I recently bought a new MSI laptop and I am really pleased with my choice so far.

Since with the previous laptop I managed to kill two of my desired features, long battery life and pretty portable, I decided is time to look really well and see what the market has to offer.

I settled on a MSI PR200WX-058EU which has the following:

• built on a Centrino platform
• Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T8300 @ 2.40GHz
  
• Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN
• Intel mobile chipset
• 3GB of memory (yes, I would have enjoyed 4, but it seems the 32 bit barrier still decides hardware configurations)
• 320GB HDD
• DVD+/-RW
• Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller
• 12" wide screen (1280x800)
• 1 Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
• 8 cell battery by default (long battery life)
  
• 1 USB 2.0 Camera - uses luvc driver
• bluetooth
• 1 card reader
• 3 USB port, 1 HDMI, 1 D-sub 15 connector, 1 PCI Express port, modem port
• fingerprint reader
• an advertised weight of 1.8kg (I weighted it at 2.1kg with the 8 cell battery)
  

In other words a small and mobile powerhouse for which I payed 3800 RON (approx. 1100 ). I'd say not too bad at all.

Thanks to Gon ri Le Bouder and some searches on the internet I concluded that
the brand is not bad at all, and now that I have it I really am sure.

Of course, I installed Debian Lenny on it (I also sent an installation report), and, in spite of the initial problems, I managed to make the laptop work pretty nice, but I am especially excited about the webcam, which works with the linux-uvc driver.


There were some issues, but I managed to fix some them while I have been ignoring some other. The LaptopTestingTeam page for MSI PR200 on the ubuntu wiki was very helpful.
What have I been ignoring?

• it seems that from time to time the battery charge status isincorrect, or acpi report that the AC is plugged in
• headphones don't automatically turn off the speakers
• fingerprint reader is not used yet, but I intent to experiment at some point with it (authentication via the fingerprint would be cool)
  
• the keyboard seems a little bit too hard (but I hope it will loose up with time)
• modem isn't probably working, but I don't think I'll ever try
• there are some issues in gnome-power-manager which cause strange behaviour and grief wrt screen brighness
• sleep doesn't work,but hibernation does
  

What would you do if I'd tell you that the battery lasts 4 hours or even more while the wlan is on and working (browsing and stuff like installing new packages, configs) with the brightness set to minimum?


I am really excited about this and I can say that I think I have found my next generation laptop, so if you're thinking of a cheap mobile powerhouse on which Linux must run, this laptop might be for you.

I find the following to be selling points (for a Linux buyer or others):

• comes with FreeDOS, so no extra money for an OS you don't use
  
• wifi works
• webcam works with luvc
• no big problems during install (the most severe are already fixed)
• long battery life, even when using wifi (4+ hours in browsing+some package installation mode, according to my tests)
• light enough to carry around easily (2.1kg, 2.4kg with charger)
• nice design - some people asked me if I bought a MacBook
• 4 state kill switch for all possible combinations for wifi/bluetooth
• hibernate works with 2.6.24 or newer (sleep doesn't, but I will try a few things later)
  
• there's no mechanical latch for the lid, there is a magnet, so there's no plastic to be broken, the laptop is more robust
• the 8 cell battery is thicker than the regular one, allowing better ventilation
• it seems it doesn't get too hot to put on my lap (still, I am a little afraid of blocking its ventilation due to the fabric of my clothes, so I'll probably try to carry around a hard paperboard or something like that)
• the big resolution 1280x800 (for this screen size) seems to partly compensate for the reduced physical size of the screen (12")
• bright screen

So, thanks again to Gon ri, Debian Installer team, LVM2 maintainers, Ubuntu Laptop Testing team, linux uvc developers, Lilo developers and maintainers, all the nice people who made and still make Debian possible.

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

Ana started to spread the world with current discussions about which KDE in Lenny. Let’s relay on Debian/KDE universe: you can follow the discussion here and participate if you care about Debian STABLE and KDE. It is a hard decision and I gave my opinion. I think it is a good compromise between stability and bleeding edge stuff.

Fathi blogged a reply to Peter in where he kind of “tagged” me to also reply. So I will.

• you can t configure size and appearance of the panel. This is a long-standing problem, but I thought it was fixed.

You can as Fathi writes, but it is … a bit well hidden.

• KMail doesn t interact well with encrypted IMAP accounts. I didn t try much beyond that, because I have no accounts that are not affected by that.

My encrypted IMAP accounts works without any problems on 3 seperate machines. (home workstation, laptop, work workstation). There is a slight packaging issue here though, not all shlibs were proper bumped, so make sure you have 4.0.80-something of all packages.

• Various kicker widgets don’t appear to be available for KDE 4 (yet?).

You have moon applet and fifteen puzzle in extragear-plasma. Eyes-widget seems gone though. Not a big loss. (Or which ones are you talking about?) - and yes, I do see kde4 in Lenny.

I don’t know if Peter tries KDE 4.1 beta1 (4.0.80) but I tend to disagree with some comments.

• you can’t configure size and appearance of the panel. This is a long-standing problem, but I thought it was fixed.

False. See the plasma icon on panel ? click on it and you’ll have what you want:

• In general, there don’t appear to be all that many configuration options available to replicate various behaviors that I have become accustomed to.

Could be nice to be more verbose.

• Rendering problems in the system tray; icons appear on top of each other.

True, but it’s better with each release and not really a showstopper.

• Various kicker widgets don’t appear to be available for KDE 4

Which one do you want ?

• Most applications don’t copy their old settings, but it appears that some do?

Indeed. KDE3 uses .kde as home directory and KDE4 uses .kde4. It is intended to not break your KDE3 until we test upgrade path.

• KMail doesn’t interact well with encrypted IMAP accounts. I didn’t try much beyond that, because I have no accounts that are not affected by that.
• Clicking on an RSS link in Konqueror doesn’t link to Akregator anymore. Probably, various MIME type associations are missing.

I don’t know I continue to use Kontact from KDE3. Modestas and Sune have switched to kde4pim and they found it better than expected.

• I couldn’t get the environment to remember to open terminal windows maximized. Very annoying.

Hmm It works for me. Konsole saves maximized/normal state.

• I couldn’t add any application icons to the panel. I’m not sure where on is supposed to store one’s favorites now.

Make sure you unlock widgets with plasma icon on the top-right corner. Drag and drop from K-Menu to panel. Sebas made a nice rough guide to plasma. Take a look !!!

• So when KDE 4 is actually usable, Debian will be ready. But not for lenny; that would be suicide in my opinion.

KDE4 is more than usable. It contains some glitches but we are far from sucide

So far, if you want to use KDE 4 under Debian, you need to install them from experimental. Under the ground, we prepared up-to-date packages from trunk (soon uploaded) and I took a snapshot of my current desktop: We didn’t know yet if Lenny will be shipped with KDE 4 but we hope it will be in good shape to have it. Everyday, improvements are done and the desktop is enough stable/solid to be used on a day to day basis. On other side, I reported a bug on plasma panel alignment isn’t saved and some hours later, Marco Martin (mart) fixed the issue \o/ Tips: if you want to have a transparent panel, you need to enable compositing.

Qt 4.4.0 rc1 was uploaded yesterday to unstable. It was previously available in experimental. A rework of the packages was done :

• Each Qt module has his own packages
• Webkit and XmlPatterns are shipped
• All sql drivers are provided as plugins
• Examples and demos are shipped built (previously shipped as compressed sources)
• Doxygen tagfile is generated/shipped

Qt4 is built on alpha, amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, s390 and sparc architectures. On other architectures, the build is in progress. It failed to build on mips/mipsel so far. And I confirm: Qt4.4.0 is a buildd killer. It needs 4x the time and double space: Automatic build of qt4-x11_4.4.0~rc1-2 on debian-31.osdl.marist.edu by sbuild/s390 98
[…]
> Build needed 04:19:38, 4733360k disk space vs. Automatic build of qt4-x11_4.3.4-2 on lxdebian.bfinv.de by sbuild/s390 98
[…]
Build needed 01:14:03, 2221884k disk space Enjoy !

Ian, you could have saved time by reading CDBS Documentation. Another useful variable is DEB_DH_INSTALL_ARGS.
DEB_DH_INSTALL_ARGS := --sourcedir=debian/tmp While I’m at some CDBS documentation sharing, to pass LDFLAGS using CDBS way:
DEB_CONFIGURE_SCRIPT_ENV += LDFLAGS="-Wl, --no-undefined -Wl,--as-needed" You can look at the online CDBS gallery website.

Wow, probably the news of the day for me. It’s done and not a joke: http://trolltech.com/28012008/28012008 What’s next now ? When you know Nokia and their consumer electronic product like the N810 uses maemo and mobile phones use Symbian, do they want to switch to Qtopia How KDE will be affected ? Everybody know the relations between Trolltech and KDE. Enough speculations, This is really exciting !

Trolltech has released Qt4.4.0 technical preview (tp1). This release introduces new features like phonon (multimedia framework) with the gstreamer plugin, webkit (web browser engine), xmlpatterns (XQuery and XPath engine), help system with QtClucene (Qt wrapper around clucene), etc … and some enhancements to current modules. It comes with new demos (browser using webkit, mediaplayer using phonon and embeddeddialogs) and new examples (help, ipc, phonon, qtconcurrent and xmlpatterns). It’s worth to take a look closer from a packager point of view:

• phonon can be found in KDE svn and webkit can be found on WebKit svn.

=> It means different release schedule and sources not always synced. It seems we need to choose which branch we want to package (TT/KDE and TT/WebKit).

• xmlpatterns module depends on exceptions support.

=> So far, we build Qt without exceptions support. If you want the xmlpatterns module, you need to enable exceptions support

• a change on Qt4.4.0 breaks ABI on mips architecture.

=> nobody is perfect… If you want to play with this release, you can find packages for Debian (sources and amd64 build at the moment) on: http://people.debian.org/~fabo/debian/qt4-x11_4.4.0~tp1-1/ the regular snaphot of the QWebView (done in 3s): As far as i can see, Qt4.4.0 will rock !

oh, we work too

Congratulations to Yves-Alexis Perez (Corsac), Nicolas Fran ois (Nekral) and Sune Vuorela (Pusling) too \o/ Finally, some accounts (~30 ?) were created and i’m in. Thanks to all people involved in Debian and Kubuntu. In particular (no order) my co-maintainers, sponsors, helpers and application manager:
* Pierre habouzit (Madcoder)
* Mark Purcell (msp)
* Ana Beatriz Guerrero (Ana)
* Enrico Zini (enrico)
* Gustavo Franco (stratus)
* Lo c Minier (lool)
* Jonathan Riddell (riddell)
* Sarah Hobbs (hobbsee)
* and many many others But I don’t forget other people who missed this train: Cyril Brulebois (kibi). Next time, it’s your turn ! (i hope soon).

This post is dedicated to dato (blog), whose picture I forgot to take (thanks Cyril Brulebois for taking this one).

From left to right: Gon ri Le Bouder, me, Lars Wirzenius, Holger Levsen and Adeodato "dato" Sim !

Fathi: While Splashy still requires a framebuffer, it's going to break suspend/resume on various systems. In the bright shiny future of kernel modesetting this ought to stop being an issue, but that's going to take several years. Having the kernel try to write to video memory before you've had an opportunity to do anything to reinitialise it is just asking for trouble, and the kernel can't usefully do that itself right now.

Debian hasn’t adopted yet a default bootup splash utility and we need one to make it more sexy : it’s time to push Splashy
Splashy is a nice boot splashing system. It doesn’t need to patch the kernel and need a single configuration file in XML. Some users complaint about a missing GUI to make it easier to change stuff. here it is: QSplashy \o/ no fear GTK/Gnome people GSplashy exists too ! if you are interested to help to make Splashy, the next bootup splash utility for Debian (and others),
join us: http://splashy.alioth.debian.org/wiki/

Right now, some Debian Developers (and also not yet Developers, like me:), are on
the work sessions in Extremadura, I am on the QA and release teams meeting.

We started in the morning with presentations (see also the schedule). Any comments and suggestions welcomed, please add comments below the post.

Lucas Nussbaum presenting:


Most of us:



And in details, names from left to right. Cyril Brulebois, Gon ri Le Bouder:


Luk Claes, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt, J rg Jaspert, Lars Wirzenius:


Fabio Tranchitella, Bernd Zeimetz, Mario Iseli, Luk Claes:


Filippo Giunchedi, Stefano Zacchiroli, Tzafrir Cohen, Simon Richter, Faidon Liambotis:


And again, so that Faidon is visible:

On Self-Reflection I have a need to write some things down recently, I don’t really know why or so. I have acquired a few new (and great) friends recently, mostly here in Brno. Also, I have more motivation than ever to try hard to live a good life. It has always been a hard way to follow for me, to be all those things that I find great in other people. How they can handle situations smoothly, what they know and what they can do. And it is great to see such people, and yet it is hard to not envy them. But envy not, since it is a great evil. One never knows what the other people have to go through, and it is just plain unfair to envy them. But I am drifting away from the subject at hand. What I have noticed as well, that I have changed in subtle ways, patterns of thinking. Self-reflection is somewhat cautiously sneaking into my mind. Two independent events have reminded me of that today. Recently, I have been participating in online discussion more than I have used to, especially with people I do not know, and with which I often tend to disagree, and this is putting me in a new kind of situation. And to be honest, I am not really handling it all that well. What has made me think about this was Boudewijn Rempt’s comment on the dot. He handled the task at hand so much better than myself, even if it was his ego that was in the line, that has made me actually stop and think about it. And as I have written in that thread, I admire Boudewijn greatly for that calm reaction, of which I would be almost surely not capable. So here I am, trying to learn from that. My memory is indeed very short, but I also take this writing as a way to train that. The second event was that a friend of mine (I do not know him long, but I call him a friend nevertheless, although I know not whether I actually deserve that) has told us something to the effect that one should learn. Meaning that one should learn from own mistakes, and no, I no more see the empty phrase behind those words. There is something in that, and it is a very interesting experience. Going through situations you have encountered and realize where you have made mistakes and what you could have done better. Actually admit, that even though the outcome was fairly good, that you have made some silly things. It is indeed a very interesting experience, to admit a failure when you are not pressed to by any external means. Liberating, maybe. Same goes for things long forgotten. Where you have made mistakes, even though you have been always righteous and positively convinced about always doing the right things. You may be wondering whether I have been on crack all the time, but, well, that is not the case. I cannot tell how this came about, and yes, I have realized those mistakes and again forgotten them and so on and so forth. But hey, I think it may be better this time. If only a little…

Top posters in a few Debian-related Planets:

$ planet-scores.sh 
Planet Debian-FR :
     19 Rapha l Hertzog
      4 Roland Mas
      3 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      2 Gr gory Colpart
      2 Alexis Sukrieh

Sometimes I think this should be renamed Planet Buxy.

Planet Debian-FR (utilisateurs) :
     10 Julien Candelier
      8 Emilien Macchi
      4 Guilhem Bonnefille
      3 Shams Fantar
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Olivier Berger (perso)
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Jean-Baptiste H tier (djib)
      1 Eric Veiras Galisson

Newly added contributors to that planet have all their recent articles aggregated, not only the ones they wrote since they were added.

Planet Debian :
     40 Christian Perrier
      2 Russell Coker
      2 Raphael Geissert
      1 Wouter Verhelst
      1 Steve Kemp
      1 Romain Francoise
      1 NOKUBI Takatsugu
      1 Michal  iha 
      1 John Goerzen
      1 Joey Schulze
      1 Gerfried Fuchs
      1 Fathi Boudra
      1 Enrico Zini
      1 Emanuele Rocca
      1 Dirk Eddelbuettel
      1 David Welton
      1 Christine Spang
      1 Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
      1 Adam Rosi-Kessel

Planet "Christian loves rugby".

debian-community.org :
      4 Holger Levsen
      3 Andrew Donnellan
      2 Evgeni Golov
      1 Wolfgang Lonien
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Martin Albisetti
      1 Marcos Marado
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Cord Beermann
      1 Benjamin A'Lee
      1 Andreas Putzo
$

I know I have an encoding problem on some planets, but that script is a very basic curl+shell+sed+grep+recode+sort+uniq pipeline, and I only use it for the amusement value. Maybe I'll recode it with a proper RSS parser some day if I feel utterly bored.

This is the traditional Hello Planet \o/ For people who don’t know me, I’m a Debian Qt/KDE/KDE Extras/Desktop teams member,
trying to make our beloved distribution more sexy. After this *very* short introduction, time to go back to the real work,
and wait for the DAM to create my account (like around 26 other DAMnified people).