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andrew.mcmillan.net.nz
cd /var/www; more /dev/rant >>index.html
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installs
A GPS is one of those toys that I have wanted for a very long time. So last year I finally marshalled enough excuses in one place, lined them up and plunked down some money for a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx in the vague belief that there's enough Linux software out there which understands GPS, and the Garmin is a brand that seems to have mature Linux support. And besides, I'd been told it was a good model that would do what I wanted and then some. Once I got it I naturally wanted to do stuff with it, and in particular I wanted to connect it up to my laptop which (of course) is running Linux and I found that it wasn't nearly as trivial as I had thought. This prompted me to run around finding software to use with it, so here's my capsule review of my journey from "extremely naive" to "very naive". Perhaps I'll also learn something from the comments of people who are further down the track. My first resort was "apt-cache search gps", of course, which immediately brings up such fine sounding programs as "gpsman", described as "A GPS manager" (I haven't managed to get it to do anything yet), "gpstrans" which since it specifically mentions Garmin GPS sounded like just the ticket (it appears to be quite old and superseded). There was some useful stuff as well.
Getting Maps on the GPSSince the Garmin GPSMap series will display maps, I wanted to be able to get some mapping data on there. There are two map sources I was interested in:
Using the NZ Open GPS MapsThe NZ Open GPS Maps are built specifically for the Garmin GPS, so getting them onto my GPS was relatively simple once I found out the exact command line was remarkably hard. The program that I needed to find to be able to get the maps onto my GPS was I downloaded the maps from the NZ Open GPS Maps hosted on the cGPSMapper site. I needed the files identified as 'binary' files - the installer is a Windows program and no use on Linux. They all have filenames like The command-line I first used to install the maps onto the GPS was: That works fine, but if you have even a moderately sized micro SD card in the GPS there are much faster ways. As I found more free maps I found much better ways to do it. An alternative approachIn the GPS (well, in my one anyway) there is a micro-SD card which is FAT formatted and all of the installed maps are in one humungous combined image of all of the uploaded maps. This means that there is no way to straightforwardly add/remove maps without creating that image, and re-uploading the whole thing. The image file is called 'gmapsupp.img' and is in the 'garmin' subdirectory on the SD card. This means that you can create the file (or even several different files, with different maps on them) and move them directly on there much quicker, either by taking the SD card out and using it in a USB2 reader (for really big files) or switching the GPS to operate in USB Storage mode (which is USB1, but OK for smaller files). You can create the IMG file to copy in as QLandKarteAnother program I found useful specifically for dealing with the Garmin GPS Map format is QLandKarte, which understands the native Garmin format and will display the maps in a graphical window. You can also point and click to select maps, building up a specific set that you can then upload to the device from within QLandKarte itself. This seems to operate a lot faster than sendmap20, presumably because it's driving the USB directly, rather than through usb_serial. To get it to work I seem to have to (a) sudo rmmod garmin_gps and (b) sudo QLandKarte, however, which is definitely not ideal. For the moment I will continue to use sendmap20 to create files which are sets of the maps I want, and will put them on the device in USB storage mode. QLandKarte is still very useful, however, for looking at maps and deciding if they are worth bothering with. I used it in this way to select the Australian maps I took with me when I went to Linux.Conf.AU recently. There are more free Garmin GPS maps. OpenStreetMap.orgThose Australian maps came from OpenStreetMap.org and ultimately I expect that it will become the best source of data for creating maps for my GPS. OpenStreetMap.org is an attempt to provide community-maintained maps for the whole world and which seems to have made significant progress in UK, Europe, America and Australia as well as many other parts of the world. The data from OpenStreetMap.org does not have the same licensing restrictions as are present even in the NZ Open GPS Maps data (which is relatively free, but has problems similar to the old-style BSD license). There are also some good mapping interfaces to the OpenStreetMap data although the searching currently still leaves something to be desired. Interfaces are also available for extracting subsets of the data, which is in a fairly straightforward XML format, or you can download the whole lot, but at nearly 3GB for the bzip2 compressed version you won't do it every day. I gave a brief overview talk about OpenStreetMap.org while I was at Linux.Conf.AU and it seemed to go down quite well (I gave it several times, in fact). You don't need a GPS to contribute to the project, and of course the maps which are being created are usable for many purposes beyond their usefulness on GPS. Some people apparently even print them out, but that just seems weird! I've now moved lots of things to a new (old) server which should be noticeably faster than the old (old) 500MHz PIII-based server. Of course since Etch was released I'm now running on Etch. This also meant an upgrade to PHP 5.2, so I spent some time getting bitten by this bug with Drupal 4.7.4 and PHP 5.2 and had to upgrade to 4.7.6. Consequently there has been a wee bit of bouncing up and down today... In the process I have also upgraded my packages for eAccelerator so that they would work with Etch. Since Andrew Hutchings had taken them off me and played a bit further I have now taken his packages and built some newer ones, including a patch for 0.9.5 to work with PHP 5.2, and an additional build dependency. My new (old) server is still 32-bit, so these packages are only built for 32-bit as yet. I'm currently trying to find a 64-bit Etch box I can build them on as well, but everyone at work seems to have gone home. You should be able to fetch them from my package repository by adding it to your sources.list with: Naturally that repository is signed with my public key (8f068012), which is in turn signed by lots of people in the Debian community and should be readily identifiable - not that that implies trust, of course :-). Also, since my new (old) server is in a different location (and to ease the transfer) everything is on a new IP address (and a new IPv6 address). Hopefully the system's accessibility over IPv6 on http://ipv6.geek.nz/ will be slowly improving as we incrementally improve our IPv6 connectivity with the rest of the world. There are times when you want to track the bleeding edge of a particular project, and having a new laptop is often one of those moments... I've recently bought an HP Compaq nx6320 and while most of it is working, one of the reasons I got it was because of Keith Packard's work on the RandR extensions for X. Well, I was definitely seeing this bug but with a small patch I can get the latest (experimental) packages for xserver-xorg-video-intel to work, and now with a few magic tweaks to my xorg.conf I can make my desktop expand to another monitor when I unsuspend at work, and contract back to just the laptop screen when I resume somewhere else. The Magic Expanding X ConfigFirst of all, when I got the driver to actually work, xrandr explained to me that my maximum resolution was 1400x1400: Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1400 x 1050, maximum 1400 x 1400 VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right) LVDS connected 1400x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 305mm x 228mm 1400x1050 60.0*+ 1280x800 60.0 1280x768 60.0 1024x768 60.0 800x600 60.3 640x480 59.9 TV disconnected (normal left inverted right) Using a few clues from Ross Burton I managed to get that "maximum 1400x1400" to increase. The trick is to add a "Virtual" setting for screen size into your "Screen" Section, like so:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "Intel 945GM/GMS/940GML"
Monitor "Laptop Panel"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Virtual 2680 1050
EndSubSection
EndSection
The downside of this is that if you set the width greater than 2048 (as I have here) then DRI won't work, so you won't get 3d stuff. I guess I can manage without ice-cream, just so long as I get my cake! Once I have the "Virtual" setting, when I resume at the office I can: xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024 --pos 1400x0 And then when I resume somewhere without the external monitor, I can: xrandr --output VGA --off QuibblesAll of these features are kind of under development, but Xorg 7.3 will support this stuff, and then Gnome and suchlike will have to start thinking about how to deal with it. The dynamic screen changing is not something these environments are completely ready for. One example is that while I know that monitor is always on the RHS of my docking station, X wants it to be the primary monitor and Gnome moves both panels onto that screen. Perhaps that's not a choice that can be made automatically. Someone who had an external keyboard plugged into their docking station might want the opposite behaviour, and there is certainly no way the environment can magically know whether that monitor is left or right of my laptop screen. Eventually I expect that Gnome will recognise this monitor, and will make the panels and location automatically set the RandR environment to match the way I set it last time. It is also somewhat annoying that I have to actually choose the virtual size. No doubt this configuration will disappear in due course and it is not really surprising to see it for something which is admittedly quite bleeding edge! I noticed at LCA that Keith had his own screen set for a Virtual size of 2048x2048, and now I know why: that's the maximum size that is supported for DRI, so if I expand my desktop onto a 1280x1024 screen I'm going to have some overlap. In fact I could almost configure my external monitor to be above my normal screen and use it that way, but it would feel pretty weird I think. In the meantime I've gone back to "blank screen" for my screen saver which admittedly is currently the only application for 3d acceleration on my desktop. Remaining Problems with this LaptopThe only outstanding issues for me with this laptop are:
That's about the best Linux compatibility I have had for any of my last five laptops within a month of buying it. Most of them have had much more significant stuff less supported even after three years of use! Once upon a time I bought a Telecom New Zealand "3G" CDMA card (Sierra Aircard 580) so I could be better connected in those places where broadband doesn't reach. When I bought it I needed to do a lot of investigation and playing around to get it going, so I wrote it all up. Times have changed now, but I'm still using the same 3G card... For comparison purposes, and so people don't think it's still that hard, I thought I would write up here what it took to get this going on my new laptop. First StepIt is likely that you still need to follow the first step listed in my old document: i.e., to ensure that the device is actually activated with the Telco! Second StepPlug the card in. Having plugged the card in it was automatically detected and all the appropriate magic was done to create the necessary /dev/ttyUSB0 device node so we can use it for dialout. This was with Linux 2.6.20 kernel and 0.105 of udev but I think it's been all workingness for some time. Third StepConfigure PPP. I run pppconfig (as root) to configure the card, but I'm sure you could use "gnome-ppp", "wvdial", "kppp" or something else that takes your fancy. The critical points are:
Hopefully, at this point, everything will be working for you. TroubleshootingWell, really, all of this (and much, much more) applied to my earlier information, and I'm sure there are better pages out there on "HOW TO CONFIGURE PPP", but here's the basics of troubleshooting it anyway. So if, for some reason, you have problems with the above then check: 1. Did you actually connect?You might have connected, but your default route or DNS might not have been set up. You can use the PING www.bbc.net.uk (212.58.240.32) 56(84) bytes of data as it's first line (then press [CTRL c]. Some websites don't respond to the ping itself, but as long as the first line displays the IP address next to the name then DNS resolution is working. If all three of those things are working, but you still can't see any web pages, then you may need to change your browser configuration to disable any proxy you may use when you are connected to your LAN or wireless LAN. 2. No Default RouteSomething has gone wrong with the PPP connection if it didn't create a default route, but if you only have a single route in your In the output of the 'route' command you will see a line that ends in 'ppp0' and starts with a number, something like this: aaa.bbb.ccc.d * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 ppp0 Using that number, type in the following command (as root, or using sudo): /sbin/route add default gw aaa.bbb.ccc.d Where 'aaa.bbb.ccc.d' is the number from the earlier '/sbin/route' command, of course. My Own ConfigurationI used pppconfig to set this up, and I call my connection 't3g', which translates to some of the filenames, so that name might be different for you. /etc/ppp/peers/t3gYou probably will want to comment out 'debug' when you get it going, and you may also want to change 'nodetach' to 'detach' to put it in the background once it's connected. I just leave it up in the terminal when it's running, however, so I can see if the connection has dropped. nodetach ttyUSB0 # 115200 460800 debug noauth defaultroute usepeerdns user mobile@jamamobile # show-password crtscts lock connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v -t3 -f /etc/chatscripts/t3g' # Possibly these pppoe options also should be included... # RFC 2516, paragraph 7 mandates that the following options MUST NOT be # requested and MUST be rejected if requested by the peer: # Address-and-Control-Field-Compression (ACFC) noaccomp # Asynchronous-Control-Character-Map (ACCM) # default-asyncmap # Do not try to negotiate other kinds of compression. nopcomp noccp novj nobsdcomp nodeflate nopredictor1 lcp-max-configure 90 /etc/chatscripts/t3gThis is a fairly standard set of modem configuration options, and then the phone number gets dialled at the end: '' 'AT' 'OK' 'ATE0V1&F&D2&C1&C2S0=0' 'OK' 'ATE0V1' 'OK' 'ATS7=90' 'OK' 'ATDT#777' /etc/ppp/pap-secretsWill need to have a line for the password, like this (it won't be the only line though): mobile@jamamobile * telecom If it still isn't workingIf you can't get it working from this point, then you probably have a different whatever-it-is than me, and I probably can't help you. Maybe it is device driver debugging that you need (/dev/ttyUSB0 is not created, perhaps) or maybe it is ppp debugging (if it is). Google Is Your Friend Opening the box, we find...Inside the box was a computer, a power adapter and a battery. There was a bunch of other stuff, but none of that applied to me! I booted from an Etch pre-release CD I had floating around, most things were detected and most things worked in a basic manner. I don't run Etch though, so I was upgrading to the truly bleeding edge fairly rapidly. Normally I run Debian Unstable, so I upgraded to that immediately and that was all fine, but with Etch being released soon many developers are putting interesting stuff into Experimental, and I wanted X.org 7.2 and Gnome 2.16 which are in there... Packages you will want to installTo get the 1400x1050 screen resolution you will need to install '915resolution'. This seems to still be the case with the packages of X.org 7.2. I have seen some interesting sounding options in the i810 man page that might be alternative ways, but the hack that 915resolution uses is a much simpler solution since it is already packaged. To get the wireless working you will need to install 'ipw3945d' and 'ipw3945-modules-2.6.18-4-686' (or some other package of the modules - I installed the source package and used module-assistant to build the modules because I like to build my own kernel). What is mostly workingA Tour on the PCI Bus
DisplayOnce I installed 915resolution the display just works under X.org 7.1 and X.org 7.2. After a suspend to disk I have to run 915resolution again otherwise X will be shown in 1024x768. I think I could then run xrandr to switch back to 1400x1050 at that point (to be confirmed). TouchpadThe touchpad has a scrolling area at the right of it, which works as designed, and it also seems to handle a two-finger tap as equivalent to a two-button click (i.e. what would normally be a middle button click). It seems nice, and I will probably get used to it. PCMCIAI pulled out my 3G card and plugged it in and it just works. There is also one of these new fandangled PCMCIA^WCardBus replacement whatsits, but I don't anticipate having anything that actually uses that any time soon. USBAll USB ports seem to work as expected. I seem to get pretty high speed transfers out of my camera too. SD * MS/Pro * MMC * SM * XDThis was something that I was hopeful would actually work, since I have a few devices that use SD cards now and it definitely seems to be the format that is taking over from Compact Flash, except for in irrelevant stuff like Sony and Olympus equipment. Unfortunately, though I compiled all of the MMC kernel stuff into my kernel (as well as the core under "Device Drivers -> MMC in the kernel configuration there are chipset drivers under "Device Drivers -> Misc devices" - go figure ). Those drivers seem to be for a "TI PCI74xx compatible" reader, and mine seems to be a "PCIxx12" something, so perhaps there just isn't a driver Right Now and I just have to wait a few months. Update: 2007-02-23 What Ain't TestedBluetoothI can see the bluetooth is there with 'lsusb', and I expect that it will all work just fine, but I don't have anything that does bluetooth, so I can't say for sure. ModemI don't have a poorband account anywhere, so I can't test it. It isn't something I expect to ever want to use, but it looks like an AC97 modem so I expect it will work just fine. TV OutSince I don't have a television. Parallel PortDidn't these things get replaced by network printers and USB printers a bunch of years ago? Serial PortYep. It has one. Weird. I wish that they had put two USB ports there instead - it would have been a much better location for stuff like my wireless mouse to plug into. FirewireI must pull one of my firewire HDs out and see if this works... What Ain't WorkingSuspend / ResumeSuspend to ram sometimes works for me, but on most occasions resume has left me with a working system but no keyboard input. Some googling suggests there are ways around this, but I am not sure if it is fully reliable at this stage. I have tried with the 'irqpoll' option included on the kernel boot line, which is purported to help with other laptops, but this (a) doesn't help, and (b) lots of other stuff seems to work badly with it. Somewhere I read a suggestion to use the 'noapic' boot option, but this won't boot. I have a vague memory that the APIC is actually required for SMP systems. Suspend to disk works, except that X comes back without the BIOS manipulations that have been done by 915resolution, so it manages to end up in a 1024x768 screen rather than 1400x1050. This can probably be fixed by also running 'xrandr' to set the resolution back after '915resolution' has been run, or by 'chvt 1' prior to suspend, then '915resolution' on resume before 'chvt 7' to bring the X screen back. I will see... Update: 2007-02-23 Suspend to disk works reliably for me now that I "chvt 1" ... suspend to disk ... "/etc/init.d/915resolution start; chvt 7". If the keyboard is not working after a resume from ram I can plug in a USB keyboard and that does work, but unloading and reloading the atkbd, psmouse and libps2 does not help (as I had hoped it would). This is really important to me, so I'll keep working on it until I can either workaround the problems, or it gets to be supported by 2.6.21 or so... Hopefully sooner rather than later! Fingerprint ReaderWell, I honestly wasn't expecting to have much luck with the fingerprint reader, and I haven't. A bit of googling did throw up Michael Crusoe's Bio API implementation which I have been unable to get to build so far, as well as the proprietary driver for the UPEK fingerprint reader, which refuses to install, probably because the Bio API isn't installed... Looking at the output of 'lsusb' it seems that it may well not be a UPEK device, since I am told "Bus 001 Device 004: ID 08ff:2580 AuthenTec, Inc.". More investigation is clearly required. That is all more than I expected to be there, to be honest, but unfortunately not enough to get me going. Oh well, I will have to take some heart from the fact that these devices are cute, rather than fully trustable. If I do eventually get it working, I now know that I need to revisit this setting up the fingerprint reader page, which seems comprehensive. Overall Impressions
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