HP BIOS update madness

Say you wanted to update the BIOS on a colleague's HP nc6230. You go to the HP website to find a "ROMPaq for HP Notebook System BIOS (68DTA) – FreeDOS Bootable Diskette", which sounds exactly like what you'd want to download.
Well, follow that link and you'll get a file called sp35281.exe. Does not look like a floppy image at all.
So let's find out what it is:

~> file sp35281.exe
sp35281.exe: MS-DOS executable PE  for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit

Damn. A Windows executable, just to create a floppy image...
But there is always wine, so we'll start it with that...

...long story short: it is some kind of self-extracting archive, which extracts an executable (of course for Windows, not DOS...), which then will write the image to the floppy disk.

There would probably be the possibility to configure wine to use a floppy image as drive A:, but fortunately this was not necessary. Examining the rom.exe, not even too closely gives:

~> du -b .wine/drive_c/SWSetup/sp35281/rom.exe
1502208 .wine/drive_c/SWSetup/sp35281/rom.exe

Which is exactly the size of a floppy disk image (1474560 Bytes) plus 27kB.
Just guessing, i extracted the last 1440kB from the executable:

tux@d173:~> dd if=.wine/drive_c/SWSetup/sp35281/rom.exe of=floppy.img bs=1k skip=27
tux@d173:~> file floppy.img
floppy.img: DOS floppy 1440k, x86 hard disk boot sector

Voilá - a bootable floppy image. Now i only hope for HP to start recognizing that they are doing no favour to their customers by obfuscating their BIOS updates like that...

Cool new machine for me

My boss was a good easter bunny. A little bit late, but the gift he brought was all the better: a brand new HP Compaq 2510p notebook (see e.g. Notebookcheck.com for the gory technical details).

It came with the "small" 6 cell battery, which lasts for over 5 hours without any aggressive power management employed, later i got the "big" 9 cell battery which lasts well over 8 hours. Who says size doesn't matter? ;)

I additionally got the HP hs2300 HSDPA Wireless module (which is very much just a rebranded Sierra Wireless MC8775 with different USB IDs) for which i already sent patches upstream for the Linux kernel and HAL, so that it will work out of the box with openSUSE 11.0.

What can i say? This is an amazing little machine.
LED backlit 12.1" display (why do the HP marketing guys call it "illumi-lite" instead of just plain saying "LED backlight"? It has an ambient light sensor which adjusts the display brightness automatically and works very well for me, but it can be switched off with a key combination.
The internal HSDPA card has an amazingly good reception - much better than all the external PCMCIA / ExpressCard cards i had so far. This might be due to the better antenna built into the display, but i don't care why - it just works much better. Additionally, it does not consume a noticeable amount of the battery unless it is really used for transmitting data. I cannot say this of any of the external solutions.
The Ultra Low Voltage Processor is not a performance monster, but it performs at least as well as the ThinkPad X32 (Pentium M 1.8GHz) i had before, and it additionally has VT extensions nicely usable with KVM and qemu-kvm, combined with the 2GB of RAM it is more than suitable for my needs.

Everything on this machine works just fine: the intel 4965 wireless, the bluetooth adapter, suspend to RAM and suspend to disk - everything. Apart from that, it is really portable and still has a built in DVD burner - what else can you demand from your friendly easter bunny?

Thanks!

P.S.: of course, all this is with the current openSUSE Factory. There was a Vista Business installed on the machine, but after fiddling around with that for a few hours, to get it small enough to resize the Partition to less than 10GB, i never booted that again, i just was not impressed by it at all.

Activation Of Internal UMTS/3G Datacards

What to do if you got a brand-new ThinkPad X300, but the internal 3G data card (a SierraWireless device with the USB ID 1199:6813) simply refuses to find a network, and as a result cannot connect?
Well, maybe the card is just deactivated by default to save battery. You can enable it easily by sending:

at+cfun?
+CFUN: 0

OK
at+cfun=1
OK


to it (AT+CFUN? returns the current state, AT+CFUN=1 enables the device) with a terminal program of your choice (i always use "screen /dev/ttyUSB0" for such tasks). At least the card remembers this setting, so you don't have to repeat it every time. However, a setting somewhere in UMTSmon to automatically deactivate the card when the program exits would be cool to save some more battery power... I will have to look into that.

Cross-Distro Packaging With Build Service Rocks!

During last hackweek a few days ago, i finished one of my pet projects: to fix up and package tuxcursors. That's fine for SUSE users out there, since i guess the package will be included in the next release, however it does not help the users of other distributions directly.
So i made my first try on building packages for Fedora and Mandriva (apart from my umtsmon packages, but those worked more by accident...) and i have to say that it is pretty easy and straightforward.
So if you want cute penguins waving at you as mouse cursors, go ahead and install the tuxcursors package for your distribution from my Build Service Home, easily found via http://software.opensuse.org/search/ (search for "tuxcursors", of course).
And if you think about packaging your project for more than one distribution, the openSUSE Build Service is definitely worth a look.

A warm welcome to the planetsuse.org readers

I finally got my act together and got syndicated on Planet SUSE which will probably multiply the number of readers of my ramblings by quite a big amount.
For those who don't know me already: i'm one of the guys of the fabulous Team Mobile Devices, located in the Nürnberg facility.
If i don't do things related to bluetooth, power management, UMTS/3G, suspend or other portable-computing stuff, i quite often hack on some small digital TV set-top-boxes, of course running Linux.
There will be the odd post in german on my blog, usually for stuff of local interest only. I hope you all can stand that.

So let's have a lot of fun...

P.S. if you want to reply on my blog, make sure not to have the string "http:" in your comment, or i will not even see it for moderation. Thanks, spammers!

KDE 4.0.0

It's out, so i tried it: KDE 4.0. It made huge progress since i last tried it about 8 weeks ago. I can, for example, now use two displays at different resolutions, and still get the Desktop right for both (i need to set them up manually in my .xsession, since the kde RandR applet cannot do that, but that's no problem).

However, as long as basic functionality like "moving and resizing the task bar" is not possible at all, i don't care about the excuses that the developers find for releasing this hunk of code, i'll just go back to 3.5 and use some selected KDE4 apps (konsole4 really rocks) on my machine.
See you later at 4.2.

Evolution Attachment Reminder.

I don't believe it.
Evolution now has an "Attachment Reminder". Note that KMail from the popular KDE desktop has such a function since ages. The GNOME crowd is now suddenly selling it as the best thing since sliced bread.
Go figure...