Another Acer Aspire ZG5 netbook problem

I’ve got two Acer Aspire ZG5 netbooks. One with hard disk, one without.

The one without a hard disk developed a problem where it would switch off after about 10 seconds. That problem went away after I fiddled with the memory compartment.

The one with the hard disk has developed the exact same problem. I fiddled with the memory compartment and the problem has not gone away.

I am really frustrated. I am also irritated about the quality of the devices. I don’t think I would ever buy one of these again. Come to think of it, I probably will never buy a netbook again. I will stick to my MacBook.

Acer Aspire ZG5 reboot problem resolved

Recently, my Acer Aspire ZG5 netbook started exhibiting bad behaviour. Within about 10 seconds of turning it on, while it’s going through the bootup process, it would just turn off. I researched it on the Internet and came up with all sorts of weird things to try. Like hold this in for 30 seconds, then press this and turn it on, or leave it in the freezer for an hour. Nothing worked.

So yesterday I decided to open it up and look at it. I unscrewed the screws at the front, and couldn’t get anything to open. I unscrewed the lid to the memory compartment and looked in there and saw nothing that would allow the case to come off, so I gave up and put the lid back on and screwed the front screws in again.

And it’s worked flawlessly since then. And I think I know why. I remember opening the memory compartment just before the problems started. And I don’t think the lid fit back on properly. When I removed the lid yesterday, I noticed it wasn’t on quite right, and when I put it back, it didn’t want to go back on quite right, and I had to juggle it and get it positioned just right and then it clicked into place and I could screw it back on.

I suspect that it’s related to that lid. When the lid is on correctly, the netbook works perfectly. When the lid is not on correctly, the netbook turns off after about 10 seconds. I can’t see any sensors in that compartment, and maybe it’s totally coincidental, but getting that lid on correctly means that the netbook works pefectly again, and I am happy. And it’s a more sensible solution than putting the netbook in the freezer for an hour.

New webserver issues

The new temporary webserver has been working fine. I’ve had a couple of small things found, had to tweak the Apache configuration a little more. I keep watching the logs for problems. I have found one annoying set of logs that so far I don’t know how to get rid of. PHP is issuing these errors frequently:

No log handling enabled - turning on stderr logging
Created directory: /var/lib/net-snmp/mib_indexes

I’ve done some reading, it’s all about the PHP log settings in php.ini, it’s bound to be related to a permissions problem (99% of all Unix problems are permissions problems) but so far I have not been able to get it working just right. I will keep searching for a solution.

Telephoto lens

I have a Sony Alpha 200 DSLR. This is the camera that most camera afficionados sneer at. All the power camera users have Canons and Nikons. But I don’t care. I like my Sony Alpha 200 and I have used it a lot and I like the results. But the stock standard lens it came with does wide angle, normal and a little telephoto. It does 18-70mm. Good for most things so far, but it doesn’t do so good when I see a race finishing on the water and I can’t get good closeups of it. The telephoto doesn’t cut it.

I decided to look for telephoto lenses, something around 75-300mm. Ouch. There’s the Sony lenses, there’s Sigma lenses and there’s Tamron. Somewhere between $170 and $400 new. I’m reluctant to jump at them. I wanted to dabble with telephoto a bit inexpensively first.

In my reading and research, I notice that the Sony lenses are rebadged Minolta lenses. In 2006, Konica-Minolta got out of the DSLR camera business and sold that division to Sony who rebadged it and continued making Minolta style cameras under their own name. The first one was the Alpha 100, and the second the Alpha 200 – the one I have. The older Minolta lenses will fit these Sony DSLRs. They are Maxxum/Dynax type lenses with an A-type bayonet mount. While researching the lenses, I found this wonderful site – the Minolta/Konica Minolta/Sony Alpha lens database – that lists all the Minolta/Sony lenses and their details. I found it incredibly useful for sorting out what was what.

I learned several things. The Sony DSLRs have the anti-shake mechanism in the camera body, not the lens, so anti-shake will work with these older Minolta lenses. These older lenses do not contain the D-function, so they will not work well with the auto-flash. As my prime purpose for getting one of these lenses is to be out at midday in blazing sun, taking photos of rowing shells hammering to the finish line, I am not concerned about flash.

So I went to eBay to see what was available. I found a Minolta 75-300m lens that would fit my Alpha 200. It’s a “Minolta AF 75-300/4.5-5.6 II” beer can style lens. It’s from 1999. So it’s about 11 years old. I got it for $40 plus some shipping. It arrived rapidly. It fit my camera. It worked. I have telephoto. It is awesome. I am playing with it, getting used to my first telephoto lens. I have two races coming up, and when the boats hit the finish line, I will be able to get closeups.

As it’s a used lens, it doesn’t come with the original gear. No lens cap, no rear cap, no pouch. I used the rear cap from my original lens, and I added a UV filter to the front, so it’s okay for the time being. I still keep it in the plastic bag it arrived in. It won’t fit in my camera bag. I’m now in the market for a larger camera bag.

Acer Aspire ZG5 problems

So I’ve got this little Acer Aspire ZG5 netbook and it’s really nice. Good size screen, screen looks good, keyboard is almost good enough to touch type on. But it’s only got 8 gig for the flash drive. That’s a bit squeezy. I can’t install everything I want, and still get reference books on.

So I do some deals and end up with a second one of these ZG5s and this one has the 160 gig hard drive. Except the battery is dead. Okay, eBay has batteries and I get one shipped for about $18. It works. The ZG5 works, I install Slackware on it and it all works nicely and there’s plenty of room on it. But running the hard disk takes a toll on the battery. Battery life is not so good.

There are a couple of minor problems with the netbooks. I can’t get the webcam or microphone working. And the trackpad does bizarre things. I don’t really care about the webcam and mike, but the trackpad irritates me so much that I stick a little USB mouse on it when I use it so I don’t have to use the trackpad.

So I continue to use the non-hard disk ZG5 at lunch time for the battery life. And then one day at lunch, the ZG5 just switches off in the middle of everything. All power went off. I turn it on, it lasts about 12 seconds through the boot process and then switches off again. I try it with the other battery, I try it on wall power, same thing. So it’s not a battery issue.

I do research and find that this is a common problem. There are lots of suggestions for fixing it. Remove the battery, remove wall power, hold the on/off switch in for about 30 seconds then do this and do that. None of it works. There is a suggestion that the thermal sensor on the motherboard has gone bad and needs to be reset by putting the ZG5 in a sealed bag and putting it in the freezer for a while. I tried that. I tried all the suggestions. Nothing works. Maybe the fan has stopped working, maybe this, maybe that.

End result – I have one ZG5 with hard disk that works great, except for battery life, and I have another ZG5 without hard disk that will run for a maximum of 12 seconds before switching off. I suspect that the bad ZG5 will never get better and I am going to just have it sitting around as spare parts for the working one.

I also have the expectation that the working ZG5 will soon stop working with some fault or other. When it goes, I will not replace it with another netbook. I’ll go back to my Mac laptops, and I’ll start looking at iPads. It’s nice to get cheap little devices that do the basic things, but I’ve reached a point where I no longer care about cheap devices, I want a device that will work reliably for long periods of time. Netbooks don’t do it for me any more.

Slackware 13.1 is official

It’s official – Slackware 13.1 has been released. See the Slackware website.

Lots of interesting new stuff, and plenty of reading to do.

I started with Slackware 3.0 back in 1995. It’s come a long way since then, but it’s still comfortingly familiar. A really high quality operating system packaged plainly and cleanly and securely. Slackware lives on, stronger than ever.

Upgrading the server

I’ve had my web and mail server stuck on Slackware 10.2 for a few years. Like late 2005. And because things are pretty complicated, I never upgraded it. It was too old to upgrade using slackpkg. It’s been a thorn in my side for some time, and I’ve been nibbling at the edges trying to upgrade it. I set up a temporary server and started to transfer functionality to it.

Last weekend, I moved the DNS and all mail functions to the temp server. Spamassassin is a real pain to install and get working correctly with sendmail. But I got it working. And majordomo for mailing lists… tricky, especially interfacing it with sendmail. But I got all that working last weekend and mail has been running smoothly on the new server.

Then it was time to move the webserver functions over. There were a lot of hidden gotchas in this.

First of all, I’m moving from Apache 1.3.33 to Apache 2.2.15. That’s a huge jump in configuration issues. I have a lot of virtual hosts, and I had a lot of config rewriting to do. I took the opportunity to clean out a lot of defunct test and development subdomains. When I cut it over, I ran into one immediate problem. When I tried to access any of the websites, the browser showed “403 Forbidden You don’t have permission to access /index.php on this server.” and the Apache logs showed “client denied by server configuration: /htroot/hvg/htdocs/index.php”.

A lot of Googling and reading showed me that there was one big difference between Apache 1.3 and Apache 2. The defaults. The new default is to deny everything. I added this clause to every virtual host:

< directory /htroot/hvg/htdocs >
      order allow,deny
      allow from all
    < /directory >

and that solved that problem. I think I have done a quick fix only, and I have a lot of reading of Apache docs ahead of me to fine-tune the new installation.

Then the second problem occurred. I had to transfer a lot of data from MySQL from the old server to the new server. MySQL 4.1.4 moving to MySQL 5.1.46. Normally, to transfer MySQL data, I would do this:

mysqldump -u root -p --opt --all-databases > all.sql

transfer the file to the new machine and do this:

mysql -u root -p < all.sql

and all the data would transfer in, including users and passwords. This happened, but users were not recognised and so my web applications did not have access to the databases. Turns out that the changes between MySQL 4 and MySQL 5 are so great that I can't do it this way. I had to create the MySQL instance, then create each database manually, and manually set up each user and password. Then I saved the data from each database and transferred it over.

mysqldump -u root -p --opt database1 > database1.sql

transfer it across and then

mysql -u root -p database1 < database1.sql

That worked fine. But then I ran into my next problem. I couldn't log into anything. The browser didn't show errors, just couldn't log into anything. The Apache logs showed the problem: "PHP Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: open(/var/lib/php/sess_188a88ad2ca63824acf4d596feb7a6c6, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13)". Okay, I know what that is. The old version of PHP would store session files in /tmp and everyone has write access to /tmp. The new PHP wants to put session files in /var/lib/php, and the way I was setup, it didn't have permission to do this.

I had a choice. I could change the config file (/etc/httpd/php.ini) and change the line that read "session.save_path = "/var/lib/php" and point it to /tmp, or I could change the permissions of /var/lib/php. I changed the permissions of /var/lib/php. Immediately I could log in and I could see the session files being written.

At that point, the new webserver was functioning adequately. I left it live. Today I looked at the logs, and I see I have some more small errors. I will deal with them ASAP.

So now my mail and webserver functions are all running on a temporary server. I will backup the real server, install Slackware, get it up to date, and then transfer the functionality back. It will be easier to do this time, as the versions will all be the same and it's all fresh in my mind.

Slackware 13.1

I’m not sure how this works officially, but it looks to me like Slackware 13.1 has been released. The new slackpkg mirrors point to slackware-13.1, /etc/slackware-version shows 3.1, and there is a new root message after the last upgrade that says “Welcome to Slackware 13.1″.

I think it’s here. But as I have been keeping my systems up with current, through slackpkg, I don’t think I have to do anything extra. This is nice. I like not having to do a big install, and still be up with all advances.

Only thing I am waiting for now is for a lot of other developers to adjust their code to the latest version of gcc. And I’m looking at the video libraries to make dvdrip work, and Digikam.

Linux Games

I read on Reddit that Wolfire Games had a special deal on games – The Humble Indie Bundle.

You get five games, no DRM, run on Mac and Linux, and you can pay what you want. The games are World of Goo (I already bought this for the Mac), Gish, Aquaria, Lugaru and Penumbra.

So I bought the set and downloaded the Mac and Linux versions. I installed the Linux versions on my desktop and I was shocked that they ran immediately. World Of Goo is fun. Aquaria – I don’t quite understand it yet, but I will persevere. It looks great, and I am intrigued. Haven’t really played much of the others yet, but I’ll get to them once I am done with Goo and Aquaria.

I had one small problem with Aquaria. On my work desktop, when the game ended, some portions of the screen did not restore and were no longer viewable. Rectangular sections of the screen and xterm were affected, but it didn’t affect Firefox in those same regions. Peculiar. I had to restart X to get that back. No big deal as I won’t be playing it at work, and it doesn’t happen at home. I think it’s related to the video card. My work computer is never as good as my home computer.

So I get the Linux versions, Anne gets the Mac versions, the game developers get some money, and everyone seems happy.

These game deals are great. I will continue to watch for them. It’s nice to get fun games that I can play on Linux.

Slackware 13.1 coming

More big changes have come down for Slackware, and I read that 13.1 is almost here. This time, for the first time, I won’t need to do a big install when the new version is released. I have been keeping my systems current with slackpkg, and these regular incremental upgrades keep me up to date with both security patches and latest versions of packages. The best thing that happened with my Unix systems was when Matthew showed me the Slackware upgrade methods.

New versions of KDE have come down, and they look interesting. It’s up to KDE 4.4.3 now. KDE looks really slick these days. I tried the new version out for a while, and although it looks slick and everything is available, I still went back to fvwm2 on my desktops and fluxbox on my netbooks. More flexible for my needs.