Dell Precision M2400 + Ubuntu Hardy

Welcome, Googlers. You are here because you have put Ubuntu Hardy (or perhaps Intrepid) on your shiny new M2400 (or other Precision laptop). And you've run into issues with your wireless; to wit, it don't work.

I've got the nVidia Quadro 370M, and Intel wireless 5100 cards. A fresh install of Hardy on a Dell Precision M2400 supports the nVidia (howto). But the 5100 wireless card support is non-existent.

To get both of these devices working, you're going to have to build a new kernel, and also compile a beta nVidia driver interface. It's actually an automated and fairly bulletproof process, so don't lose your nerve.

I think there are some other approaches that could work. I tried the compat-wireless strategy -- it's a technique using the recompiled Intel 4965 driver plus new firmware (oh yeah... you're going to need that 5000 series firmware from the Intel site anyway, so go get it). That strategy actually worked... as long as I ran "make load" on every boot... and occasionally my keyboard would freeze, requiring a reboot. I never could get that approach to feel stable, and my googling left with the impression that nobody had taken it much further than I had.

But to focus on the strategy I got working:

The problem is that the new Intel iwlagn drivers are part of the very latest kernel. I do not believe they are in even the Ububtu Intrepid kernel, so I did not attempt to promote to that alpha version of the distro. You can google to find lots of people dist-upgrading to Intrepid only to find they still don't have support for the 5100.

But there is support in the 2.6.27-rc6 kernel, the latest stable development pre-patch.

Build the 2.6.27-rc6-ultimate kernel

If you have X + nVidia set up the way you like, now would be a good time to save a copy of /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

You want to build this kernel the Ubuntu way. I suggest you follow the command line instructions on that page, and avoid the KernelCheck GUI program. I tried KernelCheck first and it is a really handy way to build a kernel. But it seems not to have left artifacts you will need later, when you build the nVidia driver interface. I admit there could have been pilot error in my case -- but I know the command line method works correctly.

When you get to the "make xconfig" step, choose Find from the Edit menu and search for "iwl". Turn on all those options.

Don't forget to select 64 bit options.

I emulated KernelCheck's naming pattern and identified my kernel with the name "ultimate", so my make-kpkg command was

make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-ultimate kernel_image kernel_headers modules_image

So my uname -r is "2.6.27-rc6-ultimate".

Follow the instructions all the way and install your kernel. Don't worry, your old kernel is still there and in case of trouble, you can always choose it in the boot menu.

Remember that firmware you downloaded above? Put it at /lib/firmware/2.6.27-rc6-ultimate/iwlwifi-5000-1.ucode. Then reboot, and you'll have wireless... but no nVidia.

Build the nVidia driver

When you reboot into your new kernel, the system will drop you into a default 800 x 600 X session. Don't attempt to configure X yet if it prompts you.

There's no pre-built nVidia driver for this kernel. I also found that only the latest beta nVidia driver interface compiled against this kernel.

In order to build and install the driver, you need to kill X and make it stay killed. Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a console, then "killall gdm". Then, following the instructions on the nVidia site, run the install script you downloaded. It should even edit the xorg.conf file to install itself, but in my case I still had to go back and set the resolutions -- I just replaced xorg.conf with the one I had saved at the beginning.

Our only departure from the Ubuntu way was using the nVidia install script -- it puts nvidia kernel module in a place of its choosing, and it won't be managed by apt for us. But we're not going to be getting new kernels from apt anyway -- we built our own, and we're now going to take responsibility for upgrading kernels (as needed) and nVidia at the same time.

Tidying up

You want to be able to suspend and hibernate, and it just takes a couple of edits. To hibernate, you'll need as much swap space as you have RAM. With this computer, unlike my last one, I've done that, and hibernate now works after the edits.

The NetworkManager annoyingly asks you to enter your keyring password whenever you log in. Googling around, I found some solutions. One of them worked for me. I'm not sure I used the best solution, so I'm punting and letting you find your own answers.

Hey -- this backlit keyboard is pretty nice!

Update Sept 17: Using the Hardy config file as your initial config (config-2.6.24-19-generic), simply enabling iwl* as above leaves you missing two modules that Ubuntu installs only as part of the linux-ubuntu-modules package. Your sound card and webcam require extra modules. In make xconfig, be sure also to select "USB Video class" (if you have the webcam) and "Intel HD Audio".

Check your DNS

Dan Kaminsky has published a widget you can use to test your DNS server for the cache poisoning design flaw. You know, the one that allows a malefactor to send your PayPal requests to their own fake servers? The one that doesn't require any vulnerability on your computer, just the standard, unpatched DNS server that you use?

Both my home and business ISPs failed the test. I followed Dan's advice and pointed our routers to OpenDNS. I guess it's a good day to be an investor in OpenDNS. Except I can't figure how they're going to execute on their plan to serve me ads via DNS. Anyway, this is their moment of glory, and they seem to be holding up under the load. If Dan has any stock in OpenDNS, that would be clever of him. I am not suggesting he does. Unless it turns out that he does. Then in that case, I am suggesting it retroactively, and don't say I didn't tell you so.

Get with it, Pops

Dare gives evidence that older Googlers are coming away dissatisfied from the experience.

Here are a few disapproving quotes:

• It was obvious that they do not care that I had 12 years software engineering experience
• orientation towards cool, but not necessarily useful or essential software
• don’t have a career path for their employees
• There is no legacy code
• As all organizations mature they tend to add PROCESS

Isn't this the static vs dynamic argument? Old models of software development vs new? On premise software vs software as a service? Will legacy code even be important at Google? Shouldn't our goal be disposable code?

Aren't perspectives like this the reason Microsoft is perceived as a falling star while Google is a rising one?

Asynchronous HTTP POST

I've got to process a huge POST asynchronously. If it were small enough I'd just return 201 Created, with the URL of the new resource in the Location header. But this is a massive file upload that requires a bunch of processing, and checking, before I can create the resource. It takes so long to process, your TCP connection will time out.

202, right?

This is a job for 202 Accepted, right? I had always understood 202 was how to respond ansynchronously to a POST. I return some hypertext with a link you can follow to see the status. You follow that link, load the status page, and hit refresh until it shows "100% done" and displays yet another link to the resource you created. That's what the RFC says to do.

In a machine to machine case, e.g. Atompub, I have to define meaningful content types so that clients can follow the hyperlinks to learn how the POST came out. If you're thinking of using the Location header: It isn't blessed for 202; even if it were, we couldn't guarantee that the resource at the returned URL will ever exist.

Why not 303?

I prefer to respond with 303 See Other. Clients follow that Location header to a status page, eliminating the extra manual step required by 202. Retrieving that page would itself return 202 Accepted, until I've created the resource, or failed to. Then that URL would return 201 Created, or whatever the result would have been in the synchronous case.

This way, user agents just follow the semantics of HTTP, and never need to understand any application entities.

Summarizing:

• Any user agent will knows to follow the 303 to the status page automatically. This is the URI giving "the response to the request", which is a status page. Any time you want the response to this POST request, go to that URI.


• GET on that status URI, for some time, returns 202 and an entity giving "an indication of the request's current status".


• Finally, at some time when you check that URI, you get the final "response to the request".

The surprising part might be encountering 202 or 201 in response to GET. But nothing says you can't, and in fact that is the "response to the request".

(Ben Ramsey discusses returning 202 from the POST. It gets a little messy.)

Ruby: DSL for Writing Programs

Ruby:

PEOPLE = [{:first=>'scott', :last=>'guthrie', :age=>32},
              {:first=>'susanne', :last=>'guthrie', :age=>32},
              {:first=>'bill', :last=>'gates', :age=>50}]

def avg_age
  guthries = PEOPLE.select {|p| p[:last] == 'guthrie'}
  guthries.inject(0) {|s, p| s + p[:age]} / guthries.length 
end

Common Lisp:

(defvar  +people+ 
  (list 
   (list :first "scott" :last "guthrie" :age 32)
   (list :first "susanne" :last "guthrie" :age 32)
   (list :first "bill" :last "gates" :age 50)))

(defun avg-age ()
  (let ((guthries  (remove-if (lambda (p) (not (equal "guthrie" (getf p :last)))) +people+)))
    (/ (reduce #'+ (map 'list  (lambda (p) (getf p :age)) guthries)) (length guthries))))

These snippets calculate the average age of the people having last name "guthrie". The functions are both two lines long, but the Ruby one is more readable.

S-expressions give Lisp powerful ways to build code in code. But writing programs using S-expressions seems cumbersome compared to Ruby's syntax. The syntax of Ruby shortens the code you have to write to do everyday tasks. It's like a domain specific language for, er, writing computer programs.

You give up some programming power -- a fair trade if you rarely need that power.

Self-appointed Guardians of Truth

SiteTruth has given my company's web site a big red .

Even though we don't sell products electronically, they wish we had a certificate. And we've never put our office address on that site -- an oversight when we moved, not a scam. So they give us a big red "Do Not Enter" sign, indicating our site is dangerous to enter. From their "about" page:

Every on-line commerce web site must display the name and address of the business behind the site. That's the law in much of the developed world. SiteTruth tries to identify that business, then find information about it. That check is used to influence search rankings. That's SiteTruth. (emphasis mine)

We're not an "on-line commerce web site", but their system can't detect that, so they're selling technology that will lower our search rankings?

We'll fix our site to please them, of course; why not? But their technology doesn't seem to increase the safety of the web. And is likely to piss off other legit site owners, some of whom may even feel litigious. Could you blame them?

Hardly any near death experiences

The Hardy upgrade went... ok. Better than the upgrade to Gutsy, at least --the initial boot this time at least got me to an X, if only in 600 x 800 mode.

So you don't have to read to the end, here's my helpful hint to you this upgrade cycle. If you're having trouble with your nVidia: after you upgrade, use Synaptic to uninstall your old restricted drivers packages (in my case, for kernel 2.6.22), and select the new ones (for kernel 2.6.24) which, in my case at least, were not selected after the upgrade.

Only after you do that, and reboot, can you see the new nVidia driver in the System/Administration/Hardware Drivers applet. This used to be called the Restricted Drivers Manager and all the online docs still refer to that. But Hardware Drivers is what you want. Go there and do what comes naturally.

Last night I was finally able to get Update Manager to connect and start downloading files. I let that run overnight -- it took 6 hours or so to download everything, presumably because of the tremendous load on the U.S. Ubuntu server.

This morning, I awoke to find it paused in a dialog. Just a warning that it was about to clobber my modified mime.types. I answered OK. It proceeded a little, displaying the progress in a little terminal window. I noticed some interesting progress output, and started editing some notes. At one point, I selected some text in the terminal window, and copied it. Using Ctrl-C. Who would have thought the goddamn terminal window was accepting keyboard input and processed the interrupt. So immediately I get three alerts warning that it could not complete the emacs/ede/eieio installations becuase it had received an interrupt. Yesterday I predicted the emacs upgrade would fail, but I didn't mean to fulfill my own prophecy.

It seemed to continue from there almost without trouble -- but at the end it complained it could not upgrade the update-manager. Ironic, isn't it? And at the end of the install it displayed a scare alert: "Your system may be unusable". Nice. Bravely, I rebooted, and found myself in 800 x 600, but at least with an otherwise stable system.

After some flailing I discovered the secret sauce to getting nVidia working again. And all systems are now go!

I wonder how Mark Pilgrim's mom and dad are doing?

[updated to fix link]

Ubuntu Hardy is out and I'm a sucker

I managed to hold off about 6 hours before giving in and pressing the "Upgrade" button to get Hardy Heron. Yes, I'm in the middle of a project. Yes, I expect I'll have nVidia issues. My emacs will probably fail upgrading as usual. But: it's too tempting. I'm a sucker. I know it! No discipline whatsoever.

Hm... I guess the servers are mighty busy today. My first attempt timed out: "Could not download the release notes/ Please check your internet connection".

Lisp a casualty of its time

This sad editorial remark from the CLIPS architecture document, describing perceptions about Lisp within NASA around 1984:

...Despite extensive demonstrations of the potential of expert systems, few of these applications were put into regular use. This failure to provide expert systems technology within NASA’s operational computing constraints could largely be traced to the use of LISP as the base language for nearly all expert system software tools at that time. In particular, three problems hindered the use of LISP based expert system tools within NASA: the low availability of LISP on a wide variety of conventional computers, the high cost of state-of-the-art LISP tools and hardware, and the poor integration of LISP with other languages (making embedded applications difficult).

Would they encounter the same barriers today, twenty-four years later?

1. Low availability of LISP on a wide variety of conventional computers: Now we have commercial implementations and open source Lisps, working on most computers and operating systems.

2.High cost of state-of-the-art LISP tools and hardware: The hardware issue has faded away since Lisp machines gave way to general purpose computers. And Lisp is no more memory intensive than Java or .NET. Of the commercial Lisps, LispWorks is affordable for normal mortals, and certainly the Allegro products are within reach of NASA. And there are several good, free, open source CLs.

3. Poor integration of LISP with other languages: An issue only if your mindset is 1984. Nowadays, to integrate with a Lisp program, you'd treat it like any other network resource -- like an RDBMS, or a web service.

I wonder what is the state of the Lisp renaissance within NASA?


[updated to expand remark on item 2]

Rule of Least Power: Bah!

The Rule of Least Power, a W3C TAG finding, posits: "Powerful languages inhibit information reuse." They're observing that it's easy to scrape documents written declaratively using HTML. The problem with using more powerful languages like Javascript, they say, is that "you typically cannot determine what a program in a Turing-complete language will do without actually running it."

So? As long as the output is a DOM, just run the program and inspect the DOM.

You already have to use a good HTML parser, right? Now, just run all the script elements on the page too -- obviously, in a restricted environment.

I'm sure Google and friends must do this. They're not going to leave valuable information on the table.