Hardy Heron - works!

Last Friday, I started my migration from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron. I took this opportunity to wipe out my entire system, starting from scratch with a new hard disk. Yeah, a 160GB notebook IDE hard disk is now only RM200, so I thought it was a worthwhile upgrade (and effort). I used to have two huge partitions (20-30GB each) formatted as FAT32 for me to share data if I so happened to boot into Windows XP. However for the past year, I never found the need to do that, so Im finally getting rid of FAT32 and by extension, issues with user and datetime information when rsynching.

Popped out the old HDD, replaced with the new, popped in the Install CD and was in the Installation screen booted up relatively quickly. The partitioning part of the installation process was quite tedious, because changing the partitions sizes was quite manual. You had to delete the partitions to make changes to the sizes. No slidey thingies as we are used to with partition management UIs.

After the CD was copied to the hard disk, Hardy booted up really fast. Im not sure its because I was so used to the relatively slow bootup of Gutsy, because it was an upgrade of Feisty Fawn, but I was well impressed with the speed. Things just worked out of the box. Wifi connected without a hitch, sound worked well, special buttons worked, and battery indicators seemed accurate. Suspend gave a problem, but fortunately Hibernate worked! Although it did give some worrying messages in between.

The new Firefox 3 beta 5 looks and feels real good. There are lots of little details which really make it look polished. My greasemonkey scripts appear to run faster than before. Im very happy that greasemonkey and firebug are easily installed via the Add/Remove software app. However some other browser plugins still arent ready, e.g. Google Sync and Permatabs.

I loved the new look to it, fonts seemed a lot more crisp (make sure this is set: System/Preferences/Fonts from BestShapes to SubPixels for your laptop/LCD screens), and windows moved alot faster. I checked out the screensavers, and the 3D ones seemed to be smoother too. However, strangely, compiz was not working. My ATI Mobility 9200 doesn't seem to work well with it, even though I have seen it work with Gutsy. Running glxgears gives a pretty good 1500 FPS. However when you close the app, it core dumps and a new dialog appears. This appears for other 3D screensavers too.

Installing the fglrx drivers doesn't seem to work either. Placing "fglrx" in the xorg.conf causes X to not start. Thats really annoying.

Also horizontal scrolling on the Mighty Mouse is not working. Whenever I change the Driver in the xorg.conf file from "mouse" to "evdev", the mouse will not work at all. Ive tried all the new tricks as described in this relatively new document, but getting horizontal scroll to work seems to be a puzzle.

Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"

It seems strange that things which used to work almost out of the box isnt working now. Whats interesting about Firefox 3 is that it is Mighty Mouse friendly: the Backward/Forward (mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action from "2" to "0") and Horizontal Scroll reversal ( mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines from "-1" to "1") settings are already corrected, so that one less fiddle in the about:config step to go through.

Another final touch is getting multimedia to work. So this command downloads the necessary unfree codecs:

# sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

It will then download 37MB of files (and more) for your viewing pleasure.

So overall, Im very happy with the new breath of fresh performance on my slightly old laptop (3 years old), Im dismayed that I can't scroll horizontally, and my compiz eyecandy isnt working. But I'm confident that I'll eventually find a way to rectify the current features as it used to work before.

It's definitely a worthy update for experts now, but for n00bs, please wait a month for workarounds and upgrades to plugins are found.

yk.

Mighty Mouse Wired!

After trying out the bluetooth MightyMouse, I went to look for a good deal online. I decided against getting the bluetooth model because my laptop doesn't have a built in bluetooth adaptor. Plus I didn't want the hassles of batteries and such.

I did find a good e-bay seller, so I bought a few to bring down the shipping costs. All in all, it was about RM100 for each mouse. Quite a bargain compared to the Mac shops at KLCC which sell it for RM199.

Finally, after waiting 11 days of waiting, my Apple Mighty Mouse has arrived! Plugged it in, and it worked off the bat - as a normal mouse. Left click, Middle click, Right click all ok. Vertical scroll is smooth and accurate. Laser light shows a picture of a mouse too. All OK!

Im now configuring xorg.conf to allow for the horizontal scroll, and this is what you need to do:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "MightyMouse"
 Option "CorePointer"
 Driver "evdev"
 Option "Name" "Primax Electronics Apple Optical USB Mouse"
 Option "HWHEELRelativeAxisButtons" "7 6"
 Option "Buttons" "8"
 Option "Buttons" "9"
EndSection

The difference between this Input device and a regular mouse is that the Driver is "evdev". The "Name" should correspond to the name detected by your system. To review, you can check out /proc/bus/input/devices. You should find an entry which looks like:

I: Bus=0003 Vendor=05ac Product=0304 Version=0110
N: Name="Primax Electronics Apple Optical USB Mouse"
P: Phys=usb-0000:00:1d.0-2/input0
S: Sysfs=/class/input/input10
H: Handlers=mouse3 event8 ts3
B: EV=100007
B: KEY=f0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: REL=143

In the xorg.conf, make sure that in the "ServerLayout" Section, you have added a reference to this input device:

  InputDevice "MightyMouse" "AlwaysCore"

Make sure the "AlwaysCore" is there, otherwise the mouse won't be recognised by X.

Restart X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace), and horizontal scroll should work. You can test with Inkscape.

For Firefox, a little bit more tweaking is required, as the horizontal scrolling of the ball actually maps to the "Back" and "Forwards" button of the browser. As you can imagine, this is "very irritating."
So to configure Firefox to behave properly, type in about:config in the URL bar, and edit mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action from "2" to "0".

Immediately, (Firefox restart not required) you will find that the horizontal scroll will work. Unfortunately, the default direction is reversed! When you scroll the ball to the right, the page goes the the left and vice versa. Very disorientating and worthy of a prank in the future.

To fix this, change mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines from "-1" to "1". This will reverse the direction to normalcy.

Compared to the bluetoothed Mighty Mouse, Wired Mighty Mouse is alot lighter, and easier on the wrist. Compared to my trusty old Logitech M-BJ58, the weight is about the same. However because of the construction of the device, it feels a lot more solid. Only time will tell how long the infamous Apple plastic will hold up.

Already Im addicted to the scrollball in moving around web-pages effortlessly. Looking for the scrollbars and aiming is now a thing of the past!

As mentioned above, I ordered a few Mighty Mouse from the seller. So I now have a couple of Apple Mighty Mouse to be resold. If you are interested, contact me. First come first serve, while stocks last, blah blah blah. RM100. A whopping 49.7487% discount! What-a-bargain. Works extremely well with your free desktop.

yk.

Apple Mighty Mouse

I managed to get my grubby little hands on a Apple Mighty Mouse. Its the bluetooth version. What enthralled me was the little scroll ball. I guess in my old age, Im finding using a scroll wheel inaccurate for small increments and tiresome for long pages. When I tried the Mighty Mouse at the new Mac shop in KLCC, I was won over.
So on my ubuntu machine, I plugged in the bluetooth dongle. On the command line I typed in:

# hidd --search

The Mighty Mouse blinked, and on screen, the taskbar displayed this popup:
Clicking on it will display this dialog:
And the default passkey for the Apple bluetooth Mighty Mouse is "0000".

Infortunately the command returned this error:
# hidd --search
Searching ...
Connecting to device 00:14:51:C4:55:71
HID create error 13 (Permission denied)

Which was strange. I could only use the root login to successfully pair with the mouse.

However once paired, the mouse worked like a charm. The scroll ball was smooth and extremely efficient. However I can't seem to get it to scroll horizontally. Perhaps its not supported yet?

The three button feature of the Mighty Mouse was ok, although disconcerting considering the entire upper body of the mouse is one big button. Im finding the weight of the device heavy. I hope it doesnt lead to RSI in the future.

Im looking for a good mouse to use at work. Considering Im on the PC 80% of the time, Id wont mind investing in a really good mouse. I don't really need the bluetooth feature, and I noticed that the Mac shop was selling the USB version for RM199. The American e-bay sell them at USD29 but shipping is about USD20 = USD49 = RM171. Hardly worth the savings.

Still undecided. I wonder if there are any other mice out there with the same scroll ball?


yk.

[Update: Info on getting horizontal scroll here ]