Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I bought this phone yesterday from the Verizon kiosk at BJ’s Wholesale Club. Since I had a (since discontinued) new-every-two bonus, it was $250 with a two-year contract extension, rather than $300. What made the sale, however, was that there was no rebate nonsense!

This is my second day with this phone and I’m really liking it. My previous phone is an original Motorola Droid. So far, I don’t miss the hardware keyboard. Although this phone is wider and taller, it’s thinner and weighs less than my Droid (5.3 oz. vs. 6 oz.), making it feel much lighter. It feels much less obtrusive in my pocket, which surprised me.

Some folks have complained the 4.65″ screen is too big for them to operate one handed. This might be true, but I’ve always held the phone in one hand and used the interface with the other.

4G is very fast. I have FiOS 15/5 at home and this is quicker than that. Upload and download speeds are about the same, rather than tiered.

There’s a WiFi tether, but Verizon has borked it so you need to purchase a tether plan. It seems possible to root it and use android-wifi-tether, but I haven’t tried.

Scrolling is very smooth. At times, I think it’s an iPhone. The phone never seems to be working hard.

Reception is about the same as my Droid, maybe not quite as good. I have the misfortune to work in a building that’s a cell dead zone. Throughout the day, the phone will be able to sneak some data in, but it’s not reliable enough for actual use. The Droid on CyanogenMod would eventually give up trying to find a signal. I’d have to cycle it through airplane mode to get it to pick up the signal again once I got outside. The Nexus has the same problem, but it takes longer to get in and out of airplane mode. Earlier today, it got stuck trying to get into airplane mode and I had to restart it.

The notification light (for new email or text, etc.) is a little odd. It’s a white light in the bottom-center of the screen and only turns on when the phone is asleep. It blinks once every eight seconds, which is way too slow. At the general suggestion of a few Nexus forums, I downloaded LightFlow, which can change the color and frequency of the light by notification type. So far so good, but it has some permissions that make me nervous.

The car dock isn’t as nice as the Droid’s. I’d prefer if it clipped in. This one you smoosh into a rubber bezel. Once in the dock, the phone does not go into a car mode. Also, when making or receiving a call, it doesn’t go into speaker mode. That’s really inconvenient.

The USB charger fits in easily, which is a big improvement over the Droid. The Droid’s charger was so finicky to connect that I got the home dock just to make connecting to power easier.

To flip between editing buffers in Emacs:
Next buffer:  <Ctrl>x<right arrow>
(While holding down the Control key, type “x” then the right arrow key)
Previous buffer <Ctrl>x<left arrow>

To increase font size: <Ctrl>x+
(While holding down the control key type “x”, then “+”)
To decrease font size: <Ctrl>x-

It’s been a while since I ran Tip On Discount with the Android SDK, so I loaded up a fresh copy of Eclipse and the SDKs. The project had all kinds of issues locating the Android libraries. The fix is to make sure project properties has the Android build set correctly, then run Android Tools -> Fix Project Properties, then Refresh the project.

After that, the project built, but when I tried to run it in an AVD, Eclipse complained my project had errors, though there were none. The cause of that was an old configuration in ~/.android. Deleting that directory try fixed the problem.

Lexmark’s customer support says there’s no way to turn off the messages about finding USB printers their printer daemon is filling up my logs with. I don’t have a way to fix that either, but a band-aid fix is the have logrotate shuffle the logs. As part of the standard configuration, the logs are renamed and compressed. Although this will shorten the length of time covered in the logs, it does free up a lot of space. Logrotate normally runs as a cron job and won’t rotate the logs more than once a day. But you can force it to do so:
$ sudo logrotate --force /etc/logrotate.conf

Actually not, but starting last night Pinto, my Thinkpad T60 with Ubuntu 10.04 started giving me errors about an X windows failure. This morning, I was still getting them, so I thought maybe an upgrade got some libraries out of sync and tried a restart. (This hasn’t actually happened with Ubuntu, but it was a problem I’ve seen in the past.) Then I couldn’t log in. My password was accepted, but after a second or two, I was returned to the log-in screen. I hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 and logged in to a text session. I looked for errors in /var/log and didn’t see any, but noticed the logs were pretty big. Next I looked in ~/.xsession-errors. There was an error about not being able to write a file to /tmp. Turns out I was out of disk space. /var/log/debug, user.log and syslog were huge. Each was filled with messages from discovery.c about searching for HID devices. The first problem was to get some disk space back so the system could function. I deleted the previous copy of the huge logs and restarted. Now I can log in again.

There are two problems here. First is that I had turned off the low disk notification for this drive. That wasn’t smart. Googling that turned up some advice about changing the low disk space warning. Running gconf-editor and drilling down to apps -> gnome-settings-daemon -> plugins -> housekeeping shows that it’s active, but ignore_paths is set to “/”. I double-clicked ignore_paths, selected “/” and clicked “remove.” Problem one solved.

Problem two is why are my logs filling up with these messages. In /var/log/debug, this sequence appears every 20 seconds:


src/demon.cpp : 234 main -- Checking for USB scanners...
src/discovery.c : 79 getScanners -- ::::::::::::::: METHOD START :::::::::::::::
src/discovery.c : 213 getUsbScanners -- ::::::::::::::: METHOD START :::::::::::::::
src/discovery.c : 221 getUsbScanners -- finding attached HID devices...
src/discovery.c : 131 getHidDevices -- ::::::::::::::: METHOD START :::::::::::::::
src/discovery.c : 158 getHidDevices -- failed in opening HIDDEV file: /dev/usb/hiddev0. No such file or directory
src/discovery.c : 158 getHidDevices -- failed in opening HIDDEV file: /dev/usb/hiddev1. No such file or directory
[a few dozen more messages like this with different device names]
src/discovery.c : 197 getHidDevices -- ::::::::::::::: METHOD END :::::::::::::::
src/discovery.c : 223 getUsbScanners -- total HID devices found: 0
src/discovery.c : 226 getUsbScanners -- ::::::::::::::: METHOD END :::::::::::::::
src/discovery.c : 92 getScanners -- getUsbScanners successful
src/discovery.c : 125 getScanners -- ::::::::::::::: METHOD END :::::::::::::::
src/demon.cpp : 240 main -- usb scanners found is 0
src/demon.cpp : 309 main -- End of checking for USB scanners.


The most recent change to my system was adding drivers for the new Lexmark all-in-one printer. It has a scanner. Hmm…

The first hit for those messages turned up a blog entry by a really pissed off Norwegian dude. He obviously hates Lexmark and his solution was to uninstall the drivers. I don’t hate Lexmark and I plan to use my printer, so his solution doesn’t really help me.

Since the error messages are about scanners and I don’t scan often from this laptop, I tried removing XSane (sane-utils, lib-sane, xsane and xsane-common). In the list, hplip also came up. This is for the HP printer the Lexmark replaced and also is used by the older HP Photosmart, but I don’t print to that printer from the laptop.

Alas, this didn’t stop the flow of messages. I’ll try Lexmark support.

Printer drivers are available for this printer from Lexmark’s site. Since I’m using 32-bit Ubuntu (uname -m responds i686 instead of x64), I downloaded “Printer driver (without JRE) for 32-bit Linux distributions with Debian-based packaging”.
After downloading, untar and run it:

• tar xzf lexmark-inkjet-legacy-1.0-1.i386.deb.sh.tar.gz
• chmod +x lexmark-inkjet-legacy-1.0-1.i386.deb.sh
• sudo ./chmod +x lexmark-inkjet-legacy-1.0-1.i386.deb.sh

During the installation, it said XSane was needed for scanning, so I installed that from Synaptic. The rest of the installation was just like the Windows installer. No problems!
As measured by Kill A Watt EZ, this printer uses 12 watts at idle and 7 watts in power saving mode.

There’s a Python script called Periscope that will search for subtitles for a video. It doesn’t always find them, however the web page lists the URLs for the subtitle providers. If Periscope fails, you can go to the sites directly and find the subtitles.

Note subtitles (.srt files) will be found by XMBC and displayed (if toggled on in XBMC) if they have the same name as the video file. However, if you are playing the file through a uPnP source, it won’t work. So mount the NAS’s video directory on the XBMC box instead.

*edit 31Mar2012* XBMC has a plug-in that will download subtitles.  In XBMC, select System -> Settings -> Add-Ons and search for “subtitles.”  The plug-in is called “XBMC Subtitles.”  Here’s how to use XBMC Subtitles.  One caveat with this:  although the integration with XBMC is great, there’s no guarantee the subtitle was created from the video you have.  For instance, if the creator of the video cut out the previous episode review, but the subtitler used a video that had it, the subtitles will be out of sync with the video by a minute or so.  If you can’t find a subtitle that matches, you can fix the offset with SubRip File Offset.  Upload the .SRT file to that site, enter the offset and replace the original .SRT with the fixed file.

In Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions I’ve used, the main menu can be raised with the keyboard shortcut Alt+F1. This didn’t work in Mythbuntu and was a constant irritation. Under Applications -> Settings -> Keyboard, choose the Application Shortcuts tab. There will be an entry for xfce4-popup-menu attached to the shortcut Ctrl+Esc. This doesn’t do anything. It seems that the name of the command to bring up the applications menu changed. It’s now xfce4-popup-applicationsmenu. If you bind this to Alt+F1, all with be right with the world.

The new HTPC is working fine except there’s no audio from the TV over the HDMI connection. Yes, this is a significant problem for a HTPC.

Sound does work with headphones plugged in to the jack on the front of the case.

*Edit* Upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 fixes this. Under Sound -> Hardware set the output to One of the HDMI selections.