My youngest sister has retired her big-ass (17″) Acer TravelMate (model 7513WSMi 7510) with a more modern offering from Sony. That was last year. Now, she thought it’d be a good idea to donate it to our oldest sister. But since the thing has always “run” like a pig with Windows Vista, her girl-geek instincts thought it better if I’d equip the old monster with Ubuntu Linux instead.

AMD 64bit

I’m also considering upgrading my own laptop to 64 bit. (They’ve told me that, really, the 32 bit age is over.) So, the first thing I’m trying to find out (now that I’m getting on the 64 bit train) is if this thing supports 64 bit. I can’t really think of a quick way to find out, so I’m just going to create a 64bit installation CD and see how that works.

…

Or, I could have just popped open the hood to see the “AMD Turion64x2 Mobile Technology” sticker.

Installation

After changing the boot order, the installation CD (burned from my T61 using “wodim -data ubuntu-10.10-desktop-amd64.iso”) seems to be booting despite the worrying sounds that seem to indicate that the laptop is trying to rip apart and eat the disc.

I’m surprised how good the current installation program looks and that it asks me if I want to “download updates while installing” and “install third-party software”. Nice.

Great idea to ask all the annoying questions (timezone, etc.) during installation instead of after! I’m amused with how much I’m behind the time if I see all the promotional screens for new and improved software which is meant to keep me inspired during the installation process. “OpenOffice.org is fully compatible with Microsoft Office[...]” Am I really that much behind with the times? Nah, I can’t imagine. I must still have some very, very nasty Excel sheet lying around somewhere, gathering dust. If I feed that monster of a thing to OpenOffice, then I’m pretty sure… Yeah, that’s going to be fun.

Post-installation configuration

I had expected to spend at least an hour or two hunting around forums to find solutions for obscure driver-related issues and other nuisances. But no issues popped up. It just worked. Ubuntu is very compatible with the Acer TravelMate 7513WSMi!

So, I spent some of the time saved on setting a user pic and a few other niceties, but I refrained from doing anything fancy, because I’ve figured out a new sister support strategy that I might blog about later. (It involves a four-hour work-week…)

[For my own reference, I started on the first draft of this post on Januari 14.]

lspci|grep -i vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 771/671 PCIE VGA Display Adapter (rev 10)

I solved the problem by manually installing a replacement driver that I found through a blog post that I found through another blog post that I found through a forum post.

Or something like that. Who cares? The point is that I’m uploading the files I found here so that I don’t have to jump through MegaUpload hoops again (and sit through MedaAnnoying ads):

• xorg-driver-sis671-0.9.1-fixed-build.zip
• xorg-driver-sis671-0.9.1-fixed-source.tar.gz

Installing the binary driver wasn’t too difficult. (I just always cringe when something happens outside of package management.)

mkdir sis; cd sis
wget http://blog.bigsmoke.us/uploads/2011/01/xorg-driver-sis671-0.9.1-fixed-build.zip
unzip *zip
sudo cp sis671_drv.* /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers
 
#Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and set `Driver   "sis671"` on the "Device" Section
[ -z $EDITOR ] && EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim
$EDITOR /etc/x11/xorg.conf

Restarting the X server after that was a bit difficult, since the upgrade to 10.04 also fucked up the console (that damn framebuffer) and because Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is disabled by default. I had to reboot. (Ok, I hate to admit: it’s not that it’s difficult, it’s just wrong.)

Anyway, after the system restart, it worked just fine again. The X log agrees:

(II) SIS: driver for SiS chipsets: SIS5597/5598, SIS530/620,
        SIS6326/AGP/DVD, SIS300/305, SIS630/730, SIS540, SIS315, SIS315H,
        SIS315PRO/E, SIS550, SIS650/M650/651/740, SIS330(Xabre),
        SIS[M]661[F|M]X/[M]741[GX]/[M]760[GX]/[M]761[GX]/662, SIS340,
        [M]670/[M]770[GX], [M]671/[M]771[GX]
(II) SIS: driver for XGI chipsets: Volari Z7 (XG20),
        Volari V3XT/V5/V8/Duo (XG40/XG42)
(II) Primary Device is: PCI 01@00:00:0
(WW) Falling back to old probe method for sis671
(--) Assigning device section with no busID to primary device
(--) Chipset [M]671/[M]771[GX] found
(II) SIS(0): SiS driver (2006/10/17-1, compiled for X.org 1.7.4.0)
(II) SIS(0): Copyright (C) 2001-2005 Thomas Winischhofer
 and others
(II) SIS(0): *** See http://www.winischhofer.at/linuxsisvga.shtml
(II) SIS(0): *** for documentation, updates and a Premium Version.
(II) SIS(0): RandR rotation support not available in this version.
(II) SIS(0): Dynamic modelist support not available in this version.
(II) SIS(0): Screen growing support not available in this version.
(II) SIS(0): Advanced Xv video blitter not available in this version.
(II) SIS(0): Advanced MergedFB support not available in this version.
(--) SIS(0): sisfb not found
(--) SIS(0): Relocated I/O registers at 0x9000

Then, to also fix the console:

grep vga16fb /etc/modprobe.d/* || sudo sh -c "echo blacklist vga16fb >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf"
 
sudo update-initramfs -u
 
sudo reboot
 
# pray 

I had two other issues that popped up after the upgrade the 10.04. I was inclined to blame the first on the new video driver, but I solved it by disabling “Hardware Acceleration” in the Flash plugin preferences. [source]

Another problem that confused my mother was that the volume control icon had gone. [solution]

$ ls *png
boucoule-17jaar-met-steen.png         evening_cloud.png  small-map-molenweg.png  tile11.png
boucoule-2001-2002-face5-400x300.png  hardwood-logo.png  step-01.png             tile9a.png

$ ls *png|while read f; do echo $f; done
boucoule-17jaar-met-steen.png
boucoule-2001-2002-face5-400x300.png
evening_cloud.png
hardwood-logo.png
small-map-molenweg.png
step-01.png
tile11.png
tile9a.png

$ ls *png|while read f; do svn mv $f index; done
A         index/boucoule-17jaar-met-steen.png
D         boucoule-17jaar-met-steen.png
A         index/boucoule-2001-2002-face5-400x300.png
D         boucoule-2001-2002-face5-400x300.png
A         index/evening_cloud.png
D         evening_cloud.png
A         index/hardwood-logo.png
D         hardwood-logo.png
A         index/small-map-molenweg.png
D         small-map-molenweg.png
A         index/step-01.png
D         step-01.png
A         index/tile11.png
D         tile11.png
A         index/tile9a.png
D         tile9a.png

Bonus points if you notice that I could have moved the JPEGs and PNGs in one command instead of doing the same thing for the second time for the JPEGs as below. (I probably forgot that I also had some JPEGs lying around, or there must have been some other lame excuse.)

$ ls *jpg
bruggetje-225x300.jpg  favicon.jpg  purple-rowan.jpg        rowan-2007.jpg                rowan-wilderness.jpg
bruggetje.jpg          hekje.jpg    rowan-2007-448x300.jpg  rowan-wilderness-400x300.jpg

$ ls *jpg|grep -v favi
bruggetje-225x300.jpg
bruggetje.jpg
hekje.jpg
purple-rowan.jpg
rowan-2007-448x300.jpg
rowan-2007.jpg
rowan-wilderness-400x300.jpg
rowan-wilderness.jpg

$ ls *jpg|grep -v favi|while read f; do svn mv $f index; done
A         index/bruggetje-225x300.jpg
D         bruggetje-225x300.jpg
A         index/bruggetje.jpg
D         bruggetje.jpg
A         index/hekje.jpg
D         hekje.jpg
A         index/purple-rowan.jpg
D         purple-rowan.jpg
A         index/rowan-2007-448x300.jpg
D         rowan-2007-448x300.jpg
A         index/rowan-2007.jpg
D         rowan-2007.jpg
A         index/rowan-wilderness-400x300.jpg
D         rowan-wilderness-400x300.jpg
A         index/rowan-wilderness.jpg
D         rowan-wilderness.jpg

I came across a great Perl module (WordPress::CLI) by Leo Charre. It depends on WordPress::XMLRPC

Another approach is to use the appfs FUSE filesystem, which uses WordPress’ support for the Atom Publishing Protocol. There’s another FUSE filesystem, BlogFS. This one depends on WordPress’ XML-RPC instead of its Atom interface.