René Rebe

For a year we wondered why our Konica Minolta 2430DL produced vertical stripes. As we mostly printed regular, every-day office letters it did not mattered too much, as it was mostly visible in more saturated areas. We mostly waved it off as: it’s probably just the empty color toner (which was at 0% for many months, but still printing in principle).

Today, however, we wanted to print some invitations, and as the Xerox Phaser 8500 had it’s (usual) hick-ups with the custom page size we decided to go with the laser printer and started to get rid of the stripes by installing a new magenta toner, but no change. As we also had a new drum in the storage we replaced this in the hope to finally clear ths stripes, but still no go.

After some more back and forth and excessive googling (which was not too helpful anyway) we further searched for replaceable consumables but did not found any. This pointed us to further disassemble the printer and we indeed found places one can self-service and clean: Most particularly the laser!

And cleaning the laser it was: After we wiped off the laser segment under the drum cartridge the stripes where finally gone! We now wonder why it is not more prominently noted more often (in magazines and the net, but also the manual) that one is supposed to wipe of some hidden laser under some “attention: don’t touch - hot!” warning signs, …

So the new drum cartridge and magenta toner could be put back into the storage, the old consumable still producing solid colors, even with the color toner cartridges indicated with 0% for about a year, now.

However, in the end we still convinced the Xerox Phaser 8500 to print our custom paper as the colors where way superior. At least we finally know where the stripes came from, and can print stripe-less on the laser printer as well.

So Microsoft finally got some TV advertisements out of the door that does not suck completely.

However, I like to add: you get what you pay for. Of course a Ferrari is no Mercedes is no Tata Nano (Indian) car. One usually get what one is paying for. And in case of this el-cheapo PC’s it’s a irregularly shaped plastic case, full of least cost hardware, with usually some design glitches (such as at least noisy audio output, up to a just-VGA external video output to the worst case: system bus noise or overheating problems causing medium to long term system stability issues). And you still pay the Microsoft Windows OS software tax, anyway.

On the other hand I even brought PowerPC based Apple computer back in the days, not even to run Mac OS - no, I just required reliable hardware, with superb battery life for my Linux needs. Back in the days the Mac OS (9 and early OS X) discs went into the trash immediately. But bug free, solidly built hardware with suspending to RAM capabilities and up to 5 hours battery life even under Linux was just outstanding back in the days.

And this technical matters aside, I really wonder if another price race to the bottom is in Microsoft’s (and the remaining “PC”/IT industries) interest after the NetB..k and NetTop inflation, …

Today Aaron Plattner from NVidia stated on the X.org mailing list when asked:

if there will be XVideo support for G90 cards to the nvidia free 2D driver

just:

XV on those GPUs requires the 3D engine, and setting that up is too complicated to be within the scope of that driver.

This let me to make some harsh notes what is “in the scope” of a driver and what’s not. Whether the closed source NVidia driver for U*ix-like systems is a favorable way to support (this) class of operating systems, or whether it has problems.

For me the Intel and ATi driver (or for that matter even the superb Matrox driver 10 years ago) always worked well. Of course the latest greatest drivers might have uncovered some compositing performance (or the like) regressions. But that’s the fast lane of the open source way of life. However, at least the availability of source allows to choose a suitable, working one, and also to fix such issues as they appear and invent in this area.

The quality is influenced by many factors, for me the source availability is one of the most important ones - without it many other factors (such as security among others) are hard to determine anyway. And on another side the NVidia driver rarely worked at all. Mostly because due to the sheer lack of x86 hardware on my side in the past (I stuck to PowerPC and SPARC for multiple reasons), and for the few AMD/Intel boxes other ABI incompatibility with the latest X.org server and/or OS kernel on the other side often came in between.

For me this boils down to a near zero usability of the binary-only nvidia drivers.

Let’s compare the GPU situation with classic CPUs:

If the vendors in the CPU-land would act like some of the vendors in the GPU-world still behave today, we would still not now how to enable the i386 protected mode, nor how-to use vector instructions or other new features of modern CPUs. If all programming material for CPUs would be hidden by the manufacturers, we also would only have very few operating systems, like Windows and Mac OS X, for example. Nothing like Linux or the BSDs - simply because few would know how to utilize the real power. And all programs would be limited to just utilitze what the vendor devices to expose to some form of driver API. Like the PC BIOS. Oh yeah - the VGA / VEAS BIOS. What a lovely dream.

It is no wonder GPGPU did not yet really take off and is not in wider use today: When utilizing it means calling into a VESA BIOS sort-of-thing and no-one knows what’s going on behind, how to debug or if it works tomorrow or the next computer nearby. And when innovators in operating system design have no access to proper register level documentation.

Just my 2 € cents on the matter, any why I’ll continue to strictly purchase only, what has open specs available. For drivers I can write, debug, review and improve. For hardware I can utilize in my OS and tomorrow, even when the vendor wants to phase it out.

So I eventually got myself one of those cheap sub-notebooks (yet those kind a NetB..ks) and had to look for something suitable to carry it along.

Turned out most of the gerneral purpose bags out there are pretty ugly - well, in my opinion at least anyway. So it took some time to actually find something I would want to be seen with out in the world at all. Yeah, yeah - I know the result of (too many?) years on Apple hardware kind of design obsesssion …

Anyway, the choice I ended up with is a black Bree Punch 52 - made out of trunk awning. A little like a messenger bag on diet.

Just yesterday I took the first look on a Samsung NC20, the first commercial device spotting a VIA Nano CPU - finally. However, I was surprised to find the CPU not indicating the VMX/VT extension to accelerate virtualization in hardware. Let’s hope the early BIOS version just forgets to enable it and there are still hopes to have a tiny device capable to run virtual machines containers for professional work (running virtual machines for security or work on projects) abroad.

Well, yesterday night I finally updated my 3G iPhone to the 2.2.1 firmware - mostly because I have bug reports pending over at Apple, where some are said to be fixed in the latest 2.2.1 FW update.

So after the usually too lengthy backup, update and restore cycle (why can’t they just send delta updates over-the-air as they do for regular, real Macs?) I was left with my iPhone not wanting to lock on a provider in Germany, and no - I’m not running it unlocked or jail-broken but with the regular T-Mobile contract here in Germany (sigh!).

Anyway, as the “reset network preferences” and googling was not of help I decided to restore without replaying the backup, and voila: it worked, locked to the all expensive T-Mobile cellular network again. Though this left me with all of my preferences and particularly my not yet downloaded photos missing. Thanks god others already created some nifty iPhone backup decoder!

Even years before the recent NetB..k ^W sub-sub-notebook storm - kind of initiated by unfortunate Asus EeePC - I already used and enjoyed one. No, not the initial, real Psion NetBook (although I had a Psion Revo at that time, …), but the MSI MegaBook S270.

It was about the size of the 10″ modern flavors and compared to the most ugly Asus EeePC even had a slick and slim design, including a quite thin metallic display cover.

It’s just now - comparing all the many variants today for family and friends asking for suggestions - for me to notice what I was already enjoying back in the days.

I’m waiting for many years now for Apple to release a sub-notebook replacement for the formerly quite handy 12″ PowerBook that is EOL from Apple’s side.

However, for some reason Apple is just not getting one pushed out. The only thing they want to sell to us is this awful MacBook Air that is just thin, but not sub-sized and due it’s outside dimensions not too useful in a plane or otherwise abroad (at least for my use cases, anyway).

Thanks to some PC vendors sub-notebooks finally start to reach a decent quality to fill this gap:

Booth the Sony Vaio VGN-P and the HP Mini 2140 are reasonably sized (or tiny), with still a decently sized keyboard to type and of good build quality. Booth also worth a second look.

While the Sony Vaio achives an amazingly tiny outer dimension it even comes with an ultra low voltage Aton Z5xx that additionally features the VT extension and results in a quite reasonable battery life for this pocket PC (nearly 4h on the standard, and up to about 8h with an optional higher capacity battery pack). Despite it’s super tiny size it even brings a WWAN - 3G - chip and GPS! The only downsides are the exorbitant price (in Germany anyway) and Intel’s Pulsbo chipset with PowerVR graphic for which there exists no open source accelerated graphic driver, yet.

The HP Mini 2140 on the other hand is a less expensive choice, but less compact. The regular Atom used, however, features neither 64bit nor VT. While it comes without 3G and GPS, it is of pretty reasonable built quality and design. Over its preceedor (the HP Mini 2133) it also increases the display size to a reasonable level (up from 8 inch to 10) and replaced the aging and hot VIA C7 CPU with the Intel Atom that has slightly more power and runs cooler. While keeping the superb keyboard and compact touchpad (with buttons on the side).

Though I got hands on some pre-sales models of booth I will still have to wait for regular sales to kick in in Germany, as well as the HD screen option for the HP Mini 2140 (1366×768, instead of the SD 1024×600 model) to become available at all.

Well - and while I continue to wait for those to become available, who knows what else is happening on the market till then: VIA Nano anyone? Endurable case design from another vendor, too?

I was keeping an eye on those cheap PC sub-notebooks (often called Net…, however a trademark of another UK-based company), but just recently noticed that the cheap Intel Atom variants used in those computers have neither 64 bit (x86-64, AMD64, Intel E64T, x64, or however you want to abbreviate it) nor the hardware assisted Virtualization Technology (VT). 64 bit support is handy for running the same, modern software as you run on a workstation and also offers a performance advantage due more CPU registers and potentially moving twice the data per clock cycle. VT on the other hand brings the popular open-source virtualizer Qemu up to speed via the help of KVM making use of said hardware assistance.

Hower the N (low-voltage) versions used in those tiny and cheap PC notebooks comes with booth disabled. Only the more expensive Z (ultra-low-voltage) flavors - most often used in higher end UMPCs - comes with at least the VT extension available. Only the “regular” Atoms (without N or Z) do have 64bit mode, however no VT extension.

Summary:
Intel Atom 200: E64T; no VT
Intel Atom N27x: no E64T, no VT
Intel Atom Z5xx: no E64T, but VT (except Z500 and Z510 which do not feature VT)

I wonder how they came to this silicon feature inheritance - what a mess.

Too bad the VIA Nano is coming so late to market: it is advertised to feature both - 64 bit and VT.

The first non x86 machine of mine was a 270MHz Ultra SPARC 5, that over the early years was tuned up a little with a 360MHz UltraSparc IIi, some additional RAM (to 256MB) and an Adapted SCSI controller with a U160 IBM disk. As the Adaptect controller has no OpenFirmware ROM I had to keep an IDE drive for booting, and thus just pluged a spare 2.5″ laptop disk over the floppy which just holds the /boot partition. Recently, however I noticed SILO look extraordinarily long to load while the IDE drive made very disgusting clicking sounds. I figured I’d better replace that drive soon before I have a non-booting SPARC and got a 512MB IDE flash module (after all I just need it to hold SILO, the kernel and the initrd. However, to my suprise, freshly formated with a Sun disklabel generated by fdisk the OpenFirmware would just hang during boot, not loading anything of SILO at all. After some back and forth with my T2 sparc64 recovery CD, the old fashioned regular disk and Google not spitting out anything useful for troubleshooting this problem, I just manually edited the disklabel to another CHS geometry than auto-detected and it just worked again. Puh!

For the records, the (Model=TRANSCEND) flash drive fakes to have CHS=993/16/63 and cfdisk happily fills this values into the partition label, however my former disklabel had 255 heads encoded and thus I manually tweaked the flash disks label to 255 heads, likewise: CHS=62/255/63.

Hope that helps others with ancient hardware.