HP Tablet running Android ICS

I picked up a 32GB HP Tablet from the firesale and have been running the stock WebOS.

In the last few weeks some of my kids have complained that the new gmail interface is no longer fully supported by the WebOS browser. Basically it won’t load unless you switch to the basic HTML version. And then you lose the gtalk chat capability – apparently the killer app for teen girls.

This morning I had one of the college kids install Android Ice Cream Sandwich (v4.0) on it. It went smoothly and works well with the exception of the camera and microphone. At the initial bootup, I connected the tablet to my google account and apps started to automatically download to it.

What is very nice is the install doesn’t overwrite the existing WebOS and can boot back to that if wanted.

The starting point for installing CyanogenMod here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/install-android-ice-cream-sandwich-hp-touchpad-minutes/

Belated Blog Birthday

I missed a couple of milestones.

This blog turned 10 years old on March 5th, 2012. It started life as a humble blosxom script and stayed like that for two years when I migrated to a self-hosted wordpress blog. Since I've been tracking late in 2007, there has been 180,000 page views -- a good percentage is probably spammers.

Here are my move viewed blog entries:

1. messing around with tiles (13-Aug-2004; 16,153 hits) -- a silly little post about using the taprats java app to generate some interesting titles. It is also where I got the favicon for nozell.com.


2. family pictures -- including one of me naked! (4-May-2003; 7,560 hits) -- Seems lots of people are searching for naked photos on the internet. Who knew? The entry has some bitrot, but I had scanned some old photos as part of a genealogy project. Here is the photo of me butt naked.
   


3. Getting started with the SheevaPlug (12-May-2009; 7,158 hits) -- finally a geek-related entry! I'm still somewhat happy with LordShiva.local, but it sometimes flakes out losing the root filesystem. Its backup function has been moved to a DreamPlug.


4. flickr upload for gnome's nautilus (4-Sep-2004; 6,077 hits) -- Back in the Debian/Sarge days I wrote a little Nautilus script to upload flickr photos. It got some link-love from flickr. Sadly the script is lost to the ages.


5. I’ve seen things, I’ve seen them with my eyes… (5-Mar-2004; 4,901 hits) -- damn earworm by the excellent Weebl. Surprisingly the link is still good. Best part of the song? Kuala Lumpur!


6. Some tips to (re)install grub on an HP ProLiant server (8-May-2004, 4762 hits) -- Back in the day HP ProLiant with SmartArray controllers, Red Hat and grub didn't love each other as much as they do today. My notes were popular for a while, less so over time.


7. Logitech USB headset & Ubuntu/Linux (13-Sep-2006; 4,263 hits) -- evidence that random devices work out of the box on Linux just like it usually does on Windows.


8. hp 2133 update (4-Jun-2008; 3,799 hits) -- described some problems installing various distros of Linux on my cute little hp2133 netbook. Since then Ubuntu has been running on the hp2133 just fine and has ubeen upgraded through Oneric. Now it is off at college with Son #2 who uses it for notetaking in class.


9. SheevaPlug customizing pre-installed Ubuntu/Jaunty (17-May-2009; 3,392 hits) -- misc notes on the SheevaPlug when it was running Ubuntu/Jaunty. Currently it is running Debian/Squeeze mainly because Ubuntu dropped support for the ARM CPU it uses.


10. SheevaPlug is now my main home server (26-Jun-2009; 2,916 hits) -- A write up on what the SheevaPlug was hosting in my home datacenter. All those functions have moved to the newer and more capable DreamPlug.
    

The other big milestone is I've had the nozell.com domain for 15 years -- 6-Feb-1997. I have children that are younger than that domain!


Record last updated on 07-Feb-2012.
Record expires on 07-Feb-2013.
Record created on 06-Feb-1997.


Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade works great on hp2133 netbook

My hp1233 netbook has been sitting around in my office for the last six months after the last Ubuntu upgrade. It was working fine, but the Natty Narwhal (11.04) upgrade caused it to hang when using wifi. See Bug #772859

So the end of last week I plugged it into my network switch and upgraded to Oneiric Ocelot. I was pleasantly surprised that the wifi now works and didn't require any fiddling around with random drivers or configs. Nicely done Ubuntu Team!

Ubuntu/natty hangs when wifi enabled

This evening I upgraded my hp2133 notebook from Ubuntu/Maverick to the new Natty. The upgrade went smoothly but now the system hangs about 2 minutes after Broadcom 4311 802.11a/b/g wifi is enabled.

Here is the bug report: BCM4311 wifi hangs hp2133 notebook after 2 minutes

Some suggestions from IRC are to try the bcmwl-kernel-source or linux-backports-modules-net-natty-generic packages.

Use an HP Cloud Map to automate Oracle on RHEL

Shameless self promotion here -- I've written a post on the HP AllianceONE Partner Solutions blog: Use an HP Cloud Map to automate Oracle on RHEL.

1st annual VMS Reunion

VMS Quilt, originally uploaded by marcn.

Last night's VMS Reunion in Nashua was great fun. My very first VMS manager that I had right out of college was there and first person I ever saw carry a cell phone (circa 1988).

Thanks to Susan Skonetski for setting it all up!

More photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn/sets/72157618959630572/

HP has released AdvFS under a GPLv2 license!

It is nice to see that this well tested filesystem technology has been made available under the GPLv2 and may have another life with Linux.

Press Release HP Contributes Source Code to Open Source Community to Advance Adoption of Linux and the AdvFS site on SourceForge.

HP leaving NH

Yup, the office building known as ZKO and where I've spent the last 20 years working for DEC/Compaq/HP is no longer going to be where I park my butt during the day. I'll be heading down to Marlboro, MA a few days a week starting sometime in 2008.

Here is what the Nashua Telegraph has to say in their newsblog section: HP to close Nashua site. The news traveled fast -- their entry is dated 5:24pm today, just hours after the official announcement to employees.

Update: Wednesday full coverage in the Nashua Telegraph: HP to close Nashua site

I wonder when the new owners will take down the VMS-inspired Non-Paged Pool sign.

Most exciting upgrade to Ubuntu/Edgy

This morning I had a free hour and this is how I upgraded my hp compaq nc6000 laptop from Ubuntu/Dapper to Ubuntu/Edgy. After updating /etc/apt/sources.list to point to the edgy repos...

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -dy dist-upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Well there was a conflict between x11-common and xinit which both wanted to provide the man page XSession.5.gz.

11:45am Wendy calls me and says the school just called and Griffin is in a ambulance on the way to the hospital and to meet her there. He accidentally ate something that contained pineapple -- to which he has a severe allergic reactions to.

11:49 I'm on the road approaching the hospital and get a call on my cell phone. The woman says she is the school nurse and starts saying my son is having an allergic reaction. I interrupt her and say 'Yes, I just talked to my wife and I'll meet the ambulance at the hospital'. She says 'Well, your son is sitting here with me in my office.' Then we realize she is the school nurse from a different chool and is talking about Trevor who is having an allergic reaction! Trevor had his bee/wasp allergy shot earlier this morning and is reacting to that. Since he too was having difficulty breathing, he too is sent via ambulance to the ER.

12:05 -- Wendy and I both arrive at the ER before either of the kids do. Explain to the ER admitting person that yes both boys are ours, they are coming from different schools, with the same problem (allergic reaction, breathing difficulty), but different reasons (food allergy vs reaction to allergy desensitizing injection).

Long story short, after evaluation, some benedril and alburterol breathing treatments, we were sent home.

Around 3pm I worked through a few iterations of apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade, apt-get -f install, aptitude dist-upgrade, I have a fully upgraded from Ubuntu/Dapper to Ubuntu/Edgy.

There are a bunch of new, interesting packages to take a look out. The list is here: EdgyConfiguration

Now that was a stressful upgrade.

My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration

I've posted some extensive notes on all the post-installation configuration steps needed to make an Ubuntu/Dapper standard install the way I like it -- dual head, personal & corporate email, network manager, f-spot, etc

Check it out: My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration

More on Dual Monitor with Ubuntu/Dapper

This is a follow on to last week's post about Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

I've been using the xorg.conf-ati.20060621 configuration at work with two monitors, but when at home the laptop didn't degrade down to working with the one LCD monitor of the laptop. So, here is a new configuration that lets you switch between a single monitor mode (1024x768) or one large one (2048x768) that can be 'slid over to' by using the mouse. The key press is Control-Alt-+ (the + over on the side where the number entry is). On the laptop, it is Control-Alt-blue_Fn-?

Here the is xorg.conf file:

xorg.conf-ati-works-with-one-monitor.20060624

Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

I've noticed a number of people asking about dual head support in dapper on #ubuntu, so here is my setup:

This hp/compaq nc6000 laptop/notebook that has an ATI card:


$ sudo lspci|grep VGA
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]


I have two head monitors working with both the 'ati' and the closed source 'fglrx' drivers.

Here are the configuration files:

xorg.conf-fglrx.20060621 -- works when booting without the second monitor

xorg.conf-ati.20060621 -- when booting with out the second monitor attached, it still thinks it is there. Some windows may pop up on the unreachable monitor.

Before you start hacking around with your xorg.conf, save a copy somewhere safe.

HP Press Release: HP Extends Open Source Services to MySQL Software

Why HP has such a large presence at MySQL UC this year...

HP Press Release: HP Extends Open Source Services to MySQL Software and MySQL AB: HP Extends Open Source Services to MySQL Software

HP and MySQL AB today announced that HP will offer new services for MySQL® database software.

As part of an agreement, HP will provide consulting, integration and support services for customers implementing MySQL Network database software into their technology environments. HP and its channel partners also will resell MySQL Network subscription services.

[tags]MySQL, hp[/tags]

Getting NetworkManager to work on Ubuntu/Dapper

network-manager-working.jpg

Originally uploaded by marcn.
I've been running the currently unreleased Ubuntu/Dapper release after having upgraded first from Hoary to Warty before arriving at Dapper.

Somewhere along the way something prevented the cool new NetworkManager from starting up. Whenever I logged it would immedately exit with a useless message about not finding all the needed resources.

Last night at the GNHLUG meeting, Christopher Aillon of Red Hat told me the magic command to fix it:

$ sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/hicolor

The lack of some icon cache was preventing a network configuration tool from running. Ugh.

This allowed the applet to start, but wasn't controlling the network devices. For that, I needed to remove references to any network devices so the only thing in my /etc/network/interfaces are these lines:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

Linux Journal Reader's Choice: HP ProLiant

My November 2005 copy of the Linux Journal arrived Monday with the
Reader's Choice Awards results -- HP ProLiant wins Favorite Server category!

Favorite Server

1. HP ProLiant


2. Monarch Empro Custom Rack Server


3. Unisys ES7000 Family

A note to HP: please take this first-place win here, where second-place votes were less than half of what you received, as proof that we like
your boxes, so you can cut out the pointless marketing poo-flinging at
Sun, already.

---

Photo of DL380 and sidebar: "Last year, the HP ProLiant BL20p G2 won the
Editor's Choice Award for Server Hardware. Now the readers are singing
the ProLiant's praises."

Yay team!

Dual head with Xinerama using Ubuntu/Breezy compaq nc6000

I finally got around to hooking up a second monitor to my Ubuntu/Breezy laptop and convinced xorg.conf to 'do the right thing'.

The compaq nc6000 notebook has the "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility 9600/9700 M10/M11 (RV350 NP)" video card
and has a video out at the back.

Here is my /etc/X11/xorg.conf with Xinerama (move windows from one screen to another). The aging Compaq monitor sits to the left of the nc6000 laptop.

Here is a copy of my configuration: xorg.conf-dual-head-xinerama

w32codecs for ubuntu 'hoary'

The stock Ubuntu repositories don't include the w32codecs (wmvdmod.dll, etc) so xine, mplayer can play WMV and other formats. Basically the package puts 127 DLLs in /usr/lib/w32codecs.

So, I temporarily added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ testing main

And then did this:


apt-get update && apt-get install w32codecs


I then commented that line out since and apt-get upgrade would have picked up a bunch of updated packages from that repository.

Migrating to Ubuntu Hoary on my laptop

I've been running Debian/Sarge (now the stable branch) on my laptop for quite a while now and its time to try a new distro for dailyl use -- Ubuntu. This week I've been running Ubuntu 'Hoary' and the transition has been very smooth.

The only configuration issue was I wanted to use ALSA on this HP Compaq nc6000 laptop. The install did detect the sound device, but did separate the speaker from
the headphone controls.

phzi on #ubuntu pointed me to the unofficial UbuntuGuide.org, specifically the section configuresoundproperly. Those instructions were perfect.

HP leads worldwide Linux server market

Since my job description contains the words Linux and ProLiant Servers, this makes me pretty happy -- HP leads worldwide Linux server market. The news has been going round
internally at HP, along with selling the 10 Millionth ProLiant server

HP has set an industry-first milestone by shipping more than 1 million Linux servers to customers since 1998, 45 percent more than any other major hardware vendor.

HP has led the worldwide Linux server market for 29 consecutive quarters. In the first quarter of 2005, HP grew 2.5 percentage points faster than the market in units on a year-over-year basis, shipped nearly 10 times as many Linux servers as Sun, led IBM by almost 8 percentage points in quarterly revenue share and outpaced Dell in both units and revenue.

MySQL Conference 05: Outside the Keynote

MySQL Conference 05: Outside the Keynote

Originally uploaded by x180.
Credit: "James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media"

The title should really be "Marc eyes the fancy phones that the other hp guys have"