Ubuntucat

So my last MP3 player (the much-lauded but ultimately disappointing Cowon iAudio 7) died because of a manufacturer error (even though Cowon claimed the repair was not under warranty). This time, I killed my MP3 player (my 2 GB Sansa Clip) with my own stupidity.

The long story
I love Ubuntu, and I keep coming back to it, but every now and then I get distro cravings and have to try something else. I hadn’t had a distro craving in probably over a year. I kept reading all these great things about Mandriva, though, and how well it works with the Eee PC 701.

So I tried downloading it to my bootable USB “key” (i.e., the Sansa Clip) and extracting the .iso the way I did for Ubuntu and eeeXubuntu. No go, though. I got a boot error of some kind (I think it was some busybox thing). When I read up online about how to install Mandriva on the Eee, I found out you have download some premade all.img file and install via FTP. So I dd‘ed the all.img to my Sandisk player, knowing all would be overwritten and thinking I could restore anyway. None of my Ubuntu adventures had affected the Sansa Clip adversely, so I wasn’t worried.

As a sidenote, Mandriva’s installer made me really appreciate the simplicity and speed of Ubuntu’s installer. The Mandriva installation took literally hours, and the first mirror I selected for doing the FTP install kept having trouble fetching packages (with no easy way of switching to another mirror). It also had this annoying Windows-like habit of asking you a question, doing some processes that took an hour or so to execute, and then asking you another question, and then doing more processes. Why can’t it just ask you all the questions up front and then do all the processes?

After Mandriva finally installed, I wasn’t that impressed, but I thought I’d at least give it a go (and I will). Even though resume from suspend worked with the prepackaged Xandros, I couldn’t get it to work with any *buntu flavor, and I’d heard it would work out of the box with Mandriva. Not so. When I try to wake up the computer with a keystroke, nothing happens. If I press the power button quickly, it looks as if it’s about to wake up but then shuts down completely. Very disappointing.

So my next task was to get my Sansa Clip back to its previous state. I realized that the all.img file I dd‘ed over was extremely small, so even though the Sansa Clip was officially 2 GB, it made my drive appear to GParted to be only a few MBs in size. GParted couldn’t recognize the full size, so I thought if I deleted the entire partition and created a new one, that’d be fine. But Mandriva’s GParted, for some reason, doesn’t let you create FAT32 or non-Linux partitions (I’m sure there are packages that could be installed that could add that support—I had no idea what those were).

For a quick fix, since it was nearby, I opened up my wife’s Macbook Pro and used the Mac Disk Utility to erase the Sansa Clip drive and format it as FAT. Bad move. The Disk Utility wiped it out completely, including the firmware!

So when I finally ejected the Sansa Clip and then tried to plug it into my Eee PC, it would not be recognized. It was totally dead. It wouldn’t turn on. It wouldn’t show a little display on the screen saying it was connected to a computer. fdisk -l on the Eee side also showed nothing connected. Same deal when I plugged it back into the Macbook Pro. And finally, same deal when I plugged it into my Windows PC at work.

The real shame of it is that it probably still works… or would work if I were able to get the firmware back on there, but without the firmware installed, the Sansa Clip doesn’t know when it’s connected to a computer, and I need to connect it to a computer to get the firmware installed.

It’s official: I’m a moron. Mandriva, I hope you appreciate all I went through to get you installed.

The short story
I erased the firmware off my Sansa Clip, and now it’s totally useless. Good thing it was cheap.

I saw Leaked: Dell Inspiron 910 (Mini Note) Specs and Release Date today and I’m intrigued, but I’m not excited yet.

I tend to be pretty cautious about computer purchases. I’ve heard rumors that the base model is supposed to be US$299, but I’m not sure what specs that’ll be. By the time you jack up the specs to be something reasonable, it may be over US$600, which I’m not willing to shell out.

I also find it odd that a couple of months ago, Dell hinted at the netbooks being announced in August. It’s almost the end of August now and it’s still just “leaked… specs” a few days before the supposed release date (August 22). If Dell is releasing the netbooks on August 22, shouldn’t they have released the full specs and pricing (not just “leads” and speculation) a lot earlier?

Well, I’m curious to see how this all turns out. I love my Eee, but I don’t love its Ubuntu-unfriendliness (I don’t think I can go back to Xandros at this point). If the Dell Inspiron 901s are priced reasonably, get good reviews, and come preinstalled with a Ubuntu version that boots up within seconds, then I may just regift my Eee to a friend who doesn’t mind Xandros and who also travels a lot.

Bring it on, Dell! Let’s see what you got.

I have consumer’s arrogance. I’ll admit it.

While innovators, inventors, businesspeople, and artists are busy working to make money (and art, too, if they’re lucky), I’m comfortably sitting back, relaxing, and critiquing them from my little soapbox of a blog. It’s easy once something has tanked to balk at it, “What were they thinking?”

Sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes they had a good idea in theory, but in practice it was terrible. Sometimes it just didn’t get implemented properly, or it worked for test groups but not consumers at large.

Well, sometimes… sometimes, it actually works!

Here are three products I balked at wrongly. I thought they were stupid until I realized they were brilliant.

• The iPod’s Scroll Wheel. Yes, I understood the appeal of the iPod. Yes, I knew Apple made slick-looking products. But the scroll wheel baffled me. I thought about the CD players of old. Wouldn’t I just want to click to the next song right or left? Why would I want to go in a circle? Apple knew, though. They knew that people either already had or would soon amass music collections with songs numbering in the thousands, and scrolling through thousands of songs without a scroll wheel is tiring for your fingers. Even though I’ve long since grown disillusioned with iPods and iTunes (I use Sandisk players with Linux now), I do miss the scroll wheel and appreciate it for the brilliant invention it was.
• The Wii. When I first heard about the Wii, I thought Nintendo was crazy. The name sounded stupid, like a kid peeing. The system’s graphics weren’t in the same class as the PS3. You used the remote to make motions with? What is this—Tron? Well, apparently it is. Gamers and non-gamers, children and adults alike love the Wii. I’m not much of a gamer myself, but I enjoy the Wii, too. It’s like a video game console for non-video-game-players. I even know someone who claims that Wii bowling practice leads to better real-life bowling performance. Not sure about that, but if it’s true, then cool!
• The Eee PC. Okay. It has a 4 GB hard drive, a crappy webcam, no optical drive, 800×480 screen resolution, a child-size keyboard, and only a 3-hour battery life? Why do I want that? I guess it’s at least cheaper than the Macbook Air by US$1400. If someone had pitched that to me, I would have said, “You must be on crack!” But the Eee PC has been selling quite well for Asus, spawning competition from HP, Acer, Dell, and others, and keeping Asus itself on its toes with a new release with better specs. It’s gotten rave reviews, too. I was intrigued by this little giant and read literally hundreds of reviews before taking the dive and buying one myself, and it’s lived up to the hype even though it isn’t perfect. Asus just realized that these days most of what people use computers for is the internet, and that’s all the Eee really is, an internet appliance that can do a few other cool things, too.

So, hats off to you CEOs who, on rare occasion, know better than I do what will be successful or a good idea.

Introduction
When I announced to the other Ubuntu Forums staff members I was getting an Eee PC and planning to stick with Xandros (as opposed to installing Ubuntu on it), one of the first pieces of advice I got was to remove unionfs from the Eee to free up space.

What’s the deal with unionfs anyway?
Just a quick primer on unionfs (as well as I can understand it): one of the great features the Eee has is the ability to restore factory settings with the press of a couple of buttons at bootup (tap F9 quickly and then select the restore option from the menu). One person made a YouTube video of the process and clocked the restore at two minutes. I did the restore myself and it took about ten seconds (not kidding).

This works because the Eee has two major hard drive partitions (and two random smaller partitions at the end—I don’t know what those are for). The first is mounted at boot as read-only and contains the factory settings. The second is mounted as read-write and is the user partition you modify after you start using the Eee. While having those two partitions makes restoring (in case you mess up something) easy and quick, it also sucks up a lot of hard drive space on a drive that is already pretty small (4 GB on the 701 version).

My experience with unionfs and reasons for removing it
Even though the advice I got turned out to be good advice, at first I was hesitant to remove unionfs for two reasons:

1. I knew I’d be tweaking Xandros a lot and wanted an easy way to restore the default installation in case I messed things up.
2. I didn’t have an external DVD-ROM drive to use for the restore DVD that came with the Eee, and I was intimidated by the tutorials about making USBs into bootable live “CDs.”

Well, after a lot of tweaks, I did manage to mess up the Eee badly enough that I could fix it by undoing all the tweaks, but I was glad to have the option to quickly restore it. And, more importantly—too cheap to buy an external DVD-ROM drive—I rolled up my sleeves and actually followed a tutorial on making a USB device into a live “CD.” It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be.

So, with the ability to back up my installation (I used the dd command to back up the entire Eee PC hard drive to a .img file on an external hard drive), I had fewer qualms about removing unionfs. I also realized through regular use with unionfs that a little less than 2 GB is not a lot to work with after you have applications installed. I don’t want to store my entire music and photo collections on the Eee, but I’d like to have some selection available there.

The removal process
Emboldened by how much easier the make-a-USB-live-”CD” process was, I went ahead and tried the Removing UnionFS/aufs tutorial on the EeeUser Wiki, and the process could have been a lot smoother. I basically ended up following the instructions, messing everything up, and then having to restore my Xandros .img with dd and then redo the instructions again.

If you’re planning to follow the instructions, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• You do not need to enable (i.e., add as a permanent boot option) single-user mode or recovery mode on the Eee, but it’s probably a good idea to know how to make it available for one-time use.
• If you have an easy way to back up the Eee (the dd command, for example, or an external DVD-ROM drive with the Eee PC DVD), you can simplify the process by using a live CD (or live “CD” USB stick) to make all the changes to /dev/sda1. You should be familiar with mounting partitions, but it’ll save you the trouble of going into recovery mode and using vi and all that. You also won’t have to constantly reboot and test things (again, you should have backed everything up first; otherwise, testing is a good thing).
• There are instructions in the middle of the page about growing the /dev/sda1 partition using GParted, but then there is a warning at the bottom of the page about how using GParted won’t work and how you should use fdisk and some other command-line options instead to merge partitions. Please heed this bottom-of-the-page warning. I tried to grow the /dev/sda1 partition in GParted to fill the space and got an error message and the /dev/sda1 partition then appeared to fill all 3.7 GB but was also almost completely full. When I rebooted into Xandros, the drive was reported as being only 2 GB large and almost full. If you want the non-unionfs-ed partition to fill the whole drive, follow the instructions about using the command-line to do it.
• The other thing I learned is that the commands given seem counterintuitive to the uninitiated. To expand the first partition to fill the space, they actually have you delete all the partitions and then create a new partition. My intuition was telling me, “Hey, this is wrong! I don’t want to delete the partition. I just want to expand it.” But if you follow the instructions and delete all the partitions and recreate a new one, it actually has the same effect as expanding the first partition. Don’t ask me how that works, but it does. You backed everything up anyway, right? There should be nothing to lose.

Conclusion
My advice to owners of any Eee PC that has a 4 GB hard drive or smaller is to find a way to back up and/or restore your Xandros installation and then get rid of unionfs as quickly as possible in order to reclaim hard drive space. The quick restore tool is fun and amazing, but it takes up too much space. I’m so glad I now have 1.8 GB of free space on my Eee instead of 400 MB.

Well, my enthusiasm for Ubuntu was a bit hasty, I guess. Everything was good for a while, but then I saw the extent to which things weren’t working. I though the microphone and video in Skype were working, but they weren’t, and the boot time was just too long (and suspend didn’t work). Worse yet, the sound controls are not integrated. The volume applet and the volume controlled by the keys defined in System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts didn’t control the actual master volume. The whole experience of getting things to work was too frustrating, so I’m very happy I had imaged Xandros and put Xandros back on for now.

Eventually, if I get restless again, I’ll probably try out eeeXubuntu 7.10, or I may wait until Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) to see if the Ubuntu developers have worked to make an Eee-friendlier release; I realize it’s tough for them since Asus uses some proprietary components.

Well, it was worth a shot, and I may shoot again, too.