A Humble Programmer

I have an Acer TravelMate 3000 laptop. The card reader did not work on Ubuntu Linux, and I didn’t care, because I didn’t need it. When I needed to transfer photos from my DC, I just used the USB cable. Recently I got a Zaurus PDA from eBay and needed to format an SD card as Ext2 so that I can install Linux on it. After a lot of searching I managed to find a guide on the Ubuntu forum to get the card reader working. But the guide was in French, so I am posting an English guide here.

First, determine what controller you have:

lspci | grep CardBus

If you see something like this:

06:07.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx21/x515 Cardbus Controller

congratulations, you have the same controller as I do, and the following procedure might work for you.

Create the file /etc/init.d/tifm with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
NAME=tifm
DESC="Texas Instrument Integrated Flash media controller"

# use lsb-base
. /lib/lsb/init-functions

retval=0
case "$1" in
    start)
        sync
        modprobe tifm_core
        modprobe tifm_7xx1
        modprobe tifm_sd
        log_end_msg $retval;
    ;;
    stop)
        modprobe -r tifm_sd
        modprobe -r tifm_7xx1
        modprobe -r tifm_core
        log_end_msg $retval
    ;;
    *)
        N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
        echo "Usage: $N {start|stop}" >&2
        retval=2
    ;;
esac

exit $retval

Make it executable and start at boot time:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/tifm
sudo update-rc.d tifm defaults

To try it right away:

sudo /etc/init.d/tifm start

Plug in a card and it should be auto-mounted.

当年从Emacs改用gvim的很重要的一个原因就是Emacs的字体怎么看都不顺眼。现在Emacs终于开始支持 antialiasing （2006年都快过完了，感觉还呆在上个世纪…）。已经习惯了vim，所以没有换回的打算，不过还是忍不住装了一下玩玩。必须要用最新的 cvs snapshot 才行，这里可以找到 Ubunty Edgy 的包。

I have an Intel Celeron-M based Acer TravelMate 3000. The Celeron-M does not come with the SpeedStep technology, so it does not support frequency-scaling natively. But I got frequency-scaling working with p4-clockmod. This is disabled in Ubuntu (up to Edgy) by default, because there’s a significant delay when changing frequency on-demand. The following comment can be found in /usr/share/powernowd/cpufreq-detect.sh:

# Disabled for now - the latency tends to be bad enough to make it
# fairly pointless.

But by enabling it and turning of on-demand scaling, you can manually decrease CPU frequency to reduce heat and power-consumption when your laptop is lightly loaded. There’s how:

You need powernowd which is included in a standard Ubuntu installation. To make sure:

sudo apt-get install powernowd

Override the default configuration to enable p4-clockmod:

sudo su
echo "FREQDRIVER=p4-clockmod" >/etc/default/powernowd

To let your non-root account change CPU frequency, set the setuid bit of cpufreq-selector, so that it runs as root:

sudo chmod +s /usr/bin/cpufreq-selector

Now add the CPU frequency scaling monitor to your GNOME panel, you should be able to change the frequency by click on the icon.

Gabor’s Blog: How Researchers are Reinventing the Mail Client

Email today has many annoyances. Even though we now seem to have a grip on the spam problem, many users are suffering from email overload: There are just too many emails flooding the inbox. Many are drowning in heaps of emails that aren’t even important – it’s just a colleague at work Cc-ing everyone evenly remotely connected to his project.

用惯了我的PowerBook，再来用PC，觉得真是怀念Mac OSX。 无聊的时候试了一下FlyakiteOSX，结果还不错，见图(Acer TravelMate 3002)。:-)

比较适合不得不用Windows又觉得微软的UI很dull的人。