New KUNZ podcast available

It took ages, yet, we got a new edition of KUNZ out.

KUNZ #4 of February 14th, 2008: MP3 Download: KUNZ-04-080214.mp3

Topics:

• a cultural calendar of Wolfsburg
• and school uniforms in Ireland.

If you enjoy this podcast, please vote for it at Podcastalley.com using this Link.

A special thank you to the pupils at the Douglas Community School in Cork, Ireland, especially their teacher Miss O’Mahony. Thank you for the warm welcome!

The celtic music was taken from the album Ton jour viendra be Bézèd’h which is freely available at Jamendo.com under a Creative Commons License.

Installing Linux on an ancient Mitac 5033

The Mitac 5033 was a popular OEM laptop some 10 years ago, also sold as Schneider 5033 (equivalent to the Mitac 5033L edition) and as Fujitsu-Siemens 5033 (equivalent to the slightly older Mitac 5033K edition).

I always try to put old hardware to good use, so I decided to install Linux to a 1996 built Mitac 5033 laptop computer. Back then, in the late 1990s, this machine already worked well with Linux, thus, my expectations were high.

Features:

• AMD K6-2 400MHz CPU
• 12″ 800×600 LCD
• 192MB RAM (I think it used to be only 64MB)
• 4GB Harddisk

To establish network connectivity, I equipped my Mitac with a Netgear WG511 WiFi PCMCIA card (prism54 chipset).

You have to create the partitions with a Linux rescue system, as the installers will most likely require more memory than available in the Mitac’s RAM, they’ll mount a pre-existing swap partition. I reserved 512MB for swapping.

For the installation you will need time – endless time. It’s very obvious that this CPU is a relic of a different era.

First try: Kubuntu 7.04 partial bummer!

The installation worked fine including the graphical display. But due to a bug in the prism54pci kernel module supplied with Ubuntu/Kubuntu I couldn’t use the Wifi adaptor, thus, rendering this installation completely useless.

Second try: OpenSuSE 10.2 total bummer!

This was a total mess. OpenSuSE installed the first CD but upon reboot failed to start the installer. I got a segmentation fault. Logging in as root was impossible despite a console login prompt. So OpenSuSE had to go, too.

Third try: Damn small Linux

Although DSL installed well on this machine, it quickly became clear that it was not going to fulfill my needs. Thus, I moved on.

Fourth try: Debian 4.0

I downloaded the “netinst” flavor of Debian and ran it without further ado using the “kde-desktop, standard” option.

Of course the proprietary nature of the Wifi adaptor’s firmware required some brief intervention. As soon as the installer asks for a Wifi ESSID, connect a USB memory stick to the Mitac that includes the proprietary driver. Press Alt-F2, start a console (i.e. press ENTER) and mount that memory stick containing the missing isl3890 file. Copy the file isl3890 to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware. You might have to create the directory first. Switch back to Alt-F1 and continue the installation.

The first problem I ran into was the xorg.conf. The default produced a screen that was simply not usable (and probably not really healthy for the LCD, either). It took me some time to figure out the correct settings for this display, but fortunately I found an old XF86Config that gave me a hint on a valid modeline. So here is the result: xorg.conf

Surprisingly the soundcard gave me a hard time under Debian. alsaconf worked fine, but after a reboot the sound was gone. In all fairness, configuring devices under Debian is really unnerving if you are used to YaST under OpenSuSE. Anyway, I ended up adding the line “modprobe snd-es18xx” to the /etc/init.d/alsa-utils right below the start section. It did the trick, though I realize it will fail with the next update. Suggestions on how to fix this permanently are very welcome.

All is well that ends well

It took me three days to finally get this historic laptop back up on its feet again. Was it worth it? Well, it seems to work at a tolerable speed as long as you don’t try anything too bold. So if you got one, install Linux and use it yourself or find someone who would appreciate it.

[Update] It turned out there is another problem with the Netgear WG511v2 Prims54-based PCMCIA WiFi adaptor. To this date it is still unable to handle WPA2 encryption. I even switched to the ndiswrapper (thus, actually using the current Windows driver for this card) since people had reported that this was the only way to get WPA encryption working. This doesn’t apply to WPA2, though. So I am either going to wait until the wpa_supplicant’s prism54 module gets fixed or find a cheap Atheros-based PCMCIA WiFi adaptor on Ebay.

OpenSuSE 10.2 on the Acer Aspire 5612z

One of our students got a new Acer Aspire 5612z as a replacement for her Travelmate 4002LMi. The installation of OpenSuSE Linux 10.2 (32 bit version) worked out of the box. I encountered no major problems with the hardware so far.

Features:

• Pentium M T2060 1.6GHz CPU
• 15.4″ WXGA LCD
• 2GB DDR2 RAM
• Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG WiFi
• 160GB Harddisk

Things that worked instantly include:

• graphics (YaST automatically chose a resolution of 1280×800 at a ratio of 16:10, I have yet to test the dualhead and 3D capabilities),
• sound,
• ethernet,
• wireless LAN (no manual interference required, I just had to insert the ESSID and the encryption details),
• power management (this sure is a plus compared to the TravelMate 4002LMi)

Things that did not work:

• modem (not recognized by YaST)

As yet untested:

• PCMCIA

I’ll do some more testing in the days to come. Hopefully things will continue to run that smoothly.

Intel’s Classmate PC runs on Linux, as does the OLPC

I just had another look at Intel’s Classmate PC. It’s a project similar to the One-Laptop-per-Child project (a.k.a. XO, photo by Wikipedia) which I think is to be commended. While the OLPC is going to run exclusively on Linux, for Intel’s Classmate PC this is just an option. According to a recent news article Intel is going to ship these machines with an adapted Mandriva Linux.

Being a teacher, of course I cannot praise these efforts enough. Supplying students with computers has so many benefits in the classroom as well as in the students’ future carreers. Also helping the students to get in touch with Linux and the entire open source community is going to pay off to our societies in the long run. As Jeremy Garcia recently commented in his podcast, many people use Windows not because they don’t like Linux, but because they have to use Windows – be it because of ignorance or be it because of specific pieces of software that have no suitable counterpart under Linux. From a daily classroom esperience, though, I can comfirm that Linux is everything you could hope for as a teacher. It provides all the tools necessary to support the curriculum on various levels.

Why, then, aren’t all the students equipped with laptop computers? Some teachers may be reluctant, but speaking from personal experience I can assure everyone that this aspect gets highly over-rated in the media. Any average teacher is grateful for being offered the chance to explore new methods in his work. The real problem here is money, even in an idustrialized country like Germany. Our laptops cost the parents and teachers € 1000.- each, which includes a three year service contract with the Saturn company. The reality is that not everybody can afford this. A 150-Dollar-Laptop (the OLPC) might be a solution, but due to the specific nature of the OLPC I think it might be better suited to a primary school environment. And they are not going to be made available over here anyway.

What might be the next step for classrooms equipped with laptop computers? One first step I would like to see would be to get in touch with one another on a worldwide scale. Nigerian students in a promotional video at the Intel site mention contacts to England. This is what we need to make the world grow closer and to provide first hand learning experiences to our students. If you know of any projects doing just that, please let me know. Also I would love to find out if there are any other Linux-only high school classes anywhere on this planet.

VoIP phone Siemens Gigaset C455 ip – testing a new gadget

After getting VoIP phone numbers at a SIP provider for our Podcast KUNZ and a couple of students as well as myself I had to try out a new gadget that hit the markets last month. It’s a phone by Siemens that offers PSTN (i.e. the normal phone line) as well as VoIP services on six different VoIP accounts that are freely configurable.

Problems I had

• Trying to configure the base via web browser turned out to be a problem, since from my server’s perspective the base is in the external zone, thus I’d access it via a Squid2 proxy. That just does not work as I keep getting incomplete HTML pages. Why? Beats me! Other hardware such as the router can be accessed without any problems. So I had to get a direct connection between browser and base.
• Then I tried to connect my old DECT phones (i.e. handsets) to this new base. It worked fine for other Siemens and Panasonic models, however, my good old Audioline phone just won’t get recognized by the base. I don’t think it’s the handset as it has connected to other bases without any problems.

Things I like

• Other than that the configuration was pretty straight forward. The web interface lets you set up LAN as well as six SIP accounts for VoIP plus something called gigaset.net which I disabled immediately not knowing what kind of data gets transfered to it.
• The color display of the handset is nice, though a little small by today’s standards.
• It’s possible to backup the handsets’ phone books via the web interface into a .tsv file. It would be more useful, though, if there was a script to convert a .vcf file into a valid .tsv for this phone.
• It supports STUN.

Things that should be improved

Maybe Siemens will make use of the firmware upgrade feature to enhance this product in the future, because there are some aspects that just don’t seem right.

• Having six SIP accounts for inbound calling is great. But you can only use one for outbound calling per handset. So in essence you need to use six different handsets to use all six SIP lines. Now here is a suggestion on how to improve this: The phone distinguishes between PSTN and VoIP calls by an * as suffix (i.e. 1234 calls via PSTN, whereas 1234* places a call via VoIP). They should use a similar suffix (or prefix) to choose between the various VoIP accounts. That would make things a lot easier.
• It would be nice to be able to switch VoIP on and off via the handset as I don’t need the router to be online all night.
• URI dialing would be nice. This way you could call URIs directly such as 613@some-other-sip-provider.com, thereby saving a lot of money. Otherwise you are stuck with whatever your SIP provider has to offer.
• The date and the time are entered through the handset. What about NTP? A device hooked up to the internet should be able to get the exact time automatically.
• The aforementioned proxy trouble needs to be resolved.

Cosmetics

• The ringback tone generated by the base when calling a VoIP number is just horrible. It almost sounds like a German ringback tone but it is much faster. It makes it difficult to tell the difference whether it’s a busy or a ringback tone – actually it sounds as if the phone was kind of nervous. I’d like to switch the tones to the American standard.

Linux – Getting the penguin into it?

I noticed that the phone relies on open source software. So I wonder if it will be possible in the future to use an alternative firmware for the base as they do with so many cool gadgets nowadays (like the Linksys router or the NSLU2 etc.)?

Summary

It’s a nice gadget and I am looking forward to gather more experience while using it in the future. However, the first impression already reveals that it is not perfect. Hopefully Siemens will improve this product via firmware upgrades or offer open source programmers access to their firmware.

[Update]

With a free firmware update the guys at Siemens added the optional suffix dialing mentioned above enabling you to choose various providers on outbound calls. So, Kudos to them!

Another KUNZ Podcast

The students have just released another edition of their Podcast KUNZ. I cannot help but being deeply impressed with their work, since I didn’t have anything to do with it this time. I guess they are getting a hang of producing a podcast. That’s quite a rewarding experience for me, I must admit. I hope they’ll keep it up, since working on a podcast can be very time consuming.

Anyway, here are their topics for this month:

• a calendar of cultural events in Wolfsburg,
• an interview with exchange students from France,
• and the basketball player of the SG Braunschweig.

KUNZ #3 of March 20th 2007 in mp3 format: KUNZ-03-070320.mp3

If you enjoy the podcast, please vote for them at Podcastalley.com using this Link. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.

Wengo Wengooooo… once again

After my previous failure to get WengoPhone to cooperate, I had the opportunity to try the Linux release candidate of version 2.1 this weekend.

Well, I must admit, things have improved a lot. Following a brief registration process, which directly compared to Skype seems a little bit too complicated, I got connected to WengoPhone and could place my first call. The sound quality does not quit match that of Skype. And the WengoPhone smilies just look plain awful. But those are things that probably will be improved pretty soon. Also the software crashed several times, but after all it’s just a release candidate.

What I found mildly annoying was the fact that Wengo refused to register a second account from my IP address. How am I supposed to get a class of 30 students to register when I have to get a new IP address for each student?

So what’s better than Skype? Well, for one thing WengoPhone is open source and it uses open standards, whereas Skype is proprietary and owned by a single corporation. Skype is free for now, but who knows what will happen once it gains a large market percentage. So open source is definitely the safer choice.

Also the Linux client of WengoPhone is fully featured, i.e. it includes webcam support as well as conference calls. The Skype version for Linux has been lacking this for ages.

Anyway, I hope the OpenWengo team will keep improving their client and I’m looking forward to using it full time one day.

Presenting ourselves

Yesterday we had the opportunity to present ourselves to parents intending to send their children to our school. Our work with the laptop computers gained a high level of attention all day – much to our satisfaction of course. On the other had it comes as no surprise to see that many people interested in modern classroom methods and media. After all, so far this Linux driven 9th grade class has been a huge success.

Also once again we tried to raise the awareness of our podcast KUNZ.

Happy New Year

With the new year well on its way, I thought it was finally time to do some catching-up here.

The KUNZ Podcast has been quite a success. Three local newspapers already sent out reporters to do interviews with students in charge of this monthly “internet radio show”. We were all so thrilled to find our pictures and flattering articles in Wolfsburg’s papers.

Apart from that I had a very nice experience today with a lady from Malaysia who does a lot for the preservation of certain species of turtles. You see, I am quite a “turtle kinda guy” myself. So when I updated our Turtle web pages today I was in need of a photo of a Batagur turtle and I found the perfect one on flickr.com (by the way, this photo shows the Malayan Box Turtle at our school). This way I discovered that this lady, Pelf Nyok, is actually a blogger herself. That’s so cool! She even posted an excerpt of our turtles pages only minutes after my comment on her blog. Pelf, if you read this, thank you soooo much!!!

About the turtles at our school, we are hoping to finally get our big tank fixed (it leaks ). So far all the shops we contacted declined to repair a fish tank of these dimensions. Let’s see how this will work out.

What else is going on around here… The students are busy producing their next podcast, for which they already recorded an interview with Braunschweig’s basketball team. Apart from that, I won’t be seeing much of them for most of the month of February, when they will explore the world of business in several companies first hand.

First podcast just around the corner

It has been quite some time since our last blog entry. That’s because we’ve been pretty busy. We recorded our first podcast back in May but could not publish it on the internet for various reasons. So in true programmers’ tradition we consider our first podcast to be version 0.1beta. However, now it seems we will be more fortunate. So the first official release of our podcast is due this month. A bumper is already online here.

Our podcast will be named KUNZ (which coincidently is a common German surname) which in our case stands for “Kultur und nachdenkliches Zeugs” i.e. “Culture and thought-provoking stuff” (CATS is a nice acronym, too ). It’ll be German for the time being and you can find it’s blog here.