Meego installation on a USB stick

This post wouldn't be if the hard-drive from my Acer Aspire One didn't die. I have a fresh backup of the disk (a full 'dd' plus a separate one for just the home partition) so if I need something back, and I know I don't I care but backups are important, I can always mount it in a loopback and copy files.

The hard-drive is actually, what I want to call it, a cheap and fake SSD. It's a PATA SSD that I'm sure I will never find a replacement for. Look:

Now the dilemma was easy, or I threw the netbook to trash, or I found something to boot on. I started to look for a solution and Meego just got released, this is crazy timing. I downloaded the boot image and tried it out, and guess what, it is getting better and better. It's definitely more beautiful, it is getting faster, it has better dialogs for customization, well just try it out if you didn't yet, you wont be disappointed but surprised.

So in the end, installing a system on a USB stick is the only solution I can come up with. I ordered an extra USB stick, but mini please, a Kingston DTmini10! Now when I tell people this is my actual hard-drive, they are like “say-whaaat.”

The installation of Meego didn't went that fluently. I have two USB sticks, one with the boot image, another serving as target device for installation. The installation worked fine without any modification, it boots but ends on a black screen with the CAPS del blinking. Boo, kernel panic, or something else ungroovy. I also tried an installation with the file-system ext3, the default is btrfs, but then the grub installer fails and the Meego installer is knocked out in a waiting sequence. So I did a default installation again, sigh. After a search I tried out some parameters for the kernel command line and adding “rootdelay=8” did the trick. In fact, the USB stick boots without problem, but past that there is some delay for the kernel to discover the USB device, you can then see the following message:

   sd 11:0:0:0: [sdx] Assuming drive cache: write through

If there is no rootdelay parameter there is no root device found, and booting just ain't gonna work out. End of story. There are some tiny tweaks to be done afterwards. The kernel command line must point to the right root device, just like for the fstab file. The kernel command line can be edited in the file /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf. Everything else works out just fine. Booting time, except the rootdelay, is acceptable, but shutting down seems to be endless, and precisely when I want the netbook to turn off I want it to be really fast. I'm going to send it to sleep more often than usual, by closing and opening the lid, which is the fastest “boot” sequence one can get ;-)

Update: I've been wrong stating the shutdown process is taking ages, I just did a shutdown and this time it went quick, so something must have been be unlucky and the disk synced something around and around.

Moblin blazing fast

I updated my netbook to give it a new look. I switched the Xfce Panel against bmpanel2 and changed the background (the previous definitelly lasted very long.) Not much changes, but I topped a cold boot of about six seconds, always faster baby :-P And the window manager is OpenBox by the way.

The only real useful entry missing in this panel is a battery monitor. At least I have an indicator over the keyboard that starts blinking when there is about three percents left. What I like about this panel is the cool themes that it is provided with, however the configuration is set through a hand-written configuration file which sucks but what do you want, it is extremely lightweight on the other hand.

Update: Should I mention I totally forgot about the Xfce power manager? Well I did, and it is provided with a notification icon displaying the battery status :-) However I had to fix the default ACPI script related to the lid, since HAL doesn't list it, in order to get the netbook to go into sleep.

Fed up with Moblin

I slowly begin to be fed up with Moblin, the base installation. The base system starts way too often with core-dumps (crash on mutter f.e. which also means X restarts), but mainly because of RPM. When package-kit starts to check for an update — or when you do any installation/upgrade with yum e.g. you use rpm directly or indirectly — the whole system goes unusable, the browser acts like it is frozen, it takes very long to switch between tasks, and all of this for at least a minute up to an hour if you accept to run an update. You can call this whatever you want, I call this a big fail.

This happens on an Acer Aspire One 9", where I guess they installed the cheapest SSD out there.

In fact things were getting really bad when I switched to an Xfce session, I received unbelievable long startup times. Uxlaunch, the new automatic login application on Moblin 2.1, is totally uncooperative. The Xfce session ends launching many tools and applications twice, two corewatcher-applets, two connman-applets, etc. Uxlaunch will run xfce4-session, but also executes the same desktop files — as it seems after a quick look in the code — from the autostart directory, which is a role taken by the Xfce session manager.

So I have been looking around to finally throw away some junk.

Now I have been looking close at the autostart applications since the "all-in-twice" fiasco to get this netbook fast again. Of course you have to know what you do, this kind of tasks isn't open to people without technical skills. First I changed the default "desktop" to Openbox, by downloading the RPM source package, compiling it and putting it inside the uxlaunch configuration file. Then I have been removing some base packages and manually hiding some desktop files to avoid them to autostart — I have been playing with the Hidden/NoDisplay key but it didn't have any effect on uxlaunch so it ended with a chmod 000 command.

I dropped four packages, kerneloops, corewatcher and obexd/openobex. I really don't want them around anymore. And I "dropped" seven autostart files, ofono which depends on a lot of applications, the bkl-orbiter, and the rest are Moblin panel related applications, bluetooth-panel which I don't even have on this netbook, carrick-panel as I use connman-applet which works at least for an automatic connection, two dalson applications dalson-power-applet and dalston-volume-applet, and at last moblin-panel-web.

I kept the gnome-settings-daemon although I have the Xfce settings daemon installed which I do prefer at some extends. And after all this I changed the GTK+ and icon themes through the gconf keys. And what's the conclusion? Moblin is nice, but I managed to munch it and enforce my desktop.

Update: After running under OpenBox I feel that my remark toward RPM is wrong, I don't know maybe it is the mixed use of OpenGL that makes the tasks taking ages to react. All in all, the default desktop environment is something where you must know about patience :-)

MP3 support on Moblin (part 2)

Part 1 showed the easy way. Now the hard way to get MP3 support is to provide it yourself by building plugins for GStreamer. Having an RPM build environment is a prerequesite. The earlier blog entry shows how to set it up and also has an example to build and install libmad which will be useful in this example and I won't repeat it here.

Download the gstreamer-plugins-ugly source package. Put it inside the SRPMS directory and run the rpm -i command on it to unarchive its content.

Open a text editor and edit the spec file available under SPECS. The package names vary between Moblin, Fedora and RPM Fusion and this needs to be fixed in the header. And in this example only the plugin libmad will be build so that's why many lines will be commented. In fact the only build dependencies will be libmad, libid3tag and liboil. I have put the diff on Snipt. To apply it use the patch command like patch -p0 < gstreamer-plugins-ugly.spec.diff. Don't miss the patch(1) man page to know about the -p option.

Now build binary packages with the command rpmbuild -bb SPECS/gstreamer-plugins-ugly.spec. Wait a minute and you should have a ready to install gst-plugins-ugly package within the RPMS directory.

You can more or less repeat this task for DivX and other video codecs support. For that you'll have to build the GStreamer FFmpeg plugin (gstreamer-ffmpeg source package). Of course FFmpeg depends on many many libraries and you'll have to build them at first.

Update: Regarding FFmpeg, it can be build from the RPM source package without external requirements, in fact it doesn't have any hard dependencies. Or you can even compile the gstreamer-ffmpeg plugin only with the internal FFmpeg sources since it is optionaly linked to an external FFmpeg library. In both cases the provided SPEC files have to be modified.

RPM build environment on Moblin

I once set up an RPM build environment on my netbook to build missing packages, often small tools. There are many docs to do that, for myself I browsed the Fedora project wiki. If you are looking for RPMish stuff you are in the right place there.

Preparation

The package rpmdevtools provides scripts for the packager, one of them is rpmdev-setuptree. This tool will set up automatically the build directory for keeping source packages, spec files, etc. You can run this command now. Within your home, it will create an rpmbuild directory and a hidden .rpmmacros file. You can move the rpmbuild directory where ever you want but you will have to fix the variable %_topdir in the hidden rpmmacros file.

That's already about it.

Build example

Lets take a small example to show the use of the RPM build environment. Download the source package libmad from RPM Fusion. Copy it to the subdirectory SRPMS and then unarchive it with the command rpm -i SRPMS/libmad-[version].src.rpm. And finally you can build the binary packages with the command rpmbuild -bb SPECS/libmad.spec. The rpmbuild command is provided by the rpm-build package.

By now you can install the packages within the subdirectory RPMS, libmad-[version].rpm and the -devel package, if you wish to build the source package madplay to play MP3s from command line :-)

External sources

• Packaging guidelines
• How to create an RPM package
• Fedora Koji
• RPM Fusion
  

MP3 support on Moblin (part 1)

The easiest way to add support for MP3 is by installing a pre-build RPM package. Fluendo has one available for free. The reason Moblin isn't distributing a decoder is of legal issues, however one might get them by "legal" ways where that term will vary amongst different juridictions. It clearly is an annoying topic to raise up! If you buy a laptop you can expect to have MP3 support since the sellers have ways to collect royalties. At least that's what I learned from the Moblin mailing-list.

Installing an RPM is done by running the simple command "rpm -i [package]" with the super user.

Moblin Day 1+2

It's the second time I'm testing Moblin. The first time was with Alpha1, but now with Alpha2 I decided to install it. One main reason I kept Alpha2 was because of the availability of Xfce 4.6 ;-) Apart from that the experience is really great and it does boot fast. I turn the netbook on and after 1-2 seconds I already see an image on top of the Xorg session. It feels like hibernation but it's not :-)

The first day
I stumbled over the bug #1088 when I entered my key for the Wifi access. Of course I obviously had to type it wrong... One way to fix this was to clean up the configuration file of connman, within /var/lib/connman/. Otherwise nothing alarming.

After that I themed a little bit the desktop, like the awesome Nodoka-Midnight theme. Next I quickly figured the package manager, yum, and I headed toward a system upgrade. This step took a very long time, up to 3 hours. Alpha2 is as of today around 1 month old and there were over 300 packages to download. That took around 700 actions for yum like installing, updating and cleaning up.

Once the upgrade was done I installed the necessary devel packages to compile xfce4-gvfs-mount and xfce4-clipman-plugin both respectively from git and subversion. The Install/Remove Software GUI (gpk-application) is very nice, better than what I knew from Synaptic. Amongst the Moblin packages I found xfce-software-development which eases a little bit the selection of packages to install.

Well, one issue at the post upgrade was the default background disappearing, so I found out that it came from the package xfce4-desktop-branding-moblin. I'm kinda attached to that background now, I like the electronic-circuit like board, so I managed to copy/paste it. It's called moblin-energy-blue-1024x600.png.

The second day
A few issues:
- Firefox crashes "a lot".
- The gvfs-fuse-daemon is missing.
- Impossible to play MP3 or Divx.

I dunno how to fix Firefox and there are no appearing bug reports. I tried out the official binary provided by Mozilla and it crashes the same ways. GMail is crashing, Twitter is crashing when reloading the page after giving an up-to-date state, https on xfce.org, etc. So this is annoying. I will try to get a backtrace and install Midori since Moblin has a recent version of WebKit GTK+.

Now about the Gvfs topic, I was first fighting with an old build of xfce4-gvfs-mount on my home partition to finally notice that the gvfs mount was useless as gvfs-fuse-daemon was missing by default on the system. This means I can only access the files the hard way by using the gvfs programs to copy, list or delete files. I had to install the package gvfs-fuse.

And finally, the Moblin repository doesn't provide decoders for MP3 or Divx. Those are provided with the set of ugly plugins for GStreamer and is not available.
Hence I downloaded and installed the following packages from Fedora 10: a52dec, libmad, libmpeg2, lame-libs, libmpeg3 and of course gstreamer-plugins-ugly. The gstreamer-plugins-ugly package depends on a little more libraries but I didn't find them and I am already covered with the libs I downloaded.

Last but not least, I miss Wesnoth and the Xfce Power Manager :-)

Update: Screenshots

Update: Actually to get Totem to read Divx I needed to install gstreamer-ffmpeg! I have a dozen of rpms in a directory.