Hardware Basic Specification 

• Android 3.1 (Honeycomb)
• 8.9″ WXGA display (1280×800)
• 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 CPU
• 16/32GB storage
• 1 GB RAM
• 2.0MP front-facing camera, 3.0MP camera around back
• 802.11a/b/g/n
• Samsung’s TouchWiz UI

The device is very thin and light. This makes it very easy and convenient to hold with one hand for reading and stuff. I also love the 8.9 inch screen size which for me is just the right sweet spot for a tablet. I have reservation about the 10.1 and the 7.0 form factor, didn’t want a device which looked like I’m carrying a tray or one which looks like a giant mobile phone. The galaxy tab 8.9 is just right, just perfect for me. Very light, very easy to hold, with just the right vertical real estate when held in landscape mode. 

Did I say it was thin? Super incredibly thin. Its thinner than the Iphone 4. A shade thinner than the Apple iPad 2. It is the thinnest tablet there is (for now).

The gtab has a resolution of 1280 x 800 which is the same resolution with the Galaxy tab 10.1, however the smaller screen gives it a higher pixel density (170 ppi) which is even much higher than the pixel density of the Apple iPad 2 (132 ppi). The result of this is a very vibrant screen with very crisp pictures and sharp icons. Although the screen is not the super amoled (uses the super PLS) which comes with my Galaxy s2. Still I find it very good with awesome viewing angles.

Default Firmware

The device is running Android Honeycomb 3.1 (while writing this) which is not the latest version of honeycomb (that one is 3.2). It comes with Samsung Touchwiz UX for tablet. (From what I have heard and seen of default honeycomb experience, its not as a total make over as is the case with the gingerbread version of Touchwiz.)

Samsung has included some software, widget and tools and made some modification to stock honeycomb applications like emails, calendar etc. I have not used a tablet with pure honeycomb experience before hence its hard to put in perspective the advantages or otherwise of Samsung’s Honeycomb additions.

One thing I can say about the out of the box experience of the device is  that its very laggy. The lag is obvious when flipping through the desktops screens (in landscape mode), or applications grid. Although the lag does not carry over to the general function of the devices (applications are start very snappy and I don’t experience slow down in the general performance of individual applications, and seems to disappears when the device is used in landscape mode) Still the obvious lag and stutter of transitions creates an air of things being slow. I found this very unfortunate for a device running a dual core Nvidia Tegra chip, clocked at GHz with 1GB of memory. This device should be as smooth as liquid.The lag issue seems to have been fixed with honeycomb 3.2 (which is not yet available for the galaxy tab 8.9 – sigh).

The Good news is that the aforementioned lag seems to appears to be a bug with the default honeycomb 3.1 / Touchwiz  launcher and should be fixed with a software upgrade. A work around the problem is the installation of the ADWlauncher ex. (Though I found the launcher to overwhelm me with options.) Luckily for me though, I got the device around when Custom ROM development for it started to take shape. Because the galaxy tab 8.9 is very new in the market (was released last month) custom ROM development has been quite slow. However the hugely popular overcome ROM for the galaxy tab series has been ported to 8.9 and it was the first thing I installed when I got the device.

Installing Overcome on the Galaxy Tab 8.9 improved the speed and reduced the lag considerably. Here are some of the Improvements Overcome brings to the Galaxy tab 8.9 Over the custom Samsung firmware

• Fully Deodexed
• Fully Zipaligned
• Rooted/Busybox installed
• Stock kernel with modified initramfs
• Slightly Themed with stock-ish Honeycomb look
• Optimized Launcher (enabled HW accel, optimized images inside to significantly reduce footprint, removed all the crap samsung put on our screens by default)
• Ads blocked
• Updated Maps to 5.11
• Updated Music to 3.0.1
• Updated SamsungApps to 3.10.024
• Updated Flash Player to 11.0.1.153
• Overscroll Glow enabled
• Browser Modifications (UAString chooser in Advanced Options, Overscroll Glow enabled, plugins set to load ON_DEMAND instead of ON, Default Zoom and Text Size options added under advanced, LightTouch disabled)
• Bootanimation.zip support (cool boot animation included thanks to gammaRascal in the Iconia forums)
• Overcome CWM Recovery 5.1.2.6
• Extended Power Menu (Reboot, Recovery, Download)
• Status Bar Hide/Show mod in extended power menu (thanks to MaximKat for original mod!)
• App_process pre-compiled binary from Android 3.2 included (improved smoothness/responsiveness)
• Roboto font included

If I was on the fence about the galaxy tab 8.9 before, installing Overcome ROM completely won me over and I fell in love with the device. It became even faster, and most of the crapware Samsung included in the device were removed. Perhaps the tweak which brought the most improvements was enabling hardware acceleration for the default launcher which (for some reason was disabled by Samsung), this more or less removed the lag experienced when flipping through the home screens or application menu grid (though not to the point of nirvana).

Honeycomb

Coming from Android Gingerbread, Honeycomb (or Samsung’s modification of it) takes some time to adjust to. I had to relearn almost everything I have come to know about Android. Although the UI idea and concepts carry over from Android 2.x (Multiple home screens, widgets, application grid, notification etc). However the implementation of this ideas are quite unique to honeycomb. Here are my thoughts on Android the Honeycomb way.

Beside the power and volume rocker buttons, the galaxy tab 8.9 Lacks any control Hardware button. All the buttons for interacting with the OS (Back, Home and Menu) are software based. This makes a lot of sense as it allows for consistency which ever orientation the device is displayed. Whether I’m using it “upside down” landscape or portrait you would always find the buttons aligned with the current screen orientation.

I didn’t miss the physical keys at all. I also like the way Honeycomb handles notification, just as unobtrusive as gingerbread, but still makes use of the screen estate. Notifications pop up is similar to that  of KDE. In the case of email notification, clicking on the main body of the notification brings up the email, but notification can also be dismissed by clicking on the “X” button.

Tapping the clock at the button right side of the screen brings up quick way to turn on (or off) wifi, notification, sound, and auto rotate. It also allows adjustments of screen brightness, quick access to settings and log of unread notifications. I am a bit indifferent to this functionality. I find it useful but it also gets in the way sometimes. I feel it could be better implemented. It was meant to replace the pull down notification drawer of gingerbread, but unlike the latter it could be activated accidentally.

Honeycomb’s software buttons are same with Android 2.x. well more or less. There is the home and back button (which perform the same functionality as with gingerbread). However, the menu button is missing. Menu is now more integrated within honeycomb applications – more on that later – and there is a “new recent application” button which is for switching between recently opened applications. It comes very handy and really improves multitasking on the tablet.

While the recent app button displays a list of recently opened applications, holding down the home key shows a list of running applications (as was the case in gingerbread). One cool thing samsung has added is ability to close this applications and free system memory.

I find this quite handy and removes the need for a 3rd party task manager. Samsung also added a button for taking screenshots, which also comes in handy (I guess…).

The difference between honeycomb and gingerbread is quite huge, from widget, wallpaper management. App menu grid (which is now paginated) and may more.  A detailed overview of android honeycomb can be viewed here.

Applications  and Utilities

Like everyone who owns a tablet, the browser is my most used application on the galaxy tab.

The default browser for honeycomb bear very close resemblance to chrome on the desktop. It doesn’t disappoint and has done well with every web page thrown at it. It has a support for adobe flash (which I removed – my quality of life is better without flash) and handles java script laden sites quite well. Minor grips I have with it is the fact that even though capable of displaying desktop view, by default the browser tend to present the mobile view of websites which really looks ugly with lots of white space and tiny text. Luckily I could change the default User Agent from Android to full desktop (whether this is an overcome ROM feature or something which came standard with the default Samsung ROM I am not sure). I also wish the x and + buttons for closing and closing a page on the browser were a little bigger I never seem to be able to close a page at first try (or maybe my hands need to be a little smaller :p). Overall the browser is fast and scrolling is butter smooth. The screen vibrant screen, pixel density all connive to make the galaxy tab 8.9 an amazing web experience.

Another area where the galaxy tab shines is emailing. Or well gmailing. The official Gmail application for honeycomb is a killer. It improves on the gingerbread email application and makes good use of the tablet screen estate. It supports multiple gmail address and just freaking awesome nothing more to add there.

Application Ecosystem

In theory all of the 500,000 applications in the Android market should be installable on the galaxy tab, however only a handful were actually developed for honeycomb or even optimized for a tablet screen estate. Since using the galaxy tab. I would group applications available for it into 4 categories.

Honeycomb Optimized Applications  These are applications which have been optimized to take advantage of the honeycomb APIs. They not only take advantage of the tablet real estate but also make use of honeycomb APIs in area of hardware accelerations  and incorporate the new honeycomb approach to menus into their UI. Honeycomb lacks the menu button which was part of standard OS button for android 2.x.  Application menus are now part of individual application UI (usually on the top right corner of the application).

Applications under the categories offer the best experience on Honeycomb . They make good use of the Tablet screen, are usually butter smooth when scrolling. and offer neat transitions. Unfortunately applications like this are in the minority and are usually only work on honeycomb.

Tablet Optimized Application This are applications which take advantage of the tablet screen estate (look good on tablets) even though are not optimized to hook on to some of honeycomb’s unique API. Hence they lack hardware acceleration (and you can see this from the jerkiness in scrolling and general transition). There also default to using legacy menu support, hence when started a menu button is displayed just beside the standard OS button. A lot of games and browsers fall under this category. They all general provide a decent (not great) experience on the Tablet

General Android Applications Applications in this category make up the bulk available in the android market. They are the applications written for mobile phones. Although they run on honeycomb tablets, they do so without taking advantage of the tablet screen estate resulting in very Ugly UI with lots of spaces, tiny text (which most times are aligned to the left side of the screen). These applications have been stretched to fit the tablet screen and the result is abysmal. 

Twitter application for android is an example. The UI doesn’t make good use of the tablet screen, instead the application is stretched to file the screen. It also doesn’t use the menu system of honeycomb but defaults to the legacy menu button. The sad part is 95% of applications in the android market fall under this category.

Hybrid Applications  Applications under this category run well both on smartphone and honeycomb tablets. The applications have been written to  default to a particular UI when it senses a smaller screen and another when the screen is larger. A good example of an application which does this is the Kindle app. The same APK I installed on my phone scaled well on the galaxy tab and even adopted the honeycomb menu system. Google reader, IMDB also fall in this category. Thankfully many applications are increasingly falling under this categories. Using a one apk approach for both tablets and smartphones. I have a got feeling that the the release of Ice Cream Sandwich would see more application adopt this approach’

Over all the number of tablet ready applications available for honeycomb pale compared to what is available for the ipad. The good news is the situation is slowly starting to change and it is hard not to find a good tablet application which meets a particular needs.

Below are a List of Recommended Tablet optimized applications that I come to use on a daily bases.

Tweetcaster

After trying out Plume and Tweetcomb, I settled to using tweetcaster as my twitter client of choice. I like the way the UI is laid out on the galaxy tab, resisting the urge to overload the extra screen with information overload (as was the case with the previous two IMHO).

Reddita 

Reddita is the best Reddit application available only for honeycomb tablets. It provides a great way to browse Reddit, create a post, comments and can even send notification of comment reply. The UI is great. Very clean and a joy to use.

Kindle

I guess no tablet experience would be complete without a great e-book reader. If I am not surfing the web on my gtab, I’m reading a book. The Kindle application is well adjusted to honeycomb looks and works great.

Komik

One usage case for tablets is: It provides a great e-comic experience with the large screen, which is about the size of a real comic. One of the first thing I did after setting up my galaxy tab was to load it up with my collection of comics. A little googling showed Komik has the best comic application for android tablets (which it was designed exclusively for) here are some of its features.

•  CBR, CBZ, and image directory comic support 
•  Comic collection browser with thumbnails
•  Quickly zoom in locally on a section of a page
•  Page thumbnails to quickly scan through comics
•  Continuous bookmarking for all comics
•  Gracefully handles dual-spread pages
•  Easy collection management from the library
•  Easily zoom into pages

AndChat

AndChat is the best IRC Client I have found (so far) for honeycomb. It’s a joy to use and supports all the standard stuffs you expect from an IRC client.

• Multi-Server support
• Multi-Charset support
• SASL Support
• UTF-8 Detection
• Chat Logs
• Typing history (DPAD up/down)
• Timestamps
• Nick highlight support for multiple nicknames
• Notifications
• SSL Support
• User list
• Encryption to protect access to password protected servers

File Manager HD

This is what I use for file management. Has got all the tools needed and can even be made to run as root. Nothing else to add.

CNN for Android Tablets

On my mobile I turn to the BBC News, but since the BBC app looks horrendous on my gtab, The CNN

application for android tablet is a nice slot in replacement. Even though CNN is not my first choice when it comes to News, I have to give it to them, their Android tablet app is gorgeous.


These are just a few  of the applications that have come to make me really love my galaxy tab 8.9. There are lots of thousands of other applications, utilities and games available for android tablets and more are being added everyday. I also get to use well known utilities like titanium backup and superuser and they work just as well.

In conclusion, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is a great tablet and I would highly recommend it. The hardware is one of the best in the market and although it’s a bit bugged down by some software issues. It’s something which can hopefully be fixed by software upgrades and there are work arounds for these problems. Even then will not call them deal breakers.

I hope I this helps someone out.

I personally don’t see google buying canonical happening any time soon. (Nor should they) Canonical’s business model is built round the very thing google wants to kill – The Desktop (as we know it)
Google’s business model is built round ads and cloud services, imperative to this model is the need to get everyone to the browser, the cloud and away from the traditional means of using the computer which involves having an OS built around local computer resources Hard drive, CPU, etc.. Ubuntu (Windows and Mac OSX) represent the very thing google is trying the get the world away from.

The new frontier in computing is the cloud. (at least that is what they wants us to believe) and google is doing everything to be the “Microsoft” of the post PC era. In light of all these Ubuntu and canonical (whose business is built around the traditional desktop computer paradigm) is not an attractive proposition to google. For google, the best way to beat Microsoft is not to take the fight to their strongest turf (even apple with all their sexiness and marketing power and industrial respect has not been able to dislodge MS on the desktop) Google wants to beat MS by obsoleting PC era of computing and replacing it with thin client devices (be it mobile phone, tablet or the chromebook) connecting to a cloud backend. Hence it would make more sense for them to invest their effort accelerating the demise of the PC era by taking out some of the stumbling blocks to the post PC era. “How do we get more people connected to the web?” “How do we reduce the cost of the Internet.” Buying canonical is validating the PC era.

In any case if google wants to use Ubuntu as some kind of stopgap to take some momentum off Microsoft’s grip on the desktop. Then all it needs do is try to improve the desktop experience in Linux. It could start by releasing natives Linux version for some of its popular desktops applications that run on other platforms. However from their body language google could care less about the Linux desktop. It never released a Linux version of Google Sketchup , the recently released google music uploader has a Mac and Windows version non was released for Linux, remember how Linux users had to wait for close to a year to get a stable version of google chrome. Even when they do release Linux version of their desktop software. Its doesn’t run native e.g Picasa for linux (which is essentially the windows version using wine hence lacks native OS integration with Linux and also lacks some of the features available in the windows version ) or is feature crippled compared to the windows version e.g google desktop for Linux lacks support for google gadgets. Has it stands Windows is googles number one choice for their PC applications

While I don’t think google hates Ubuntu or Linux (Words on the street is that google does in fact run its own version of Ubuntu which it offers to its developers as one of its OS of choice) however I think google is just not interested in the PC computing space. Google is a cloud company and its business model is built around people connecting to the cloud where it can make money from ads and software as a service. Canonical just does not fit into this model.

Beside canonical can hardly be described as a money making machine. The company is yet to break even in close to it’s 4 years of existence. It has not been able to build a successful business model around Ubuntu. Hence buying it would be a very bad business move, rather google can work with canonical and use some of their expertise to enhance their chromebook. (which is what their doing actually)

If ever (you can never say never ) google does indeed buy canonical. It will find a way to kill off the Ubuntu project or merge it with their chrome OS effort. In any case I am not sure this what we want. So maybe we should be careful what we ask for

Just my 2 cent

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I did however see the move as food for thought for those spending so much time and energy trying to convince same adobe to port photoshop to Linux. Not that I don’t want photoshop or the next cool proprietary desktop app to be ported (Ok frankly I don’t think am missing anything so I care less) But we really have to come to terms with the reality, we can not compel or cajole a company to port their X application to Linux. it is a situation beyond our control and not something we have the power to change (any time soon).

What we do have power to over is how to take advantage of the open source ecosystem and see how we can improve it. How can we improve Gimp, make it rock, and blow pass photoshop – Donation, code, documentations, even the occasional writing a developer of your favourite app to let him know you appreciate what he is doing all goes a long way.

The reason why many Linux users cared less about this Adobe move is, I mean let’s be frank over 90% of adobe air apps are twitter client, an area very well covered in the Linux ecosystem. Majority of Linux users use Choqok/Gwibber/Hotot/Pino/etc. (applications which not only have better UI and OS integration with Linux but in many cases are have richer feature set compared to the tweetdecks of this world) hence couldn’t be bothered.

I think what these reveals is that, When we make the applications on the Linux ecosystem rock. (The Amarok, the Gimp, The Libreoffice etc) More people would find reason to use and stick to Linux on the desktop, when they see a reason to use Linux, The ecosystem would increase to a point where even the big application vendors might take notice and decide that the Linux ecosystem is perhaps worth giving a try. Even if it doesn’t turn out like this. Then at least we would have applications which are comparable (if not better) than the alternatives in other platforms.

Ok maybe things are not that simplistic, but I do feel strongly that it is more pragmatic if we improve the Linux ecosystem from within the ecosystem. A situation where efforts are being channelled towards sulking up to adobe to port Photoshop to Linux while the Gimp Project is desperately short of hands really doesn’t make sense (IMHO) We have Gimp which is free and developed in the open. Fine photoshop has some features not available in Gimp (but which are really not needed by mainstream users) however Gimp is extendible developed in the open. Effort channelled towards getting the missing photoshop features to Gimp would definitely yield more positive result than the out come of getting photoshop on Linux.

I use Gimp here as a case study but same thing applies to many important free software projects Libreoffice, Scribus, Inkscape, Evolution, Kontact etc. I think everyone from the distros to the users and even the companies whose business model is built round Linux all need to play more proactive role at improving our ecosystem.

Being proactive means doing something to improve the software you use everyday. File a bug, documentation, feature request with mock up, code, donate and remembering to thank those whose labour of love we are enjoying. We have to make the best of what we have in hand and spend less time chasing shadows.

Just my 2 cents

This functionality did not come out of the box with Kubuntu 11.04, but a little investigation revealed that it was added when I tried out the latest release of Muon Suite (The awesome Package installer which should replace kpackagekit on the next version of Kubuntu) I must have installed a package called plasma-runner-installer and probably forgot all about it.

In any case it has gone a long way to enhance my workflow on kubuntu. I can now install any package I want right from Krunner without having to open a package manager or Terminal.

Installation

The package is in a 3rd repository and would need to be added.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:echidnaman/qapt-experimental

Once added refresh your software source

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install plasma-runner-installer

I don’t remember doing this, but incase it does not work for you a little post install set-up might be needed. Go to the settings section of krunning and enabling “Installer” Plugin should do the trick.

Now everything is all set up. Simply use the keyboard short cut  “alt + f2″ to start krunner and type the name of the app you require

Hope someone finds this useful

Situation under Natty Narwhal

Things did improve under Natty, at least out of the box I got basic multitouch functionalities like finger scroll, two/three finger tab to right click and middle click respectively. However right and middle click is still missing.

Luckily..

There is a work around which fixes most of remaining issues I have with clickpad on Kubuntu 11.04. This work around provides even better Multitouch, right and Middle Click support.

Basic gist of the WorkAround

So words on the street is that Opensuse has very good clickpad support (probably not unrelated to the fact that some variants of the HP Probook ship with Suse Enterprise Linux) so there is a patch which when applied to the synaptic source package fixes the issue. Hence the fix for this involves some command-line. I will try to make it as easy as possible though usual caveat applies: This fix works for me on the HP Probook 4420s, I do not guarantee it would work for anyone else. In fact it might kill your cat.

Work Around.

Open your favourite Terminal (Konsole for kubuntu)
First create a directory (folder) where the package will be built. for the sake of consistency you can call the “build” and place it on your desktop. all that is done with this command

mkdir $HOME/Desktop/build

Next move into the directory just created and download the opensuse patch.

cd $HOME/Desktop/build && wget http://david.hardeman.nu/synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2

Then download the Ubuntu source package for synaptic

apt-get source xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

What the next series of command will do is to move into the directory of the Ubuntu synaptic package just downloaded and from then into a directory named “debian” and another named “patch”, extract the suse synaptic patch and apply it to the Ubuntu synaptic source package. (Honestly its not as confusing as I made it sound. Just follow the commands step by step and you should* be fine)

cd xserver-xorg-input-synaptics*
cd debian
cd patches
tar xfvj ../../../synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2
ls -1 2*.patch >> series
cd ../..

Next thing is to build the Ubuntu synaptic package from source, but before that the dependencies needed to get a successful build would first have to be installed

sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

Then the actual building of a new synaptic package into a deb for easy installation

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot

If everything goes fine, 2 .deb files would be created in the root of the “build” directory (created earlier)
Both can be installed with the follow

sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-synaptics_1*.deb
sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-synaptics-dev*

All that is left now is to log out and log in back (Better still restart) and the clickpad should have both multitouch and right click support

Kubuntu users can go to systemsettings –> Input Devices –> Touchpad to tweak the clickpad to suit their taste.

Known issues

• Double tapping the LED to disable touchpad still doesn’t work
• Click and Drag sadly still doesn’t work

The work for better clickpad support is still a work in progress on Linux generally. But you can follow the bug here.

Thanks to David Härdeman for providing the documentation for this patch.

Hope this helps someone

…after I installed Kubuntu 11.04 beta, everything was going smooth, wireless worked out of the box, (unlike 10.10 where I had to install some freedom hating broadcom driver) I had the awesome kde 4.6.2, seating on top what has been tagged the most significant Linux kernel release for desktop users in a long time kernel v2.6.38 (with the magic patch and all). Life was good.

Then it happened!

Trouble started when I wanted to send some files to my phone from laptop via the bluetooth. (You see I happen to be among the unfortunate set of people who have the same button for enabling wireless and bluetooth.) I tried enabling the laptop’s bluetooth when the whole system came to a standstill. I did a forceful shut-down after which my install never saw the light of the day again. Everytime I tried booting the PC, it always got stuck at the boot process. The scary part was even the the Kubuntu 11.04 Livecd stopped Booting at all! Only Kubuntu 10.10 was able to boot (from Livecd).

Searching for Answers

The most frustrating part of my Nasty Natty experience (pun intended) was trying to determine the root cause. How to explain how an OS installs fine, then crashes and not only does it become unable to boot, even attempts to do a clean install also hits a dead then. Here were a list of my suspicions

Corrupt system Memory (I know from experience that the best way to test if a system has bad memory is to load in a Live cd, this was ruled out by the fact that I was able to load on Kubuntu 10.10 on Live cd without issues)

Then I thought maybe a bad system Bios (I really wanted to pursue this option and upgrade the system BIOS via windows. Thankfully windows won’t install, complained about some partition issues)

I also considered a badly burnt media (but checked its integrity and it was said to be ok)

Kde 4.6 bug? (Xubuntu 11.04 had the same problem) kernel bug? hmmm

Light Bulb Moment…

Came while talking to a friend about the problem on irc and he suggested it was most like kernel problem probably some bad module. This got me thinking, I remembered the last thing I was doing (or wanted to do) when all this started was enabling bluetooth (shares the same button as the wireless)

I then decided to go into the system BIOS and disable the wireless / bluetooth radio. Fired the LiveCD of Xubuntu 11.04 and Voilà Xubuntu booted successfully, no hangs or freeze. But also no wireless.

Work Around

After I was able to get Xubuntu to successfully boot. I proceeded to install it. (for testing purpose I enabled the wireless radio from Bios and had the issue the freshly install Xubuntu 11.04 freeze at login screen (again) disabled it and everything worked fine (But no wireless)

Here is what I now did to fix the issue on my laptop. I did not have this issue on 10.10 mostly because that version of Kubuntu did not ship with the opensource broadcom drivers. I had to use the binary only driver from broadcom, hence the idea was to revert back to that setup.

first I installed the broadcom-sta-common (It provide a binary only closed source driver for broadcom)

sudo apt-get install broadcom-sta-common


Once installed, I edited the following file /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

NB its always a good thing to backup before making any change to config file.
backup with this command

cp /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf-orig

In case things gets jammed up and you want to revert, you can easily do so with

cp /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf-orig /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

kdesudo kate /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf


NB gnome user should use gtksudo gedit in place of kdesudo kate (and if you are like me, you can use ever reliable vim )

Anyway I blacklisted the brcm80211 open source broadcom driver by adding this line to, /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf blacklist brcm80211 Before the last line. When done, everything looked like this

# wl module from Broadcom conflicts with ssb
# We must blacklist the following modules:
blacklist b44
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist b43
blacklist ssb
blacklist brcm80211
install wl /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install wl $CMDLINE_OPTS

I saved the file and then edited this file /etc/modules (again backup before editing)

cp /etc/modules /etc/modules-orig

By adding the module for the closed source (freedom hating but stable) broadcom driver so it is loaded at every system boot

I added lw to the end of /etc/modules so the file looks like this

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.

lp
lw

Saved the file, exited, and rebooted this time with the wireless on to test if the issue as been fixed. The laptop rebooted fine, no issue, but still no wireless. Then I started the Kubuntu additional driver tool or kdesudo jockey-kde (from commandline on Kubuntu) or gtksudo jockey (from commandline on Ubuntu) which searched and informed me I needed to activate some proprietary drivers to make the wireless card work properly. I enabled them, It did its magic and voilà the wireless card came on. I was able to enable and disable it without the system kernel panicing.

I rebooted my laptop and there was no problem at all, everything worked just like it did on 10.10.
I explained the same step to some dude on irc having similar problem and my solution worked for him so I decided to share in case anyone is having such problems.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Pastebin Plasma Widget from Bobby Adesuyan on Vimeo.

The Pastebin plasmoid is part of the standard set of plasmoid shipped with Kde 4.5

if you are on U|K|Xubuntu 11.04 there is a better workaround were both right / middle click and multitouch works and works way better than this. Although I don’t know if same would work on Ubuntu 10.10.

One thing admire about Macbooks is their Multitouch enabled Touchpads which allows for advanced gestures like pinch to zoom, double tapping to right click, Two finger scroll etc.  I recently bought a new laptop which did not ship with the traditional laptop touchpad but with something called a clickpad.

The Good News

Clickpads are the latest innovations from Synaptic (Not the package Manager Gui ) It replaces the traditional touchpad which is convention with most laptops.  It is  (From what I read)  suppose to bring better gesture support and (Mac like) multitouch. Unlike tranditional Touchpads which has 3 physical button, built with single touch in mind. The clickpad is just one Click Button which has been mapped into Zones (i.e there is the right and left click zone etc)

Naturally this should mean that all the awesome gesture support I have always admired about Macs is finally available for my laptop?

The Bad News

Well not Quite. Support the for clickpad on Ubuntu is still a bit flaky (to say the least). Not only are advanced features like enhanced gesture support and multitouch not available out of the box on Ubuntu. Other basic features like right clicking, horizontal scrolling, click and drag etc can be quite a hassle. On Ubuntu 10.04 some of the basic features have been fixed (although multitouch support is still lacking).

Same thing can not be said of Ubuntu 10.10 because there was a regression which make it impossible to right click using the touchpad. Already a bug has been filled concerning the issue and I wrote about a work around which works quite well.

Ray of Hope

It came yesterday when I stumbled on this bug report . Some (Awesome) dude created a package which brings basic Multitouch support for Clickpad on *buntu 10.10 . According to him

“the attached dkms package should provide multitouch support for a family of synaptics touchpads. Install and reboot. Please report both success and failure here. Thanks!”

source
And from feed backs there seems to be more success than failures.

Installation, configuration and Caveats

Installation

is very easy, Just download the deb package here and download click to install. Once installed, Reboot

Configuration

If everything goes well, Out of the box you should get basic multitouch goodness like two finger tapping to right click. To get more you have go a step further.

Kubuntu users

should head over to Systemsettings  > Input Devices > Touchpad Go to the “Scrolling” section and enable “Vertical Two Finger Scrolling” (There are other options there like “Horizontal Two Finger Scrolling” which I did not enable cause I am not really sure what it does, if you do please let me know how it goes :p) Then head over to the next Tab called “Tapping” what I did was to enable tabbing, then I went on to map Two fingers tapping to the Left click action menu and mapped three fingers tapping to the Middle key Again there are couple of options that can be set but I choose to limit myself by what I felt I needed.

Ubuntu users

Go to System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad and select “Two-finger scrolling”.

When all is set and done I logged out (rebooted? I can’t remember) and Voilà! I am able to use basic Multitouch support like two finger scrolling, three fingers to right click, three fingers to middle click. And my work flow? It increased by 50% percent (well more or less)

Caveat

While I hate to be a kill joy, I have to say that Ubuntu support for Clickpad even with this patch installed is not yet Nirvana. There are still some draw backs and advance gestures support like pinch to zoom are still not yet supported. Here is a list of what works and what doesn’t

What works

• Two Finger Scrolling
• Two fingers tapping to right click
• Three Fingers Tapping to Left click

NB There are lots of configuration (at least on Kubuntu) I only enabled the ones which made sense to me and which I was certain I needed hence this should not be seen as a conclusive list of which gestures are supported.

What doesn’t work

• Pinch to Zoom: Simply does not work period
• Traditional Right click: there is a regression with Ubuntu 10.10 which make it impossible to right click using the clickpad. I wrote about a work around this bug a while back Unfortunately the fix for the clickpad right click issue is not compatible with the patch that enabled multitouch. Hence the user has to pick which they are comfortable with. Either you still with the Traditional (single touch) Touchpad where right and left click are supported. Or you go with the Multitouch Clickpad where right | middle click is not supported (At least the traditional way)

I choose to stick with the latter .As many users most have noticed, the right click support in my work around is quite flaky, and pretty annoying sometimes. I have been using the Multitouch package now for 2 days and the difference is clear, while it might not be as smooth as the Mac experience (Yet), Its a generation better than the situation in my previous workaround. Just remember that this is a work in progress and Work is been done to bring an even better support to the next version of Ubuntu 11.04. It is important to subscribe to this bug report and follow its progress. With all the activities and work going into clickpad and multitouch on Linux both upstream and downstream, the only way is up

NB:

If you applied the patch (which enables right | middle click for clickpad) in my previous post. You need to remove it for the multitouch patch to work. You can remove the pmouse patch by doing the following

sudo dkms uninstall -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic
sudo dkms remove -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic --all

Reboot (not sure if that is necessary but its not bad to play it safe), and then install the Multitouch patch.

Hope someone finds this useful.

My previous favourite was winff. It is a nice frontend to ffmpeg and is capable of some pretty neat stuff. However there is a new* kid on the block which I found to be the coolest Media Converter  on Linux in terms of easy of use and number of cool features it packs.

Mobile Media Converter

(The name is self explanatory I guess)

is a free video and audio converter for converting between popular desktop media formats like MP3, Windows Media Audio (wma), Ogg Vorbis Audio (ogg), Wave Audio (wav), MPEG video, AVI, Windows Media Video (wmv), Flash Video (flv), QuickTime Video (mov) and commonly used mobile devices/phones formats like AMR audio (amr) and 3GPvideo. iPod/iPhone and PSP compatible MP4 video are supported. Moreover, you can remove and add new formats  or devices through the internet

source

Features

Some of the really cool features packed into MMC include

• Integrated YoutTube downloader for on the fly downloading of files from youtube and converting to preferred formats
• Trim and Crop Support It allows the user to trip audio clips or crop video clips taking out unwanted parts (excellent for rings tones and stuff)
• Subtitles Support Allow subtitles to be encoded onto the video for watching even on devices that does not supports them. Just drag and drop your video files and their subtitles on Mobile Media Converter

My Experience

Ease of Use

The first impression I got from using MMC is the ease of use. Even though it does comes with some very powerful features it manages to (brilliantly) expose these features allowing the users to easily make use of them. A good example is how the Video Trim feature is implemented It uses two sliders (top and bottom) the top slider is used to select where to start the trim and the bottom slider for where to stop the trim. I found this to be very intuitive and easy to use. The Crop feature is just as dumb proof. There are two vertical sliders (left and right) and two Horizontal sliders (Top and Bottom) Adjusting the sliders can be used to crop out unwanted section of the screen

Simple Sleek and Logical UI

One of the things that struck me about MMC was just how simple sleek and logical the UI was. It is not cluttered by menus and every feature is implemented in a way that makes them easy to discover and logical to use It supports dragging and dropping files to convert. To edit a file all you have to do is right click and edit It also makes use of very unobtrusive animation which provide smooth transitions between tasks. Overall it manages to unlock some of the most powerful features of FFmpeg and mencoder (Both commandline utilities) and exposes them to the user in a very simple way.

Features and Stability

Ability to embed subtitles to files, download files from youtube and encode them on the fly are just some of the neat features packed into MMC yet it manages to performs all the function without crashing or hogging my CPU. It also supports quite a large number of preset and allows for additional preset to be downloaded from the web providing a UI for the latter

Usage and Result

I have to admit I did not do a thorough test of MMC. But couple of Videos I tried converting all seems to work fine without any issues. The encoding went fast. The output was pretty decent. I have unable to test out some of the advanced features because I have not had any need for them. In all MMC is pretty much a frontend to FFmpeg which is a pretty solid tried and tested (knock on wood) commandline tool for doing that kind of stuff.

Installation

MMC is cross platform hence they are packages for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X If you are running Ubuntu Then you can easily download a .deb package and double click to install. The download instruction can be found here

So I guess you can call this my little review for the Mobile Media Converter. I hope someone finds it useful.

Recently though I have been given Clementine and amarok a fare share of play on my desktop (even though the later is still the star player (pun intended). However it seems all that might change. I was  reading a blog post about the monochomization of the notification area icon of clementine in the latest development build, so I decided to give it a go to see how that would fit in with kde 4.5 systemtray icon which are also monochrome. I did not notice any different in the systemtray icon ( which was still the same ole draining orange icon. sigh) But I got an unexpected surprise inform  some new features. Here are some of the new features and improvements I noticed while using the development branch of Clementine.

Lyrics Support ..  

…which by default uses lyric.wikia.com as backend (very configuration in fact from the  settings there are tons of lyrics backends to choose from)

Better Integration with lastfm (yay!)

Beside basic integrations like scrobbling, and loving tracks. It add cool features like displaying cool stats about the track you are listening to like how many times you have scrobbled that particular song to lastfm and how many times the song has been scrobbled as a whole, and how many others are listening to same track.   

The Artist info tab (Part of the redesigned sidebar) Displays Artist Pictures, Tags,  Similar artist and Biography which uses wikipedia as default (although lastfm, aol, myspace etc are also supported)

Though I am still discovering the latest Clementine which in turn is still under heavy development, I can not help but feel this is what Amarok 2x should have been design wise. I really feel Amarok could do without many of the clutter and buttons, even then its still one of the best Music players on Linux. I would not advise you give it a go if a stable music player is what you need because the current stable release is quite good. However if you (like me) don’t mind living on the edge then head over here on how you can get the latest development version

K|X|Ubuntu user can simply add the Clementine development PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine-dev
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install clementine

From what I have seen so far, the next stable release of Clementine is making strong strides to becoming the Most Valuable Player on my Desktop. The Tight Integration with Lastfm and Kiss design wins it for me.

N.B

For those who have not heard about  Clementine, it  is a multiplatform music player, inspired by Amarok 1.4, focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching and playing your music. It has packages for Linux, Windows and Mac. (On its way to world domination)

Features

• Search and play your local music library.
• Listen to internet radio from Last.fm, SomaFM and Magnatune.
• Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX.
• Visualisations from projectM.
• Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC.
• Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music.
• Download missing album cover art from Last.fm.
• Cross-platform – works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl).
• Remote control using a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line.
• Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player.
• Queue manager.