The market for Tablet PC’s and Webpads is not very large compared to the Desktop or Laptop markets. Their linux market is in fact much smaller. Some manufacturers however do produce linux compatible devices. Fujitsu provides a rather nice series of webpads. The older version Stylistic ST4110 Tablet PC originally had Windows XP Tablet Edition which was replaced with Linux.

Users of Fedora know that a great deal of extra customization is required to properly setup the operating system. Hence the decision was made to use SuSE.

Some words about SuSE. This is a very polished distribution with many features ready to work out of the box for desktop usage and laptop usage, unlike Fedora. It comes with better packaged software and direct support for more drivers (proprietory or not). Configuring SuSE 9.2 was much more work than configuring SuSE 10.1 for the Fujitsu Stylistic Tablet PC. I’ve provided an incremental update.

Although this wasn’t a review, I highly recommend SuSE for situations such as these. The purchase of the boxed media has proved valuable multiple times.

Posted in: Devices, Setup, SuSE,

SpamAssassin is a free tool for mailservers to identify SPAM. It has a several parameters it checks (forged headers, HTML only content, blacklisted hosts, improper mail relays, etc) and assigns a score for every parameter. If the total score is greater than the threshold, it is marked as spam and either tagged, moved to a separate mailbox or deleted. I started using SpamAssassin in April of 2005 and it has caught thousands of messages. I know this isn’t large, but it made my inbox manageable.

Originally I set the threshold at 5 however this still lead to several messages a day. So I kept reducing the score, by 0.1 till I stopped at 4.5 and I only had 1 spam message every 3-4 days. I was completely satisified even though an occasional non-spam did get improperly marked (usually an SMS from a cell phone).

As of June 15, SpamAssassin has failed me. I am getting dozens of junk mail passing into my inbox daily. I am seeing scores of 3, 0 and even -0.7. Either the spammers got smart or the scores are not properly being assigned. I am using the latest version SpamAssassin 3.1.3 and I haven’t changed any options.

I may have to investigate further with my hosting provider. But I am curious if anyone else seen this?

Posted in: Hosting, Miscellaneous, Server,

After almost 14 months, the MPlayer developers put out a new release: 1.0pre8 (I doubt 1.0 will ever happen). The official announcement was made on the mailing list on Monday. The mailing list had implied a release was pending.

In the meantime, Fedora Core 4 came and went and Fedora fans are on FC5. The good news is that MPlayer properly supports GCC4.x (which FC4 and FC5 use). Anyone who has used a development build already knows these improvements. Additionally the long overdue GTK2 update for the GUI was available. However the most significant changes will be in the background with many improvements in file format support as well as DVD and MPEG updates.

As always, I updated my MPlayer compile guide for Fedora. It never ceases to amaze me how many people actually read it and use it. For the more practical users, most repositories should be coming online soon with updates for yum. Simply run:

# su -c 'yum update mplayer'

I’ve checked Livna, FreshRPMs and ATrpms, none seem to have the update yet. So yum users will have to wait.

Posted in: FC5, Fedora, Multimedia, Software,

In a serious blow to the freedom of the internet as a whole, the US House of Representatives defeated the Net Neutrality vote that would have prevented telecommunication companies from discriminating how and which websites can be accessed by end users. The effects which by far are not exagerated are listed on the It’s Our Net website.

The bottom line is your internet provider (broadband, dial-up, etc) is not restricted from treating all websites equally. For example, if Comcast were to feel a particular website was consuming too much bandwidth, that website can be restricted or possibly taxed. This will undoubtedly effect every website and every web user.

How does this affect Linux? Linux and most open source owes its great success to the ability for any user to access and contribute via the internet. Any company with an agenda or incentive is now able to obstruct that.

As it is many telecommunications companies act as local monopolies, with this new development I can only see further loss of consumer rights and freedoms.

Posted in: Linux, Philosophy, Politics,

Over the last weekend I installed Fedora Core 5 on a Dell Latitude D810 laptop.

Unlike Jason’s laptop criteria, I basically required a Dell laptop. I wanted the D610, however it was unavailable and I had to settle for the D810. Even though I customized it, I really did not have any control over what hardware specifically would be better for Linux. However one luxury I was afforded was to be able to maximize the provided features.

In fact the only features that possibly would have made a significant difference were the ATI video chipset and Wireless chipset.

On Video: My personal opinion has been the Nvidia GeForce based chipsets on laptops (I’ve used Sony laptops) typically outperform the ATI based chipsets. There was not much option here, however so long as the video RAM was dedicated I was satisified.

I had selected the maximum 1920 x 1200 screen and default open source Xorg driver for ATI seemed a little slow for 2-D drawing and motions. I tested the glxgears for about 150FPS (very slow), however with the very easy install of the proprietary ATI drivers, that was increased to about 900FPS (very acceptable).

On Wireless: This has always been a nightmare in the Linux world. It has improved over the past 3 years since I’ve used it, but too often do new hardware changes cause problems. Regardless the 2 options were an A/B/G device or B/G. I picked the B/G solution since I’ve seen even less success with A based chipsets. The B/G was from from Intel, which Intel does support for linux.

I was eager to try Fedora Core 5’s new wireless tools (NetworkManager, etc) however I was very much disappointed. I was easily able to install the Intel ipw2200 drivers. However the default network tools did not detect my SSID and there were some problems with the connection at first. The NetworkManager caused me to lose the connection and it would not re-connect. In the end I was able to get the wireless working perfectly with a reboot.

I did have 1 minor nuisance with the Dell keyboard. The Wifi Toggle (wireless on/off button) is implemented as a Blue-Function Special Key instead of a physical separate button. As you can guess, I was not able to get that key to work when running Fedora. The syslog kept complaining. Oh well, booting into Windows fixed that. More investigation is needed as I know this should be possible to work.

Other Points

I was very pleased with the Linux performance on this Dell laptop. Virtually everything worked as I expected.

The power management properly support S3 (suspend to ram) and S4 (suspend to disk - “hibernate”) with or without the ATI and wireless drivers. (Same cannot be said of Nvidia!!!)

The harddisk was SATA which worried me at first, but FC5 detected it properly. I even booted with an older CD with kernel 2.6.9 which gave no problems.

The pointing devices were nice also. The touchpad and pointing thumb-stick gave no difficulties.

As a linux laptop, I would highly recommend this laptop. It is a bit bulky and large but since it functions mostly as a “desktop” this isn’t a serious concern. I feel I lucked out with the convenience of installing Linux on this laptop, however I hope my points help people make more educated decisions when selecting laptops.

Posted in: Devices, FC5, Fedora, Hardware, Linux, Setup,