Linux on Advent 9112

A while ago my wife got a (two actually) Advent 9112 portable. Elgiganten and PC City (Swedish companies part of Dixons) has been seeling them really cheap, and in spite of their small size, they seems to be rather nice machines (they even have IEEE1394 ports if you need that).
(They are rebranded machines, original name is ECS S20II).

Anyway, this is a consumer information post for those considering one of those. As Ubuntu is our standard distro nowadays, Gutsy was what we tried. Basically, everything worked out of the box (although it took us a good while to figure out that we had to enable the built in camera with a Fn-sequence).

In spite of what is said on the tech guys page, the wlan card didn't seem to be a Intel card but a realtek one (the rt73usb driver was used). We noticed network issues after hibernation sometimes but didn't care enough to examine those.

However, she no longer has this machine. The first one she got had a hot subpixel that was rather annoying, and the replacement had the problem off turning itself off randomly (not very often, the first time was after a week's usage). When we returned that, we decided to get a HP TX1345 instead (mainly because we thought it'd be fun with a touchscreen). I'll write about that one later.

PulseAudio and v4l2 for Flash

I just tried out PulseAudio yesterday and found it a rather enjoyable experience. The only thing that didn't work out of the box turned out to be Adobe Flash. I soon found libflashsupport that I think is rather interesting. In addition to how it's used there, I'm guessing it should be easy to whip out support for v4l2, which would help if you have a modern laptop and want to use the uvcvideo-driver.

Please Dear Internet, do this for me!

In the section "Cool hacks I want to do put probably won't get around to in quite a while" we have (among other things) a value calculator for LibraryThing - something that takes a look at your (or a public) library and calculates what it would cost to buy that library.

There are price comparison sites galore for books, but I want an API to code against (I could of course screen scrape and watch it break every now and then, but I prefer not to. And unfortunately, none of the data providers I've tried asking have been interested enough to answer, it seems.

Terratec Cinergy 400 USB Mk2 and Linux

I spent some time yesterday investigating my TV device, as it would please me greatly not having to reboot to OS X to record stuff.

As it had support for some devices from the same company, I thought the Em2880 driver was a good place to start looking. So i put in a sensible configuration and made it use that driver. No luck.

After some additional fiddling, I decided to open the box and see what I had. Most of the circuits seemed pretty normal (SAA7113H, TDA9874AH, ALC202), but there was a IC3160-64TQ I didn't recognize.

After some googling, I found it in a product list as TV tuner USB. I didn't manage to find any datasheet or other documentation though.

Somewhat later, I found this review of the Compro Videomate Action Pro and Ultra, which explained that the IC 3160 was previously known as AVIClink AL5000. At least that explains the ViP5000 I see from it.

Next step; there doesn't seem to be any drivers available for that chipset, so it's write your own if I want one. I do, but am not sure how long that would take (although thanks to this page, I've found usbsnoop, which could help a lot). And if I get another card (they seem to be rather cheap nowadays) I have a feeling I won't be as eager to work on this.

C# for Emacs?

Dear lazyweb, is there still no C# mode (ruleset) standard enough to be a part of cc-mode, or at least available as a simple apt-get?

(My current environment is Ubuntu gutsy.)

Outlook and Cyrus (or any other IMAP server)

We've recently had the "pleasure" of investigating Outlook to make it work better with Cyrus when using IMAP, but as it's most about Outlook, this might help for all you dovecot and other users as well.

• There's no escape from PST hell! Your PST files need to be undamaged and preferably local for Outlook to work good. We haven't investigated any of the non-MS repair tools, but scanpst.exe is a good start.
• The default configuration for Outlook is "not so good" - it will traverse the entire folder structure regularly. That wouldn't be so bad except that it uses a rather short (fixed) timeout for the entire operation, and complains loudly and behaves badly if doesn't complete in time. Under Tools > Send/Receive > Send/Receive Settings > Define Send/Receive Groups -> All Accounts you should deselect anything but the Inbox.
  You'll also need to deselect "Get folder unread count" or it will still traverse your entire folder structure.
• Though the need seems to vary, I'd still recommend running with some hack to wake up Outlook from IDLE in order for the connection not to time out and be disconnected. Dovecot seems to contain such a hack natively. We're on Cyrus and I've whipped out a hack that does the same thing. (Lie to the client saying we have new mail, immediately followed by an expunge and new information where that faked mail has disappeared).

The second bullet is particularly exciting to me - for starters, I've strongly preferred if the timeout was per sub action (actual IMAP command) as that wouldn't break things for those who use a large amount of folders.

I was also rather thrilled to discover that "Get folder unread count" automatically recurses and queries all subfolder of the selected folder, without giving the user any hint about what's happening.

Migrated

After having successfully migrated Himmelmora mo to blogger, I quickly decied to migrate Sky heath as well. As you'll probably have noticed some way if you're reading this.