Huawei E1550

Update: You no longer need to install udev-extras in Ubuntu 10.04.

I picked up a Huawei E1550 pre-pay mobile broadband dongle, £39.99 with 3 Mobile including 3Gb usage (note it’s not the device they’re picturing).

I’m on a course next month so that’ll do fine, I have no reception at home and am not away enough to warrant a contract.

It appears to identify itself as USB storage, to install drivers on Windows then flip-flops to a modem.  Nice idea, terrible implementation, even in Windows where it installs drivers every time you use a different USB port (it’s often wise to try such devices in Windows – so you don’t chase your tail with a faulty device).  Pretty sure it’s the autorun program that’s flipping the device.

Anyway for 8.10 you need udev-extras, you don’t need this for 10.04 onwards:
sudo apt-get install udev-extras

Add a udev rule:
gksu gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/15-huawei-e1550.rules

What we’re doing is telling udev that when this device is plugged in to switch its mode.  Paste this and save:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",
SYSFS{idProduct}=="1446",
SYSFS{idVendor}=="12d1",
RUN+="/lib/udev/modem-modeswitch --vendor 0x12d1 --product 0x1446 --type option-zerocd"

On next insertion, Network Manager’s mobile broadband configuration assistant will run – select “3 (handsets)”.

Also, the booklet that came with mine was fairly unhelpful but flashing green lights are powered, flashing blue show available networks and solid blue is connected to a network.

The differences with both Fedora and Arch are on my wiki pages.

Please don’t ask if it works in Linpus Linux Lite because I haven’t had that installed in ages.  I suspect the Fedora guide will point the way but I know Acer have their own mobile broadband software for Huawei devices.  Whether that extends to this model I couldn’t say.

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http://wiki.lynxworks.eu/aspireone/arch

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I was surprised, especially on Ubuntu, how easy it was to setup.

My netbook runs Arch, so I installed it on that and my Dell 1545 running Ubuntu 9.04.

Hardware

In Ubuntu the firmware was added to linux-restricted-modules 2.6.24, so it’s picked up straight away.  Under Arch the firmware is missing but there’s a copy here which needs to be put in /lib/firmware before plugging in.  Once plugged in checking dmesg shows the device is recognised, don’t worry about the error message:

dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (based on ZL353)' in warm state.
dvb-usb: will use the device's hardware PID filter (table count: 15).
DVB: registering new adapter (WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (based on ZL353))
DVB: registering adapter 0 frontend 0 (WideView USB DVB-T)...
input: IR-receiver inside an USB DVB receiver as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-3/input/input11
dvb-usb: schedule remote query interval to 300 msecs.
dvb-usb: WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (based on ZL353) successfully initialized and connected.
dvb-usb: recv bulk message failed: -110

Notice that the IR receiver is also initialised, more on that later.

Software

I’m using VLC but need a couple of other utilities too:

sudo apt-get install dvb-apps dvb-utils vlc for Ubuntu.

sudo pacman -S linuxtv-dvb-apps vlc for Arch.

Now scan for channels.  You need to know your transmitter, which you can find out from Ofcom (in the UK) and replace “Sudbury” with it:

scan /usr/share/dvb/dvb-t/uk-Sudbury -o zap|tee /home/dougie/channel-list.conf

Opening this file in VLC will now give you TV playback:

vlc /home/$USER/channel-list.conf

Create a launcher and you’re done.  Well unless you want to use the remote of course.

Remote

It’s relatively straight forward in Ubuntu, install lirc:

sudo apt-get install lirc

When the menu appears, choose Freecom DVB-T USB Stick and click OK.  Next select None and click OK.  Lastly choose /dev/input/by-path/pci-2-3-event-ir and click OK.

I had to transpose the VOL_DOWN / CH_DOWN and VOL_UP / CH_UP in /usr/share/lirc/remotes/freecom/lircd.conf.freeconf, your mileage may vary as there appears to be two remote layouts.

Now if you run irw in a terminal and press the buttons on the remote, you should see output like:

0000000080010071 00 MUTE Freecom_DVB-T_USB


Now we’re nearly there, just need to tell applications (in this case VLC) what to do.  This is done by editing ~/.lircrc.

Configuration is not particularly well documented but centres around ~/.lircrc.  Each button has a configuration block, starting with begin and ending with end.  You need to stipulate the program to receive (in our case VLC), the button (which we know from irw) and what it does in the receiving program.  For example, assigning the volume up button to increase the volume in VLC.

begin
prog = vlc
button = VOL_UP
config = key-vol-up
repeat = 1
end


Open VLC and click Tools -> Preferences, then under “Show settings” click “Advanced”.  Under “Interfaces/Control Interfaces” tick “Infrared remote control interface”.  Click “Save” to close.

VLC Infrared Option

Sadly, I couldn’t get it to work on Arch.  The remote is recognised without lirc, detecting some of the keypresses – power, mute, volume and the numbers but checking sendkey and xev shows there is no keycode generated.

With lirc, irw doesn’t see input and yet the /etc/input/event does.  I’m reasonably sure that a module is overriding lirc and tried removing the obvious but to no avail.

After spending the better part of a day farting about with it, I realise that on a small screen the chances of me needing a remote negate the effort.  Bugs me that I haven’t got it though, so I guess I’ll revist it when I’ve more time.

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I am a heavy web user.  Everything from webmail to banking, if I can do it on-line I will.

So when I’m away from home (which is common) I like to have connectivity.  With WiFi access and mobile broadband what to connect to is straightforward.  As I like to travel light, I prefer to use a netbook and as they are typically lower specification, you quickly become aware of software bloat.

For years I have used Firefox.  I like its extensibility, security and reliability.  Sadly on smaller platforms, its starting to appear in need of a regular appearance at the gym.  Routinely sitting between 500 and 600 Mb with one or two tabs, the paging is noticable on a 512Mb Acer Aspire One (AOA 110-Ab) running Arch Linux.  This combined with the slower write access to an SSD makes for an irritating stuttering affect.

There are other issues to.  Since version two of Firefox went, sqlite databases are the order of the day.  Some of these grow to quite surprising sizes in a short space of time, noticeably urlclassifier3.sqlite (currently ~34Mb).  Disabling this protection seems a step backwards so I went as far as using tmpfs mounted profiles using rsync on a cron job to back it up to a tarball.

None of this really helped and the crux of the matter is still memory footprint.  So, on my mobile platform at least, Firefox must be replaced with a smaller alternative.

It must have a small footprint, fast page rendering and support Adobe Flash.  Niceties would be GTK (as I’m on Gnome) and a full screen mode.

Arora Browsing My Site

After much trial and error with everything from Epiphany to Opera, I decided to use Webkit.  With footprint in mind it came down to two contenders – Midori and Arora.  Midori is impressive but not mature enough so I chose Arora, version 0.8.0.  Having just checked the Jaunty repository, it appears Ubuntu users have a much older release – 0.5.0.

Arora seems to render pages much quicker and it certainly loads quicker.  There is a sizable decrease in memory footprint – averaging at around 150 Mb.  I’ve browsed for a few hours with several tabs open and not seen it go over 200Mb.

Netscape plugins are supported so Flash works just fine and even surpasses Firefox, where I have an issue with scroll bars not being rendered.  JavaScript too is not noticably slower, I’m sure with quantifiable tests Firefox would be quicker as a lot of work has been put into this recently.

Although QT based, it fits in well with the Caramello theme.  On the downside, its full screen mode is poor in comparison to Firefox, leaving the bookmarks bar in site taking up screen real estate – always a consideration on a small screen.

Arora in Full Screen

It’s a great shame that the version in our repositories is so old.  Since I started writing the system documentation for Ubuntu Netbook Remix I have moved to using an image in VirtualBox as I prefer a more tailored system provided by Arch.  Arora fits in well with this approach and is certainly lightweight enough to allow me to run a couple of applications on startup – Dropbox client, Skype client and Gwibber.  This gives accessibilty with fast booting and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  I also hope we can package a more recent version, especially for use with UNR.

Update: as Leonel pointed out, Arora 0.8 is available in Jaunty Backports.

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If you intend to use an SD card as a home partition you need to know two things – suspend to ram will not work with the stock kernel (it will with one of the Aspire One kernels) and you must not use ext2 for it – XFS seems much more stable.

The version of dhcpcd on the current Arch install image seems to have a bug – it will not initiate a DHCP request on the Aspire One. I got round this is by installing from the USB Core Image and then download the current dhcpcd (4.0.7-1) to a USB stick and used:

pacman -U dhcpcd-4.0.7-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz

Then rebooted. It required me to manually drop then raise the interface and call the daemon.

Update: I redid another machine on the weekend and had to edit /etc/rc.conf to add the interface before rebooting:

eth0="dhcp"
interfaces=(etho)

The upgrade in klibc has also caused me to have to do a:

pacman -Syu --force

/etc/rc.conf needs a couple of tweaks for timezone, input and modules – not to mention network but I’ll leave that for now. Here is my modified one:

# /etc/rc.conf - Main Configuration for Arch Linux#

# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
# LOCALIZATION
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------

LOCALE="en_GB.utf8"
HARDWARECLOCK="localtime"
USEDIRECTISA="no"
TIMEZONE="Europe/London"
KEYMAP="uk"
CONSOLEFONT=
CONSOLEMAP=
USECOLOR="yes"

# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
# HARDWARE
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------

MOD_AUTOLOAD="yes"
MODULES=(!memstick !snd-pcsp acpi_cpufreq r8169 pciehp ath5k uvcvideo)

# Scan for LVM volume groups at startup, required if you use LVM
USELVM="no"

# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
# NETWORKING
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------

HOSTNAME="aspireone"

# Interfaces are controlled by wicd
INTERFACES=(!eth0 !wlan0)

# Routes to start at boot-up (in this order)
gateway="default gw 192.168.0.1"
ROUTES=(!gateway)

# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
# DAEMONS
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
DAEMONS=(hal fam syslog-ng !network @wicd @alsa)

Bringing me to the interesting issue of Xorg. I didn’t really like hotplug support – the initial Xorg install generated an xorg.xonf fine but of course the keyboard and mouse didn’t work because evdev wasn’t available. The need to manipulate slightly obscure text files from one folder to another is a step back for Linux I think.

So, now we need to:

pacman -S libgl xorg xf86-input-evdev xf86-video-intel xf86-input-synaptics

Before we can work with the damn X configuration. The beginners guide over at the Arch Wiki covers this well enough that I don’t need to regurgitate it but I will mention how to get the keyboard and mouse to work.

First, add hal to the daemons in /etc/rc.conf and then copy the hotplug files to a permanent location (otherwise upgrades will remove them):

cp /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10ovendor/10-keymap.fdi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/.

Then edit it, changing the “input.xkb.layout” key to the right one for you (in my case the UK is “gb”). Now restart hal:

/etc/rc.d/hal restart

And then get a default X config:

xorg -configure

Test it using:

X -config /root/xorg.conf.new

If all is well, then copy it to etc:

cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I’m going to install XFCE, but you can install other desktops just as easily – change “xfce” to “gnome”, “kde” or whatever:

pacman -S xfce4

73.99Mb’s later, XFCE is in place. You can use “startxfce” to run it or configure a login manager – I use SLIM:

pacman -S slim

I use inittab – you can use /etc/rc.conf and load slim as a daemon but I don’t care for that. So edit /etc/inittab, change:

id:3:initdefault:

To

id:5:initdefault:

You also need to set the login manager, so change:

x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/xdm -nodaemon

To:

x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/slim >& /dev/null

Before we can reboot however, we need to add the XFCE session to the system xinitrc (/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc) to point to XFCE otherwise we get a error message from Slim. Remove the relevant comment mark to enable (exec startxfce4).

There are also some keyboard tweaks we require, so I changed /etc/rc.local to include the WiFi switch and the function keys:

/usr/bin/setkeycodes e055 159
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e056 158
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e025 130
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e026 131
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e027 132
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e029 122
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e071 134
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e072 135

Next onto that perrenial favourite – wireless. The kernel update does the work here – just need to install a managment system. I prefer wicd, fewer dependencies and no reliance on QT:

sudo pacman -S wicd

Notice from my /etc/rc.conf that I’ve stopped the eth0 and wlan0 interfaces loading and added wicd to the daemon list. This refused to play without a reboot and remember when using wicd-client to configure that when it says it can’t do something without encryption it wants a password entered in the settings.

Power management was one good reason to reinstall. So lets put acpid on:

pacman -S acpid

Once installed, I added two events, one to suspend on shutting the lid and another to shutdown when the button is pressed:

/etc/acpi/events/lid

event=button/lid.*
action=/usr/sbin/pm-suspend

/etc/acpi/events/power

event=button/power.*
action=/sbin/poweroff

The wireless wont restart after suspend, so you need to add /etc/pm/config.d/modules:

SUSPEND_MODULES="ath5k"

OK so that’s the meat of it. I have also made some alterations to system files specific to the A110, such as fstab, menu.lst and inittab.

Now, I like the filters to improve the display of fonts, so download the tarballs from AUR – libxft-lcd, cairo-lcd and fontconfig-lcd. Uninstall libxft and cairo then build and install.

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Its all up and running and other than two quirks, the guide on Arch Wiki is spot on.

As I said, I came across two quirks – the install image used kernel 2.6.26, which detects the r8196 module for the network but for some reason will not answer a dhcp request after reboot (only after reboot) – so replace it with 2.26.27 before reboot. You’ll need to anyway because the Atheros wireless chipset in the Aspire One is supported OOB on the more recent kernel.

The second is well documented, that ext2 partitions on SD are corrupted on suspend. I opted for an XFS partition though and have not had any issues.

The only things I haven’t got working are suspend to RAM and the WiFi light (although the switch works). Neither of these is a show-stopper because I’ve got boot time down to under 18 seconds which is only a few seconds more than resume from RAM.

I’d also advise binning dhcpd and using wicd – which integrates well with XFCE and being a daemon means WiFi is up before you’ve got a desktop.

Really impressed with Arch, a distro I haven’t used before. It’s from the minimalist camp and allows a tailored installation with little or no cruft. Its documentation is fantastic (I have seen a few ideas that I intend to implement in Ubuntu!).

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