openSUSE 11.2 on an HP Mini 210 1010NR

I recently acquired an HP Mini 210 1010NR, which is a modern Pine Trail netbook.

Specs:

  • Intel Atom N450 processor (1.66 GHz, HT enabled)
  • 1 GB (1024 MB) RAM
  • 160 GB HDD
  • 10.1″ LCD display (1024×600 resolution, fairly standard)
  • 1.3MP webcam
  • HP Synaptics Clickpad
  • Broadcom 802.11g wireless
  • 10/100 Ethernet
  • Intel HD graphics (3100 I do believe)

What works out of the box:

  • Most everything

What doesn’t:

  • Wifi
  • Touchpad

Fixing things!
The install went fairly smoothly. I have an HP DVD-RAM USB drive which helped alot (it came with my HP Envy 15 laptop…). Once installed, wifi can be made to work on a clean install of openSUSE 11.2 by following these steps:

  1. Connect to the internet via ethernet
  2. Update the kernel-default package to the most current package. You can run zypper up or Yast Online Update or preferred update mechanism and just install all the updates as well.
  3. Add the Packman repository
  4. Install the broadcom-wl and broadcom-wl-kmp-default packages (must do both, or you will change your kernel to the debug kernel. Don’t want that now…)
  5. Reboot

Voila, you have working wifi

The touchpad is a bit more tricky, since its not really a touchpad, but Synaptics new ClickPad found in the HP Mini and HP Envy lines. While openSUSE 11.3 will fix this correctly, you can get it working by doing the following:

  1. Install kernel-source, make, and gcc
  2. Update /usr/src/linux/drivers/input/mouse/synaptics.c and /usr/src/linux/drivers/input/mouse/synaptics.h with the files in the attached zip: Desktop.zip
  3. Using README.SUSE in the kernel source directory, configure, build, and install your custom kernel
  4. Reboot
  5. Voila, a working touchpad. No multitouch, but hey, like I said, openSUSE 11.3 will be working properly with this fancy touchpad.

Facebook for Android

So.. Facebook and Google have finally released a Facebook application for Android. For this review, I’m testing on the following:


T-Mobile G1 (on the T-Mobile USA network in Atlanta, so full 3G)
OS: Android 1.6
It’s a very basic application, much more so than the Facebook application for Blackberry (which I used through several iterations, owning a Blackberry Pearl 8100, Blackberry Curve 8320, Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220, and using a Blackberry 8800 from work). It doesn’t let you see your Facebook inbox for one, but let’s hope Facebook (well, the Google engineer that is working at Facebook for this application) gets around to adding that feature soon. However, it is very quick at posting messages and loading your news feed (the page you see), and it does let you upload photos and videos (very well integrated with Android) and comment/like on posts. It even has a home screen widget that has a textfield for updating your status and showing recent status updates.

PackageKit

jpr noted on his blog that I’ve been interesting in integrating PackageKit into the distribution. This is one of my many goals for making openSUSE a better operating system than it already is.
Currently, I’m waiting for PolicyKit 0.5 and dbus 1.1.2 to get into the distribution. After that, we can write a zypp backend, test it, and send it upstream to PackageKit, since they want backends to be part of PackageKit themselves. Our various updaters can be replaced by PackageKit frontends, and Benji‘s One-Click Install can be simplified since it can use PackageKit to set up the repositories and install the packages, instead of a nasty hack of calling another yast module via a longish command.

Policy Editor Module Help

I'm currently working on the policy-editor module for YaST (to edit
PolicyKit configuration), and I want some input on some of the design
decisions:
1. I'm using python code for the loading and parsing of the policy
description files (its XML, and DOM makes parsing XML a dream). The
policy description files describes the actions, provides a
(translateable) description, and sane defaults.
That part I'm fine with, since I can use YCP to interact with and load
the model from the python code.
2. The actual policies as defined by the system administrator is located
in /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf
Now my question is, how should I go about generating this file? Should
we use this file directly, or use sysconfig to generate the file
dynamically, and potentially provide for a "local include" so that you
can include custom policies not set via YaST?

OpenSUSE 10.3 Package : mugshot

I added mugshot to my OBS repo: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jhaygood/openSUSE_10.3/
For more information on mugshot: http://www.mugshot.org
Any other cool packages I should add?

Another reason the iPod (and its creator!) sucks

While I like some of Apple’s engineering’s efforts (webkit.org mostly), some of their other creations suck.
The new Apple iPod Touch was released the other day. Apple apparently changed the database format of the on device media library to require some secret cryptography so that it only works with Apple iTunes, preventing other players (such as Banshee) from properly working with the iPod. I don’t personally own an iPod for many reasons, and this is just another reason to boycott the Apple iPod.