My "new" laptop

I'm posting from my "new" laptop. This is what I suspect will ultimately supercede my ASUS Eee PC, which seemed like a good idea at the time. That said, this little box isn't over-sized (yet), but I'm working on it. Here's what its go, at this moment:

$ dmesg | grep -i vga
vga1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY" rev 0x00
wsdisplay0 at vga1 mux 1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation)
$ dmesg | grep -i cpu
cpu0: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz ("GenuineIntel" 686-class) 2.40 GHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,SBF,CNXT-ID
cpu0 at mainbus0
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0/16: reported by CPUID; using exception 16
$ dmesg | grep -i mem
real mem = 267411456 (255MB)
avail mem = 250511360 (238MB)
spdmem0 at iic0 addr 0x51: 256MB DDR SDRAM non-parity PC2100CL2.5

My immediate needs for this thing are: 1) a new battery (its a laptop, afterall), 2) a wireless card (a PCMCIA card that works with OpenBSD), and 3) more RAM. If by some miracle I got all three of those things taken-care of, I suspect this would be a fairly respectable little laptop! I think I could get it all taken-care of for under $200, so I'm going to see what kind of price I can get for my Eee PC...if I can get $200+ for it, I'm in like Flynn!

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NetworkManager: busted old crap; WICD: hot freshness

I suspect that anyone who uses GNOME's NetworkManager application and tray applet to manage multiple network connections shares my frustration. I did some hunting after I wasted gobs of time yesterday fighting with NetworkManager... I found WICD. WICD is a sweet little suite of python scripts that can manage wireless and wired network interfaces, and so far it hasn't been the epic pain in the ass that NetworkManager has consistently been. w00t!!! I'm running it in XFCE on my EEE in addition to GNOME on my work laptop.

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replacing GNOME Power Manager in XFCE4 on a laptop

I am running XFCE4 on my Eee PC, and since it was recommended to not use the GNOME Power Manager, I decided I'd implement the hack that allows you to use the XFCE battery manager and still have the power button bring-up the shutdown dialog... that hack is documented on the eeeXubuntu page... but there's a step missing: you have to tell X that your user is authorized to run programs like that on your display (this might seem like a bit bizzare to a Linux novice, but to those of us who grew-up running X11R6 from back in the day, it isn't too odd.) To do this, you have to add an entry to your /etc/X11/xserver/SecurityPolicy file:

property SCREEN_RESOURCES cjsteele ar aw

Once you've made the change, you just have to restart your X server -- I know you can do this without rebooting, but logging-out and logging-in didn't accomplish it, so I took the lazy path and rebooted. Now, it should Just Work.

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EEE PC: minimizing disk writes by relocating browser cache

I got my ASUS EEE PC 4G Surf on Friday. It took me all of ten minutes to decide that that default OS is pretty-much junk for a long-time Linux geek like me. SO, on Friday evening I installed EeeXubuntu. I rather fancy it. Seems like they've got the big issues worked-out, there are some asthetic issues that need to be overcome, but that's another post.

This post is dedicated to reducing disk IO on the EEE. SO, there have been others who've written about hacking /etc/fstab with mount options like 'noatime' and the like, and that is all well and fine, but here's my addition...

The overwhelming creation of temp files on my system comes from web-surfing. Therefore, I decided to make my Firefox Cache a ramdisk. This is pretty trivial, simply find your cache (usually in ~/.mozilla/firefox/SOMETHING/Cache where SOMETHING is a bunch of garbage text) and make an entry in /etc/fstab for it as follows:

tmpfs /home/USERNAME/.mozilla/firefox/SOMETHING/Cache uid=USERNAME,gid=USERGROUP 0 0

Next step is to close Firefox, delete everything in your Cache, and reboot (or do a `mount -a -t tmpfs -o remount`) and DISCO! your web browsing will all be cached.

This configuration has a couple of interesting security ramifications that I had not previously considered until I wrote-this-up... that is: 1) the forensic evidence of malicious web activity will not be stored on any disk, therefore there is virtually no forensicly sound information recoverable from the device unless it is taken "hot", and 2) since all cached data is destroyed after each boot, chances are that any malicious activity done TO YOU (i.e. malware from websites, etc.) won't be traceable either.

All of that aside, I still think for the purpose of cutting down on writes to the flash drive, this setup has merit... and it won't change my intentions of running this way.

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