Feb 6 2008

XPS m1330 Review

Posted by Fab

As I have mentioned on the show, here is the review of my new laptop. I am actually running Debian lenny/sid on it and I have moved the whole production environment over to it so everything should be much more reliable now. I love this machine! What a wonderful Linux laptop… But now, without further ado, on to the review:

It has been nearly four weeks now since my brand new Dell XPS m1330 laptop arrived over here and I have now had enough time with it to give a detailed review of my experiences, including installing and running Linux Mint 4.0 on it. In a nutshell, I am very impressed. this is the most Linux compatible laptop I have seen to date. I can wholeheartedly recommend buying it — if you are patient and keep an eye on the Dell website like I did, you might even get a pretty good deal on them (I managed to score €250 off in addition to free shipping). I had to specifically request them to deliver the laptop without Windows via email but in the time since, they started selling it with Ubuntu preinstalled which is great and also explains why the platform is so amazingly Linux compatible.But lets start at the beginning. First of all, here’s the specifications of the machine (which in basically all cases is pretty maxed out as it is):

  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T7500, 2.20GHz
  • Memory: 4GB Dual Channel 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Display: 13.3″ WXGA White-LED Display (with TrueLife)
  • Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 8400M GS with 256MB VRAM
  • Storage: 320GB SATA drive (@5400rpm)
  • Optical: 8x DVD+/-RW slot-load drive
  • Networking: Intel Next-Gen Wireless-N, Bluetooth
  • Ports: Ethernet, 2x USB2.0, Firewire, HDMI, VGA, SD card reader
  • Extras: Fingerprint reader, media buttons, remote control, webcam

As for the case design, it completely blows me away. The screen is mindbogglingly thin and really bright and the combination of brushed aluminium and rubberised plastic make this little laptop a real eye turner. As you can see in the corresponding photo gallery, I choose the red one which looks really slick. The barrel hinges on the screen look and work great and make a very sturdy impression as well. Despite the MacBook Air, this is still one of the thinnest notebooks on the market and it’s also pretty light. In fact, this is a real MacBook-killer in my opinion — compared to the Air, the construction seems very solid and as an added bonus it comes with an optical drive and an Ethernet port as well.

I waited for some time for Dell to offer some nice special deals — which they did shortly after Christmas — and snapped it up. I configured it through their web interface and when I got the order confirmation, I wrote them an email asking if they could keep Windows and the other apps off the machine. They were very nice about it and refunded me the money for Vista, Works and the Symantec crap and when the system arrived, there was no OS on it at all. I formatted the drive and installed Ubuntu Studio on it which even after about two hours of hacking would still refuse to recognise the sound card, at which point I got fed up with it (a multimedia distro without sound doesn’t cut it, I’m afraid) and moved on to Linux Mint. That installed in about 15 minutes after which I imported my home folder from a backup and reinstalled all my applications with AptOnCD.

As I have mentioned in the beginning of this review, I am really amazed at how well the hardware is supported in Linux which in the light of Dell’s recent move to sell it preinstalled with Ubuntu doesn’t seem like a coincidence. The wifi card connected as soon as I entered my WPA key and even works with the Gnome Network Manager, which has caused me a lot of grief in the past — so far it hasn’t dropped out a single time. The same goes for the Bluetooth module: it works flawlessly with the Gnome management utility. The install of the binary Nvidia drivers via the restricted drivers manager was also a breeze; basically three clicks and a reboot. After that I could use CompizFusion with all effects cranked up the wazoo and also play World of Warcraft, Civilization IV and Command & Conquer 3 trough Wine as well as the native Linux clients of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and EVE Online. For a laptop, this machine is quite a nice gaming rig (only the didicated VRAM is a bit on the low side). As for peripherals, the trackpad features and all the media buttons — which are amazingly cool looking touch surfaces that light up blue when you activate them — worked out of the box and even the little remote control which retracts into the ExpressCard slot does everything it should exactly as you expect it to. The SD card reader and the build-in web cam also worked out of the box and I was immediately able to transfer photos from my Nikon D50 and use the video call feature in the Skype 2.0 beta. The only component that you have to set up manually is the biometric fingerprint reader (which I haven’t done yet, but according to this blog post isn’t too hard). The sound card is very well supported in Mint, just the internal microphone doesn’t work (there’s apparently a kernel patch to fix this, but I won’t bother with it since these internal mics always have horrible quality anyway and I was never planning on using it for exactly that reason).

The only slightly negative point about this whole purchase was the fact that Dell apparently left a hidden partition for MediaDirect on the hard drive which in Windows is needed for that feature to work, but messes up GRUB when you have it installed and press the little “house” button (which is conveniently located next to the power switch and turns it into some kind of self-destruct button on Linux systems). According to a thread on the Ubuntu forums that process isn’t irreversible but still a bloody annoying caveat. This discovery lead me to back up my data and applications and completely zero my drive with the dd command which is, as I was told, the only way to get rid of the hidden partition. I let this running over night and reinstalled Mint in the morning (luckily, Linux installs much faster than most other operating systems). I must also stress that AptOnCD proved invaluable here once again. The ability to completely back up and restore all applications you ever installed on your system in a matter of minutes is priceless. This power is the reason why I absolutely prefer distributions that use apt over all others. I could have saved myself a lot of hassle had I known about the hidden partition before I first installed the OS, though. I can only assume the presence of that partition on my system was a mix up on somebody’s part at Dell — I don’t hold a grudge about it though, in the grand scheme of things it was only a minor hiccup compared to how satisfied I am with this purchase as a whole. My mate Dan, who ordered the same laptop and asked Dell to install Linux on it for him didn’t have the MediaDirect thing on his drive and his machine boots straight into GRUB when said button is pressed (as mine also does now, after the wipe).

All in all, I am completely in love with this machine. As I said, it wasn’t cheap (especially in this configuration; although you can get some good deals on the basic models — especially with the new Ubuntu offerings) but it is one of the best mobile computers out there right now in my opinion. Who said you need to buy a Mac to get a fast, sexy looking system? And lets face it, I rather have the freedom of choice that Linux gives me… Bottom line: The perfect laptop to run Linux on. Mint 4.0 on this machine easily rivals the ease of use of Windows or Mac OS X — in the case of Vista I would even say it exceeds it. Again, I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone looking for a desktop replacement or simply a sleek mobile alternative, especially for using Linux on the road.

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Oct 12 2007

MythTV Write-up

Posted by Fab

As promised, I have just finished an in-depth write-up of my experiences with setting up MythTV which we talked about on the last episode of the podcast. I have also included a few pictures of the different stages of progression through the project. I think the end result looks very slick. If you liked our MythTV episode and you want to know a bit more about my experiences, read on. As always: If you have any questions about this or want to tell us about your experiences with MythTV, use the “contact” button at the top.

mythbox1I wanted to have a TiVo for ages, but after fruitlessly waiting for quite some time for the damn things, or some comparable solution to be available here in Germany, I finally decided to roll my own. Once I reached that conclusion, there was no question to make it Linux based, of course. If I go through the trouble of researching all this stuff to build my own system instead of choosing an appliance, I want it as flexible as possible. mythbox2That led me to picking MythTV as the software solution and I had been busily planning the project for a few months in advance while saving enough money to start buying the hardware. That point finally came and I ordered a sleek little XPS 210 and a stylish 19” widescreen LCD monitor from Dell. I have been very happy with their laptops for years and the XPS 210 is exactly the form factor I was looking for; the plan was to find a really nice looking, compact machine since it has to sit in my living room all year round. mythbox3I had been toying with the idea of buying a Mac mini from Apple but that system, while being smaller, isn’t upgradable at all and since it doesn’t include a DVB-S card, it wasn’t a a good choice for what I had in mind. Not to mention that it is way overpriced for what it is. Still to get DVB-S functionality in the Dell machine, I had to find a low profile PCI compliant DVB-S tuner card, which luckily I did — although it wasn’t easy and did involve a lot of research on the topic. Finally, with all parts ordered, I was ready to build my very own open source, next-gen DVR system running Linux. Or so I thought…
mythbox4After about three weeks of waiting for Dell to build my system (as it turns out some parts were backordered), I finally got my XPS210. As I started to unpack this gorgeous system, I immediately realised that I’d made a mistake when I spec’d out the hardware. I had bought an PCI tuner card inspite the fact that this system only has PCIe slots! This was an especially grave mistake, since there are currently no drivers for PCIe devices in Linux. mythbox5Well, since I hadn’t really expected this to be easy — if I had been looking for an easy, albeit crippled, solution I would’ve used Vista’s Media Center for this — I just treated it as another challenge on the long way to becoming a Linux guru and pushed it to my backlog for the moment, set up the system anyway, opened it up for the first time and just enjoyed the wonderful engineering for a bit. The XPS210 really is an amazing little PC. It’s only about 9.5 cm wide and the inside of the chassis is totally crammed, but it’s a beautiful system nonetheless. It is also totally tool-less, meaning that you can take all the main components apart without having to use a screwdriver — it’s all pins and doohickeys. I am also really happy I bought a Dell monitor; this 19” widescreen has a really nice design and the picture is impeccable. It has the solid feel of high quality hardware about it, which I like a lot.

mythbox6First on the list was getting MythTV up and running. I definitely wanted to try Mythbuntu because I liked the idea of the project. Unfortunately, the Live CD wouldn’t even boot (and yes, I did check the MD5 hash). I suspect a conflict with the BIOS since even in my working setup now, the machine refuses to reboot, it just halts — Dell probably put some new exotic BIOS into this thing that the Linux kernel doesn’t fully support yet. I resorted to downloading the alternate install CD of Ubuntu Feisty and following this guide which turned out to work quite well. I basically had to install a command line only version of Feisty and then use aptitude to install the MythTV packages, which wasn’t hard. MythTV automatically installs Openbox as a desktop environment for itself and then displays the GUI configuration screens so that you can complete the install. I had no problems whatsoever in setting it up. mythbox7Since I didn’t have a working DVB-S capture card yet, I did not configure the TV functions at this point, which obviously means that there wasn’t much MythTV could actually do at this stage. I therefore turned my attention to installing some plugins like MythDVD, MythMusic, MythVideo and MythWeb. All this went quite well and I then spend some more time at configuring those to my liking (using xine as my player for video and DVD content and Firefox as the browser for MythWeb, for example). Since I have quite a big video collection of DVD rips residing on several hard drives around here, I spend most of the next day copying that content over to the mythbox. For that purpose, I set up an OpenSSH server to access the mythbox from my laptop which allows me to mount the /var/lib/mythtv directory directly onto my desktop and copy the stuff over using a GUI. I could’ve also used the command line, but since I have multiple backups of everything I was glad for the graphical interface, it was hard enough to sort it all out as it was.

After getting all of this to work, I could finally watch some Firefly episodes on this thing. Everything worked great and the system was very stable, except that I had some pretty noticeable tearing effects in the video playback. This was of course due to the fact that hardware acceleration wasn’t enabled by default. I knew when I bought the system, that getting this to work might turn out to be hairy since the machine has got an ATI graphics chip in it; a Radeon X1300 to be precise — and ATI is notorious for providing very poor support for open source solutions. Their fglrx driver is crap, a poor implementation if I ever saw one, and it took me about two days of heavy duty hacking to get it to work with my 2.6.20-16-generic kernel. It sure wasn’t fun, but I’m pretty proud of myself that I got it working. That it took two days to do this is manifest to the fact that ATI’s proprietary, crapshot driver needs a complete overhaul. That their drivers are supposed to be open sourced soon will fix this, I hope. The only little problem that remains is the fact that for some weird, random reason (as documented on the MythTV bug tracker) I cannot use the IMDb information grabbing script in MythVideo without the DRI component of the fglrx driver crashing mythfrontend as I found out via this blog post. For now I just don’t use that script and enter all my data manually until I can upgrade to a fixed version without using the nightly builds. At this point the video plugin with all my ripped content, the music playback and the web surfing parts did work and were very stable, but I still couldn’t watch live TV yet. That was the next hurdle I had to overcome: I needed to find a DVB-S card for this thing.

mythbox8After I had decided my only hope at this point would be a USB receiver, I looked around on nearly a hundred sites, forums and wikis for the right hardware that would work with my kernel version and setup. The first USB box I bought, a TechniSat SkyStar USB Plus, should have worked, except it turned out to be a rebranded card from another manufacturer whos drivers weren’t supported. I resold the thing on eBay and kept searching until I finally came across another card that I could actually buy here in Germany and which did work: The Pinnacle PCTV 400e. I found a used one pretty cheap somewhere on the ‘net and I was very, very happy to see the thing announce itself properly via dmesg when I plugged it into the machine. After a quick hunt on the web for the proper firmware for the box, I just dumped the .fw file into Ubuntu’s /lib/firware directory and it now gets automatically loaded on startup when the kernel registers the PCTV device. mythbox9The next step then was to set up the TV functions in mythtv-setup, that’s the step I skipped earlier, and then have it automatically scan all available channels and put that data into MythTV’s database. Configuring this wasn’t hard, but some choices seem kinda arbitrary when you don’t know what you’re actually doing. In cases like this, wikis and forums will be your saviour! Next, I assigned sensible numbers to the three dozen or so channels I mostly watch and started scheduling recordings and finally watched some live TV.

The last piece of the puzzle that still eluded me at this point was a working remote control. The Pinnacle USB box does come with one, but it turns out that the driver for the device doesn’t support sending the RC signals back to Linux. Although I was very happy at finally having found a capture card that worked, the remote problem still irked me. After all, what’s a TV without a remote control? I knew that to get a remote control to work with most programs in Linux, you need to set up something called LIRC so I had a look around for remotes that were compatible with that program. I figured out that I could get what they call an MCE remote very cheaply on eBay. The irony here is that those things are specifically made to control XP and Vista Media Center machines. Therefore mine has an ugly Vista logo bubble in the middle — I really have to put a Tux sticker over that some time… Anyway, the remote I bought wasn’t that hard to configure and after assigning all the buttons and fixing some smaller startup issues with LIRC, it works perfectly. The best thing about this remote control is the fact that it uses RF instead of infrared signals, which vastly improves the range of the remote and means it doesn’t need a line of sight to the receiver to work. With everything in place, this meant that after over six weeks of work, I finally had finished my project.

As you can see from this account, hacking together a MythTV box isn’t exactly an easy or very userfriendly process. For me, something immediately looses the label “user friendly” at the point it asks you to compile anything. But despite all of the sweat and blood, it is definitely worth it. MythTV is a great system; it is very powerful, very flexible and getting it to work is a hugely rewarding process. And on top of all this, I learned incredibly much in solving all the problems along the way. Spending a lot of money on a box you just plunck down beside your TV may be very easy, but mastering the skill and knowledge to hack together the system yourself is much more fun! But the most important selling point of MythTV for me is the ability to customise every aspect of the user experience. You just can’t do that with an out-of-the-box solution.

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