10 CHF (6€) each instead of 28 CHF each (17€) if we buy all of them. Of course we couldn’t reject this offer and bought all five remaining cases.

Another part of the thread was about performance. Although ETRAX CRIS is used by its inventor AXIS in many of its products (they’re famous for the Linux based web-cams) many were not sure if the board’s performance would be sufficient for their ideas. Another disadvantage of the ETRAX CRIS architecture is that no mainstream Linux distribution supports it.

Another point was the Foxboard’s price (169€, ca. 268 CHF). Bones just mentioned that an NSLU2 costs only about 100 CHF (60€).

Probably on IRC someone (probably Bones, too) wondered if it’s possible to fit a NSLU2 into such a quite inexpensive Tux Case. We took Wikipedia’s picture of the NSLU2 board, compared the size of the USB ports on that picture, compared them with real-life USB ports and found out the size of the board that way. And when I got my Tux-Case I noticed that the NSLU2 board really could fit into the Tux-Case.

Since I’m already building a bigger NAS-like home server, I have no use for another, much slower NAS. But since I more or less gave up the also ARM-based Thecus N4100, another ARM-based machine in my hardware collection wouldn’t be bad.

So it didn’t took long and the idea was born to build the NSLU2 board into a Tux-Case and let the website tux.ethz.ch run on it. (I inherited its administration from Beat and it’s currently just a virtual host on one of our webservers.) Then it would be a server named Tux, serving Tuxes, looking like a Tux and running Tux’ operating system Linux. :-)

I ordered an NSLU2 at Brack for 117.60 CHF (ca. 70€). Played around with the original firmware for a moment, but it’s horrible from a security point of view: You can’t even change the admin password (default: “admin”) if no USB harddisk is attached. And no, a USB stick doesn’t suffice. So I didn’t wait long and tried to install Debian’s “armel” (ARM, Little Endian) port on it. But the NSLU2 refused the “new firmware” with the error message “Upgrade: no enough free space.”. While this is not in the Debian specific NSLU2 FAQ, it is mentioned in the general troubleshooting FAQ. As described in there, first upgrading to the most recent firmware version and then uploading the Debian installer worked fine.

After I had successfully installed Debian Lenny on a pqi 4 GB USB sticked into the NSLU2 and verified that everything is working fine, I opened the NSLU2 case and checked if it really would fit into a Tux Case.

It does, but very, very close. You’ll have to drill some holes and the ethernet socket will stick out Tux’s shoulder, but everything else should fit perfectly after a few mounting parts inside the Tux Case have been removed. As a proof of concept I laid the NSLU2 board on the Tux Case’s back:

Pictures taken with my Nokia E51

So later the LEDs will be in Tux’ one shoulder while the network socket will be in his other shoulder. And the USB stick will be inside his paunch via a USB hub.

Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware //at 01:39 //by abe

Ever since my former desktop machine gsa died and I started using only laptops at home, I noticed a need for a home server for storing all my MP3s, holiday pictures, games, and backups of my other machines. And I also want a filtering web proxy at home again.

Current situation

Currently my Norhtec MicroClient Jr. “c2” with it’s 120 GB 2.5" harddisk does some of these jobs (mostly storage and backup), but it neither has the disk space nor the performance to do all the things I want.

For storage I once bought a TheCus N4100, the big brother of the popular and officially Debian supported N2100. Unfortunately there are a few things different than in the N2100 (NIC without MAC) which makes it much more difficult to get Debian on it and the original firmware doesn’t support NFS at all. *grmpf* I had hints from others who managed to get Debian on this NAS, but I didn’t find the time and leisure to really dig into cross-compiling kernels. (Although with the new 1.3.06 firmware, so called modules became possible also for the N4100 and a SSH module has been posted with which a Debian chroot could be installed and the required kernel build on the machine itself.)

I though wasn’t very angry when the N4100+ came out shortly after I bought the N4100, because the N4100+ was no more an ARM based device but had a Celeron processor inside instead. And a NAS which is built on average PC hardware wasn’t as appealing as some device based on some more exotic architecture mainly used in embedded devices. :-)

The Mini-ITX Appeal

This view changed rapidly, when Raffzahn showed me a few Mini-ITX boards and cases. I surfed around on Mini-ITX.com store and stumbled upon the NAS-like ES34069 case from Chenbro featuring four S-ATA hotswap 3.5" slots, a slim-line CD-ROM drive slot, a SD card reader, and enough space for an additional 2.5" hard disk and a low profile Mini-ITX board.

Additionally, the VIA EPIA SN series of Mini-ITX boards sports 4 S-ATA ports and either a passively cooled 1 GHz C7 processor or an actively cooled 1.8 GHz C7 processor. That should be enough power for a small multi-purpose home server while still keep the power consumption low. And I’m not the only one having this idea, Mini-ITX.com suggests this combination and Chenbro officially supports the VIA EPIA SN boards.

Additionally, Debian 5.0 Lenny seems to run fine on the SN series, only lm-sensors seems to have problems with SN18000G and SN10000EG (but not SN18000 and SN10000E).

So when the Chenbro ES34069 case showed up in digitec’s online shop, I ordered one there and a VIA EPIA SN18000G board at Brack. I didn’t order any disks since for data storage I plan to use the four Samsung 400 GB 3.5" S-ATA disks I bought for the N4100, and for the system I plant to use the 2.5" disk I initially bought for my MicroClient JrSX “c1”, but then continued to use it only with the CF card. Not yet sure, if I’ll also equip the slim-line optical drive slot, too.

The case took several weeks to deliver and the mainboard hasn’t arrived yet. Instead I got an e-mail from Brack that VIA products are currently very difficult to get in Switzerland. Reason is said to be that VIA tries to channel the distribution of their products to a single distributor. (Sounds somehow similar to what Apple tried with the iPhone and failed.)

Mini-ITX boards and power consumption

So I now have a nice case without a board. There aren’t that many Mini-ITX boards out there sporting 4 S-ATA ports. One which cleary stood out was the new Intel DG45FC Mini-ITX board with LGA775 socket. (In Switzerland neither available at Brack nor at digitec, but e.g. at PCP.) But reading the specs of this board it was also clear that it wasn’t thought for NAS systems but high-performance HTPCs — the focus seems to be on multimedia performance which a NAS doesn’t need.

Its newer sister, the Intel DQ45EK Mini-ITX board is focussed more on office and business PCs than on multimedia. But Intels remote adminstration is not really a plus for me (don’t need it, I’ve got SSH ;-) and it’s neither cheaper than the DG45FC nor does it have significantly lower power-consuption.

Despite the 120W power-supply there are people who already combined the Chenbro ES34069 with the Intel DG45FC or DQ45EK board, e.g. one of the administrators of the German NAS-Portal forums built such a machine and this German guy who wants to build a Windows Home Server based on such a combination. At least the NAS-Portal administrator found out that the board consumes so much power that together with the 4 S-ATA disks the included 120W power supply doesn’t suffice and the system is not stable in this configuration. Trusted Reviews review of the DG45FC explains why: It’s one of the first Mini-ITX board not following the MoDT idea, has a desktop chipset instead a mobile chipset and therefore hasn’t all of the power-saving features of those mobile chipsets.

But it’s easy to see anyway: Most of the CPUs supported by the DG45FC and DQ45EK boards have a TDP of 65W. Offically the processor cooler delivered with the case supports processors with up to 65W, but 65W is already more than the half of what the power supply delivers and according to the Trusted Reviews review, the board itself consumes another 35W itself. So for the four 3.5" S-ATA disks — which are usually not as economical as notebook disks — about 20W are left. This can’t work! The guy from NAS-Portal.org plans to solve the problem by using a universal 180W notebook power supply instead of the original one.

In comparison to the 100W of the both Intel boards, VIA’s SN18000G consumes only 26W (the fanless SN10000EG even only 22W) and that’s board and processor! That’s about ¼ of what the Intel board consumes. Imagine the difference between having a 100W light bulb (suffices for a whole small room) shining 365 days a year compared to a 25W light bulb (often used in bedside lamps) in a year.

Other Mini-ITX mainboards with 4x S-ATA include the following ones:

• Jetway JNC62K: According to Mini-ITX.com it fits into the Chenbro ES34069 case, but requires at least a 120W power supply which again questions its power consumption and its usage together with four 3.5" harddisks, although it is recommended for the ES34069 by Mini-ITX.com. But I haven’t made that good experiences with NVidia chipsets yet, so this board seems currently no option for me anyway. OTOH there’s German speaking guy who build a ES34069 based server using this board and only three SATA harddisks and runs the OpenSolaris based and commercial NexentaStor on it, so the hardware can’t be too exotic. (Review at Bit-Tech; Review at MiniITX.biz)
• (Added on 07-Oct-2008) Jetway NC81-LF: The non-Nvidia brother of the NC82K using the AMD 780G chipset. Supports CPUs from 35W to 65W TDP. (Review at MiniTechNet)
• Albatron KI690-AM2: Already over one year old and Silent PC Review says it has an extremely restrictive BIOS and poor fan control. (Another Review at TweakTown)
• iEi KINO-9454-R20: Seems to support only Pentium 4 and Pentium D.
• Several Commell mainboards: LV-66A (VIA C7 1.5 GHz), LV-672 (Pentium 4), LV-674 (Pentium D).
• Gigabyte GA-6KIEH-RH (not yet available)
• Kontron 986LCD-M/mITX: Socket mPGA478 and mPGA479, supports Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile beyond others; 3x GBit network interfaces, but also quite multimedia focussed — the review at EPIACenter.de (German written) says using it for NAS or a network-focussed machine is casting pearls before swine. :-) But the same counts for the DG45FC surely, too. ;-) Importer for Switzerland seems to be fabrimexSystems and end customers can buy it e.g. at ichbinleise.ch (which seem to sell only Kontron mainboards), but it’s way more expensive than the Intel DG45FC and even more expensive than the VIA SN18000G.
• J&W MINIX™ 780G-SP128MB (identical to the Albatron KI780G mainboard according to MiniTechNet): Another new multimedia focussed mainboard, but unless ATI drivers are way less usable than the NVidia drivers, I prefer not to use ATI graphics cards. (Review at MiniITX.biz)
• Advantech AIMB-221, AMD/ATI based and said to have a power-consumption less than 100W and a low TCO. But 100W are still too much for the 120W PSU. (German review at MiniTechNet)

Conclusion

For now, I decided to wait a little bit more for my VIA EPIA SN18000G board which still seems to be the best board for the Chenbro ES34069 case although not really cheap. But if I once in a not that distant future decide to have a desktop at home again, I’m quite sure it’ll sport a cute Mini-ITX case (perhaps a nice black-orange HFX micro M1 case by mCubed — unfortunately the M2 is no more available in a color combination including orange ;-) with an Intel DG45FC or Kontron 986LCD-M/mITX and a decent Core 2 Duo processor.

Software Plans

Of course my home server will run Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny on it, with software RAID-5 and LVM2 over the 1.6 TB of S-ATA disks resulting in 1.2 TB available disk space which will be offered using at least NFS, SMB and SSH (think sshfs). Planned software includes BackupPC (a very fine pulling backup system for machines which are not online 24/7) and Privoxy. I’ll perhaps also install Tor and a caching proxy like Squid or Polipo. Another idea is to run Mediatomb on that machine. :-)

Can’t resist this meme //at 20:38 //by abe

Just stumbled over this meme at Adrian (the meme seems to be started by madduck involuntarily), and since I’m fascinated by how people choose hostnames since my early years at university, I can’t resist to add my two cents to this meme.

To be exact, I have two schemes, one for servers out there somewhere (Hetzner, xencon, etc.) and they’re all wordplays on their domain name noone.org, e.g. symlink.to.noone.org (short name “sym” :-), gateway.to.noone.org (usually an alias for one of the machines below), virtually.noone.org (always a virtual machine, initially UML, soon a Xen DomU), etc. So nothing for a quiz here.

My other scheme is for all my machines at home and my mobile machines. I’ll start this list with the not so obvious hostnames, so the earlier you guess the scheme, the better you are (or the better you know me ;-). One more hint in advance: “(*)” means this attribute or fact made me choose the name for the machine and therefore can be used as hint for the scheme. :-)

azam

My first PC at all, a 386 with 25 MHz and MS-DOS. (Got named retroactively(*). Hadn’t hostnames at that time.)

ak (pronounced as letters)

Got it from my brother after he didn’t need it anymore. It initially was identical to azam, but once was upgraded to a 486. Still have the 386 board, though.

azka

My first self-bought computer, a pure SCSI system with a AMD K5-PR133 and 32 MB RAM. Initially had SuSE 4.4 and Windows 95 on. Still my last machine which had a Windows installed! :-)

m35

Same case and same speed as azka. Used it for experimenting(*) with Sid years ago.

azu

Initially also an AMD K5-PR133, later replaced by a Pentium 90 and used as DSL router.

azl

An HP Vectra 386/25N book size mini desktop I saved from the scrapyard at Y_Plentyn before his (first) move to Munich. The cutest(*) 386 I ever saw.

ayce

A 386 with 387 co-processor(*) and solded 8 MB of RAM.

ayca

A 1992 Toshiba T6400C 486 laptop bought at VCFe 5.0.

bijou

My 1996 ThinkPad 760ED, which is still working and running Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny (I started with Debian 3.0 Woody on it and always dist-upgraded it! :-)

gsa (pronounced as letters)

My long-time desktop after azka. A Pentium II with 400 MHz and 578 MB of RAM at the end. Bought used at LinuxTag 2003, it worked until end of last year when it started to suddenly switch off more and more often and now refuses to boot at all. Hasn’t been replaced yet though. I mostly use my laptops at home since then.

gsx (pronounced as letters)

An AMD K6 with 500 MHz I got from maol and which was used as Symlink test server more than once. (It was the machine initially named symlink.to.noone.org because of that.)

hy

My 32 bit Sparc, a Hamilton Hamstation.

hz (pronounced as letters)

My 64 bit Sparc, an UltraSparc 5.

tub

An HP Apollo 9000 Series 400, model 400t from 1990.

tpv (pronounced as letters, too ;-)

My Zaurus SL-5500G.

tryane

A Unisys Acquanta CP mini desktop with a passively cooled(*) 200 MHz Pemtium MMX. Used as DSL router for while, but the power supply fan was too noisy.

lna (pronounced as letters)

A 233 MHz Alpha

loadrunner

An IBM ThinkPad A31 running Sid. I use it as beside terminal.

pony

A Compaq LTE5100 laptop with a Pentium 90 running Sid.

dagonet

A Sony Vaio laptop which ran Debian GNU/kFreeBSD until it broke.

Those who know me quite good should already have guessed the scheme, even if they can’t assign all the names. For all others, here’s one name which doesn’t exactly fit into the scheme, but still is related in someway, but you need to knowledge of the theme’s subject to know the relation:

colani

A big tower from the early 90s designed by Colani.

Ok, and now the more obvious hostnames:

rosalie

A very compact Toshiba T1000LE 8086 laptop running ELKS and FreeDOS.

amisuper

Also an old Symlink test server from maol. He named it “dual”. 2x(*) Pentium I with 166 MHz. Unfortunately doesn’t boot anymore.

visa

An IBM NetVista workstation running Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. My current IRC host.

nemo

My ASUS EeePC running Debian 5.0 Lenny.

pluriel

My current WLAN router running FreeWRT.

c1

My MicroClient JrSX, an embedded 486SX compatible machine with 300 Mhz for VESA mountings.

c2

My MicroClient Jr, an embedded Pentium MMX compatible machine with 200 Mhz for VESA mountings.

c-crosser

My Lenovo ThinkPad T61 running Debian 5.0 Lenny.

c-cactus and c-metisse

The KVM based virtual(*) machines on c-crosser running Sid and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

jumper

My NAS(*) at home, currently a TheCus N4100. Soon to be replaced by some Mini-ITX box.

Any one who hasn’t guessed the scheme yet? For those understanding German it’s explained at the end of my old hardware page. For all others I suggest either to look at the domain name in my e-mail address (no, it’s usually not noone.org).

Still not clear? Well, feel free to ask me for all the gory details or mark the following white box to see the scheme as well as the explanations for nearly all hostnames hidden in there:

All the machines are named after Citroëns. Old machines after old Citroëns, current hardware after current Citroën models or prototypes.

Those names starting with “A” are 2CV derivatives since the 2CV was Citroëns “A” model. “AZ” was the 2CV, AZU and AK were 2CV vans and everything starting with AY (e.g. AYA, AYA2, AYB – but those don’t sound that nice ;-) is Dyane based, but I currently only use Méhara names (AYCA is the normal Méhari, AYCE the 4x4 version). Interestingly not everything starting with AYC is a Méhari: AYCD was the Acadiane, the Dyane van.

HY and HZ are variants of Citroëns “H van” (HX, HW and H1600 as well, but they don’t sound that nice), TUB was the pre-WWII “H van” prototype and later the nickname of the “H van” in France.

TPV was the name of the pre-WWII 2CV prototype and an abbreviation for Toute Petite Voiture (French for “Very Small Car”), hence the Zaurus, my smallest Linux box, got that name. Rosalie was the nickname of a rear-wheel drive pre-WWII Citroën.

M35 was a Wankel engine prototype of the Ami 8 and the Ami Super was the 4 cylinder version of the Ami 8. Bijou was a 2CV based coupé build by Citroën UK in the late 50s and early 60s.

Visa and LNA were 2CV predecessors which were available with 2CV engines, but were stopped before the 2CV. GSA and GSX are GS late derivatives.

C1, C2, (C3) Pluriel, C-Crosser, Jumper and Nemo are current Citroën models and C-Cactus and C-Métisse are recent Citroën prototypes and show cars.

The 2CV Dagonet was an aerodynamically optimised 2CVs by Jean Dagonet in the 50s. The Tryane is an aerodynamic and fuel efficient, three wheeled car by Friend Wood based on the 2CV and with a body of wood. And Colani once dressed a 2CV so that it broke several efficiency world records.

The Namco Pony was a 2CV based light utility truck (similar to the Méhari, but with steel body) built in Greece under license in many variants.

And Loadrunner is the name of some CX six-wheeler conversions.

Some links about the naming items:

• Tryane II
• An original Loadrunner and a just recently built Loadrunner. I even saw the base of exactly that one in RL shortly before it was converted into a Loadrunner.
• Luigi Colani
• Dagonet
• Namco Pony
• C1, C2, C-Crosser, C-Cactus, C-Métisse, Pluriel, Nemo, Visa, LNA, GSA, Ami Super, Rosalie
• AZAM, AZL, AZKA, AZU, AK, AYCD, Bijou, TPV
• HY, HZ, TUB.

Hope you had fun. I had. ;-)

Now playing: Willi Astor — Gwand Anham Ära

Blosxom 2.1.0 released //at 02:01 //by abe

Today I had the honour to prepare and announce the first Blosxom release after exactly two years and six days.

The primary cause for the Blosxom 2.1.0 release date this week was to get our development efforts of the last two year into Debian Lenny with a nice version number (i.e. one without snapshot dates in the package version ;-). The second biggest cause was that it just was time. But Debian Freezes always give you a good kick in the ass. ;-)

Rhonda plans to prepare an updated blosxom package for Debian during the day. (Update 25-Jul-2008: Packages are available.) So if Planet Debian is broken in a few days, you know whom to blame: Me and my last minute bug fixes. ;-)

But since you seem to be able to read this, the release shouldn’t be too broken – because of course my blog already runs the very fresh Blosxom 2.1.0 release. ;-)

Conkeror in the Debian NEW queue //at 21:39 //by abe

I already mentioned a few times in the blog that I’m working on a Debian package of the Conkeror web browser. And now, after a lot of fine-tuning (and I still further new ideas how to improve the package ;-) Conkeror is finally in the NEW queue and hopefully will hit unstable in a few days. (Update Thursday, 03-Jul-2008, 18:13 CEST: The package has been accepted by Jörg and should be included on most architectures in tonight’s updates.)

Those who could hardly await it can fetch Conkeror .debs from http://noone.org/debian/. The conkeror package itself is a non-architecture specific package (but needs xulrunner-1.9 to be available), and its small C-written helper program spawn-process-helper is available as package conkeror-spawn-process-helper for i386, amd64, sparc, alpha, powerpc, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. There are no backported packages for Etch available, though, since I don’t know of anyone yet, who has successfully backported xulrunner-1.9 to Etch.

Interestingly the interest in Conkeror seems to have risen in the Debian community independently of its Debian packaging. Luca Capello, who sponsored the upload of my Conkeror package, pointed me to two blog post on Planet Debian, written by people being fed up with Firefox 3 already and are looking for a more lean, but still Gecko based web browser: Decklin Foster is fed up with Firefox’ -eh- Iceweasel’s arrogance and MJ Ray is fed up with Firefox 3 and its SSL problems.

Since my previously favourited Gecko based web browser Kazehakase never became really stable but instead became slow and leaking memory (and therefore not much better than Firefox 2), I can imagine that it’s no more an candidate for people seaking for a lean and fast web browser.

Conkeror has some “strange” concepts of which the primary one is that it looks and feels like Emacs:

• The current location is shown in a status bar below the website, where Emacs usually shows buffer names. All input, even entering new URLs to go to, is done via the mini-buffer, an input line below the status bar.

• Instead of tabs it uses Emacs’ concept of buffers. So no tab bar clutter and though easy access to all currently open pages.

• It has no buttons, menu-bar or such. And except the status bar and mini-buffer, it uses the whole size of the window for the displayed web page. This is the main reason why I prefer Conkeror on the 7” EeePC: I don’t want to waste any pixels for buttons or menu bars and still have a fully functional web browser.

• It of course has Emacs alike keybindings (with a slight touch of Lynx). While this may seem awkward for the vi world (Hey, they have the vimperator^*, also in Debian since a few days!), as an Emacs user you just have to remember that you web browser now also expects to be treated like an Emacs. It just works:

  C-x C-c

  Exit Emacs -eh- Conkeror

  C-x C-f

  Open File -eh- web page in new buffer

  C-x C-b

  Change to some other tab -eh- buffer

  C-x C-v

  Replace web page in this buffer and use the current URL as start for entering the new one

  C-x 5 2

  Open new frame -eh- window

  C-x 5 0

  Close current frame -eh- window

  C-x k

  Close tab, -eh- kill buffer

  C-h i

  Documentation

  C-s

  Incremental search forward

  C-r

  Incremental search backward

  C-g

  Stop

  l

  Go back (Think info-mode)

  g

  Go to (Open web page in this buffer)

  (Hehe, I like the faces of vi users having read these keybindings and now wondering how to remember them. SCNR. Well, sometimes vi key bindings are a mystery to me, too. :-)

  There are of course many more and nearly all are the same as in Emacs, even the universal argument C-u and the M-x command-line are there. E.g. C-u g lets you open a web page in a new buffer, too.

• Conkeror also has very promising concept for following and copying links with the keyboard only. Opera is very inefficient here since you have to jump from link to link to get to the one you want. In Conkeror you just press f for following or c for copying links and then all links on the currently shown part of the page show a small number attached to it. Then you just enter the number (and additionally press enter if the number is ambigous) and the link is either opened or copied to the clipboard.

  A funny anecdote about how this concept grew over the time: Early versions of Conkeror (back in the days when it just was a Firefox externsion as vimperator) numbered all links on the page, not only the visible ones. On large pages with many links or buttons (e.g. my blog ;-), this took minutes to complete. The idea to just number the visible links is so simple and important – but someone first needed to have it. :-)

Footnotes

*) I just noticed that there is now also muttator, making Thunderbird look and behave like vim (and probably also mutt), too. Wonder into which e-mail client the Emacs community will convert Thunderbird. GNUS? RMAIL? VM? Wanderslust? What will it be called? Wunderbird? Thunderslust? (SCNRE ;-)

How to get Network Manager working with ratpoison //at 00:59 //by abe

Using GNOME Network Manager is a neat way to connect to wireless or virtual private networks from a laptop running Debian Lenny, Sid, Etch with Backports or any of the *buntu distributions. You can control everything from the system tray. But not all window managers have a system tray. And with some window managers it’s not obvious how to make them work with one of those lean third party trays and panels.

Especially my favourite window manager for small displays as on the EeePC – ratpoison – insolently puts any panel or tray in the middle of the screen by default. It took me a moment to find out how to make ratpoison work with my favourite third party system tray trayer (which can handle transparency and is only a system tray, no taskbar).

First we need to make ratpoison ignore the trayer on the one hand and and reserve space for it on the screen. Fiddling around with preconfigured frames didn’t work well and the following way is also more straight forward:

1. trayer always has “panel” as window title, so adding the following line to your .ratpoisonrc makes ratpoison ignore trayer:

   unmanage panel

2. Now all windows overlap the trayer, so we need to configure the space for it. Trayer in the default configuration shows up at the bottom and has a height of 26 pixels, so we tell ratpoison to add a padding of 26 pixels at the bottom of the screen by adding the following line to the .ratpoisonrc:

   set padding 0 0 0 26

Now we are confronted with the problem that these settings only apply to new windows, not ones which were already running when ratpoison starts. I usually start my X session using an .xinitrc or an .Xsession which calls the window manager using exec at the end.

We can start the trayer later though by spawning a subshell in the background with a sleep at the beginning. Also the Network Manager applet (nm-applet) can be started that way. In my case the end of the .Xsession looks like this:

( sleep 1; \
  trayer --align right --edge bottom --distance 0 \
	 --expand true \
	 --transparent true --alpha 128 --tint 0 \
	 --SetDockType true --SetPartialStrut true & 
  nm-applet & ) &

exec ratpoison

The result could look like this:

The other programs in the system tray are from right to left: nm-applet (GNOME Network Manager), Twitux (GTK Twitter Client), Audacious, Opera, Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM), Icedove (unbranded Mozilla Thunderbird). The clock on the bottom left is from the package osdclock.

Oh, and although I’m fine with trayer: if anybody knows a possibility to control the GNOME Network Manager without the need for a system tray, I would be very happy if you could tell me. :-)

Update 18-June-2008 23:45:

Matto Fransen used my howto to get ratpoison and nm-applet working together on Ubuntu. He also explains in his blog post, what may be necessary to get nm-applet working as intended in the first place — things I already had forgotten when I wrote this posting initally. :-)

Debian and GPRS with the Nokia E51 //at 00:39 //by abe

A while ago I wanted to have internet over GPRS (either EDGE or UMTS) via my Nokia E51 working before I leave for the weekend. But whatever I tried, I always got an ERROR if I sent any AT command. Even ATZ and ATH resulted in errors. So started googling for all components: I found AT commands which are said to work with the Nokia E51, I found AT commands which are said to work with Swisscom GPRS and I found many sites describing how to setup a bluetooth modem.

But since the even those AT commands which should work with both, Swisscom GPRS and Nokia E51 didn’t work at all, I noticed that all the Nokia E51 howtos were using the USB cable. So I tried that, too, and it worked immediately. It looks very strange to me that the set of AT commands is dependend on which way you connect to the phone. :-/

So here’s my working PPP config:

hide-password
noauth
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -e -f /etc/chatscripts/swisscom-gprs"
/dev/ttyACM0
460800
defaultroute
crtscts
user "guest"
usepeerdns
noccp
bsdcomp 0,0
lcp-echo-failure 10000
lcp-echo-interval 1000
asyncmap 0
novj
nomagic

TIMEOUT 5
ABORT BUSY
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT VOICE
ABORT 'NO DIALTONE'
ABORT 'NO ANSWER'
ABORT DELAYED
ABORT ERROR
'' \nAT
TIMEOUT 12
OK ATH
OK ATE1
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","gprs.swisscom.ch"'
OK ATD*99#
CONNECT ""

So I have now four levels of mobile computing available:

• Nokia E51 with T9 and phone keyboard (for short texts)
• Nokia E51 with Nokia SU-8W bluetooth keyboard (for longer texts and emergencies, see photo on the right)
• ASUS EeePC (7", 630 MHz Celeron, 2GB RAM, 4GB SSD) with Nokia E51 as modem (complete computer, but still small, portable and nearly always with me)
• Lenovo ThinkPad T61 (14" wide screen, 2.2 GHz Core2Duo, 4GB RAM, 160 GB SATA Disk) with Nokia E51 as modem (complete computer with power and disk space)

Should suffice in nearly all situations. ;-)