Tex Yoda II Mechanical Keyboard with Trackpoint //at 03:38 //by abe

Here’s a short review of the Tex Yoda II Mechanical Keyboard with Trackpoint, a pointer to the next Swiss Mechanical Keyboard Meetup and why I ordered a $300 keyboard with less keys than a normal one.

Short Review of the Tex Yoda II

Pro

• Trackpoint
• Cherry MX Switches
• Compact but heavy alumium case
• Backlight (optional)
• USB C connector and USB A to C cable with angled USB C plug
• All three types of Thinkpad Trackpoint caps included
• Configurable layout with nice web-based configurator (might be opensourced in the future)
• Fn+Trackpoint = scrolling (not further configurable, though)
• Case not clipped, but screwed
• Backlight brightness and Trackpoint speed configurable via key bindings (usually Fn and some other key)
• Default Fn keybindings as side printed and backlit labels
• Nice packaging

Contra

• It’s only a 60% Keyboard (I prefer TKL) and the two common top rows are merged into one, switched with the Fn key.
• Cursor keys by default (and labeled) on the right side (mapped to Fn + WASD) — maybe good for games, but not for me.
• ~ on Fn-Shift-Esc
• Occassionally backlight flickering (low frequency)
• Pulsed LED light effect (i.e. high frequency flickering) on all but the lowest brightness level
• Trackpoint is very sensitive even in the slowest setting — use Fn+Q and Fn+E to adjust the trackpoint speed (“tps”)
• No manual included or (obviously) downloadable.
• Only the DIP switches 1-3 and 6 are documented, 4 and 5 are not. (Thanks gismo for the question about them!)
• No more included USB hub like the Tex Yoda I had or the HHKB Lite 2 (USB 1.1 only) has.

My Modifications So Far

Layout Modifications Via The Web-Based Yoda 2 Configurator

• Right Control and Menu key are Right and Left cursors keys
• Fn+Enter and Fn+Shift are Up and Down cursor keys
• Right Windows key is the Compose key (done in software via xmodmap)
• Middle mouse button is of course a middle click (not Fn as with the default layout).

Other Modifications

• Clear dampening o-rings (clear, 50A) under each key cap for a more silent typing experience
• Braided USB cable

Next Swiss Mechanical Keyboard Meetup

On Sunday, the 18th of February 2018, the 4th Swiss Mechanical Keyboard Meetup will happen, this time at ETH Zurich, building CAB, room H52. I’ll be there with at least my Tex Yoda II and my vintage Cherry G80-2100.

Why I ordered a $300 keyboard

(JFTR: It was actually USD $299 plus shipping from the US to Europe and customs fee in Switzerland. Can’t exactly find out how much of shipping and customs fee were actually for that one keyboard, because I ordered several items at once. It’s complicated…)

I always was and still are a big fan of Trackpoints as common on IBM and Lenovo Thinkapds as well as a few other laptop manufactures.

For a while I just used Thinkpads as my private everyday computer, first a Thinkpad T61, later a Thinkpad X240. At some point I also wanted a keyboard with Trackpoint on my workstation at work. So I ordered a Lenovo Thinkpad USB Keyboard with Trackpoint. Then I decided that I want a permanent workstation at home again and ordered two more such keyboards: One for the workstation at home, one for my Debian GNU/kFreeBSD running ASUS EeeBox (not affected by Meltdown or Spectre, yay! :-) which I often took with me to staff Debian booths at events. There, a compact keyboard with a built-in pointing device was perfect.

Then I met the guys from the Swiss Mechanical Keyboard Meetup at their 3rd meetup (pictures) and knew: I need a mechanical keyboard with Trackpoint.

IBM built one Model M with Trackpoint, the M13, but they’re hard to get. For example, ClickyKeyboards sells them, but doesn’t publish the price tag. :-/ Additionally, back then there were only two mouse buttons usual and I really need the third mouse button for unix-style pasting.

Then there’s the Unicomp Endura Pro, the legit successor of the IBM Model M13, but it’s only available with an IMHO very ugly color combination: light grey key caps in a black case. And they want approximately 50% of the price as shipping costs (to Europe). Additionally it didn’t have some other nice keyboard features I started to love: Narrow bezels are nice and keyboards with backlight (like the Thinkpad X240 ff. has) have their advantages, too. So … no.

Soon I found, what I was looking for: The Tex Yoda, a nice, modern and quite compact mechanical keyboard with Trackpoint. Unfortunately it is sold out since quite some years ago and more then 5000 people on Massdrop were waiting for its reintroduction.

And then the unexpected happened: The Tex Yoda II has been announced. I knew, I had to get one. From then on the main question was when and where will it be available. To my surprise it was not on Massdrop but at a rather normal dealer, at MechanicalKeyboards.com.

At that time a friend heard me talking of mechanical keyboards and of being unsure about which keyboard switches I should order. He offered to lend me his KBTalking ONI TKL (Ten Key Less) keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches for a while. Which was great, because from theory, MX Brown switches were likely the most fitting ones for me. He also gave me two other non-functional keyboards with other Cherry MX switch colors (variants) for comparision. As a another keyboard to compare I had my programmable Cherry G80-2100 from the early ’90s with vintage Cherry MX Black switches. Another keyboard to compare with is my Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB) Lite 2 (PD-KB200B/U) which I got as a gift a few years ago. While the HHKB once was a status symbol amongst hackers and system administrators, the old models (like this one) only had membrane type keyboard switches. (They nevertheless still seem to get built, but only sold in Japan.)

I noticed that I was quickly able to type faster with the Cherry MX Brown switches and the TKL layout than with the classic Thinkpad layout and its rubber dome switches or with the HHKB. So two things became clear:

• At least for now I want Cherry MX Brown switches.
• I want a TKL (ten key less) layout, i.e. one without the number block but with the cursor block. As with the Lenovo Thinkpad USB Keyboards and the HHKB, I really like the cursor keys being in the easy to reach lower right corner. The number pad is just in the way to have that.

Unfortunately the Tex Yoda II was without that cursor block. But since it otherwise fitted perfectly into my wishlist (Trackpoint, Cherry MX Brown switches available, Backlight, narrow bezels, heavy weight), I had to buy one once available.

So in early December 2017, I ordered a Tex Yoda II White Backlit Mechanical Keyboard (Brown Cherry MX) at MechanicalKeyboards.com.

Because I was nevertheless keen on a TKL-sized keyboard I also ordered a Deck Francium Pro White LED Backlit PBT Mechanical Keyboard (Brown Cherry MX) which has an ugly font on the key caps, but was available for a reduced price at that time, and the controller got quite good reviews. And there was that very nice Tai-Hao 104 Key PBT Double Shot Keycap Set - Orange and Black, so the font issue was quickly solved with keycaps in my favourite colour: orange. :-)

The package arrived in early January. The aluminum case of the Tex Yoda II was even nicer than I thought. Unfortunately they’ve sent me a Deck Hassium full-size keyboard instead of the wanted TKL-sized Deck Francium. But the support of MechanicalKeyboards.com was very helpful and I assume I can get the keyboard exchanged at no cost.

Debian and GPRS with the Nokia E51 //at 01:33 //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. ;-)

One month with Debian Lenny on the EeePC //at 19:15 //by abe

I ogled with an ASUS EeePC since it was announced, but didn’t want to order one abroad. So I waited until they became available in Switzerland. Digitec is the official EeePC importer for Switzerland and seeems also to be the moving power for yet to come the Swiss localisation of the EeePC. But initially they only offered imported EeePCs with German keyboard layout, but since I really got used to the US layout, I didn’t want to buy ay new laptops or keyboards with German layout.

When asking them about US layouts they told me they won’t import from the US and that their competitor Steg Computer is importing US models. But I wasn’t comfortable with Steg and EeePCs also were more expensive there, so I hesitated ordering at Steg.

So it was quite unexpected for me when US models showed up on digitec’s website. (Interestingly I never received any mail from their advertised EeePC newsletter, not even when they added 2G models t their repertoire.)

So at the end of March (and therefore later as most other geeks ;-) I ordered an ASUS EeePC at digitec. For me, white laptops look like Macs (and Macs are for sissies or masochists ;-) — so I had no problems to decide that I want a black EeePC with US keyboard layout. 2G was to small for my purposes (and also not that much cheaper) and 8G not available. So I went with the 4G, since Debian doesn’t need so much space if you choose the right packages (i.e. neither or at least not that much of GNOME or KDE ;-). I preferred the 4G over the 4G Surf because of the bigger battery capacity (and not because of the webcam which I consider funny but useless:-).

Initially the delivery date was set the 28th of March. Then it was subsequently set to “beginning of April”, “mid of April”, “end of April” and “beginning of May”. It finally arrived on 8th of May. In the meanwhile there were reports that even the 4G has been equipped with the smaller battery of the 4G Surf because of some battery shortage after some battery plant burnt down. But fortunately the delivery problems with black 4G US models doesn’t seem to have its reason there and my 4G has a 5200 mAh battery (at least according to its label and ACPI).

I also ordered a 2 GB bar of Corsair ValueSelect RAM so that I can pump up the RAM of my EeePC by factor four (for about 10% of the price of the EeePC itself) resulting in having half as much RAM as disk space. Well, I guess, I won’t do suspend to disk in that configuration… ;-)

The original Xandros based Linux only noticed 1 GB of the installed 2 GB as already noted on many other places in the web. But that doesn’t really matter, since it only lasted until I found out how to restore it from DVD in case I want to sell the EeePC later (e.g. for getting the successor). It’s fine for novices, but Linuxes feel strange if you can’t even get a console or a terminal with a command line. ;-)

The Debian EeePC installer worked fine except that it argued over a checksum error on our mirror which wasn’t reproducable after the installation anymore. I’ve chosen the EeePC to be my first (nearly) pure Lenny installation — compared to the three machines running Sid (i386, amd64 and kfreebsd-i386). It though has a few packages from experimental (mostly xulrunner-1.9) installed.

As window managers I have installed ratpoison, FLWM and FVWM. ratpoison — best described as screen for X (although you can’t detach and reattach) since it’s my personal preferences for being productive without big screen resolutions and flwm for a low-resource window manager which can be used intuitivly by both, geeks and non-geeks (and still doesn’t look like Windows at all ;-). And FVWM is installed because it’s my default window manager on all machines with bigger or multiple screens – to be able to compare it with my usual environment.

As web browser I’ve got Opera as primary browser (as everywhere else, too) and Conkeror (the EeePC is the test-case for upcoming Debian package of Conkeror) as well as links2 and lynx on the (nearly) text-only side on it, although I need them seldomly.

As office programs (as I would ever need some ;-) I’ve got AbiWord and Gnumeric installed since I already use a few GNOME applications (e.g. Network Manager, Twitux, etc.) and OpenOffice.org would take up 170 MB more disk space (then including OOo Draw and OOo Impress) and Siag Office is no more in Debian since years. (Initially I had OpenOffice.org installed instead of AbiWord and Gnumeric until I noticed that I need some of the GNOME libraries anyway.)

I also decided that I will need LaTeX then and when so TeX Live also got its chunk of the 4 GB of disk space.

I also have a bunch of games on the EeePC. Unfortunately there are a few games which don’t work well on the EeePC due to it’s resolution being smaller than 800x600, so I deinstalled them already again, e.g. I can’t play Cuyo on the EeePC but flobopuyo. Sauerbraten segfaults, but Doom (prboom with freedoom WADs) works fine. Further non-working games unfortunately include Battle of Wesnoth and XFrisk.

Still, although quite some parts of GNOME and GNOME Office, TeX Live, ScummVM with Flight of the Amazon Queen and Beneath a Steel Sky, GNU Emacs 22, Iceweasel 3 (aka Mozilla Firefox 3), Icedove (aka Mozilla Thunderbird) and the Iceowl (aka Mozilla Sunbird) are installed, only 2.3 GB of the available hard disk space are used by the installation (i.e. without my home directory).

Oh, and btw: Although except the very compact and a little bit wobbly keyboard the EeePC doesn’t feel really small to me (I’ve got quite small hands), but when I sat down in front of my 14” ThinkPad T61 after a day or two with EeePC, the T61, — especially screen and keyboard — felt huge as if it would be some 17” or even bigger notebook. ;-)

OTOH I still think that a 1920×1200 (which means nearly four xterms in a row) resolution on a 14” notebook would be a good idea, especially compared to the 1440×900 (which means nearly three xterms in a row) my T61 has. ;-)

Personal Resumée after one month

Pro EeePC

• It’s geeky. If you show up with it, people want to lift it to see how much it weights and try the tiny keyboard. They’re surprised that 800x480 aren’t that small and that the performance isn’t that bad.
• Very compact and robust. With the T61 I always fear that its edges are too close to the the outside of my backpack and could be damaged that way.
• The price of course: CHF 499 at digitec (plus CHF 54 for the 2 GB RAM)
• Runs Linux ex factory. So yu don’t have to expect that many driver hassles.
• RAM upgrades are very straight forward and do not void the warranty. (BTW: The sticker over one of the screws which probably should prove the integrity can be removed and placed again easily… :-)
• The weight. 0.92 kg can be easily held wit one hand, also because of less leverage effect as with full-size laptops.
• The SSD despite it’s size. Being such lightweight you accelerate the EeePC unmindfully even when it runs. But it doesn’t matter, at least not to the hard disk. And it boots very fast, especially after the usage of insserv.
• Intergrated Ethernet network interface. (Hey, the MacBook Air hasn’t a builtin one, not even an external shipped with it! ;-)
• Three USB sockets (the MacBook Air has only one which is usually taken for the Ethernet network adaptor — Ok, with the EeePC usually one is taken for the Bluetooth dongle, but then are still two sockets left… ;-)
• Great contrast on the builtin screen.
• External VGA output. You have to configure X.org to make the virtual screen big enough (e.g. 2048×2048 instead of the default 800×800).
• Despite its size quite a lot of space for modifications inside the case. Especially a bluetooth case mode should be no big deal.

Contra EeePC

• The keyboard: keys smaller than usually (ok, wouldn’t work otherwise ;-), very wobbly, no precise contact depth (pressing Shift and Fn with one finger often doesn’t press Fn right), not all keys on the same plane, unusual offsets between the key rows (the number row has about half a key width offset to the left) or position of keys (I often hit Ins when I want Home, Del when I want Backspace or Fn when I want Ctrl, the ~ key is between Esc and F1, Up is between Slash and Right Shift, etc.)
• The position of the power button: It’s exactly where I want to put thumb when holding the EeePC solely with the right hand. And yes, I already accidentially switch it off several times because of that. For luck the button doesn’t work at all when the lid is closed, because you still can reach it easily while it’s closed.
• The mouse button(s): It only has two buttons which are one part you can press more to the left and more to the right side. And if you press it in the middle you randomly get either a left or a right click. You have to press it very hard to get both clicks at the same time. (e.g. to emulate a third middle button). Three separated mouse buttons would have been way better.
• It has (only) a touchpad. I definitely prefer thumbsticks as the ThinkPads have, but got used to it, though. I have seen worse touchpads, too.
• The noisy and not very precisely beared fan, which seems to strife its environment when the EeePC is being accelerated. Whih happens quite often because of its size and weight and because the SSD doesn’t mind acceleration. The fan does mind – and you hear it. :-(
• Some programs need minimum 800x600 resolution to work well.

Pro ThinkPad (in direct comparision)

• Thumbstick.
• One of the best laptop keyboards around.
• Three easy to distinguish mouse buttons.
• Even ressource-hungry programs like Liferea work fine.
• Quite big screen resolution (1440×900).
• Bigger battery, space for additional batteries.
• Could be a workstation replacement.

Pro Lenny on the EeePC

• The installer image of the Debian EeePC Project works out of the box. All necessary drivers are available, if you include the non-free repositories and the eeepc.debian.net repositories.
• Stable enough for daily use. (IMHO Debian Testing – and even Debian Unstable – is more stable as many other distribution’s stable releases, e.g. those from SuSE.)

Con Lenny on the EeePC

• My favourite feed reader Liferea has changed its cache format since the version in Debian Etch, so I can’t sync Liferea caches between my Debian Etch running T61 and the Testing running EeePC. Well, fortunately the version of Liferea in Debian Etch still works on Debian Lenny, so I just downgraded the package to the version from Etch and set it on hold. I don’t use it on the EeePC though since it needs way too long to start (about 10 to 15 minutes compared to 1 to 3 minutes on the T61)

Summary

I’m very happy with the EeePC and I didn’t expect that it would replace my 14” ThinkPad in so many (but still not all) situations. :-)

Following Bleeding Edge Software and still using Debian Stable //at 23:04 //by abe

Many Linux fans know that Debian Stable usually already lost the “b” when it’s being released. ;-) What seems not so well known (especially not by some DesktopBSD Marketing guy at last year’s LinuxDay.at :-) is that there is really a lot of people who really like this “stale” software collection — because it’s rock solid — especially compared to the ports in FreeBSD or DesktopBSD *evilgrin* which unnecessarily follow every new feature upstream introduces. This is really annoying in a server environment where you want as less changes as possible when updates are necessary due to security issues. My personal favourites here are Samba and CUPS. *grmpf*

Although I belong to those people who run Debian Stable even on brand-new hardware, I sometimes have to use the newest beta or alpha versions of some software to get it even only running. And doing so is fun but feels strange somehow, though. Currently I follow the pre-releases of three software makers quite close, due to a new laptop:

At the beginning of last semester I bought a brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad T61 (2,2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo T7500, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HD, 1440x900 14” Widescreen) without preinstalled operating system (possible thanks to the ETHZ Neptun Project) and installed — of course — 64-bit Debian Stable on it.

While the Debian Installer from Etch worked fine even on such new hardware, not all features worked out of the box because some components were just too new.

So the first thing I did was installing 2.6.22 from Backports.org, quickly moving farther to vanilla 2.6.23. Nearly everything I needed worked except the wireless network card. It needs the iwlwifi driver which is officially in the Linux kernel starting at the upcoming 2.6.24 (said to be released during the next few days). So I run 2.6.24 pre-releases on the laptop since the first release candidate, always eagerly waiting for either the next RC or the final release. (And 2.6.24 looks impressively stable to me — even since the early release candidates. :-)

I even got the fingerprint reader working for login and sudo (but not xscreensaver) using libthinkfinger backported to Etch from Debian Experimental. I’m just not sure if this is a good idea since the back of the screen already has enough of my fingerprints on it. ;-)

The next software of which I’m currently running an alpha version is 64-bit Opera 9.50 (aka Kestrel, available at snapshot.opera.com) because no earlier Opera version is available for 64-bit Linuxes. Here I had different experiences: The builds from October and November were already quite stable, but since December it crashes usually several times a day.

At work I also run the 64-bit Opera on my workstation, but stalled updating it when I noticed that it became so unstable. So my Opera at work has currently an uptime of nearly four weeks — and would have probably more if I hadn’t rebooted my workstation in Mid-December.

Somehow this hunting for new versions and eagerly waiting for every new (pre-)release makes me really fidgety sometimes. And my understanding for people doing this for there whole userland or even operating system has grown, but I still prefer to have stale but stable software on all my productive machines, even on my laptop — just with some few and handpicked excpetions.

The third but less thrilling thing I’m following are nVidia drivers for X. Since the free nv driver of X.org doesn’t support (and not only just doesn’t know) my graphics card yet and nouveau isn’t ready yet, I run the binary only and closed source driver from nVidia, waiting for that one release which supports Xen since I really would like to run a Xen guest with Debian Unstable for testing purposes and package building on my laptop. Until then I have to content myself with the much more unwieldy QEMU respectively KVM.

Anyway, I’m very happy with the T61 and Debian Stable and can easily connive at the few not (yet) perfect issues like missing Xen support by nVidia, broken ad-hoc mode in the wireless card, no internal card-reader (as announced in the Neptun specifications) and no native serial port.

Some useful links regarding the subject of this post:

• Linux Weather Forecast
• Opera Desktop Team
• Nouveau: Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
• ThinkWiki

Now playing: Jean Michel Jarre — Rendez-vous à Paris