oh no!

Disclaimer: Writing this late at night. Style may suck. The information I provide may not be helpful to you. This is just my own, personal experience with the device.

What I pointed out some time ago now became official: Dell now sells their XPS M1330 laptop series with Ubuntu 7.10 preinstalled.

I already ordered the exact same laptop some weeks ago, because I needed it as fast as possible and thus couldn’t wait for it being offered with Ubuntu instead of Vista.

The parcel arrived on monday last week and I have been testing my new device since.
My first impression was: Wow!

My setup is this. As you can see, long battery life is important to me. (WLED-Display consumes 20% less power, according to Dell. Intel-Graphics don’t need as much power as NVIDIA. I got an additional battery, too.)

Here’s my experience in more detail:
I fired up the machine and accidentially it booted right into Vista.
“Do you want to accept the licence agreement?” [ ] yes or [ ] yes.
Ok. Hard reboot in order not to accept the agreement (UI was lacking any kind of “abort” button), inserting ubuntu disc, booting up the alternate installer.
After I finished setting up (i.e. formatting, partitioning and encrypthing) my HDD the installation went on without any problems.

I booted into ubuntu the first time and tried some things. These are the things that work:
- Graphics (not *yet* with Compiz out-of-the-box, but 3D-Accelration is available out-of-the-box. Compiz needs manual tweaking in 7.10)
- Resolution detected correctly
- VGA-Out
- USB 2.0
- Audio
- Multimedia-keys (those are awesome! All of them work.)
- Remote Control (I actually played tetris with it, controlled rhythmbox and read some slides)
- Bluetooth
- Wireless
- Ethernet
- Card-Reader (Tested it with a fellow-students card. Think it was SD. Not sure.)
- Optical Drive (Reading and writing to optical media. Only tried burning a CD this far.)
- Keyboard-Shortcuts (i.e. brightness of display, etc.)
- Webcam
- Suspend
- Touchpad

What does not work out of the box but with (manually installed) drivers:
- Biometric Fingerprint (I think the technology sucks. I don’t use it. It’s not that useful to me.)

What does not work:
- I havn’t found any component that doesn’t work up to now.

What was not tested up to now:
- Express-Card-Slot
- Burning a DVD
- HDMI-Out
- Did I miss anything?

It is quite a pleasure to work with the device. It is powerful and responsive. The keyboard-layout is great.
6-cell-battery provides roughly 3:20h of power (normal use).
9-cell-battery provides between 4:00 and 7:00h of power, depending on use. I have an average of 6:00h.
Those times were achieved without any tweaking.
Your results may and will vary.

The glossy display - in my opinion - doesn’t suck as much as I expected. I can work with it without any problems.

So, is it a nice piece of technology? Definitely!
Would I buy it again? Definitely.
Hardware Support is just great in Ubuntu. Everything works this far, mostly out of the box.
Good buy.

If any of you wants to order this device with Vista, here’s an interesting offer for you:
Order it with Ubuntu and buy my Vista, Works, etc. software. I declined the license agreement and didn’t open the cover in which the CDs come in. In case you are interested, I won’t demand the whole price for the software, of course… That could save you some bucks. I don’t need the software but sadly had no option to buy the machine without it, so you can have it for a good prize.

If you have any questions, just drop a comment.

(P.S.: If you consider buying this device make sure you use the Codes available on the net. That will cut 10% off the prize!)

My laptop, a HP Compaq nx6125, has served me for quite some time now.
Most of the time it was a pleasent experience to work with it. (It has its glitches, though.)
Being a student running around in my university all day I need a small laptop with extra-long battery-life. My nx6125 is a 15 inch laptop with 1:30 hours of battery supply. That is a pain for me.
So I decided to get a newer and better laptop for my studies.

After quite some time of comparing different laptops I decided for the Dell XPS M1330.
I was able to order it with all the features I wanted, including Intel graphics, Intel wifi, etc.
Unfortunately, I was not able to get it with Ubuntu instead of Vista. All the guys and ladies I had a call with said it was not possible to do that.
I asked if I could get a refund after having purchased it, but all of them said that was impossible too.
Frankly speaking, that sucks.
I do not want Vista, I will not use it and therefore I do not want to pay for it.
Having read that others succeeded in getting a refund back from Dell I will at least try it after the parcel has arrived.

Unfortunately I need the notebook as soon as possible, so I had no option to wait and ordered it.
Here is the happy part of the story: The last guy I had on the phone told me Dell was going to sell the XPS M1330 with Ubuntu preinstalled in january 2008.

That would be cool for some of you, since it is a *very* cool piece of hardware.
As I said I was not that lucky because I need the laptop soon.
Just wanted to share the information.

(Please keep in mind that this information came from Dell Germany and is no official statement or a promise.)

Are there any experiences with refunding Windows with Dell?

After my last blog posting we received quite a bit of feedback (bug reports, code and amazing artwork).

Since many people want to help we need a way to communicate with each other.
For that we now set up a mailing list to which you can subscribe.
You can subscribe yourself here.
I think the mailinglist will cover everything related to MeMaker (Development, GUI-Design, Infos about the application, Infos about bugfixing, Artwork-things, et cetera)
It would be great if you could write a brief introduction to yourself as first post to the list (no curriculum vitae, just very brief) and tell us how you want to contribute. We don’t sign contracts! This is a very easy and relaxed project and we don’t want to scare you off with that list. It just makes things easier.
So make sure you subscribe!
Our code, bugs and blueprints will still remain on launchpad, of course.

If you are one of the important artwork guys, make sure to read this.
(This is actually not yet finished, but it gives you basic information on how to create proper artwork.)
I especially recommend the “vacuum defs” section
Vacuum defs is an amazing feature of Inkscape.
It lets you tidy your svg-code up and remove all definitions that are not needed.
Often that shrinks the size quite a bit.
(Yesterday I did that with some files and they shrinked from 150kb to 5kb! Is that great? With just removing things that are not needed at all!)
So please, use vacuum defs. It’s just a click away (File -> Vacuum Defs) and has many advantages (smaller files, faster parsing of files which makes the application faster.)

We also fixed some bugs. Thanks to everyone who helped finding them. And of course thanks to our artists. Please continue to contribute. Furthermore, I want to encourage everyone of you to help us. Just contact us. It’s easy and you don’t need to be a kernel-hacker!

Some of you may remember that some time ago I introduced a new software-project on this blog.
We have been pretty active since then and some things have changed (positively).

Click here for a presentation-video! (2,5 MB. ogg theora)

First of all: MeMaker now uses cairo to render the images. That makes the whole thing a lot cleaner, easier and the images are now rendered properly (hopefully :)).
Another new feature are the new up- and down-arrows with which you can move your faces mouth / nose / head / whatever up and down within the face.
Behind the scenes we now use a new version of motor, our backend that actually puts all the images together. This new version has been improved a lot (complete rewrite). MeMaker now tries to automatically put the features (The elements of your face. We call them features.) in correct order without delay.
Another reason for the rewrite (despite the fact that the old version was not good enough) is, that we used python-lxml as an additional dependency (2 MB) which is not installed by default on ubuntu.
We now use pythons in-built functionality, DOM, to handle the xml-code.
Now we don’t have any dependencies to packages that are not in ubuntus main-repository. (I think all dependencies are installed by default. But not sure on that. If not, we will try to have only dependencies that are installed by default.)
You sure ask why we were doing that?

Well, there has been some great news:
There is a spec out there. The goal of the spec is to have a facebrowser for gdm-login in Hardy Heron, the upcoming version of ubuntu (April 08).
The spec says: A user should not need to enter his username and password, but just click on an image of his face (and enter his password if set).
The spec looks quite interesting (there is some concept-art). The most interesting part (for me, of course) is this:

To increase the level of integration tools like MeMaker and cheese are meant to be added to gdm-utilities like gdm-setup and gnome-about-me, so users have very easy means to provide a nice image for their entry in the face-browser.

That means: If you can’t or do not want to select an image of yourself from a file, don’t want to take one with your webcam and don’t want to use one of the stock-images, you can use MeMaker to create a cartoon-style representation of yourself which then is used for your login and in applications like Pidgin.
So, if there’s enough time to implement that spec completely, MeMaker will be part of ubuntu.

For that to happen we of course need your help, yes I mean you.
1. We need artwork. Lots of artwork. If you want to contribute to something that many people will likely see in their favorite linux-distro, you can help us by creating simple, good-looking svg-images which represent features of a face.
If you want to do so, check this introduction on how to get started. (Or contact us.)

2. We need bug-reports. Loads of bug-reports. Every software has bugs and so has MeMaker. Download MeMaker, start it and play with it. If you find any bugs, just report them here.
We need a pretty stable application. (For instructions on how to download a recent version of MeMaker see below.)

Please help us. Your name will of course be mentioned in the credits, unless you don’t wish that.

Instructions on how to download and run MeMaker:
MeMaker uses the bzr version-control-system.
If you don’t have bzr installed just open up a terminal and type:
sudo aptitude install bzr
Then download a recent copy of MeMaker:
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~encompass/memaker/trunk MeMaker
You should then have a folder called ‘MeMaker’ within the folder where you executed the above command.
Change into that directories src-subdirectory:
cd MeMaker/src
And launch the program:
python memaker.py
Now don’t close the terminal from which you launched the program or it will quit. This terminal gives you information on what goes wrong (in case something goes wrong). If you report a bug, please copy the contents of that terminal into a file and attach it to your bugreport.
Be aware that this is still an alpha version.

With the above bzr branch-command you get the latest version available at the time you executed the command. If you want to update your copy of MeMaker (e.g. after a bugfix) you can just change into that directory and do:

bzr pull

If you have any questions, contact us.
Check http://launchpad.net/memaker

To make it short:
Mandriva made quite a good deal with Nigeria. The deal was to prepare 17.000 Classmate-PCs (similiar to OLPC) with an optimised install of Mandrivas own linux-distribution.
Now, all of a sudden, the Nigerian government “decided” to install Microsoft Windows XP on those Laptops after their delivery.
I would love to know why they are going to replace an optimised and perfectly suited operating system for that specific machine with Windows XP. (Please bear in mind that those machines are not very powerful.)

Please take the time to read an open letter, written by François Bancilhon, Mandrivas CEO (I guess), where he adresses Steven Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. Here is the link: http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/

Things like these really suck.
I hope Mandriva can convince the Nigerian government that they made a poor decision.

Man, it was quite a cool event.
I like meeting people I only see on the internet and I met quite a lot of them.
The first German ubucon went very good, as far as I am concerned. It was much fun and I even learned many new things. We had more than 300 visitors of any age (excluding babies, from 13 to ??. Can’t exactly recall the oldest age.)

If you want videos / presentation-material, please stay tuned. They will be digitally enhanced and uploaded soon. I will inform you as soon as that happens.
Photos can be found here: http://linuxwiki.de/Ubucon2007/Feedback
Please bear in mind that is a wiki. So if you have taken photos on your own, please upload and link them there. (If you don’t have webspace, just contact me.)
If you receive 3sat on your TV, make sure you watch “neues”. (We had a team there with cameras.)

I was too busy to blog the hell out of the event, but fortunately suzan wasn’t. If you want her live-blogpostings with extra images you can get them here: http://mylinux.suzansworld.com/

We would appreciate any feedback you can provide, be it good or bad. Please check www.ubucon.de Note that the poll isn’t what I meant by saying “feedback”. In the upper right corner is a link called “Meinung” where you can easily tell us what you think has to be improved for the next time.
Give us constructive critizism!

Looking forward to next year.

Use Bittorrent!

BANANAS!

Just as a quick note: I am happy to announce two more speeches that will be held during the first German ubuntu conference this weekend (w00t!).

You may already know Nick Bauermeister since he wrote some pretty interesting postings concerning Compiz Fusion on his blog (which is by the way aggregated on Planet Ubuntu Users) . I am glad he prepares himself for a presentation about CF on saturday, 16.00 - 17.00 o’ clock.

The second new talk will be provided by Christian Perle, dealing with a topic which is explained best by the title of his speech: “It’s all the manufacturer’s fault? - Hardware unter Linux”. Why does some hardware work out of the box while other fails? What about WLAN? I am looking forward to it.

There will be a Key-Signing-Event as well.

If you fetch a DECT-Telephone we can even talk to each other on the phone. We will have a local telephone-network, proudly presented by Eventphone. You may already know this technique from the famous “Chaos Communication Congress”. If you want to talk to me, just dial 1337, which I registered for myself.

If you still need a place to sleep and can’t find any, just drop me a comment and I will provide information you may find interesting.

So your checklist is:
[ ] make sure you will be on #ubuntu-release-party tomorrow.
[ ] make sure to be in Krefeld, Germany this weekend, celebrating the new Ubuntu release and having fun at the first german ubuntu conference.

<historical_moment>
I am very proud to announce to you the first alpha version of MeMaker! MeMaker is a tool that lets you easily create an avatar of yourself by just selecting a face, ears, eyes and so on. It then automatically merges these parts of your face together. Once you are satisfied with the result you can save the file to your disk. The coolest part, however, is, that this works with Scalable Vector Graphics (svg) which you can rescale to whatever size you want, without a loss of quality. The program is written in python and still is something between alpha and beta, released under GPLv3. We would appreciate any kind of support. (Bug reports, graphics contribution!!, packaging!, code, …)
The project was started by Jason, who wrote most of the code, graphics and GUI (so far, hehe). I joined to write the engine that actually does the merging. That’s where Aaron Spike (an Inkscape Dev) came across and helped us quite a bit (he still does. Thanks!).
</historical_moment>

So, this is done. Now comes the part that you have long awaited.
After my last successfull riddle I decided to do it again. This is a good opportunity to get your hands on MeMaker.
With MeMaker, I created an image of one of our top-bloggers here at planet.ubuntu.com (his postings are excellent).
Try to guess who it is.
Here’s the image (converted to png for compatibility reasons):

And here is a small (2.5 MB ogg) video that shows the process of creating the above avatar. (Thanks to Jason. If you hear anything, that’s his finnish class. )

You see that we still have very few graphics. If you are an artist, please join us and create small graphics that we can use! You can contact us in #memaker on irc.freenode.net

(By the way: I switched to another theme. The one I previously used wasn’t that good in combination with images and other stuff.)

Now, who is this?