Julien Valroff's weblog and personal homepage
Posts tagged Tech
New camera: Sony DSC-H9
Jun 9th
I received this week my new bridge camera: a Sony DSC-H9. It is meant to replace my Konica Minolta Z5, which had some defaults for the use I have.
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.
New 16:10 wide screen
May 19th
I have purchased a new screen, and I have chosen an Acer AL2002W, mainly because of its low price. It is a 20″ wide screen, with a native resolution of 1680×1050 @60Hz. For now, it seems to be good value for money, and working with this screen is very confortable (I previously used a standard 4:3 17″ screen at 1280×1024).
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.
Sound output broken on my Dell Inspiron
Mar 3rd
I have recently noticed that the sound output of my (nearly) 3 months-old Dell Inspiron 1300 is broken. I am pretty sure it is something like a bad contact.
As I use this laptop mainly as a media box, I cannot leave it in this state.
I thus wrote to Dell Support team on Thursday evening, less than 5 days before the end of the 90 days warranty. They called me back yesterday morning to confirm they have received my request, and I received an e-mail yesterday afternoon asking me to do some further tests.
I think I will have to sent the laptop back and wait for ages until it comes back. As it obviously runs Debian, I will also have to set up the original system back on it, which will oblige me to re-install the whole system after repair.
Cheap is not always good.
Bluetooth™ on Debian
Jan 10th
I have purchased a cheap Sitecom Bluetooth™ USB-adapter (€15 in my nearest but not preferred merchant). It works perfectly on Linux. I will surely write an article on the steps needed to make it communicate with a bluetooth™-enabled mobile phone under the GNOME environment. I am just waiting to solve a small issue with gnome-bluetooth which does not detect the phone automatically.
By the way, gnome-bluetooth Debian packages and related librairies have been made available from my repository for a few weeks now.
New laptop
Dec 6th
I have finally chosen to purchase a Dell laptop.
A cheap Inspiron 1300 which should do the job I would like it to do.
Transport costs were free and the RAM was doubled to 512Mo for €1. Total cost: €499. Not that bad, isn’t it?
According to the various Linux installation reports I could read, Linux should be supported at almost 100%. The only thing that could trigger me is the internal dial-up modem, a Conexant HSF the Linux drivers of which are not free (both free as in free beer and free speach).
This will be my first experience with a Dell computer.
HP PSC 2610 fax function
Oct 16th
I have been working for a few days on making the fax function of my HP PSC 2610 working.
Although it is now officially supported by HPLIP, as stated on their website, all the jobs I add to the virtual printer queue are stopped because of an odd error which I cannot (yet) debug given the poor information in my possession. People involved in HP OSS projects are helping me a lot, one of them having set up this configuration with Ubuntu, which makes me very confident!
Update: I have just found that a bug already exists in the BTS for that problem which prevents Debian users from using HPLIP fax functions!
New laptop
Jan 8th
Yesterday, I bought a new laptop: a Toshiba Satellite M40X-141 (link in French, as this product seems to be only available here). I bought it in a hypermaket for €399 (with a 50% discount!).
I first booted once to bundled Windows XP, and checked everything was usable (wifi, video card, sound etc.). Then, I installed Debian Etch thanks to the debian-installer Etch beta 1, and run the install without any major problem (except maybe the ata_piix module preventing access to DVD drive, which is very easy to fix by loading the ide-cd and isofs modules at the first install screen).
So far, everything is working fine, even the Atheros wifi card, thanks to madfiwi drivers.
I will soon write an article on www.kirya.net to detail all the installation process and configuration for this laptop.
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