Russell's Blog

For Father's day, I've been helping my dad get Ubuntu working on his new laptop (a Dell Latitude D420). Getting Ubuntu configured has turned out to be surprisingly painless, especially compared to Windows XP.

My dad had originally hoped to buy a machine with Ubuntu pre-installed. Unfortunately, getting Dell to actually sell you a computer with Ubuntu is more or less impossible. My dad isn't the only one to come to this conclusion. HP and IBM have a similar approach; they make a big deal of offering Linux pre-installed on their hardware, but it's only offered on a tiny and undesirable subset of their products, and the sales department will do everything possible short of hanging up on you to prevent you from buying one. So, he gave up and bought the machine he wanted, figuring he'd postpone his switch to Ubuntu.

After a failed attempt to restore his Windows XP installation from backups on is old computer, reinstalling XP from the provided CD turned out to be a neigh impossible task. With no drivers for any of the hardware (even the USB bus), once the OS was loaded, we couldn't think of a way of getting the drivers onto the disk so they might be installed. The machine uses a USB CD drive, so without the USB bus drivers, you can't even burn a CD with the drivers. The needed drivers are probably somewhere on the XP install CD, but there's no way of getting them.

So, we figured we'd give Ubuntu a shot after all. The process could hardly have been more painless. The only shortcomings of the Ubuntu install process are legally imposed and have easy workarounds -- fetching the Broadcom firmware for the wireless card, for example. After completing those chores, the machine Just Works.

My dad is a smart guy, so I wasn't worried about the "normal" sorts of troubles in switching to Linux. When you switch to a new OS, there is a reasonable expectation of effort required to learn the new environment. He'll figure out how to use the the software and OS features on his own. I was worried about poor hardware support. My dad can figure out how to install software and use it without my help, but it'll be a while (if ever) before he would consider compiling his own kernel to fix a hardware issue. It's not reasonable to expect someone who is switching to a new OS to repair it and learn it simultaneously.

Fortunately, all of the headaches I was fearing seem to have been addressed. It suspends and resumes without complaint, you can join wireless networks (including encrypted ones) from a nice little drop down menu. The network menu lets you switch between an ethernet connection and a WiFi connection if both are available. The Add/Remove Software application is intuitive and easy to use. No indoctrination into kernel compilation and command line tools is immediately necessary.

So, our assessment is that Ubuntu is, so far, much more user friendly than Windows. An inexperienced computer user would have a better chance of getting Ubuntu installed correctly than Windows. On this hardware, it wouldn't be all smooth sailing, but it's pretty close. If you're experienced enough to know the definition of words like "partition" and "firmware," then it's a piece of cake.

It's a shame, really, that Dell won't sell Ubuntu on this machine. Ubuntu is slick, snappy, easy to use, and it makes their hardware look good.

My dad's only complaint so far has been, "Yuck. This brown color is ugly. How do I change the color scheme?"

Now that Apple is integrating little video cameras into most of its products, the venerable Apple iSight has been discontinued. This is very good news if you happen to know a Mac user who likes to buy new things. Chances are pretty good that they have an iSight that they no longer need. Despite being discontinued, the iSight still seems to command its former full retail price on eBay for reasons I do not understand. However you get your hands on one, the iSight can be made to work on a Linux machine without too much difficulty.

The iSight isn't a particularly wonderful video camera, but it is pretty ideal for videoconferencing. So, here is how to get the iSight to work with Gnome's videoconferencing software, Ekiga. I will assume that you know how to find and install software on your computer.

You will need an ieee1394 port, and you will need to load the following kernel modules :

• ieee1394
• video1394
• ohci1394
• videodev

You will also need to make sure video4linux (V4L2) and the V4L1 compatibility modules is either loaded as a module of compiled into your kernel. The easiest way to get the device working is with the vloopback kernel module, which you will probably have to download and build yourself (I found the Subversion repository to be easiest to use -- the 1.1-rc1 tarball complained of a missing config.h file).

Once you've got the vloopback module loaded, you should be able to get the camera working using Coriander. When you launch Coriander, it will either work, or it will tell you which kernel modules you are missing. If it works, you should see "Apple Computer, Inc." under the "Camera Select" dropdown menu. The Coriander interface is somewhat counterintuitive and a bit heavy on options, but it is very useful. Go to "Services" and select "VIDEO1394" from the "Method" dropdown menu. Then clicking the "Receive" and "Display" buttons (which are actually toggles, despite appearances) should pop open a video preview.

Chances are, the permissions on the necessary devices in /dev will be wrong, so you may have to run Coriander as root. You should make sure the devices are readable and writable by the "video" group (or whatever you or your distribution deems appropriate for the group name), and then add yourself to that group. You will need to the following devices :

crw-rw---- 1 root video 81, 0 Apr 20 21:57 /dev/video0
crw-rw---- 1 root video 81, 1 Apr 20 21:57 /dev/video1
...
crw-rw-r-- 1 root video 171, 16 Apr 20 21:57 /dev/video1394/0
crw-rw-r-- 1 root video 171, 17 Apr 20 21:57 /dev/video1394/1
...
crw-rw---- 1 root video 171, 0 Apr 19 21:38 /dev/raw1394

Evidently, you don't need these:

crw------- 1 root video 10, 204 Apr 20 21:57 /dev/video/em8300
crw------- 1 root video 10, 206 Apr 20 21:57 /dev/video/em8300_ma
crw------- 1 root video 10, 205 Apr 20 21:57 /dev/video/em8300_mv
crw------- 1 root video 10, 207 Apr 20 21:57 /dev/video/em8300_sp

You may want to use your iSight for something other than uploading images to an FTP site (which Coriander will do wonderfully). If you try to use your iSight with Ekiga, you may notice that even with all the right kernel modules loaded, it's still impossible to configure the iSight via the Ekiga configuration druid. If this is the case, you need to install some packages :

• libpt-1.10.0 - Portable Windows Library
• libpt-plugins-alsa - Portable Windows Library Audio Plugin for the ALSA Interface
• libpt-plugins-avc - PWLib Video Plugin for IEEE1394 (FireWire) AVC devices
• libpt-plugins-dc - PWLib Video Plugin for IEEE1394 (Firewire) DC Devices
• libpt-plugins-oss - Portable Windows Library Audio Plugins for the OSS Interface
• libpt-plugins-v4l - Portable Windows Library Video Plugin for Video4Linux
• libpt-plugins-v4l2 - Portable Windows Library Video Plugin for Video4Linux v2

Quit Ekiga and try the druid again. You should be able to select "1394DC" for the Video plugin, and "/dev/video1394/0" for the Input device. Clicking the little video icon should start the video preview.

Note: If you close the little shutter on the iSight while Ekiga is running, it will crash. Evidently the shutter actually turns off the device.