From lincoln at EmperorLinux.com  Wed May  5 17:50:51 2004
From: lincoln at EmperorLinux.com (Lincoln Durey)
Date: Wed May  5 16:58:43 2004
Subject: [EmperorLinux-Lincolns-Logbook] 
	How do I pick a new Linux Laptop system and distro?
Message-ID: <1083790251.9780.748.camel@localhost>

Portable Linux Enthusiast,

Todays article has relevance to all of us at some time or another.  It
is the nature of hardware to get old and slow.  So, we all find
ourselves needing new Linux laptop about every 3 years.

Lincoln's new Linux Laptop:
===========================

As the founder and president of a Linux laptop company, I get quite a
few questions about which machine I use, and which Linux distro I use.
While those are interesting questions with easy answers which we'll
get to, I also field the age old question of "how can I take my data
with me" from our returning customers (as we've been at this Linux on
laptops thing for 5 years now, we have many customers coming back
after a 3-4 year run on one of our systems, and it's time to upgrade).
So, I'm going to roll all these questions into one essay and answer:
"How do I pick a new Linux laptop system and distro, and then move my
data, and my work flow to it?"

I took delivery of an EmperorLinux Toucan T21 in January of 2001, and
used it approximately 12-16 hours a day for over three years.  The
Toucan T21 (named "tori") ran Red Hat 7.3, with all the same
modifications to the kernel (the empkernel), and the config files that
our customers enjoy.  Recently, tori started making not-happy-disk
noises, and the LCD back-light was flickering.

So, on March 19th, 2004 I selected a nice new <a
href="http://www.EmperorLinux.com/toucan.php">Toucan T41</a> with
Fedora from our assembly line, and christened her "sophie".  This will
detail what I got hardware wise, and then all the extra tweaks I've
made to sophie over the past few days to get her totally up to speed.
I've had to get my data over, configure printing, and get user-space
applications configured.

It is interesting to look at how far Linux laptops have come in the
past 3 years.  By getting sophie, I've upgraded my CPU from a P-III
850 with 256MB cache to a Pentium M 1700 with 1MB cache, my disk from
32GB@4200rpm to 60GB@7200rpm, and ram from 384MB to 1GB.  From a
connectivity standpoint, I've jumped my ethernet from 10/100 to
Gigabit, and my WiFi from a PCMCIA 'b' card to internal 802.11a/b/g
Atheros (the best Linux WiFi card around), and now I can start playing
with internal BlueTooth.  Not all things change though.  The T41, like
the T21 still has a 1400x1050 LCD panel, and at 14 inches, it is still
the smallest screen to be significantly over 1024x768.

Data Transfer:
==============

First, we have to get all the data copied over from tori to sophie.
(tori had a daily rsync to our QuadXeon server, but I'm going to go
the direct route here, since tori hasn't failed me yet.)

(Shameless plug: Yes I really just pulled a Toucan T41 off our Fedora
production line, and this is all I had to do, no config, no kernel, no
effort!)

for i in durey elf emperor; do
        useradd $i;
        passwd $i;
done

we can be on tori, and push to sophie:
tori # rsync -e ssh -av /home/durey durey@sophie:/home/

or we can be on sophie and pull from tori:
sophie # rsync -e ssh -av emperor@tori:/home/emperor /home/

Of course there are a few more files I need:
rsync -e ssh -av /usr/local/bin/* root@sophie:/usr/local/bin/
rsync -e ssh -av /root root@sophie:/

Media: Xmms and Xine:
=====================

As most of you know, most Linux distributions no longer ship xmms with
support for playing mp3s.  This is due to the Fraunhofer licensing
fees for mp3 decoding.  However, as an individual, you can easily add
mp3 playback capability to Fedora with these RPMs:

wget
http://www.xmms.org/files/1.2.x/rpm/fc1/xmms-1.2.10-1.i386.rpm
http://www.xmms.org/files/1.2.x/rpm/fc1/xmms-alsa-1.2.10-1.i386.rpm
http://www.xmms.org/files/1.2.x/rpm/fc1/xmms-vorbis-1.2.10-1.i386.rpm
http://www.xmms.org/files/1.2.x/rpm/fc1/xmms-gl-1.2.10-1.i386.rpm

Then, just "rpm -Uvh xmms*.rpm" them onto your system.

watching DVD movies on ones laptop is very nice if you travel, have no
home DVD player, or just want to show your friends how cool Linux is.
Xine has long been my favorite Linux DVD player, but xine in legendary
for being a difficult build from source.  Enter APT.  Debian's apt has
been ported to Fedora, and it makes finding and installing new stuff a
breeze.  Get apt from fedora.us, and install it:

http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/1/apt/apt-0.5.15cnc3-0.1.fr.i386.rpm
http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/1/apt/apt-devel-0.5.15cnc3-0.1.fr.i386.rpm

rpm -Uvh apt-0.5.15cnc3-0.1.fr.i386.rpm
apt-devel-0.5.15cnc3-0.1.fr.i386.rpm

To get a local listing of all the Fedora apt packages you can choose
from, run:

apt-get update

And then, to search that data for the Xine player:

apt-cache search xine dvd
        libdvdcss - A portable abstraction library for DVD decryption.
        libdvdcss-devel - Development files from the libdvdcss DVD
decryption library.
        xine - A free multimedia player.
        xine-lib - Core library for the xine video player
        xine-lib-devel - Development files for the xine library

and then to install xine, and all of its dependencies, and all of the
decryption plugins you'll need for your usual encrypted DVDs like the
Matrix.

apt-get install xine

Galeon, Printing, AA Fonts:
===========================

I really liked the Galeon web browser on my rh7.3 system, and was
rather dismayed at the lack of Galeon in Fedora.  They have replaced
Galeon with the much less functional "Epiphany", which doesn't have
near the flexibility of Galeon, especially with respect to tabs (and
saving tabbed sessions).  Thankfully, fedora.us has a wonderful trove
of packages for Fedora, and there you can find Galeon for Fedora:

http://download.fedora.us/fedora/fedora/1/i386/RPMS.testing/galeon-1.3.11-0.fdr.3.a.fixed.1.i386.rpm

Here at EmperorLinux, we use an in-house system to generate automated
e-mails for quotes, order confirmations, and shipping notices.  The
web form that does this spits out the mailto protocol (RFC 2368),
which as far as I know, only Evolution can handle properly, so we need
to send "mailto" URLs to evolution:
                                                                                                    This setting stored in GConf, in /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto, and if there is no handler set, then the key will not exist, so:

gconftool-2 --type=string --set
/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/command 'evolution %s'
gconftool-2 --type=bool --set /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/enabled
true

We have quite a few printers here, from a high-speed Optra for
printing the manuals, to a dot matrix for shipping labels.  Of course
everything is done in latex and output as postscript files.  We also
have several different ways our printers are connected, so we can
really give the Linux printing subsystem a workout.  The chart below
summarizes how I've configured CUPS on my new Toucan T41 Linux laptop
to talk to a local (parallel-port connected) Laser Jet 2100, a remote
dot matrix, and several postscript printers.  On RH7.3 I had used
"printtool" for this, and in Fedora, printtool is still there, and is
the same as printconf-gui.  printconf-tui is also available.
cupsconfig will give you a different interface to the same printer
configuration data.  All cupsconfig does is run point a web-browser at
http://localhost:631/

Printer            Queue Type       Details            Driver  Notes
----------------   ----- ----       -------            ------  -----
HP Laser Jet 2100  lp    local      /dev/lp0           pxlmono was ljet4
Epson              dots  unix LPD   raw3@192.168.1.25  epson   360x180
Lexmark E312       lex   unix LPD   raw1@192.168.1.25  postscript
Lexmark Optra      optra JetDirect  192.168.1.6:9100   postscript

You may find this handy for printing to remote Unix LPD hosts:
mkdir -m 1777 /var/spool/cups/tmp

apt-cache search gnome-terminal

GNOME control center -> "File Types and Programs" -> Documents/Published
Materials ->

Call me old-fashioned, but I really do not like anti-aliased fonts in
most applications.  Don't get me wrong, I have _always_ used
anti-aliasing in the gv Postscript viewer, but to have all my
terminals and web-browsers be AA is a pain.  It is harder to type
while reading AA fonts, and you can not get as much information on the
page clearly.  You can turn off AA fonts in gnome on a per-process
basis by simply setting the environment variable GDK_USE_XFT=0.  i.e.
run "export GDK_USE_XFT=0; galeon", and you'll have nice sharp fixed
fonts.

Conclusion:
===========

My Toucan T41 Linux laptop has now been serving me well for the past
month, and it is doing everything I need.  I hack, and it compiles
kernels very quickly (ccache).  I've been using 2.6 on it, but that is
another story.  It plays mp3's, oggs, and DVDs.  I can access all our
intranet services via ssh encrypted tunnels, and everything else the
president of a Linux laptop company needs to do to run the show.  Yay!

Note:
=====

The compiled-into-pdf version of these notes will soon be available at
<a
href="http://www.EmperorLinux.com/lincoln/logbook.php">www.EmperorLinux.com/lincoln/logbook.php</a>
                                                                                                    



       -- Lincoln

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