YiBi's Life|Live Log

I just got myself a bluetooth keyboard to get rid of all the wires running on my desk. First thing I tried was to pair it with my notebook running Ubuntu 10.10. Pairing was ok. And that’s about it?! It was painful trying to get the keyboard properly connected. There’s no indication in dmesg that a keyboard is found, and after a few tries restarting bluetooth, restarting the keyboard, dmesg showed HID device detected, ie the keyboard, but it still doesn’t work.

At first I thought it could be the keyboard itself. Afterall, I got it from http://ww.taobao.com. So, I decided to pair it with my iPhone. Seamless. Paired, got it working right away. Switched off the keyboard, turned it on again and iPhone connected the keyboard automatically. My Macbook was the ultimate. Even in sleep mode, it was holding on to the connection to the keyboard. and I could wake the Macbook from sleep mode with this keyboard. The experience was perfect!

So, what’s wrong with Ubuntu? I know, with some troubleshooting and tinkering, I can definitely get it to work eventually, but it’s so much more troublesome compared to Mac. The Ubuntu desktop experience has improved and surpassed other Linux distros, but it’s still way way way behind Mac.

Enough of rants, I still need to try to get the keyboard to work. Shall update the blog once I solve the problem.

For some reason, I can get tethering to work natively on Linux after I did an upgrade on my unstable Debian.

This was not possible previously. Now the kernel detects a new device called ipheth (IPhone USB Ethernet device). This is the magic that made the tethering possible. And the best part is that it works out of the box with Network Manager.

This is really cool. I used to tether from Linux using Bluetooth, but the connection is unstable sometimes.

Screenshots of dmesg output etc. Click for the full size image.

I’m running the unstable distro of Debian, so I’m not sure if this is available on the stable release. It might be possible on Ubuntu, since they get all the cutting edge stuff.

Recently got a mini usb bluetooth dongle. Sad thing is that I found that it doesn’t play well in the latest version of Ubuntu. Did a quick search on Google and found that it’s because of the new btusb kernel module in the latest kernels. The old kernels were using hci_usb.

I booted up Debian with kernel 2.6.24 to verify and the dongle works perfectly. I was actually worried that the dongle I got was faulty. Now I’m contemplating compiling kernel 2.6.32 to see if the problem gets fixed. Still reading through the release notes of 2.6.32 though.

Better ideas anyone?

The need for speed is never satiable. I was running Windows XP in Virtualbox with 1 VCPU all these while. Speed was acceptable for me to do my office related stuff like Exchange and Office.

My CPU was a Core2Duo with HyperThread. So technically, I have 4 VCPU to play with. So I decided I could spare another 1 core for my Windows XP installation. The result – Terrible.

Windows XP booting took more than 5 mins as compared to about 1.5mins previously. Ran top and saw that Virtualbox was using 198% CPU. Normal circumstances with 1 VCPU, it would be at 98%. Switched back to 1 VCPU, things became normal again.

I’m not too sure if it’s Virtualbox that’s not handling the job scheduling correctly, but if anyone runs into this problem of having slow performance in Virtualbox, this could be the solution.

My itchy hands got the better of me again. Ubuntu 9.04 is in Alpha6, which means there are things that could still be broken. But alas, I could not control my itchy hands, so I went ahead and upgraded from the current 8.10.

Fortunately, I did not regret the upgrade. The whole interface seems faster compared to 8.10. I was actually worried that it’s going to get slower, like my last upgrade from 7.10 to 8.10. I guess the improvement could be from the newer version of Xorg and/or the ext4 filesystem. I hated the ext3 filesystem because it’s so slow.

Here’s more information on Ubuntu 9.04 codenamed Jaunty Jackalope.

Anyway this is the machine that I use at work, the laptop’s provided by my company. Nothing beats my personal Macbook at this point of time. :)