Webcam
I've since updated the laptop to Ubuntu 7.04
and then immediately thereafter to Ubuntu 7.10
and nothing bad has happened. The web camera was getting closer to
usable as I could see it in lsusb
binder@death:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 05e1:0501 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
binder@death:~$
and so knew it was a Syntek webcam. I did some browsing around and
found recommendations to use the cutting edge Syntek driver
via an Ubuntu forums thread and following those suggestions,
I could see it recognized in dmesg:
[ 31.580000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 webcam driver startup
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 - STK-1135 based webcam found.
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek AVStream USB2.0 1.3M WebCam - Product ID 0x0501.
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Release: 0005
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Number of interfaces : 1
[ 31.592000] stk11xx: Initialize USB2.0 Syntek Camera
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is ready
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is now controlling video device /dev/video0
[ 31.808000] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb_stk11xx_driver
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: v1.1.0 : Syntek USB Video Camera
So now I was nearly home. But I still needed to do one more thing to get it
to go because when I tried to start Camorama it kept erroring out with:
Could not connect to video device (/dev/video0).
Please check connection.
And when I ran it from the command line with the -D switch, I got a touch
more information:
binder@death:~$ camorama --debug
VIDIOCGCAP -- could not get camera capabilities, exiting.....
Which turned out to be resolved by the same thing that always fixes using
multimedia devices in Linux: permissions. In this case, /dev/video0 existed,
was owned by root:video and only had permissions for user and group.
So I added my user account to group video with:
sudo adduser binder video
and all is right with the world.
posted at 21:04 PDT (-0700)
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A Laptop of One's Own
After I moved to the Bay Area, my desktop machines began the long slow death
march which machines undertake after they've been bumped around from state
to state for a half decade, and seen heavy use as development platforms,
house servers, and world facing servers. Which is to say they got gradually
less useful / available to me on a personal level. Meaning that for the
past three years or so, I've been using whatever laptops my job issued to me
for anything I needed to do at home. Meaning I stopped coding on my personal
projects, stopped enjoying much of the material the web has to offer. You
know. Pr0n.
But now that's changed!
I bought a laptop for myself, my very first just-for-me laptop, in May of this
year and as I threatened at the time, here's my review of it.
First off, what is it? It's an XW1560 from RCubed. I'd link to it but they
seem to have discontinued that model. The closest match is probably
their XW1580. It's about the same size, had the same CPU choice,
different video, similar RAM. So pretty comparable to what I have.
How do I like what I have? It's AWESOME.
I got a dual boot configuration because there are a few things I need to
provide technical support for in my superhero identity which require me to
use Windows but I only tend to boot up in that mode when fighting crime or
when a particularly exciting Patch Tuesday has happened and I need to catch up.
Otherwise the laptop runs Ubuntu 6.06.
Despite it being a dual core 64-bit CPU, it's running the 32bit release of
Linux so that I can have multimedia flash support. Remember that bit in the
first paragraph where you thought I was joking? I'm still making that joke.
One of the services RCubed provides with an Ubuntu pre-install are nice icons
to install proprietary binary-only multimedia drivers. That means I can watch
Windows Media and MPEG-n format video on this laptop and getting to that
point was painless. Yes, I know how to do that manually and yes I've gone
through that loop more than once but oh how nice it was to have someone else
do the work for me on this. The downside to that is that I'm leaving it at
release 6.06 until the next Ubuntu LTS releases, rather than chasing the
cutting, or even the stable, edge.
Things I do with this laptop which seem pretty cool to me
- watch DVD movies
- watch videos from the web
- use wpa2 wireless access points
- code in as many languages as I care to (I exclude here the ones which suck, ie, are proprietary or otherwise lack SDKs for Linux)
- boot painlessly into Windows when I need to suffer the Land of Suck
- use a number of solid state removable media with it, no gotchas
Things I don't do with this laptop but wish I could
- use the built-in camera; maybe a newer kernel / drivers will help
- use the firewire or E-SATA interfaces; none of my devices need this so the ports just sit idle and I couldn't tell you if they work
- go on battery power for more than two hours; my only real complaint, the battery life is shitty but I think I'm just spoiled from using other laptops
- make better use of the SD/MMC bay; all my solid state stuff is CF (oops!)
Things I'd do differently if I were to buy a laptop today
- nothing; this is exactly the laptop I wanted and I didn't pay more than seemed reasonable for it
Who might enjoy a laptop from RCubed
- people who want to get a dedicated Linux laptop without doing a lot of research / labor to get to that point
- people who like to use the little magic key stuff on laptop keyboards; they come configured to work with Linux (thanks, RCubed!, thanks, Ubuntu!)
- people who will not be angry when UPS drops the package and
SOAKS IT IN WATER as they did with mine; man, UPS keeps working my teats.
If I could change one thing about RCubed it would be to have them
provide shipping options other than UPS ones
I did buy myself a ShaggyMac screen protector because I'd been very
happy with what a similar set of laptop pajamas did for a Powerbook I
bought some time back and am pleased at how well that has helped keep the
RCubed laptop clean and crud-free. So that's a pretty cool purchase I
made, there.
posted at 12:06 PDT (-0700)
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