The Monomagician

Introduction

2008 was a special year for my wife Karin and I as we celebrated our 25^th wedding anniversary.

We knew we wanted to do something special to celebrate and came up with the idea of a ‘mini grand tour’ of Italy, taking in Rome, Florence and then a couple of days in the Piedmonte region.

Having taken to heart the notion of trying to reduce our impact on the Environment, we decided to avoid using aircraft and make our way by train where possible.

Our trip had the hallmarks of being quite an adventure and planning started in earnest in the previous October, when we signed up for a GCSE Italian evening class!

In addition to learning a little of the Italian language, we also started to work out just how feasible it would be to travel from our home in Swindon to Rome by train. The answer, it transpired was ‘eminently feasible!’ There is a daily sleeper train from Paris Gare de Bercy to Roma Termini called the Palatino. We booked our Eurostar tickets on-line. Whilst we could have done the same for the Palatino tickets, we opted to let a travel agent sort this out as we wanted to make absolutely sure we got what we wanted.

As we were celebrating a very special occasion, we decided to travel first-class on the Eurostar. It wasn’t cheap, but we would be wined and dined as we made our way through Kent, the Chunnel and Northern France. Now that the high-speed rail link from St Pancras to Folkestone has been completed, the journey time from London to Paris has been cut to about two and a half hours. I think it would be difficult, if not impossible to do the journey in the same time by air once you factor in check-in times, baggage collection and subsequent travel from the airport to the centre of Paris.

Equipment Decisions.

With travel arrangements and hotels booked, it was time to think about luggage and above all, camera equipment. We wanted to travel light, not wanting to have to lug huge suitcases and heavy camera bags through station concourses or on the underground. So we decided to restrict our luggage to a single airline wheeled carry-on sized case each.

Karin had already made a decision to take her Canon G9 digital compact camera rather than her EOS350D . The G9 was until recently, Canon’s top of the range compact digital camera. It’s quite small and light, very well made and has a 12MP sensor, so can produce excellent results. I originally wanted to take a Leica M8 digital rangefinder with 2 or 3 lenses. But in the end, I too opted to take a G9.  It’s much lighter and from a purely practical perspective, it meant we could save space and weight by having just one battery charger for the two cameras. In addition to the two cameras and a single battery charger, we each took a spare battery and eight 2 gigabyte SD cards. We could have saved a tiny amount of space and weight by using higher capacity SDHC cards, but we both felt that 2 gigabyte cards were large enough. Entrusting around 115 raw images to a single card is plenty in my book! For backup, we shared a 40 gigabyte Jobo Gigavue hard drive. Each outfit fitted into a Lowepro ‘bumbag’.

Any initial misgivings about not bringing my Leica outfit were removed when we arrived at Roma Termini. It was 30 degrees and there was a transport strike. Any hope of getting a taxi to our hotel before we melted was dashed as soon as we saw the queues. So we decided to walk to the hotel. It was only about a mile, but it made me very glad that I didn’t have my Billingham bag to carry as well as drag my suitcase through Rome.

Out and about in Rome

Rome is a fascinating city. There is so much to see and do and it was impossible to do the city justice in the three days we spent there. Thankfully, there is a very good underground system and most of the main sites of interest are close to a Metro station or are easy to get to by foot.

The entrance to the Palazzo Barberini - home of the National Art Collection

Apart from the heat, which was often oppressive, the down side of travelling to Rome in July is the harshness of the light. Many photographs were spoiled by hard directional lighting and it was often impossible to capture the full dynamic range of a scene. Many of the best shots were taken in shade.

A couple of things to watch out for were the hawkers around the Spanish Steps and students wanting signatures on petitions. The hawkers would usually approach couples, offering a rose, saying it’s a gift. Then when you’ve taken it from them, ask for money. Another trick was to offer to take a couple’s photo with their camera -  for a fee of course.

The students were everywhere!  They all wanted us to sign a petition and it got very wearing.  We soon learned that saying ‘non grazie, ho gia fatto’ (No thanks, I’ve already done it) was enough to get them to move on to some other unsuspecting person. (more…)

Introduction

A few months ago I decided to get hold of an ultra portable PC.  I originally wanted to get an Asus EEE PC with a 9″ screen.  Various on-line dealers had other ideas though.  Try as I might, I ended up being sent versions that ran Windows XP rather than Linux.  I eventually gave up on the EEE PCand noticed that HP had released their offering into the ultra portable space, the Mininote 2133.

The first one I ordered came with (you’ve guessed it) Windows XP.  The second, from Misco, had Linux installed.

Off to a poor start…

The default operating system with the 2133 is Suse Linux Enterprise Edition (SLED) version 10.  All worked well for a while, then I started to have problems getting software updates.  Then after one set of updates that DID come through, the wireless LAN connection failed and resolutely refused to come back up.

Since the Mininote didn’t come with an installation disk, I tried to get one off the HP website.  Sadly, the site was rather lacking in content.  It was possible to get the individual files that make up the distribution, but nobody at HP had bothered to create a proper distribution disk that could be used to take the PC back to its factory configuration.  Research on the Internet indicated that I wasn’t the only one with problems and as I tried to resolve the growing list of problems using SLED, it became clear to me just what an appalling botch-up job HP had done with the operating system.  I suspect the reason was that they felt they had to get something to market to compete with the EEE PC, but at the expense of quality.

Ubuntu beckons

I finally decided to ditch SLED and installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS ‘Hardy Heron’.  There was even a helpful ‘how to guide’ in the Ubuntu Wiki to help me get the various proprietary components to work properly.  It was a great success, though the wireless LAN could be a bit temperamental. It would often take several attempts to get a connection established. On a couple of occasions, the wireless networks would refuse to come up after software updates had been applied, so I became very reluctant to keep the system up to date.

My wireless problems came to a head when I migrated our internet connection from a Linksys WRT54G router to a BT Home Hub 2.  No matter what I tried, the darned laptop wouldn’t talk to it.

Everything pointed to a problem with the WLAN driver in the laptop as both of the Windows laptops we own and a Palm TX connected first time.  So it was back to the forums and google to search out a solution to the problem.

The 2133 uses a Broadcom chip for the wireless network and it had been necessary to use ndiswrapper to get the chip to use a driver originally meant for a Windows device.  According to the forums, the latest incarnation of Ubuntu, 8.10 ‘Intrepid Ibex’ supported the Broadcom chip natively.

8.10 - a leap of faith

It so happened that I had a CD with 8.10 on it courtesey of Linux Format Magazine, so I loaded it.  Waddya know?  No wireless!  Some head scratching and yet more searching on the web and I had the Broadcom STA driver and managed to get the 2133 to connect to the network.  The problem was, that every time I restarted the laptop, I had to reinstall the 802.11 crypto module for TKIP and the driver.  Whilst this isn’t insurmountable (all I did was write a two line script), it was inconvenient.  But at least I had a laptop that could connect wirelessly to the Internet.

When I started to look through the operating system, I could see that Linux Format had put all sorts of packages in the distribution that were, frankly, a waste of time.  So I decided to download the distribution from the Ubuntu website and give that a go.  After all, I figured I had nothing to lose.

What a revelation!  I loaded the liverun version and it immediately detected my wireless network.  As soon as I entered the WPA key, it was up and running!  No mucking about with STA drivers or anything!  Half an hour later, after having double-clicked the ‘install’ icon on the desktop, I had a brand spanking new system.

I’ve carried out a couple of mods, courtesy of Erik Hess who has done a great job in sorting out the tweaks needed to get the 2133 to work with this OS.

Now, as a I write this, I have installed Unison so I can keep documents in sync with my main Ubuntu desktop machine.  The browser has the same favourites as my main machine and the email accounts are set up (I have an IMAP server which means I can view email from a number of different machines).

All that is left is to import my email address book and I’m pretty much sorted.  Whilst I would love to have an LDAP directory, this is a step too far for my rather simple mind at this stage…though it does look very interesting!

Conclusion

So, to conclude: once I finally downloaded the proper version of Ubuntu 8.10 and installed it, there were a few minor tweaks required to get the HP Mininote 2133 working.  The main bugbear that I had, namely with WiFi performance seems to have been fixed and the system just works.

The laptop seems to load more quickly and the BEST thing is that the wireless network just comes up!

I really do hope this operating system version works well, otherwise, y relationship with what is a very good hardware platform could well be over and I will be looking to replace it with something else.