Back to Linux on MiLeap

(Ha, finally, got some time to quickly jot this down!)

Almost one year ago I had a pressing need for a fully functional software stack for MiLeap in which I could do some real work (and some play), so after evaluating Ubuntu (at that time 7.10 [the good one] and then 8.04 [bad experience]) I shifted MiLeap to Vista (see the post here). For this post I got some pretty immature comments from people who really do not understand what a user needs (you can also read the comments and my reply in the post).

In the mean time I tried other distribution (Puppy Linux was the one that worked best). But I wanted to try a more main stream distribution. I tried Ubuntu netbook remix in the mean time but was not satisfied. Also I do not have any plans of upgrading the Vista HB on this machine to Win 7 as it doesn't meet the minimum advertised system requirements of 1GHz processor (MiLeap has 900 MHz Celeron ULV processor).

As I got a new machine for my work purposes (Dell Studio XPS), I decided to do a fresh clean install of Ubuntu netbook remix on MiLeap. But I must say that this was a complete disaster. One of the primary requirements for me to use a distribution is Skype should work without any glitch. UNR failed miserably with it, and in the attempt to configure the sound settings I manged to crash the UNR desktop and I had no time what-so-ever to spend in fixing it. Later on I figured out that UNR's system requirement is an Intel Atom processor (minimum) [http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr], so no point fiddling with it either.

Next up tried Xbuntu, everything worked great. Except that the UI looked pretty sluggish and arcane. I needed a modern desktop environment and which is quite responsive. So after perusal from one of my friends (who actually wants me to try OpenSuse instead), I went ahead and installed KDE 4.3 from the Kubuntu development repository. And I am amazed, but this is exactly what I needed. Though there still are a few bug in KDE, and some plasmoids crash suddenly, this is a fairly stable system. Well needless to say, my primary requirement, Skype, works like a charm.




I am still wondering ... I seem to have missed the wonderful KDE for quite some time (6 years since I have been using GNOME as the only DE!)...


Note: My current MiLeap configuration is a bit different from one what I originally purchased. The original one has 512 MB RAM, while my current one has 2GB of RAM. So I have no idea how KDE4.3 will behave on the original MiLeap configuration. In the mean time I would be trying OpenSuse on my Mac with KDE 4.3 ... more on this when I get some more spare time now!

PS: This was written using Chrome 3.0 (in-progress version) for Linux running in KDE. I am not sure why, but Firefox is too sluggish on MiLeap (windows or linux), mostly because of a slow disk.

Update: Downgraded MiLeap L to 1GB RAM and it still works well. I think upgrading the RAM to 2GB on MiLeap is not really beneficial unless you intend to run Vista or do some serious programming, both of these are ruled out for me. Hibernation also works without any problems, though it seems to take longer time to wake up from hibernation than clean boot. In any case, I am beginning to like KDE, its just a fresh breath of air :)

I am using a Mac!

I had always thought that I would never own a Mac. Well that is still partly true, but now I do have an old Mac that I bought for $260. When I was in India, I did think that, given the price factor of a new Mac, I would never buy a Mac. But recently I moved over to Oz and though that investing about 3K on MacBook Air would be good idea. But then I dropped the idea completely as the only reason for which I wanted to get it (the Nvidia mobile 9600 graphics processor) was not really good: it only had 128MB VRAM. That meant I would not really be able to do CUDA programming on it.

As far as laptop was concerned, my Mi Leap-L (now dual booted with Vista and Ubuntu 8.10) are great for my work and for communication back home. But I still wanted to try Mac. And Lol, the CS department came out with an old Mac sale :) This is iBookG4, 12.1" (not the new Intel once), but pretty cool .. Am testing it out, so may post some more info. at a later time :)

Switching form Ubuntu to Windows Vista! (...installing Vista on HCL MiLeap-L)

I never thought that anybody will ever write such a post! And I would have considered myself to be the last person to ever think of making the switch.

But it happened. I have been using Windows Vista Home Basic on my HCL MiLeap-L, which originally came loaded with Ubuntu 7.10 which I had upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 very recently. The switch was not a single day decision. I was using Ubuntu on my MiLeap of quite a time, in fact ever since I purchased it, thats about six months ago. Over the time I realised that I was spending more and more time configuring and fine tuning the Ubuntu installation than actually getting any real work done. True, I learned (majority of the times re-learned) many a things, but I just felt that all this was a complete waste of time. The Ububtu updates are one of the most horrid experiences; they can come any time (unlike scheduled release of Windows updates) and they are big all the time (10s or 100s or MBs!). Then as I mentioned in this post, that I had to recompile the rt73 drivers for appropriately supporting wi-fi ad-hoc mode... this resulted in another pain, every time there is a kernel version change, I had to recompile these drivers. And after I updated to Ubuntu 8.04 there have been at least a dozen of these updates. All this made me think hard and finally I switched over to Vista.

I have installed a Windows Vista Home Basic edition on MiLeap, as this is the only edition which is fit for the kind of hardware that is there on my laptop. I chose Vista instead of XP because I have been using Vista on primary desktop and my experience with it has been a far better environment than XP.

It took about 2hrs to completely install Vista and get the desktop. The drivers for my Wi-Fi and Sound were missing in the default install. Which were easy to obtain from Windows update ( I connected to the net using the Ethernet port on my laptop). I also quickly updated to SP1. Overall the amount of download was about 300 MB. This was far better than Ubuntu, where I am sure that I have done more than 2GB updates.

So what do I miss from Ubuntu world?

If I forget about the philosophical reason for using Ubuntu, which anyway a user hardly cares (a user psychology is always to get her task done, and very rarely how the task is done)... I only miss one thing: the gcc compiler package. That said, I rarely used it on my laptop, as most of the time I accessed it from either my VirtualBox installation or my old and well configured FC6 linux box. There was obviously no problem in installing Python and Java on my laptop, that I frequently use (need)...Python for trying out s/t quickly and Java ofcourse for MeTA Studio :)

Other things that I generally use on my laptop: OpenOffice, LaTeX, Media player and Browser are there in Vista. OpenOffice and LaTeX of course had to be installed. But the Windows Media player and IE7 are just great. I hardly used Firefox in Ubuntu (when I had it installed), but rather used Opera as it was better and faster. But on Vista I am sticking to IE7 for the time being, for some strange reasons like this and this [links to previous post].

The new Windows media player has a simple but amazing feature, that allows you to share your playlist to other Windows media player capable devices.. and you can guess what I do with my desktop and laptop ;)

Next, I used to use Gizmo to make voice calls to my GTalk mates... now with GTalk available natively, I am evidently not missing it.

Next, my laptop has a strange screen resolution: 800x480. Ubuntu had always trouble with this, most of the dialogs never fitted properly in the display area, even after I did a lot of tweaking. Vista was not without problems though. The first time I started it, it went to a virtual 1024x768 resolution and gave me a scrollable desktop! But after I changed the resolution appropriately, all most all the dialogs I have encountered are fitted properly in the display area... which is sorta great considering that Vista was never made for such a low powered ULCPCs.

Boot up time of Vista is about same as Ubuntu, provided AVG is not installed. In any case I installed and uninstalled AVG which I found to really slow down my laptop to make it almost unusable. So, for the moment I rely on Vista's "strong" security features and windows defender to protect me against malicious attacks.

Though battery times are almost equal for both Vista and Ubuntu, I find Vista does a better job in handling the "sleep" mode. For me the sleep and the hibernate feature never worked on the Ubuntu setup. But it has worked out-of-box for the Vista installation. And now, I never shutdown my laptop ... I just put it to sleep :-) Putting it in sleep mode has obvious advantage of getting the desktop back in under 20sec (max), as against about 2mins required to boot up the whole stuff. My desktop though boots in less than 20 secs, and wakes up from a sleep in about 5 secs ... owing obviously to quite high end hardware specs. 

So whats not well with Vista?

Well the general answer to this Q is, nothing so far ;)

But there are a few things that are not smooth. One of the prime things is the support for Bluetooth dongles. While on Linux I found that most of the dongles work properly without a hassle, this is not true with Vista, forget about earlier versions of Windows. I simply do not understand why this area is so neglected in Windows.

In Ubuntu, when running on battery mode, the GNOME applet always used to display the amount of time the battery will last. But in Vista so far what I get the the % amount of battery remaining, this to me is actually not so helpful. Till now I have not found a way to change this.

And what about Vista ratings?

aka. Windows Experience Index. Here is it:

evidently, the very basic stuff, if you compare it with my dekstop:

PS: This post was written on my MiLeap running on Vista Home Basic using Windows Live Writer.

PPS: I am in no way advocating the use of Vista. I am just telling my experience. Its for each user to decide what is best for him/her. I am no way related to Microsoft and this post is not endrosed by them either.

Internet connection sharing from Vista

I have a broadband connection on my main desktop that runs Vista, which has an ethernet port and a usb WiFi dongle. And I have HCL MiLeap-L that comes with WiFi on board. I always wanted to have internet connection sharing setup on my Vista machine so that I can access Internet anywhere from my house using MiLeap-L. Until recently, I could not figure out why the ad-hoc network created from Vista was not getting configured from the default NetworkManager applet of Ubuntu (MiLeap-L runs 8.04).

It turned out that this the problem with the default Ubuntu driver for the WiFi chipset on MiLeap-L. The default driver (supposedly a newer version) called rt73usb has buggy support for ad-hoc mode operation. So after googling around a bit I found that you need to use the legacy drivers rt73 and blacklist the newer ones to get it working. Moreover the older version is not compatible with the NetworkManager applet and you have to use its own GUI called rtutilt. So here is what I did to get stuff working:

1) I already have latest kernel update with the requisite build tools and kernel headers. If you don't you will have to get that using apt-get install kernel* build-essential.

2) Get the latest rt73 source from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/rt73-cvs-daily.tar.gz

Do the following using root (sudo -s) credentials:
3) unpack, change to Module directory. Then make and make install.

4) Remove previous module: rmmod rt73usb

5) add:
blacklist rt73usb
blacklist rt2500usb

at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

6) modprob rt73
depsmod -a

7) Install rtutilt using synaptic manager (u may have to enable extra repos)

8) disable NeworkManager applet from Main Menu->System->Preferences->Sessions

9) reboot and use Main Menu -> Internet -> RutilT WAN Manager to discover and connect to access point or ad-hoc network.

Note: If at any point of time you need to upgrade the kernel, you will have to most likely recompile rt73 drivers.

On Vista:
Its straight forward here.

1) First enable Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) on interface to which broadband is connected, in my case this is the LAN. This automatically assigns 192.168.0.1 then to the WiFi interface. The required gateway and other settings are also automatically made.

2) Then setup a ad-hoc connection using the Connection wizard in which can be initiated by clicking the Network icon on the task bar... or better still use the Instant search!

3) Thats it!

Hope this is useful to other HCL MiLeap users who want to try similar setup.

PS: when you need to use WiFi from any other source, you need to use the RutilT GUI now instead of the NetworkManager applet in Ubuntu.

PPS: This whole stuff was written on my MiLeap-L and posted using the connection that I set up as described above :)

Microsoft and HCL: Worlds cheapest windows laptop!

Was hoping that this was a april fool's prank...
But if this is true, its not really gud for adoption of Ubuntu (Linux) based laptops (such as HCLs own MiLeap L). All this means that there has been a great demand for Windows based low cost laptops (even ASUS is releasing Eee with WinXP preloaded), and these people will eventually move to Vista (MS is smart in seeing this). So all the bashing and FUD for Vista will have no effect after all. People who use unrealistic reasons for adopting OSS are any way going to fail because customers do genuinely see the benefits in Windows... and Vista is definitely a superior OS.

But in other ways its good that its creating a new market and new opportunities.

Only it would now be tougher for me to convince my uncle to use Ubuntu on MiLeap L that i got for him :(

Is Mobilis dead?

Short answer is a big YES. Long answer is, unless Encore Software (who makes Mobilis) is able to reduce the price of the device to around 5000 INR, it simply won't have any takers. This is not the only way of revival though, there are many more steps that need to be taken and I am enlisting them here.

The first thing to note is a comparison of Mobilis with other contenders of low cost laptops in the current market. I have just compared with what I have with me (HCL MiLeap L and Mobilis). I have not put up the other contender, ASUS Eee PC partly because I myself have not used it personally and partly because specs wise its comparison with Mobilis will look even worse ;) [because of accessories like integrated web cam].

Comparison Chart:

	HCL MiLeap L	Mobilis (basic model)
Processor	Intel Celeron M ULV @ 900 MHz	Intel XScale @ 400 MHz
Architecture	x86	ARM
Cooling Fan	Yes	No
Memory	512 MB (DDR2)	128 MB
Storage	30 GB HDD	128 MB Flash
Ethernet	Yes (In built)	No (USB based can be used) *
WiFi	Yes (In built)	No (USB based can be used) *
Bluetooth	No (USB based can be used)	No
Screen (size, resolution, touch)	7", 800 x 480, no touch screen	7.5", 800 x 600, touch screen
Touchpad	Yes, pretty usable	No, not required
Keypad	Yes, pretty usable	Yes, hopeless design
Battery	About 4 hrs 30 mins	About 6 hrs
Weight	1.44 Kg	about 600 grams
OS	Linux (Ubuntu)	Embedded Linux (Montavista)
Price (INR)	17,000	20,000 +

* Not every USB device can be used. The driver support on the installed OS is very bad.

 

The first thing one notices from the above comparison chart is that for less, you are basically getting more in case of MiLeap! Granted that Mobilis sports a fantastic touch screen, with a slightly larger screen and resolution. But then MiLeap has 512 MB RAM and 30 GB storage as compared to paltry 128 MB each of RAM and Flash storage!

 

What else is wrong?

• The price needs to be competitive (it should be priced around 5000 INR, any thing above is expensive for this device) with other ultraportables that have come up in market. What I think Encore should be doing is build a reference design and then sell the design to OEM manufactures and charge them some percent for each unit that is sold. This way the OEMs do not have to pay a hefty amount at the beginning (as in the case of simputer), and Encore will also be benefited in long run.
• On board flash memory needs to be redesigned so that it is expandable easily.
• OS used is another major issue. Montavista is actually a commercial vendor and you pay up a lot for their licensing fees which adds up to the total cost of the device. The development toolchain for OS is also not free, it costs another 5000 INR! And I have no idea why the old 2.4.x kernel is still being used on the device. Driver support from Motavista is absolutely useless, as compared to any modern Linux distribution. I guess Encore should look at some community supported OS like Ubuntu mobile and port it on their platform instead of using Montavista, which just adds up to the total cost of the device, and also provides a very crippled environment.
• The worst design in the whole Mobilis tablet is the keypad. It is simply not usable. It has to be redesigned, and should look attractive and easy for a user to use it.
• WiFi and Ethernet port should be inbuilt, and should not cost another 5000 INR to get them fitted!

 

I guess, I have made my point. Good luck Mobilis.

 

PS: If anyone at Encore Software does read this, I at least hope that they take this post seriously as I still use my Mobilis!

Review of HCL MiLeap-L

Recently HCL India released a series of ultraportables branded as MiLeap series. The cheapest one of these is a flash based (2GB), Intel class mate PC style, MiLeap X series. I purchased a slightly higher version of these machines called MiLeap L series that instead comes with a 30GB HDD. This review is on MiLeap L series, though I also intend to buy the flash based version of this device for my uncle for reasons given below ;)

Hardware Specs
This is an ultraportable with following main specs:
- Intel Celeron M ULV (ultra low voltage) processor @ 900 MHz
- 512 MB DDR2 RAM
- WiFi, 10/100 ethernet
- 2 USB ports
- 1 SD Card reader
- Inbuilt Mic and Speakers
- Audio out and in jacks
- Touchpad
- 7 inch TFT screen with 800x480 as max res
- Battery Backup: ~4Hrs
- Total weight (including battery): 1.44 Kg

General feel, usability...
I just love this piece :) HCL has done a nice thing in packaging this little laptop not only on the hardware front but on the preinstalled Ubuntu distribution. The preinstalled Ubuntu takes up about 3GB of disk (so i am not sure what the flash version is bundled with). As against a standard install this comes with all the required apps (OpenOffice, Gimp, a series of media players and best of all with all required codes) out of box. The only thing that I didn't like was a 8GB partition on which FreeDOS was installed (presumably for those who want to switch over to windows), which i immediately reformatted as ext3 :)

Ubuntu is quite usable on this little laptop. Word processing and all other apps open without much fuz and seems quite fast for me. The boot time is a bit slow, but thats mostly as a result of using a bit slower processor. Network configuration, WiFi to be specific is just a breeze and worked great for me.

All other usability features of Ubuntu works great, and I feel that this pretty good for people looking for office related tasks and also for surfing.

The most wonderful aspect of the whole thing is the preinstalled gcc compiler set, which just worked out of box. I feel with the price tag (17000 INR) this is a pretty good buy for students learning programming. Though vi is preinstalled, you need to download vim and emacs if you really intend to do serious programming. I also installed the latest JRE and was pleased to see that MeTA Studio ran effortlessly of it ;)

The keypad and the touchpad are also nicely designed and are pretty much usable. There was one small problem though, that I found when using vi, that there is only one SHIFT key, but with a small form factor like that it would be difficult to fit in any extra key.

Overall the battery backup is pretty good and goes well beyond 4 hrs if you use the screen with reduced brightness. With standard brightness too, the battery pack gives at least 4hrs backup.

On heating issue, this heats up as much as my Mobilis, so I think that there is not much of a problem with it. I have continuously used the machine for about 4 hours and find it okay. Some times the base gets heated up a bit, and so its advised not to keep it on your lap for along time ;)

Final thoughts
I think HCL and Intel have finally begun to introduce to Indian market of what I had said earlier in my blogs. I have used Mobilis from Encore and after nearly an year after I tried using it I find it a highly restrictive device that is overpriced (the only thing on which it scores over MiLeap is a battery backup of about 6hrs). I would highly recommend this (and other MiLeap series too) if you are on a lookout for an affordable ultraportable, or even a second computing device.

NB: The whole review was written and published from my MiLeap L :)

Update: About the sound, its pretty good for the form factor.
About the heating issue, I think the use of flash drive will drastically reduce the heat generation. Also the flash drive is more rugged with no moving parts and hence the reason I will be buying it (MiLeap X) for my uncle ;)

Update 2: Aniruddha had written in to ask if VGA connecter is available from MiLeap L, short answer is NO. Check comments for more info.