Moving from a Laptop to a Cloud Lifestyle

September 8, 2011 | etbe

My Laptop History

In 1998 I bought my first laptop, it was a Thinkpad 385XD, it had a PentiumMMX 233MHz CPU, 96M of RAM, and an 800*600 display. This was less RAM than I could have afforded in a desktop system and the 800*600 display didn’t compare well to the 1280*1024 resolution 17 inch Trinitron monitor I had been using. Having only 1/3 the pixels is a significant loss and a 12.1 inch TFT display of that era compared very poorly with a good Trinitron monitor.

In spite of this I found it a much better system to use because it was ALWAYS with me, I used it for many things that were probably better suited to a PDA (there probably aren’t many people who have carried a 7.1 pound (3.2Kg) laptop to as many places as I did). But some of my best coding was done on public transport.

But I didn’t buy my first laptop for that purpose, I bought it because I was moving to another country and there just wasn’t any other option for having a computer.

In late 1999 I bought my second laptop, it was a Thinkpad 600E [1]. It had twice the CPU speed, twice the RAM, and a 1024*768 display that displayed color a lot better. Since then I had another three Thinkpads, a T21, a T43, and now a T61. One of the ways I measure a display is the number of 80*25 terminal windows that I can display at one time, my first Thinkpad could display four windows with a significant amount of overlap. My second could display four with little overlap, my third (with 1280*1024 resolution) could display four clearly and another two with overlap, and my current Thinkpad does 1680*1050 and can display four windows clearly and another five without excessive overlap.

For most of the last 13 years my Thinkpads weren’t that far behind what I could afford to get as a desktop system, until now.

A Smart Phone as the Primary Computing Device

For the past 6 months the Linux system I’ve used most frequently is my Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Android phone [2]. Most of my computer use is on my laptop, but the many short periods of time using my phone add up. This has forced some changes to the way I work. I now use IMAP instead of POP for receiving mail so I can use my phone and my laptop with the same mail spool. This is a significant benefit for my email productivity, instead of having 100 new mailing list messages waiting for me when I get home I can read them on my phone and then have maybe 1 message that can’t be addressed without access to something better than a phone. My backlog of 10,000 unread mailing list messages lasted less than a month after getting an Android phone!

A few years ago I got an EeePC 701 that I use for emergency net access when a server goes down. But even a 920g EeePC is more weight than I want to carry, as I need to have a mobile phone anyway there is effectively no extra mass or space used to have a phone capable of running a ssh client. My EeePC doesn’t get much use nowadays.

A Cheap 27 inch Monitor from Dell

Dell Australia is currently selling a 27 inch monitor that does 2560*1440 (WQHD) for $899AU. Dell Australia offers a motor club discount which pretty much everyone in Australia can get as almost everyone is either a member of such a club or knows a member well enough to use their membership number for the discount. This discount reduces the price to $764.15. The availability of such a great cheap monitor has caused me to change my working habits. It doesn’t make sense to have a reasonably powerful laptop used in one location for almost all the time when a desktop system with a much better monitor can be used.

The Plan

Now that my 27 inch monitor has arrived I have to figure out a way of making things work. I still need to work from a laptop on occasion but my main computer use is going to be a smart-phone and a desktop system.

Email is already sorted out, I already have three IMAP client systems (netbook, laptop, and phone), adding a desktop system as a fourth isn’t going to change anything.

The next issue is software development. In the past I haven’t used version control systems that much for my hobby work, I have just released a new version every time I had some significant changes. Obviously to support development on two or three systems I need to use a VCS rigorously. I’m currently considering Subversion and Git. Subversion is really easy to use (for me), but it seems to be losing popularity. Git is really popular so if I use it for my own projects then I could allow anonymous access for anyone who’s interested – maybe that will encourage more people to contribute.

One thing I haven’t even investigated yet is how to manage my web browsing work-flow in a distributed manner. My pattern when using a laptop is to have many windows and tabs open at the same time for issues that I am researching and to only close them days or weeks later when I have finished with the issue. For example if I’m buying some new computer gear I will typically open a web browser window with multiple tabs related to the equipment (hardware, software, prices, etc) and keep them all open until I have received it and got it working. Chromium, Mozilla, and presumably other modern web browsers have a facility to reopen windows after a crash. It would be ideal for me if there was some sort of similar facility that allowed me to open the windows that are open on another system – and to push window open commands to another system. For example when doing web browsing on my phone I would like to be able to push the URLs of pages that can’t be viewed on a phone to my desktop system and have them open waiting for me when I get home.

It would be nice if web browsing could be conceptually similar to a remote desktop service in terms of what the user sees.

Finally in my home directory there are lots of random files. Probably about half of them could be deleted if I was more organised (disk space is cheap and most of the files are small). For the rest it would be good if they could be accessed from other locations. I have read about people putting the majority of their home directory under version control, but I’m not sure that would work well for me.

It would be good if I could do something similar with editor sessions, if I had a file open in vi on my desktop before I left home it would be good if I could get a session on my laptop to open the “same” file (well the same named file checked out of the VCS).

Configuring the Desktop System

One of the disadvantages of a laptop is that RAID usually isn’t viable. With a desktop system software RAID-1 is easy to configure but it results in two disks making heat and noise. For my new desktop system I’m thinking of using a DRBD device for /home to store the data locally as well as almost instantly copying it to RAID-1 storage on the server. The main advantage of DRBD over NFS, NBD, and iSCSI is that I can keep working if the server becomes unavailable (EG use the desktop system to ask Google how to fix a server fault). Also with DRBD it’s a configuration option to allow synchronous writes to return after the data is written locally which is handy if the server is congested.

Another option that I’m considering is a diskless system using NBD or iSCSI for all storage. This will prevent using swap (you can’t swap to a network device to avoid deadlocks) but that won’t necessarily be a problem given the decrease in RAM prices as I can just buy enough RAM to not need swap.

The Future

Eventually I want to be able to use a tablet for almost everything including software development. While a tablet display isn’t going to be great for coding I’m sure that I can make use of enough otherwise wasted time to justify the expense. I will probably need a tablet that acts like a regular Linux computer – not an Android tablet.

Leaving Three

June 4, 2011 | etbe

In February I started the process of moving my phone and my wife’s phone to Virgin from Three [1]. The reason is that Three didn’t offer any good phones on affordable contracts, the cheapest that was suitable was a HTC Desire HD which would have cost me $55 per month, while I could justify spending that for my own phone (which is used for responding to SMS from Nagios to fix client servers) I didn’t have the budget to spend that much on my wife’s phone too – and I really want us to have the same type of phone for ease of support. So I chose Virgin who offers the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for as little as $29 per month – I chose a $39 per month deal that included 1500MB of data transfer and also had three months free which makes it effectively $34.12 per month.

When using previous phones that weren’t particularly smart I had also carried a Netbook and a 3G modem with me most of the time. Now that I have a phone that is a ssh client I don’t need that so I tried to cancel the contract today.

Three allows you to do almost everything over the Internet except cancel a contract – their web site doesn’t even give a phone number to call for that purpose. This must keep their support people busy, Vodaphone (which has just merged with Three) has recently had a horrible security breach because their sales booths used public Internet access for all customer data [2]. Also there is currently a law suit against Vodafone for poor network performance and misleading claims about service areas [3]. My experience with Three performance has been reasonably good apart from the fact that they advertised 3G service in Bendigo and provided none.

As Three are apparently desperate to retain customers they offered me free service for 6 months if I don’t close the account now. So I have a SIM that supports 1G of 3G data transfer per month for no charge until December (worth $90). What can I do with it? I don’t own a 3G modem as I gave that to my parents (who are quite happy with pre-paid 3G net access via Three) and the phones that I have which can be used for tethering are a little slow (usable for ssh and basic web access but not for Youtube etc).

Is there a way of selling such a SIM? Note that my name is still on the contract and any excess data or roaming fees will be billed to me so I can’t just put it on ebay.

I guess that one thing I can do is to use the SIM for receiving phone calls. For example if a friend was visiting from another country and wanted to receive calls without paying roaming fees I could lend them a phone.

Any ideas?

This Event Will be Photographed

May 2, 2011 | etbe

The above sign was prominently displayed at a fair that was recently run by the Banyule Council. We have had some discussions in the Linux community about what policies should be used in regard to photography at events, it seems that this is a precedent for being able to opt-out of public photography.

Locked Down Phones and Horrible Telcos

December 19, 2010 | etbe

Choosing a Phone

I was considering renewing my Three contract and getting a HTC Desire HD [1]. What I need is a phone that is good for being a ssh client on 3G networks, has a good camera, and has all the fancy Google Apps.

In the comments Lon recommended a Norwegian review of phone cameras which gave the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 a much better review than the HTC Desire HD [2] – the Xperia was the highest rating Android camera phone while the Nokia N8 was the best overall.

Also the Xperia is a lot cheaper, I can get it on a $29 monthly cap from Virgin as opposed to $44 per month from Three. So just on hardware and price the Xperia beats the Desire HD.

One of the advantages of the Xperia from Virgin being cheap is that my wife and I can use the same model of phone. This avoids having to solve two sets of phone related problems and also allows us to do things like swap batteries between the phones based on who can most conveniently charge their phone.

The Need for Root

But one problem with e Xperia is that the CyanogenMod images for rooted Android phones can’t be installed on an Xperia because the boot loader hasn’t yet been cracked [3]. I would like to run CyanogenMod so I can get wireless proxy support, and support for tunneling IP over DNS, ICMP, and OpenVPN.

The Three web site claims that they have 3G phone and net access in Bendigo, but on a recent holiday my phone said that it was “roaming” all the time and I couldn’t get net access. I ended up having to use McDonalds Wifi net access which had ports such as 22 blocked and thus forced me to use Iodine IP over DNS to get proper net access. To avoid having to talk my mother through rebooting servers in future I need to have a mobile ssh client that can use all possible protocols. I could carry my EeePC with me all the time, but sometimes it’s good to travel light.

OTOH, as I feel compelled to fiddle with all my computers it would probably give me a more reliable mobile experience if I was unable to mess with my phone.

Why Buying a Phone Outright Isn’t Viable

A $29 monthly plan is probably the cheapest plan that will do for anyone who uses a phone regularly, I have had a Three $29 plan for the last four years which allows up to $150 of calls to be made in a month and typically use about $60. So any plan which doesn’t have such a cap will have to be no more than half the price of Three on a per-minute basis to compete. If I’m going to pay $29 per month ($696 over a 24 month contract) then I can use a free phone. If I was to buy a phone then it would cost at least $500 for anything that I like and maybe a lot more.

Buying a phone independently of a contract would about double the cost of owning a phone. It’s really not a viable option.

Therefore I am compelled to buy a phone that is on offer from a Telco. Things like the Nokia N900 are nice devices but as the Telcos don’t offer them I can’t consider them.

No Discount if you Don’t get a Phone

The annoying thing is that the Telcos don’t offer a discount if you choose not to get a phone. Obviously buying the hardware costs them some money, so a $29 cap with a phone included should have a matching offer of something less than $29 if you choose not to get the phone from them. I currently have a $29 per month contract with Three, I can renew that for another two years at the same rate and get a half-decent phone for “free” or I can renew for two years on a $19 per month contract and get a low-end phone for “free” but I can’t get a price that is lower than $19 per month if I decide to keep my current phone.

If Three was to offer such a discount then I would consider buying a phone outright over the net and staying with them. But as it is they don’t provide good deals for buying a phone and give me an economic incentive to go to another provider. So I will probably use Virgin when my contract runs out in January.

Locked Phones

Many Telcos still sell locked phones on a contract. When that happens it’s really difficult to get a phone unlocked as the Telco employees usually aren’t very helpful. There are a variety of web sites claiming to generate unlock codes for phones, most seem to charge $10 or more for this service and the free ones have a very small range of phones, so getting the unlock code from the Telco seems to be the only option for a phone at the end of it’s contract period as it’s not worth enough to justify the $10 expense.

While some Telcos sell unlocked phones on plans the ones that lock their phones have a chilling effect on the industry. Most people don’t test whether their old phone can be used with a different provider they just throw it out – the phone stores conveniently provide bins for old phones that are apparently recycled for some good cause.

Conclusion

If you make serious use of mobile phones (EG being ready to fix errors reported by Nagios 24*7) then choosing a new phone and plan is one of the most difficult things there is to do. All the plans are quite complicated and every Telco offers a different set of phones. The Telco web sites are usually poorly done, most of them don’t have an option to search for Android phones or for phones with a certain minimum resolution – they usually don’t even state the resolution and use terms such as WQVGA which don’t even have a fixed meaning in pixels. When it comes to choosing a plan most Telcos don’t have a clear comparison of the different plans, writing your own spreadsheet comparing plan costs is a good idea.

The fact that Telcos such as Virgin and Three/Vodaphone allow free calls to other people using the same company makes it even more tricky. I have to discuss my phone plans with several relatives as there is a good incentive for everyone to use the same provider.

I think that we need government regulation on the way that phones are bundled. The market for phones that aren’t associated with Telco contracts has been destroyed by the anti-competitive behavior of the Telcos.

Quality of Cameras in Phones

November 26, 2010 | etbe

The discussion in the comments on my post about a mobile phone for Sysadmin use [1] turned to the issue of picture quality. This is an issue for a sysadmin as photographing the screen of a crashed computer while being a rare occurrence can be an important part of solving a computer problem.

Lon recommended a review of phone cameras by the Norwegian site Amobil [2]. This review only included devices that had already passed earlier review, so even the HTC Desire HD (which came last on the Amobil tests) still has a better camera than most phones on the market. It’s a pity that no English-language site seems to have done such a review.

The Amobil article (when translated) says: â€œIn the mobile industry is faced with the need for much extra processing for the images to look good, because there is no room for large optics and large image sensors that receive sufficient amount of lightâ€.

IMHO thatâ€™s overstating the case. I have yet to see a camera-phone that couldnâ€™t be redesigned in a trivial way to give a better camera functionality. It appears that the limiting factor is the thickness of phone which limits the maximum focal length and therefore the maximum area (I presume itâ€™s safe to assume that Fresnel lenses are not viable for cameras). My LG U990 Viewty is 14.8mm thick, I would be happy with something a bit thicker if it gave a better picture, 30mm wouldnâ€™t be a problem (my first few mobile phones were thicker than that and had no camera). Maybe a design could have the camera stick out such that the main body of the phone was 15mm thick while the camera part was 30mm. Also having the camera in a central part of the phone (underneath the touch-screen) probably loses at least 1mm of focal length. It seems that the amount of light captured will be the square of the focal length, so an ideal (IMHO) camera design could have twice the depth of a Viewty, 4* the light captured, and therefore have an 8MP camera with a better response in adverse light than the Viewty (which is pretty good for a phone but crap for a camera).

I noted in the comments that it’s a pity that camera-phones don’t support storing pictures in RAW format, Paul pointed out that the Nokia N900 supports RAW pictures. I’m glad to learn that at least one phone-camera manufacturer is doing the sane thing, now we just need to have RAW pictures as a check-list item on reviews to force others to do the same. I wonder whether a modified version of the Android OS could support RAW format…

Amobil published an article about some joint ventures between camera and phone companies [3]. Apparently LG are working on a phone with 3* Optical Zoom that uses Pentax optics, while the Olympus camera company is considering the purchase of a phone company with the apparent aim of producing a killer camera-phone.

I wonder whether I should delay the purchase of my next phone for a few months to take advantage of some of these developments. If nothing else I expect some significant improvements in the screen resolution of phones in the near future. The maximum screen resolution that is common at the moment is 800*480 (WVGA), but the iPhone 4 supports 960*640 resolution which is 60% more pixels and I expect other manufacturers to release phones to compete with it in the near future.

Raw Satire Usually Fails on the Internet

September 2, 2010 | etbe

Sarcasm and satire usually don’t work on the Internet. One cause of this is the lack of out of band signalling via facial expression or tone of voice. Another issue is the fact that in real life people usually know something about the person who they listen to while on the Internet it’s most common to read articles without knowing much about the author. So the reader can’t use “I know that the author isn’t an asshole” as a starting point to determine whether a message should be interpreted literally.

This is really nothing new. The standard in printed communication for a long time has been to use Emoticons (Wikipedia) to indicate emotion and other interpretation that might not be deduced from a direct reading of the text. The Wikipedia page cites examples of emoticon use dating back to 1857 – although the combinations of characters used for different emotions has changed significantly many times. The common uses that we now know on the Internet date back to 1982.

In my experience the symbol :-# is commonly used to note sarcasm or satire. Unfortunately it seems that none of the Internet search engines allow searching for such strings so I couldn’t find an early example of this being used. While I haven’t found a reference describing this practice, I regularly receive messages annotated with it and find that people generally understand what I mean when I use it in my own email. But that is usually applied to a sentence or two.

For a larger section of text a pseudo-HTML tag such as </satire> can be used to signal the end of satire. It seems that a matching start tag is optional as recognising the start of satire is a lot easier once the reader knows that some of the content is satirical. In spoken English a phrase such as “but seriously” may be used for the same purpose, but such a subtle signal may be missed on the Internet – particularly by readers who don’t use English as their first language.

Another way of signaling a non-literal interpretation is by using Scare Quotes – the deliberate usage of quotation symbols to indicate that the writer disagrees with the content that is written. That is common for the case of referencing a phrase or sentence that you disagree with, but doesn’t work for a larger section of text.

A final option is to make the satire or sarcasm so extreme that no-one can possibly mistake it for being literal. This is not always possible, Poe’s Law holds that “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing” [1]. I think that Poe was understating the case, it is impossible to create a parody of religion that most people won’t mistake for the real thing without signals or context. For an example read LandOverBaptist.org and Chick.com, of course if you know those sites then you will know whether they are satirical or serious – but I expect that most readers of my blog won’t invest enough effort into either of those religious sites to determine whether they are serious or satire.

But satire and sarcasm without signals or a reputation usually fails. One example of success is The Onion which is a long running and well known satirical news site [2]. But even The Onion it is regularly mistaken for being serious – the number of occasions when people forward me Onion articles for amusement are vastly outnumbered by the number of occasions when I see people taking it seriously.

Even when material is known to be satirical it can still fail grossly. An example is the Chaser’s satire of the Make A Wish Foundation [3]. Even material that is well known to be satirical seems to fail when it attacks bad targets or attacks in a bad way. One difficulty is in satirising bigoted people, to effectively satirise them without attacking the minority groups that they dislike can be a difficult challenge.

Finally, when you write some satire and members of your audience don’t recognise it you should consider the possibility that you failed to do it properly. If you can’t get a hit rate close to 100% for people with the same background as you then it’s probably a serious failure.

A Netbook for Aircraft Navigation

August 25, 2010 | etbe

There is apparently some MS-Windows software for navigating light aircraft in Australia. It takes input from a GPS device and knows the rules for certain types of common tasks (such as which direction to use when approaching an airport). My first question when I heard of this was “so if the Windows laptop crashes does your plane crash?“. But I’ve been assured that paper maps will always be available.

The requirement is for a touch-screen device because a regular laptop in the open position won’t leave enough room for the control stick. So the question is, what is the best touch-screen Windows laptop? It must be relatively rugged spinning media for storage is unacceptable due to the risk of damage in turbulence, it should be relatively cheap (less than $1000), and can apparently have a somewhat low resolution for the screen.

The pilot who asked me for advice on this matter is currently thinking of the ASUS Eee T91 which runs Windows XP home, has 16G of solid-state storage and a 1024*600 screen. I am concerned about the reliability of that system as the rotatable screen design seems inherently weak.

The Smartbook concept sounds appealing, I don’t expect that you would want to wait for a typical OS to boot while flying a plane. But those devices mostly use ARM CPUs and thus can’t run MS-Windows. One particularly interesting device is the Always Innovating Touchbook [1] which has a detachable keyboard – which would be handy for non-airline use. Unfortunately it seems that Always Innovating aren’t doing production at the moment, they say “The current Touch Book production is in stand-by and will resume in the summer when we will release our newest and craziest innovation” – well summer is almost over in the northern hemisphere so I guess that means there won’t be anything from them for another 9 months.

A device such as an iPad would also be a good option for looking at static documents. The pilot is considering using a MS-Windows PC to generate images and then viewing them on such a device. But he’s not really enthusiastic about it.

Are there any good and cheap touch-screen devices that run MS-Windows? Are there any particularly noteworthy PDF reader devices which would be better than an iPad for viewing maps while flying a plane? Is it possible to run a MS-Windows application that uses a GPS under Wine on a Netbook?

[1] https://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

Cyborgs solving Protein Folding problems

August 10, 2010 | etbe

Arstechnica has an interesting article about protein folding problems being solved by a combination of brute-force software and human pattern recognition in the form of a computer game [1]. Here is a link to the primary source which also mentions the fact that players can design their own proteins which could potentially cure some diseases [2].

It is also similar to Jane McGoningal’s ideas about using online gaming to make a better world [4] which inspired my post about choosing a free software mission [5].

What other serious problems can we solve via computer games and screen-savers?

Yubikeys Have Arrived

July 28, 2010 | etbe

In my previous post about the Yubikey I suggested that computer users’ groups should arrange bulk purchases to get the best prices [1]. I ran such a buying club for Linux users in Australia as well as members of SAGE-AU [2].

The keys have arrived and I now have to start posting them out. Above is a picture of two boxes that each contain 100 keys. Presumably if you buy a smaller number of keys then you get more fancy packing.

Thanks to Yubico for giving us a greater discount than the usual discount rate for boxes of 100 keys!

ATI ES1000 Video on Debian/Squeeze

April 18, 2010 | etbe

The Problem

I’ve just upgraded my Dell PowerEdge T105 [1] from Debian/Lenny to Debian/Squeeze. Unfortunately the result of the upgrade was that everything in an X display looked very green while the console display looked the way it usually did.

I asked for advice on the LUV mailing list [2] and got a lot of good advice. Daniel Pittman offered a lot of great advice.

The first suggestion was to check the gamma levels, the program xgamma displays the relative levels of Red, Green, and Blue (the primary colors for monitors) where it is usually expected that all of them will have the value of 1.0. This turned out to not be the problem, but it’s worth noting for future instances of such problems. It’s also worth noting the potential use of this to correct problems with display hardware, I’ve had two Thinkpads turn red towards the end of their lives due to display hardware problems and I now realise I could have worked around the problem with xgamma.

He also suggested that it might be ICC, the command “xprop -root | grep -i icc” might display something if that was the case. I’m still not sure what ICC is about but I know it’s not set on my system.

The next suggestion was to use the VESA display driver to try and discover whether it was a bug in the ATI driver. It turned out that the VESA driver solved that problem, I was tempted to continue using the VESA driver until I realised that the VESA driver has a maximum resolution of 1280*1024 which isn’t suitable for a 1680*1050 resolution display.

After reviewing my Xorg configuration file Daniel noted that my frame buffer depth of 16 bits per pixel is regarded as unusual by today’s standards and probably isn’t tested well. As 24bpp is generally implemented with 32bits for each pixel that means it takes twice the frame-buffer storage (both in the X server and in some applications) as well as twice the memory bandwidth to send data around. So I generally use 16bpp for my systems to make them run a little faster.

(II) RADEON(0): Not using mode “1680×1050” (mode requires too much memory bandwidth)

I tried using a depth of 24bpp and then I saw messages such as the above in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. It seems that the display hardware in my ATI ES1000 (the on-motherboard video card in the Dell server) doesn’t have the memory bandwidth to support 1680*1050*24bpp. I tried using the gtf to generate new mode lines, but it seems that there is no 24bpp mode which has a low enough vertical refresh rate to not exhaust memory bandwidth but which is also high enough for the monitor to get a signal lock.

The Solution

My current solution is to use 15bpp mode which gives almost the same quality as 16bpp and uses the same small amount of memory bandwidth. It seems that 15bpp doesn’t trigger the display driver bug. Of course one down-side to this is that the default KDE4 desktop background in Debian seems perfectly optimised to make 15bpp modes look ugly, it has a range of shades of blue that look chunky.

What I really want to do is to get a better video card. Among other things I want to get a 1920*1080 resolution monitor in the near future, Dell is selling such monitors at very low prices and there are a bunch of affordable digital cameras that record video at that resolution. Even if I can get the ES1000 to work at 1920*1080 resolution it won’t support playing Full HD resolution video – I can barely play Youtube videos with it!

I’ve previously described my experience with the awful Computers and Parts Land (CPL) store [3] where they insisted that a PCIe*16 graphics card would work in my PCIe*8 system and then claimed to be doing me a favor by giving me a credit note for the full value (not a refund). This convinced me to not bother trying to buy such a card for the past year. But now it seems that I will be forced to buy one.

What I Want to Buy

I want a PCIe*8 video card that supports 1920*1080 resolution at 24bpp and has good enough performance with free Linux drivers to support Full HD video playback. Also PCIe*4 would do, and I’m prepared to compromise on support of Full HD video. Basically anything better than the ES1000 will do.

Does anyone know how I can buy such a card? I would prefer an ATI card but will take an NVidia if necessary.

Note that I have no plans to cut one of the PCIe sockets on my motherboard (it’s an expensive system and I’m not going to risk breaking it). I will consider cutting the excess pins off a video card as a last resort. But I would rather just buy a PCIe*8 video card.

Note that I am not going to pay cash in advance to a random person who reads my blog. Anyone who wants to sell me a second-hand card must either have a good reputation in the Linux community or ship the card to me on the condition that I pay after it passes the tests.

Update: The first version of this post said that I upgraded TO Lenny, not FROM it.

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

Category Archives: Misc Computer