GPS Track Collection Will Not Resume

Well, after about six months of waiting my dad finally got his broken gps (Magellan eXplorist) replaced with a new model (Magellan Triton). The company was kind enough to send out this updated model for free. You can read previous posts over the past month to see how my experience with it has been. After further experimentation I have found that the unit will shut down for no apparent reason. It's not a power saving mode (since it has to do a cold re-acquire and the track it's saving has a jump in it), nor is it a timed option for an automatic shutoff (the length of time for it to shut off has been random as far as I can tell {could be moon phases?}). Because the unit turns itself off at random times on its own, it's useless to me. My dad could still use it for his fishing stuff (since he doesn't need the unit on for any more than a couple minutes at a time anyways), but he dislikes the unit for his own reasons.

Stupid Magellan

Magellan can bite my shiny metal ass.

My dad's older Magellan eXplorist broke down, so my dad sent it in to Magellan to have it repaired. They said it couldn't be done, and wanted my dad to pay money for them to ship out a new one to him. After about five months of email and phone calls, they finally broke down and sent my dad a new gps unit for free. The thing is, they aren't making eXplorists anymore, so they sent my dad a new Triton 500. I'm fairly confident in saying that this product, though newer, is worse than the eXplorist. And the eXplorist was already a pretty bad unit. There are just so many terrible things with this unit, I'm surprised Magellan is still in business. When you hook it up to your computer you have to use Magellan's software to manage the files on your gps unit. The eXplorist would show up as a mass storage device, so you could transfer tracks, waypoints and other files quite easily just by using the file manager in your preferred operating system. With the Triton, they have decided to take out USB mass storage support, and force you to use their own shitty software, and believe me, it's terrible. The proprietary software that you have to use to manage your gps unit doesn't even come in the box, you have to download it from their website, and before you can download it, you have to sign up. You forget all hope of using the Triton in Linux. I've tried for several hours to get this thing to work in Linux, with no hope in sight. Hell, Magellan doesn't even have a USB vendor id listed in the Linux USB ID page, nor do they have one listed in the official USB-IF Company List. Naturally, the USB-IF wants me to pay $2000 to view the Integrators List. Seeing as how they're not on the first two lists, I'm beginning to wonder if they are certified to use USB at all. When you hook the Triton up to your computer (Linux or Windows) it can randomly crash. Yes, this product is that good. There are so many little braindead things about this unit, it makes me wonder if they did any testing on it. There are features listed on the main menu in the device that won't work, because Magellan is planning on enabling those features in a future firmware upgrade. Basically, this means they wanted to have a bullet point on the box, but didn't have the time to implement it.

I would encourage everyone I know to never purchase a Magellan product. I've used two of their products so far, and both turned out to be crap.

More testing of Ubuntu

Yesterday I forgot to mention one critical test; connecting an external monitor through the VGA cable. This is particularly important because laptops are often used for giving presentations, and the ability to hook up a laptop to a projector with ease is very important. In Vista, when I plug the laptop into the television, the screen automatically gets initialized and the tv gets the last setting that I had used (which is clone). Unfortunately, things were not as smooth in Ubuntu. There was no automagic stuff, and no popups or notifications that anything had been plugged in. Using the gnome-display-properties utility also did not turn up anything. I had to install nvidia-settings in order to detect and manage the television screen. This is something that Gnome could work on, seeing as how the nvidia-settings utility is supposed to be open source, so code could be taken from there and put into gnome-display-properties.

I also said yesterday that I will have to test my firewire vid cam, but upon inspection I see that the laptop has a four pin 1394 plug, but the cable I have is six pin. I will have to wait and see what I can use for testing firewire on this.

Anyways, the UPS guy just dropped off my Dad's new gps unit, and my brother wants the laptop for midi recording, so I have to go. Out.

Laptop vs. Ubuntu

Today I decided to install Ubuntu Hardy on my Dad's laptop. I set aside 12 GiB of space on the hard drive to make the necessary Linux partitions, and went to work at it. I decided to use the 64-bit version instead of the 32-bit, seeing as how I use 64 on my main desktop all the time, and Adobe Flash/Nvidia are better with 64 bit these days. I must say that I am really pleasantly surprised with how well Ubuntu works on this thing. First, a rundown of the hardware:
MSI Mega Book M670, model number MS-1632
AMD Turion64x2
nVidia Corporation MCP51 PCI-X GeForce Go 6100
nVidia Corporation MCP51 USB Controller
nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio
nVidia Corporation MCP51 Ethernet Controller
O2 Micro, Inc. Firewire (IEEE 1394)
O2 Micro, Inc. Integrated MMC/SD Controller
O2 Micro, Inc. Integrated MS/xD Controller
RaLink RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g

This laptop was purchased for cheap ($600) at the NCIX grand reopening sale they had last summer, so I'm not expecting much for a low-cost laptop like this. Surprisingly everything has worked so far. Right out of the box I got a pretty good experience. The laptop booted fine, straight into the correct resolution, with the bongo drum sounds right on the first startup. Ethernet and wireless network connections both worked right out of the box. Network Manager found my home network, and let me connect to it. Using the CPU Frequency Scaling Applet and Powertop, I can see that cpu scaling is working properly. Plugging headphones in the front jack works, disabling the main speakers as it should. Extra function buttons (volume up/down, open email, open web browser) all work, with the volume buttons coming up with fancy overlay graphics to show the volume. The "Email Button" opens Evolution, and the "Internet Button" opens Firefox. Plugging in an SD card from my digital camera automatically mounts the card on the desktop, and opens F-Spot, asking me if I want to import photos. Rhythmbox can see the DAAP share that I've got set up on my desktop computer, so I can listen to music by streaming between the two computers (Apple changed their iTunes protocol, which means not even the official iTunes can stream from Rhythmbox, see my current MSN alias name.) The built in microphone captures audio using the Sound Recorder application, though the microphone is crappy and picks up a lot of background noise. Plugging in my brother's new electronic drum kit (midi through usb) worked out of the box, and a standard install of Rosegarden was recording midi input quite easily. Vista's driver finder utility couldn't even tell who the manufacturer was, and I had to spend half an hour trying to get drivers set up in Vista. Really, quite a bit on this laptop works.

What doesn't work out of the box? It's important to know where things don't work out of the box, so we can see where improvements need to be made.

Ubuntu does not ship with mp3 decoding capabilities, and these have to be installed by the end user. This is the fault of MPEG-LA, and Linux distros can't do anything about this. When trying to play an mp3 over daap in Rhythmbox, it prompted me to install codecs, and opened a simple version of synaptic with two options: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg and gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly. I decided to first try the ffmpeg package, seeing as how that is a well supported package, and ffmpeg is a very good project. Unfortunately, this did not allow Rhythmbox to play mp3 files. Why it gave me an option that wouldn't work, I don't know, and this is one area where Ubuntu needs to improve. Installing plugins-ugly got mp3 working just fine.

Suspend and hibernate did not work out of the box. Upon trying to revive the system, the video did nothing (black screen, backlight stayed off). Using the restricted drivers manager built into Ubuntu (jockey-gtk) to install the proprietary nvidia drivers fixed all hibernate/suspend issues for me. These now work marvelously, even coming up a bit faster than Vista does. Not having proper drivers to do power management for the graphics card is definitely Nvidia's fault, but hopefully they will follow AMD's lead and start releasing specs documents and the situation will improve.

The last thing that doesn't work: the little red led light behind the headphone jack doesn't light up when you plug/unplug headphones. It lights up in Vista, but not in Ubuntu. Oh well.

Things not tested: ieee1394 - the only device I have for testing firewire is a video camera. I don't have any firewire hard drives or anything like that, so the old digital 8mm camera is all I've got for testing. I'm not holding out much hope for it, though, as the 1394 stack in the Linux kernel is currently going through a major overhaul. There have actually been many regressions in 1394 for Linux. Add on to this the fact that video editing software is difficult to use in Linux, and testing the firewire probably won't go that well.

Overall, I would say that Linux certainly has come a long way. In some respects it is more difficult to use than Vista (having to install mp3 support myself), but in other ways it is better than Vista (Vista gave me weeks of trouble and forcing me to email RaLink and Linksys support to get my wireless working properly). Of course, other things like Adobe Flash and dvd playback won't work out of the box in Ubuntu, but neither do they work out of the box in Vista. Overall the experience has been excellent. Due to Vistas crap that it gave me for wireless networking, I'd have to say that Ubuntu Hardy was actually easier to get installed and running than Vista was (and Vista came preinstalled from the factory with the laptop). Hurrah for Linux, perhaps we are closer to 10x10.