My aim is now to use a laptop for my daily tasks: picture editing, small development, multimedia etc.

Ideal features would be:

• Large screen (18,4″)
• Large disk space (at least 250Gb)
• Separate numpad
• At least 2Ghz CPU (dual core)
• 4Gb RAM
• Wifi 802.11g, ethernet 100 connections
• At least 3 USB and 1 firewire port
• Built-in memory card reader with Compact Flash support
• DVD burner

I do not care about the weight, as it would mainly stay on my desktop.

I currently have a desktop computer with 2Go RAM, an Intel 4400 Dual Core CPU (@ 2Ghz) with 200Gb hard disk – though it is enough at the moment, I would prefer the laptop to be more powerful in order to be able to run smoothly with future applications which will be released in 2 or 3 years!

Ideally, it would be around €1,000 (obviously, the cheaper the better, but I want something reliable for a few years if possible).

Last but not least, it needs to be 100% compatible with GNU/Linux (Debian in particular) – I do not care about compiling kernel modules, but would rather prefer they are free (as in free speech).

Do you have any experiences with such laptops?
What would be your recommendations?

Is my idea something totally weird (I mean, should I keep my current desktop computer)?!

Changes since oldest v3 firmware are:

• The choice to select auto exposure bracketing (single & continuous) with 3 shots in 2 EV steps has been added.
• The choice to turn [Off] the High ISO NR feature has been added.
• Improvement of the image quality in high ISO setting.
• Improvement of the auto white balance and D-Range Optimizer performance.
• Improvement of reliability for communication between camera body and vertical grip.

Though I haven’t yet tested the improvements of the image quality using high sensibility or D-Range Optimizer, I mostly appreciate the possibility to make 3 shots at +/-2EV in auto-bracketing, which eases creation of HDR or exposure-blended images.

Download link for Windows work well on GNU/Linux (using Wine to extract the firmware file): http://support.sony-europe.com/dime/digistill/alpha/alpha.aspx?site=&m=DSLR-A700&site=odw_en_GB&odw_model=DSLR-A700

Note that upgrading the firmware resets the counter for file naming.

At first sight, everything was working well “out of the box”, but when I have checked the log files, I could see the following lines repeated very frequently:

Jun  1 08:22:08 athyr kernel: [ 1412.134045] usb 6-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3

I repeat everything seems to work OK, but I can’t stand this kind of messages, especially when it deals with storage (by experience, everything works well during the tests, you simply ignore error messages, and you loose your data the first time you really use your hardware!).

After some googling, I have found this issue is hardware related. A lot of people seem to get hit by this. Some have even reverted to USB 1 (UHCI)!

Further googling pointed out this article.

I have tried to disable USB auto-suspend, and changing the idle-delay time (default is 2 seconds). But it doesn’t help.

Just for reference, this can be done like this:
echo -1 > /sys/module/usbcore/parameters/autosuspend

Note the following part of the documentation:
The idle-delay values for already existing devices will not be affected

To make the change permanent, you need to append usbcore.autosuspend=-1 to the boot parameters (USB support is compiled into Debian kernels).
More information on: http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/usb/power-management.txt

I can also see the following message at boot time:

unable to enumerate USB device on port 4

According to this recent discussion, it seems it is harmless.

I have however noticed that unplugging the card reader and re-plugging it after the system has booted make these log entries disappear. Does someone have an idea?

Note that I use the latest Debian 2.6.25 kernel:

$ uname -a
Linux athyr 2.6.25-2-amd64 #1 SMP Tue May 27 12:45:24 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

The aim is to ease maintenance, reduce power usage, and avoid any risk of fire when not at home.

Most of the websites and the mail server were moved to the new virtual server at the beginning of the week.

I had to postpone my backup configuration to deal with the OpenSSL vulnerability.

Unfortunately, one of the filer of my new hosting company crashed on Thursday and all the data of my virtual host have been lost.

The server is still unreachable, I had to move back to my home server on Friday.

This lead to some outages on all my websites in the meantime. Sorry for any inconvenience.

I have also lost a few e-mail (which I have received on the new host, but not yet read, ie. not yet in my MUA cache). If you sent something I haven’t yet answered to, please send it again.

I hope I will be able to work on the virtual server again next week-end.

As for music, it works fine with rhythmbox from experimental rebuilt against latest libgpod library.

But I can’t find any Linux software which would allow us to transfer pictures. I have tried gpixpod, but it seems the iPod is too new as it doesn’t even detect it. iTunes does not run with Wine.

I think I will try to set up iPod Linux some day…

I have chosen an Asus P5B-V motherboard with an Intel E4400 Core 2 Duo CPU. I have also acquired 2x1Go DDR2 memory from Corsair.

I wanted an Intel based video card (the Asus has a 965G integrated chipset), and I am now able to run (useless) compiz-fusion without a problem.

So far, everything runs fine, and the system is very quiet, even with the fan and heat sink shipped with the CPU. lm-sensors work fine with this configuration.

For now, I am trying to get a 1680×1050 resolution in console thanks to uvesafb and 915resolution in initramfs, but still have issues. I have contacted the developer and hope to be able to write an article explaining the necessary steps.

So far, I was already able to connect to the internet in GSM, will try GPRS tomorrow as I need to change my SIM card.

libbtctl and gnome-bluetooth 0.9.0 were also released today. Updated packages have been uploaded to my unofficial repository (please read carefully the release announcement which explains these packages have been deprecated).

I have also tried wammu for the first time, it will help me update my address book.

It allows me to profit from Orange VoIP service (and thus stop my standard phone line), as well as from the TV over ADSL (which I haven’t tried yet).

My only issue is that I can’t disable to router mode of the Livebox (which is a Sagem F@st 3202 router) – I would have liked to keep my current configuration with a simple modem, in bridge mode. However, I have managed to re-configure shorewall on my internal router and redirect everything from the livebox to this router.

This setup means double NAT, but it seems to work like a charm.

Along with its 8.1MP CCD and its 15x optical zoom, the H9 has some nice features, such as a big 3″ screen, a NightShot® infrared system, a high sensibility mode (up to 3200 ISO with some expected noise) etc.

Following to my first tests, I particularly like the menus, which are clear and allow very quick fine setup. The AF is very reactive, the built-in flash quite effective. The camera is delivered with an infrared remote control, as well as a lenscap. The only drawback for the moment is the usb cable which is not easy to connect to the camera. I guess I should use an external smart card reader in the future.

While configuring Xorg was painless (with both free nv and proprietary nvidia drivers), I still haven’t managed to get the framebuffer working with the native resolution of the screen.

As vesafb doesn’t seem to be able to use a 1680×1050 resolution (hwinfo --framebuffer only gives 4:3 modes), I have tried to patch my kernel with vesafb-tng, which haven’t yield better results.

While nvidiafb allows me to get a 1680×1050 framebuffer, it conflicts with proprietary nvidia driver, preventing it from being loaded. With the free nv driver, I can’t have the display centered both in console and in X (they both use the same mode, and the screen is able to stroe user modes at the condition the new display information habe 1Khz difference for horizontal frequency or 1Hz for vertical frequency or the syn signal polarities are different from the default modes).

By the way, I have noticed that two of my laptops have the same Intel 915 video chipset, and one only is able to have a 1280×800 framebuffer (using the undocumented vga=0x362 code). I can’t understand the reason of this difference.