Setting Up a Laptop on Top of Pappys Seeds

Moriah · Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 5:47 am Post subject:

So now all is in pretty good shape except for the flakey bluetooth mouse. I haven't even tried other bluetooth devices yet, as the mouse is in HID mode, and therefore is pretty simple from a device point of view. I need to get bluetooth on solid ground.

I am also having trouble getting some usb devices to work properly under vmware. My Blackberry cannot be backed up or charged under windoze xp running as a guest under vmware. My "Neat Receipts" portable laptop scanner does not work properly under windoze xp under vmware either, which I suspect is a bandwidth issue, but that's only a guess.

Another issue concerns the external vga video connector. If the external monitor is connected when I boot up, both the internal display and the external display work great, but if I later go portable with it, and therefore unplug the external monitor, when I return to my desk and reconnect the external vga video cable, the external monitor gets no signal. This is strange, because with windoze xp, I can *NEVER* get the external monitor to work if I am running the intel video chipset; but both internal and external video work fine with the ATI radeon hd chipset. There must be some kind of video switching that automatically takes place when the external monitor is unplugged. I need to know how to switch the external monitor back on using the intel video. Right now, I have to reboot to get the external video working, which it just a bit inconvenient.

I also experienced a weird thing this evening while I was at Panera Bread with my wife: my Sprint wireless broadband device just disappeared. I suspect that while driving thru the hills of Kentucky I lost a cell and had no other to hand-off to, so it dropped the connection. Given that, udev might have dropped the device entirely, making it impossible to reconnect. I had to reboot to get my wlan going again. :evil:

I am now running 4 X-servers on this laptop: one for general linux use with my favorite window manager, ctwm, and 27 virtual dektops; one to connect to my lan-based virtual workstation's vncserver, one as a control area for vmware virtual machines, and one to run a vncviewer to see the windoze xp virtual machine. I prefer to run my vncviewers for real or virtual machines on their own dedicated X-server so I can run the vncviewer on an X-server that does not have a window manager. This gives me maximum flexibility as to how the window manager on the vncserver uses alt, ctl, shift, etc. keys, and mouse buttons. It also lets me use the full 1920x1200 pixel screen for the viewer, which makes it really look and feel like I am really on the real machine.

Another thought... I never got hibernate working. I am still running gentoo-sources, not tuxonice, and sleep works great. BUT... There is a security concern. I went to all the trouble to make this laptop boot from a usb stick and require a pass phrase to enable decryption of the disk, which is whole-disk encrypted. As long as the computer is off, the disk is safe with that AES-256 encryption, but when it is booted up and running, the disk may be easily read by any running program on the machine. Sleep does not shut off. The decryption key is still present in the still powered up ram. The computer can be awakened by opening the lid, and voila, there is all my precious data, ready for anybody to see and take.

I need to hibernate the box to properly protect it and still preserve the state of what all was running on it before hibernation. Sleep is fine if I want to carry the laptop around under my arm, or even sit it on the seat next to me in the car, but it will never do if I ever have to leave the laptop unatended for even a short while, such as passing thru an airport security check. Sleep is quick to enter and quick to leave, but it is not secure. Hibernation is secure, because the boot key and passphrase are needed to get the machine up and running again, and the encryption protects the data when it is powered off.

So the next sub-project for this laptop has got to be hibernation!

But first, I need to make an image backup, just in case...

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pappy_mcfae · Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 6:17 am Post subject:

Yay! Good to read!

BB!
P
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Moriah · Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 6:25 am Post subject:

Once I get everything up to snuff, do you think I should write a HowTo for this, or is this forum thread good enough? I have tried to use it like a dairy so that others would benefit from it, but sometimes we diverge, or spend a lot of time doing something the wrong way before we get it right. Somebody who just wants to set up a laptop might not want to wade through all of that.
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Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 8:49 am Post subject:

Absolutely! It's the spirit of Linux to do such things. And since you learned so many things, it would be a shame to keep it all to yourself.

BB!
P
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Moriah · Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 3:23 pm Post subject:

Well, its not exactly kept to myself; it is in this thread you know...
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pappy_mcfae · Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 9:10 pm Post subject:

Ill chosen words. Putting your experience down in the form of a how-to is a lot better than letting others follow a thread. I usually do it when I figure out something I didn't know.

BB!
P
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Moriah · Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 10:38 pm Post subject:

Well then, let me get the issues I listed a few posts ago resolved and I will write that HowTo.
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Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

Moriah · Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 1:00 am Post subject:

Well I guess that's the payback price for all the help I have received setting this thing up.

So tell me, Mike Hunt, do you actually know who Brian Auger is? And no fair looking him up in wikipedia either! :wink:

BTW My other keyboard (not the qwerty one) is a Hammond.

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Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

Well, I suppose I cheated because I Googled for Brian Auger on YouTube. Not sure though if that's who you meant.
But you're probably talking more about something like this I suppose. It's quite nice actually.

Keep up the good work bro.

Moriah · Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 4:54 am Post subject:

So you found Oblivion Express. Aptly named, as at least here in the states you could hardly find anything by him by that time. I flipped out over him in 1969 when I heard the Trinity album with Julie Driscol, but my all time favorite track is Ellis Island on the Streetnoise album. Of course, being a Hammond organist myself, I'm pretty partial to any good jazz or gospel Hammond organ playing...

Brian Auger was second only to Jimmy Smith in influencing my own style on the instrument. Of course I am nowhere near as good as either of them, but I only play in church now, and I am blessed by it.

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Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.

Moriah · Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 6:49 am Post subject:

Back to the laptop...

Not only am I a gentoo user and a laptop user, but I am also a Blackberry user.

As such, now that my trusty laptop is running gentoo instead of windoze xp-pro, I needed a way to charge and backup my blackberry, since I can no longer do this from windoze. For some as yet undetermined reason, the usb support thru vmware workstation for windoze xp is broken. I discussed this earlier, and the symptoms are many, but rather than fix this now, I just wanted to be able to support my blackberry from linux directly.

A little thinking, and I remembered seeing a driver in the kernel config stuff to enable charging a blackberry over the usb port. I built the module and modprobed it, but it did not work for me. Probably written for an older model blackberry. I have an 8830, wich is several years old, but there are plenty older ones.

So I googled and came up with app-pda/barry; yes, the spelling is correct. Makes it very hard to find with emerge -s ! :evil:

It was also masked for ~amd64, so I tweaked /etc/portage/package.keywords to let it emerge anyway. It build without any problems. I next looked over the man page and tried out the btool command line program, but it barfed with an ugly error.

More googling, and I found a companion tool called bcharge for charging a blackberry. Since I am getting ready for a road trip next week, I will need a way to charge my blackberry. I did a man bcharge and discovered that it was installed along with btool, so I tried it out, and VOILA! It worked.

Further googling also showed me that for newer blackberry models that also have a flash memory card in them (gotta have someplace to keep my tunes) you *MUST* run bcharge to cause the blackberry to shift modes so that btool will work. So I tried btool again after running bcharge, and WHEE! It worked too!

So my linux laptop now supports my blackberry.
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The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.

Moriah · Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 2:49 am Post subject:

Its been a while since I posted to this thread. I have been on the road. I am presently in Florida visiting my father, age 88, and more of a computer geek than any 88 year old person that I know. We spent the evening having a great Italian dinner, followed by several hours of training his "Dragon Speak"(TM) speech to text software. How many 88 year olds do you know that run a network of several computers in their home, with speech recognition no less?

Anyway, I have had a lot of chances to use my nice laptop running 2.6.31-gentoo-r6 x86_64 with a fully encrypted solid state disk. Everything has been working great except for that stupid !@#$% bluetooth mouse, which always works the first time after a reboot, and sometimes works after it times out, but mostly doesn't, and requires a reboot to make it work.

The vmware running windoze xp as a guest works fine. My GPS even works with it, but for some strange reason, my blackberry does not (although it works fine with bcharge and btool under straight gentoo), and neither does my little "Neat Receipts"(TM) scanner. The scanner at least *TRIES* to work, but the results are terrible. The scanned image is barely recognizable.

Sometimes when travelling down the road in the car connected to the internet with my Sprint broadband wireless thru the Pantech PX-500 PC-card, it will drop out and I cannot get it to reconnect. This might be due to a roaming situation; I do not know how to tell. If I reboot, it will connect again, but most of the time it "just works". I travelled all the way from Kentucky to Florida and kepth the connection thru a vpn tunnel to my home network via vnc without a hitch, but when I travelled thru the Low Country of South Carolina, it dropped out a couple of times and I had to reboot to get it to reconnect. It did the same thing in the Florida pan handle, but in South Florida, it works fine. Go figgure!

Because of all my travelling, I have not had a chance to try to install tuxonice yet, but I will report back when I do. Hibernation would be nice, especially since the encryption only really protects the disk when the machine is turned off. Sleep keeps the key in ram, but hibernation keeps it on the encrypted disk, and I will have to boot it back up with the usb stick and enter my pass phrase again to bring it out of hibernation.

That's all I have to report so far.

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The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.

Moriah · Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 3:30 pm Post subject:

I emerged tuxonice an got linux-2.6.30-tuxonice-r6, but I am presently running 2.6.31-gentoo-r6, so I am a bit puzzled as to how to proceed. If the tuxonice was the same or a newer version than the kernel I am now running, I think I could use make oldconfig, but since it is an earlier version, I do not know how to merge my changes into the .config file.

I am thinking that I should probably start by fetching Pappy's seed for this version of tuxonice and then do a side by side diff of my present config against Pappy's seed for the version of tuxonice I have, and then I will still need to decide what to do next.

Is there a better way to go about this?
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The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 7:55 pm Post subject:

Moriah,

make oldconfig still works
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Moriah · Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 8:19 pm Post subject:

It will even do a retrograde instead of an upgrade? Great! I'll try it. Thanks!

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Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2010 12:29 am Post subject:

Yes, it does work in retrograde. It tends to require a closer look to make sure that nothing got lost in translation, but it does work.

BB!
P
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Moriah · Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 2:33 pm Post subject:

Well, I'm back home in Kentucky again after 2 weeks in Florida to visit my father.

I have been incrementally fiddling with the bluetooth configuration, and while it still isn't perfect, it is better. I can now pretty reliably re-connect to my Microsoft bluetooth mouse from the laptop, but I still have to power off the mouse, then power it back on and push the pairing button on the bottom, then do a hidd --search to re-connect.

Normally, once two bluetooth devices are paired, they should not need to be re-paired unless at least one of them has been paired to a different device and is them re-paired to the first device.

If no such pairing occurs, just having the bluetooth device power up or come in range should be sufficient to re-establish the bluetooth connection; this is how my mouse works with windoze xp sp3. It would be really nice to get it to work that way with linux.

These files changed since I last posted on bluetooth, so here is what they look like now:

Moriah · Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 2:39 pm Post subject:

I still have a minor problem with my video. When I boot the laptop, sometimes it fails to properly start the framebuffer for the console. When this happens, the text of the screen stays large -- like the initial stage of booting -- the video fails to display on the external VGA-connected monitor, only the built-in laptop screen, and the X-servers refuse to switch back to console mode.

It is obvious that this has occurred before I even log in, since the login prompt is large (basicly 80x25 chars fills the screen).

If I reboot, it will usually come up OK, with the framebuffer working. If not, another reboot will usually fix it.

Looks like a race condition to me. I am using the integrated intel video hardware because it saves battery and I do not need the accelerated 3D graphics for the stuff that I do.

Any ideas what is causing this, or how to fix it?

I feel like I am kick-starting an old motorcycle. :evil:

_________________
The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 7:26 pm Post subject:

Are you using KMS? That sounds a lot like a KMS style issue.

Cheers,
Pappy
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Moriah · Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 8:30 pm Post subject:

What is KMS ??? I never heard of it.

_________________
The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 8:48 pm Post subject:

Moriah · Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2010 2:32 am Post subject:

I just tried rebuilding a kernel with the KMS disables and the VESA VGA frame buffer enabled. Bad idea! It *NEVER* came up in hires framebuffer ode.

But while poking around in the video drivers section, I did notice that I still had the dysfunctional radeon driver in my build. I took it out, but things were no better. All I got was 80x25 lores console mode.

So I went back to my original kernel and just eliminated the radeon stuff, leaving the intel stuff I actually needed. It seems to be working better, but not totally better.

I ran some tests. In 10 reboots, it came up in lores mode 2 times, and hires mode 8 times. In 10 halts followed by a power up, it was also 2 lores and 8 hires.

It seems to me that it was more like 50-50 before eliminating the radeon stuff.

I think maybe it is time for a Pappy kernel checkup, with my .config and my dmessg; what do you think? Do you have time to look at it? I know you are busy...

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The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2010 6:06 am Post subject:

PM me.

Cheers,
Pappy
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Moriah · Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2010 10:28 pm Post subject:

I am preparing to install tuxonice to get hibernation working on this project laptop. This is desirable not only for battery life reasons, but for security reasons. With the fully encrypted disk, the crypto key is stored in ram to be able to access the drive. When the laptop is powered off, this key is no longer available, which is why you need to enter the pass phrase when you boot the box. When the box is merely sleeping, ram is still in a low power state, and the key is still in it, so the disk can be decrypted when the laptop wakes up.

I am presently running gentoo-sources 2.6.31-r6, and I was hoping to install the same version of tuxonice, but portage is showing the most recent version to be 2.6.30-r6, which would be downgrade from my current version.

I am hesitant to downgrade my kernel version both because it might cause trouble with my currently working .config, and also because my present kernel is working so well.

Also, in reading the Gento TuxOnIce Wiki, I see that the usual hibernation save file is the swap file, and that it must be of type 82 (Linux swap) as determined by fdisk -l. Well, I am running 8gb of ram and a 256gb solid state drive, so I am not using any swap. Furthermore, my disk is fully encrypted with no partition table at all, and the decrypted psuedo-drive is running lvm without any partitions either. The options using a swapfile or a dedicated file all require providing the resume= option on the kernel line in grub.conf with information determining the absolute location of the swapfile or dedicated file. Since everything on this laptop is under lvm, these locations are subject to change when certain lvm operations are performed, so that approach will not work.

This leaves the swap partition method as the only possibly viable way to go for me, as this method just takes the name of the partition containing the swap space. I am hoping that I can create an lvm logical device for a swap partition, even though I do not activate it for normal operating system use, and that tuxonice will be able to find it after lvm is activated by the initramfs before the pivotroot operation during the boot. I am hoping that this file only gets looked for after the pivot root, or else my goose is cooked as far as hibernation goes.

_________________
The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.