Since the idea of opening my PC on a regular basis to connect a drive is a bit of a turn off, I used to use an external USB drive enclosure. This works fine, but it’s a bit slow (well, at least until USB 3.0 makes its debut). The eSATA standard allows you to connect external drives at full SATA speed, but it’s not cost-effective to buy an enclosure for every external drive you have.

Enter the Docking Bay. This is a simple weighed base that allows you to connect a hard-drive in a similar way to how you used to plug in game cartridges into a classic game console like the Atari 2600. You can then eject the hard-drive and plug another one in, all without restarting the PC.

This is a review of one such Docking Bay and how it works with Ubuntu, including the wonders of hot-swapping.

I came across this generic eSATA Docking Bay whilst browsing my local PC store. eSATA Docking Bays have been around for awhile now, but I never got around to getting one so I figured I may as well try this one and see how it went under Ubuntu.

With a HDD inserted into the dock.

Without the HDD inserted into the dock.

There is unit was branded “A-Power” but I’ve seen several of these drives with various brand names on it, so this one is as generic as they come, but it comes in one of three variants:

1. eSATA and USB Docking Bay
2. eSATA and USB Docking Bay with in-built USB card-reader
3. USB-only Docking Bay with in-built USB card-reader

In my case, I got the first variant as I already have a separate card-reader.

Hooking Up

The Docking Bay is very easy to hook up. The package comes with the following components:

• The Docking Bay unit
• Power Supply
• eSATA cable
• USB cable

After connecting power, the Docking Bay is connected to the PC by the eSATA cable to a spare eSATA port on the back of your PC. You then insert the hard-drive into the slot on the top of the unit – it caters for both 3.5″ desktop hard-drives and 2.5″ notebook hard-drives. Once inserted, power on the drive using the power button at the back of the unit. The power light on the top of the Docking Bay will light up and you can now switch on your PC.

Configuration

eSATA Docking Bays don’t actually need any configuration as such. If you wish to make use of SATA’s ability to hot-swap, you will need to enable the Advanced Configuration Host Interface (AHCI) in your PC’s BIOS. Not every motherboard has AHCI, but if your machine is a recent machine, you should have AHCI capabilities. If you do not enable AHCI, you can still use your Docking Bay, however you will not be able to hot-swap a new drive without shutting down your PC first.

Using the Docking Bay

Drives inserted into the Docking bay appear like any ordinary permanently installed hard-drive inside your PC. You can format them, partition them, read and write data to them and see their SMART status like any other drive.

Doing an unscientific benchmarks using the dd app with a 7200rpm Seagate 1TB HDD, I was able to write straight zeros to the drive at a rate of about 116MB/s and read at about 120MB/s.

Real-world file copying transferred data at about 86MB/s which is consistent with normal single-drive copy speeds.

Doing a fresh installation of Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 on the hard-drive and booting my system from the docking bay and then repeating the boot test with the drive attached directly to the internal SATA connection as normal, Ubuntu booted in precisely the same amount of time, as one would expect. I was also able to dual-boot Ubuntu with Windows 7 without any issue.

Hot-swapping works well also. While Ubuntu is running, I insert my hard-drive into the dock, power on the drive and wait a few seconds. The drive appears in the Places menu, you choose it, enter your sudo password to mount the drive, and the drive appears on your desktop. When you are done with the drive, you simply do a right-mouse-click on the drive’s icon, choose “Unmount” and wait for any data to be written to the drive. Once the drive icon disappears off the desktop, you can then power off the drive in the docking bay, then press the eject button to remove the drive.

Dealing with differently sized drives, I tried a half-height Seagate 500GB I have (see photos). The spring-loaded flap on the top of the drive was able to hold the drive in place without a problem. Trying with a 2.5″ notebook HDD, the docking bay provides a cut-out section that allows you to insert the 2.5″ HDD but the flap does not press directly against the drive.

Conclusion

The convenience of a hard-drive docking station cannot be understated. This unit provides a simple, effective interface. For AUD$25 it’s cheap and in the last couple of months I’ve been using this unit, it has proven to be very reliable.

While this unit is not exactly the most elegant-looking of devices, it does the job and does it well.

Review score: 9 out of 10

After playing a couple of games, one of the next things I did was to partition the hard-drive and install the PPC version of Ubuntu 8.10 onto it. This is a quick run-down of my experience installing and playing with it.

Well first up I needed to grab the PPC version of Ubuntu. I was under the impression that Canonical had ceased PPC Ubuntu development, but it appears they haven’t. I found the Alternate Install for a dedicated PS3 Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 ISO here for download. This disc is tailor made for the PS3 to get you up and running with the minimum of fuss.

EDIT September 2009: The release of the new “slim” PlayStation3 console has unfortunately seen Sony Computer Entertainment remove the ability to install Linux onto the hard-drive. Only owners of the older, larger PS3′s will be able to install Linux to their systems from now on.

While that downloaded, I prepared the PS3 itself. Thankfully Sony had the foresight to allow alternate operating systems to be installed, thus creating a greater attraction for tinkerers like myself. Unfortunately the ability to install Linux is marred by the fact that access is provided through a Hypervisor which does not give access to the PS3′s graphics hardware, thus preventing the possibility of creating home-brew games. It also limits you to 217MB of the total 256MB system RAM, presumably with some RAM being used for the video framebuffer much like a cheap motherboard with no dedicated video RAM.

Preparing the PS3 for a Linux install is simple enough. First you need to partition the drive. The PS3 OS allows you to allocate 10GB to the “other OS” or 10GB to the PS3 OS. You do not have any ability to set the size manually. Since I don’t really intend to use the PS3 as a workstation for any serious work, I opted to give Linux only 10GB. The system partitioned the drive and rebooted. WARNING: This process will destroy any data already on the drive, including downloaded games and configuration data. Make sure you backup your PS3 data before doing this!

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After that, you need to install the bootloader for the “other OS”. The ISO image I downloaded contained the required PS3 bootloader KBoot and once the ISO finished downloading and I burned it to a CD, I stuck it into the PS3′s optical drive and told the PS3 to go looking for the boot loader there. It found it, installed it and all was good.

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You then need to tell the PS3 to change its “default OS” when turning on the system. By default it’s “PS3″, so I changed this in the system settings to be “Other OS” and the PS3 immediately asked if I wanted to reboot into the “other OS” now. I said “yes”. The machine shutdown and rebooted.

Almost right away I was looking at two penguins and a bit of text centred on my Benq E2200HD screen (connected via HDMI). Like most Linux distros, all I had to do was hit Enter to begin loading the installation program. To do that, however, I needed a keyboard! I grabbed my Microsoft USB keyboard and mouse, connected them to a passive USB four-port hub and then connected that to the PS3, so I could keep the other powered USB port free if I needed it for things like external HDD’s and the like. One USB port can happily power a USB keyboard and mouse together without a problem.

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Ubuntu’s Alternate installer for PPC processors starts and looks exactly like its x86 bretheren, so I won’t go into detail about it here other than point out that when it asked which device I wanted to install on, the hard-drive presented was just the 10GB partition that the PS3 had created – you cannot see the rest of the drive at all (because this is all the Hypervisor presents to you).

The rest of the installation went as normal as any x86 install, however I did notice that the overall installation time was about double that of a typical desktop install. I put this down to two factors – the PS3′s HDD is only 5400rpm and the low available memory probably slowed it down too.

Once installed, the system rebooted. Unlike the desktop flavour of Ubuntu, you don’t get the splash screen, only Linux’s trademarked scrolling of information (most of which has been suppressed by the “quiet” kernel option in the KBoot configuration file). The console was in 1440×900 mode, but the screenshot below shows the console in 1920×1080 mode after I changed the config (see further below).

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Once loaded, the ever-familiar GDM login screen appeared. I logged in and within 10 seconds I was looking at the default Ubuntu Intrepid GNOME desktop. Unfortunately it didn’t fill my screen. In fact, it was only 1440×900 in size on my 1920×1080 monitor, neatly centred in the middle of the screen.

We needed to fix this, so first up was a quick review of the Linux PS3 wiki that had a reference for all the available screenmodes and the required changes to the KBoot configuration file that were required. In my case, I wanted to envoke a 1080p screen mode. I edited the KBoot configuration with:

$ sudo gedit /boot/etc/kboot.conf

…and added the following onto the ends of the two kernel lines in that file:

video=ps3fb:mode:165

This will tell Ubuntu to use 1080p “full screen” on reboot. I saved the configuration, performed a full system restart (you can’t just restart X) and viola! Ubuntu’s console and X displays were now in glorious 1080p.

If you are using an ordinary television, you can try:

video=ps3fb:mode:166

…which will give you full DVD resolution at 720 x 576 (576i mode), but you may need to adjust your TV’s settings to be able to see the entire picture as this will make use of your display’s “overscan” area which is generally beyond the visible area of the screem.

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Logging in and starting a few apps, Ubuntu runs exactly as you’d expect on any desktop PC system. Unfortunately due to the low memory available, performance is a little sluggish, but it’s not bad enough that you couldn’t make serious use of it.

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I did notice that general performance improved once you had used a few applications. For example, OpenOffice.org took a full minute to load up for the first time, but subsequent starts only took about 5-10 seconds. Mozilla took about 30 seconds to start, but once up, it surfed the ‘net quickly and no differently to a normal desktop installation. I was also able to use the optical drive and read the content of CD, DVD and Blu-ray media. I could also happily playback most media without issue after installing the Ubuntu Restricted Extras package as well.

Unfortunately desktop effects such as Compiz are not possible on the PS3 because the Hypervisor does not give you direct access to the PS3′s “RSX” GPU. This was a deliberate move by Sony to prevent homebrew games being developed. Not a great loss, however, as the PS3 is already a little hampered by the fact that it has less than 256MB of RAM to work with.

The PS3 is now “permanently” in Linux mode until you tell it to go back to the normal PS3 OS. If you shutdown and reboot (or indeed turn the console off and back on again), it will boot straight back to Linux every time. To get back to the PS3 OS, all you have to do is issue the following command at the kboot prompt, before Ubuntu starts to boot:

ps3-boot-game-os

…and hit Enter. The PS3 will shutdown, restart and next thing you know you’re looking at the PS3′s normal Xross-Media Bar (XMB) menu again. To get back into Linux again, you simply change the “default OS” back to “other OS” again and reboot when prompted.

Ubuntu is of course not the only Linux distribution that can be installed onto the PS3, and there are plenty of videos on YouTube of people using one or more PS3′s running Linux to great effect. Check them out!

Conclusion: It’s awesome that Sony allow people to play with their hardware (with certain restrictions) and makes the PS3 a far more attractive option to buy than the XBox360 or even the Wii. The latter two options really are geared towards playing games only whilst the PS3 can entertain you and help you with serious work, especially tapping into the awesome power of the PPC. For families who are a cash-strapped for a new PC, the speed of Ubuntu on the PS3 won’t blow you away, however it is perfectly viable to use as a cheap home computer that can also keep the kids happy and play high-definition Blu-ray movies, however after trying out Ubuntu on a regular TV display (an old Amiga 1084 monitor) for the hell of it, 576i takes me right back to the days of Amiga Workbench in 15KHz interlace complete with full flicker!! No, you really need to have a proper 720p or preferably a 1080p display to use Ubuntu properly, to not only keep the sanity of your vision but to give you enough desktop real estate to move around as well.

Review score: 8 out of 10

Today, we now have 32GB USB Flash Drives that go for a paltry AUD$95, and this is a review of Transcend’s offering.

I have to admit I’m a bit of sucker for Transcend. They make good products that perform well at a reasonable price, and I have bought several of their USB Flash Drive products over the last 5 years from 1GB through to 8GB. Sure, there are solutions that are much faster than Trancend, such as Corsair, but along with that comes a larger price tag. The Transcend product is competitively priced and performs more than acceptably to be used even as a boot device.

So today I obtained a 32GB stick. The package is simple – along with some catalogue advertising material, the stick itself is roughly 10mm x 50mm in size and is about 6mm deep, comes with a Transcend-branded lanyard, a removable thin clear plastic layer on the burgundy-coloured part of the stick to protect it from scratches and that’s pretty much it. The non-retractable USB connector is protected by a removable plastic cap. Refreshingly, the cardboard insert from the packaging actually makes reference to Linux as a supported platform, citing a requirement of kernel 2.4.2 or later.

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Like all sticks these days, this USB 2.0 unit is pre-formatted to FAT32 thus allowing it to work with pretty much every major platform out there. Personally I rarely use my sticks on Windows PC’s, though I keep an 8GB stick handy with FAT32 just in case. Most of the time, however, I reformat them to EXT2 or EXT3.

So, let’s plug this guy in. It’s always interesting to see how they implement the activity LED (well OK, it’s hardly anything to write home about, but I’ve got to generate some excitement somehow…!). Previous Transcend sticks had an obvious dot on the top, usually sporting a blue LED as has been the trend for the last few years, but this time they’ve gone different. There is no obvious hole on the stick for an activity light and upon connecting it to my PC’s front USB ports, the end of the stick suddenly lit up in bright roadwork-vest-orange. Well, that’s a welcome change. I can leave it plugged in a dark room without it becoming distracting! The LED remains on all the time to show that it is active and flashes HDD-style when there is activity.

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Nautilus popped up its usual “what do you want to do” prompt and I elected to open a window. As typical with most USB Flash Drives, this one came up imaginatively titled “disk” which is Ubuntu’s way of telling you that the stick has no actual label. The stick itself is completely empty – no promotional software or funky one-touch-backup applications are included.

First thing was first – relabel that stick. There’s nothing worse than having several USB Flash Drives and not knowing what’s on them at a glance. I fired up Ubuntu’s Partition Editor (GParted) and had a look at the stick. The stick’s actual storage space is 29.92GB and I observed that the leading 4MB were not allocated. Usually you find most Windows-formatted devices have the last few MB unallocatable, not that it actually matters.

Anyway, I quickly unmounted the stick and renamed it and remounted it. For those that are interested, this is what the dmesg output for it looks like:

usb 8-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8
usb 8-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi19 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 8
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
usb-storage: device scan complete
scsi 19:0:0:0: Direct-Access     JetFlash Transcend 32GB   8.07 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] 62750720 512-byte hardware sectors (32128 MB)
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] 62750720 512-byte hardware sectors (32128 MB)
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
 sdf: sdf1
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI removable disk
sd 19:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0

Exciting stuff.

With my now-properly-named stick, it was time to do some read/write tests. The stick comes preformatted as FAT32, so we’ll use that, but at the same time I will also conduct some tests using Linux-native filesystems. In this case, EXT3. Our test data will be a series of 15,645 thumbnail images, each averaging about 18K in size. We will also do a large file copy test using a compressed high-definition video file at 3.1GB in size. We will time how long it takes to copy this data to the USB Flash Drive and calculate the transfer speed from that. Then we will reboot the machine, to ensure no data is cached, and copy that data back from the USB stick to measure the read speed.

For comparison, we will also do the EXT3 tests with an older (6 month old) 8GB USB Flash Drive, also made by Transcend, to see if there has been a notable change in read or write speed between products.

First up, the small file copy test. Our test data is 15,645 thumbnail files from our host PC’s hard-drive, each averaging about 18K in size (total 281MB).

• Using the FAT32 filesystem on the 32GB stick, copying the small files took 12 minutes to copy at approximately 345K per second. Ouch – slow.
• Using the Ext3 filesystem on the 32GB stick, copying the same files took only 2 minutes and 53 seconds at a rate of approximately 1.6MB per second. Much better.
• And using the EXT3 filesystem on the older 8GB stick, copying the same data took only 2 minutes and 40 seconds, just edging out the 32GB stick.

Now for the large file copy test. Our test data is a single 3.1GB high-definition video file being copied from the host PC’s hard-drive.

• Using the FAT32 filesystem on the 32GB stick, copying the large file took a pathetic 69 minutes and 24 seconds to transfer, or about 780K per second. It really shows that FAT32 really does not like large files at all.
• Using the Ext3 filesystem on the 32GB stick, copying the same file took a far more respectable 6 minutes and 16 seconds to complete at approximately 8.4MB per second.
• Finally, the Ext3-formatted 8GB stick copied the file in 5 minutes and 55 seconds, which beats the 32GB stick, but only by about 20 seconds and half a megabyte per second (8.9MB/s).

To be fair, Windows’ NTFS filesystem should show reasonably similar figures to Ext3, but I did not test that as this article is about Ubuntu, not Windows!

Finally, we have the read-test. We rebooted the host PC to clear any cached data and copied only the 3.1GB large file from the USB stick to the host PC’s hard-drive.

• The FAT32-formatted 32GB stick copied the file in 3 minutes and 13 seconds. Exponentially faster than its write action.
• The EXT3-formatted 32GB stick took 2 minutes and 32 seconds to copy the file.
• The EXT3-formatted 8GB stick by comparison did the same copy in 3 minutes and four seconds. Interesting that it’s a slow reader compared to the 32Gb stick, but a slightly faster writer.

So transfer speeds have largely remained unchanged between generations, which is a Good Thing(TM) – if there is any faster speed, then that’s a bonus, but the last thing you want is greater capacity at a tragic expense of transfer speed, and whilst we do have that discrepancy here, it’s negligible at best.

Conclusion

Trancend’s 32GB USB Flash Drive is not the largest currently-available on the market, but it is certainly one of the most affordable and has good performance to boot. Aesthetically, the white plastic looks and feels a little cheap, but the stick as a whole feels robust and could probably take a few knocks without having a fit. The lanyard included is more than adequate to hang around your neck with, and the overall size of the stick means you could also comfortably add it to your keyring or hip pocket without it getting in the way, though the separate USB cap could probably be easily lost in that instance.

Review score: 8 out of 10

Unlike when DVD first appeared, and probably thanks to the battle that was waged between the HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats, the provision of high-definition media and associated players has dropped in price rather dramatically to drive acceptance. I have a fairly large original DVD collection, but I am a quality freak and in light of high-definition releases, I loathed the idea of buying a DVD version of a given movie knowing that for about the same price I can buy a high-definition version.

So I decided to buy a Blu-ray drive. One of the cheapest options on the market is LG’s internal drive option called the “Super Multi Blue Blu-ray Disc & HD DVD-ROM Drive”, model GGC-H20L for about AUD$150. This review is my experience using the drive under Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.

My unit came packaged in a slightly larger-than-usual box with attractive print on it. I normally prefer to buy an OEM drive since this packaging generally always ends up in the bin, so I’d rather save some money. Unfortunately my retailer didn’t have any, so I had to buy the retail box.

In a nutshell, this unit is able to read HD-DVD and Blu-Ray media as well as DVD and CD media, but it can only write to DVD and CD media (all the usual formats you expect, so I won’t detail them here). This suits me fine as these days I rarely write any discs except for giving someone a copy of Ubuntu on disc, and I just needed the ability to read Blu-ray movies that I buy.

Out of the box, the package contains the drive itself, a program disc for Windows only with disc burning software, a backup application, a simple DVD authoring application and PowerDVD for movie playback (this disc was promptly thrown in the bin – I don’t need it). There is also a printed manual, four mounting screws and a serial ATA (SATA) cable and a serial ATA Molex-to-SATA power adapter cable provided.

This is my first optical drive with a SATA interface – everything before this used the usual IDE cable, so it was a pleasure to connect the drive and banish the last of my parallel cables to the cable bucket. General installation was a breeze – as typical as any other optical drive.

Powering up, the system recognised the drive straight away and Ubuntu started booting. Ubuntu saw the drive right away and mounted it as my CDROM drive. It still gets referred to as /media/cdrom which I could change, but honestly, there’s little point to that (and maybe I’m being just a bit lazy because typing “cdrom” is faster and easier than typing “blu-ray”).

The tray of the drive ejects very quietly which is a nice change from my old Sony DVD-RW unit and upon closing makes that satisfying deep “ker-klump” noise akin to the quiet closing of a door on an expensive luxury car. The activity light on the front of the unit is a lone bright-blue LED. Of course, a Blu-ray capable unit with a blue light – brilliant…

To do some basic testing, I stuck in a regular CD. The drive detected the disc within seconds and Ubuntu popped up the icon for it on my desktop. No faster or slower than my Sony drive. I was able to read the CD without any issue.

I repeated the test with a DVD disc. Again, no issues. The disc was identified and opened within seconds.

I don’t have any HD-DVD discs handy, so I was unable to test this feature (not that you can buy any of these discs out there anymore anyway).

I then inserted one of my newly purchased Blu-Ray movie discs. Again, the disc was detected within seconds and an icon appeared for it on my desktop (note that reading Blu-ray discs requires the UDF 2.5 filesystem which Ubuntu Intrepid thankfully has already).

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The Autorun had no idea what to do with the disc:

I was half expecting the laser to spend a few extra seconds determining whether or not the disc was Blu-ray or HD-DVD, but clearly a delay is not needed, despite using a different laser. I was impressed. Again, I was able to read and navigate the Blu-ray disc and I was also able to copy files from it without any issue. The drive transferred data at approximately 8.8MB per second. I was able to read off 500MB worth of data in about 1 minute. In the case of the movie disc I inserted, the actual feature is a 21GB file which would have taken approximately 40 minutes to copy.

Burning discs was completed with usual success. I burnt an Ubuntu ISO to a CD using Brasero without any issue. Burning a DVD was effortless also. Again, burn time seemed to be no different to my old Sony unit.

The drive has Lightscribe ability as well, to burn funky labels onto Lightscribe-compatible discs, but as I did not have any such discs handy, I was unable to test this feature.

In operation, the drive is very quiet. Any noise it does make is certainly being overshadowed by the noise of my PC’s fan and the room air-conditioning I’m using right now.

Predictably I was unable to PLAY any of the Blu-ray movies I purchased due to the fact that the DRM used on these movies is vastly different to that on DVD’s, and that Linux has no official support for Blu-ray – both Totem and MPlayer certainly had no idea what the media was.

Instead, my primary use of this drive will be to make file backups of decrypted Blu-ray movies I purchase and watch them that way instead (because I’m a sucker for high-definition). I have written up a separate post detailing how I did this, the results of which are playable in both Totem and MPlayer – you can read it here.

All up, I think this is a good value for money drive. It’s cheap, cheerful and does the job as advertised. At the moment, it appears the only widespread use of the Blu-ray medium is for movies (and PlayStation3 titles). Outside of that, my drive will ultimately still spend most of its time reading DVD and CD mediums. Who knows, maybe PC games and Linux distros will eventually be released on Blu-ray?

Outside of that, the drive is reasonably future-proof with the ability to be updated via firmware updates, although such updates are Windows-only executables on the LG website, which is a shame. Still, it’s better than having to deal with a DOS boot floppy of old, and it is possible to run the firmware update through a virtual Windows session or via Wine. At the time of writing, my drive was delivered with version 1.03 of the firmware.

Aside from its enforcement of DRM, the Windows-only firmware upgrades and its decidely Volvo-like aesthetics (it’s boxy, but it’s good), there’s nothing really to fault this drive. I give it a hearty thumbs up.

Review score: 8 out of 10

So why would you want a Bluetooth mouse? Well, the obvious reason is the convenience of no cables. This mouse is primarily targeted at the notebook market where people cannot easily use, or just plain don’t like, the mouse touchpad or joystick. Being Bluetooth, you can connect it to any device that also has Bluetooth capability (which these days is just about every modern notebook, or desktop with a USB Bluetooth adapter). The only real con is having to charge or replace batteries.

The Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 comes packaged in one of those annoying difficult-to-open hard plastic packages – you know, the kind that usually draws blood. Thankfully, I think Microsoft have heeded the baying masses and have neatly provided little holes in the backside of the packaging for you to easily get a pair of scissors into as indicated by a couple of printed scissor icons, but then I discovered I didn’t even need to do that either – the plastic is perforated, allowing you to get a finger in and simply rip the packaging open – with no blood being drawn – extra points there.

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So once you have playfully ripped into the packaging like a 10 year old on Xmas morning, this is what comes inside the retail package:

You get: The mouse A trendy neoprene rubber carry pouch Two AAA batteries A quickstart guide, battery disposal disclaimer and a full instruction manual, neatly crushed into a triangle by the top side of the box packaging

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The mouse is very lightweight and looks pretty stylish with an attractive combination of black underside and sideskirts, white top and a spine of gun-metal grey. The mouse wheel is transparent. The top side features a Bluetooth logo and a battery indicator. There are four buttons – two traditional left & right mouse buttons, wheel button in the middle and a thumb button that is designed with right-handed users in mind. The wheel does not feature left & right movement, but has a fairly notchy ratchet when rotating the wheel, but does not require much pressure to rotate.

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The rear end resembles a Renault Megane – with a big arse and a star-zappy logo thing which is not a button and appears to be for decorative purposes only.

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The underside features the battery compartment, the laser unit, Bluetooth pairing button, a two-position sliding on-off switch, usual array of skidpads and a Gnuine Microsoft sticker.

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Overall, this mouse is roughly two-thirds the size of a regular adult desktop mouse. It’s even smaller than a CD-ROM disc! The size is deliberate, however – it makes for a more portable package in your laptop bag.

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The neoprene rubber pouch provided is a snug fit for the mouse, but makes a good home for it when stashing it away in your bag. The pouch features a simple hook-tape seal and does the job. If you are an EeePC user, you will already be familiar with the good protection the neoprene rubber sleeve provides, so this mouse pouch will look right at home next to it. The pouch also has a red Microsoft logo tag on it to satisfy brand-toting users.

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Inserting the batteries is a very straight-forward exercise without any difficulty. The battery is cover is easily removed by finger without needing a tool and the battery compartments are spacious and feature pull-up tabs to remove the batteries easily when they eventually need replacement.

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Upon switching on the mouse, the battery indicator on top of the mouse turned green for a few seconds, then went out and started alternating between green and red flashes at a rate of one flash per second. It had immediately entered pairing mode without me having to manually trigger it. The Bluetooth logo does not light up.

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Pairing the mouse with Ubuntu Intrepid is an incredibly simple four-step process:

EDIT August 2009: The Bluetooth stack in Ubuntu Jaunty changed such that the mouse will pair, but the mouse will not acknowledge the connection nor will the mouse ever work. As of August 2009, the latest version of the Bluez Bluetooth stack and the Blueman applet fix this problem. Refer to this article for more information.

1. Do a single right-mouse click on the Bluetooth icon in your system tray and choose “Setup new device…”.

   
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2. The Bluetooth Device Wizard will appear. Click “Forward”..
3. Your PC will query for local unpaired Bluetooth devices. After a brief delay, you will see the Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000′s MAC address followed shortly by its actual name. Simply click on the name in the list and click “Forward”..
4. Your PC will commence pairing with the mouse. You don’t have to do anything except wait a couple of seconds. Once the pairing is complete, the wizard will finish..

The mouse is now immediately usable and you can also keep using your original mouse at the same time as well (if you like fighting over one mouse pointer, that is). At this time, the indicator on the top of the mouse switches off as well. The only time I should see it next illuminate is during power-on self-test or when the battery starts running low.

In operation, the mouse feels reasonably comfortable and is easy to maneuver. Button clicks are clear and responsive, although the fourth thumb button was technically non-functional, though pressing it brought focus upon whatever you were hovering over without actually performing a left-mouse click.  It’s not too heavy but not too light either, though with prolonged use, I suspect those with relatively big hands will find the apparent gap underneath the palm of your hand to get annoying and the mouse is a good third smaller than a regular sized mouse (remember it’s intended to be carried by notebook users, not used on a desktop). Those with smaller hands such as most female adults and early-teen children, may probably find this mouse to be more comfortable than a regularly-sized mouse for western adult hands.

I found that the mouse was quite sensitive compared to my regular desktop mouse, as though mouse-acceleration had been increased by a small percentage in my system’s configuration. If this proves annoying, you would have to adjust your desktop mouse preferences a bit to compensate.

Rather interestingly, the laser is completely invisible. There is no red glow emanating from the mouse at all, even if you lift the mouse slightly off the table. There are no blingy glowy bits on the top side of the mouse to waste battery either.

Unfortunately I cannot gauge the expected battery life until I’ve made prolonged use of the mouse, and the manual provided does not provide any indication as to the expected battery life nor does it mention any potential power-saving features of the mouse such as power-down due to in activity, etc (however the quick-start guide makes reference to switching off the mouse when in transit). In fact, I found it amusing to read in the manual protective advisories not to “walk on power cords” in relation to the mouse – it appears this is a generic peripheral manual that Microsoft supply with all their gear.

Anyway, I went on to test the reconnection speed of the mouse now that it was paired. I switched off the mouse for a few seconds and then turned it back on and started moving the mouse until I saw the mouse pointer moving on-screen. Disappointingly, Ubuntu did not reconnect with the mouse. In fact, I wasn’t able to reconnect to it until I had deleted the pairing and re-paired it again.

A system restart after having successfully paired the mouse earlier also failed to reconnect it when the desktop reappeared again.

EDIT August 2009: The latest version of the Bluez Bluetooth stack and the Blueman applet fixes this re-connection problem under Ubuntu Intrepid and Ubuntu Jaunty without the need to do the manual fix below.

This is contrary to previous versions of Ubuntu where reconnection occurred without a problem. As it turns out, the HIDD application and corresponding hcid.conf file are not employed anymore by Ubuntu Intrepid, having been replaced by the Bluetooth applet we’re using today. It appears Intrepid does not actively scan for Bluetooth devices to “re-activate” them upon a restart.

So with that in mind, I tried issuing the following command in a terminal:

$ sudo hciconfig hci0 pscan

…which tells my Bluetooth adapter at hci0 to switch to “scanning” mode. Within about 10 seconds, the mouse pointer started moving again!

Another reboot still failed to have the mouse reconnect automatically again, so I decided to add the command into my /etc/rc.local file which is executed every time the system reboots.

Edit it with:

$ sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

…and in the editor, add it anywhere BEFORE the last exit 0 line, eg:

#!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.

sudo hciconfig hci0 pscan
exit 0

Save your changes and reboot. When the system restarted, the mouse still failed to move, however turning the mouse off and then on again without another reboot did make the mouse start moving again within 10 seconds, so the reconnection process relies on the rodent’s current connection status to be “deleted” before Ubuntu will reconnect to it. This is annoying, but for the moment switching the mouse off and then on is a helluva lot less painful than having to delete and re-pair the mouse manually every reboot. A number of bug reports have already been listed on Launchpad in relation to this problem, so no doubt it will be rectified in due course.

Conclusion

This is a reasonably comfortable, sturdy mouse with a robust feel to it that I believe would survive being knocked about a few times. It is compact and does not have unnecessary design features that would waste battery life. It meets the requirements to be portable and is simple to use.

The manual is generic and not very helpful in relation to the nature of the product (with the exception of the quick-start guide), however I think in this day and age most people have a good basic understanding of mouse concepts to not need a manual.

I’d have liked to have been given a written reference to the expected battery life, and it would have been nice to have a plug-in USB recharge feature or a docking station of some sort, however such features would have increased the cost of the product.

While not a feature-rich mouse in general given the target audience for a simple “it just works” device, this is a great value-for-money product and I would have no hesitation in recommending it to prospective users. At AUD$45, it’s a bargain compared to its nearest rivals who list for AUD$65 or more for the same featureset.

Review score: 8 out of 10

If you’ve already setup previous versions via the Sun repository, then Virtualbox appears in Synaptic as a completely separate application to previous versions. Generally you uninstall the previous version (preserving your config files) and then install the new version, which automatically performs any upgrading that is required of your config files. Thankfully Synaptic can do the job in one hit, uninstalling selected software prior to installing new selections.

(Click for full size)

Once installed, I was presented with the familiar Virtualbox interface. Nothing has changed here. What has changed is largely under the surface and one or two extra Settings options. For starters, under General->Basic, we have a new checkbox for enabling 3D acceleration. Theoretically this would allow you to play games and use other accelerated applications within a virtual session, as it would be passed through to your host’s 3D video card to process. At this stage, this feature is highly experimental and only supports OpenGL currently (no Direct3D), and only supports it under specific guest configurations. This will change in due course, but for now is a welcome addition to Virtualbox.

(Click for full size)

The second great change that I notice is the complete elimination for the need to use network bridges or TUN/TAP devices to give your Virtual Machine a true connection to your network. It’s now simply a case of telling your VM to use a Host adapter and then pick a Host adapter from the available list. Very cool.

(Click for full size)

Other features in this release:

• Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
• Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental)
• Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements (EPT and VPID)
• Experimental LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers
• Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots
• New NAT engine with significantly better performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support

…and the usual array of bug fixes.

So how does it run?

After initial installation, I ran up my VM install of Windows XP MCE 2005 without changing any of the VM settings and shortly after boot commenced I was met with as Blue Screen of Death. Oh dear, however I wasn’t completely surprised either – Windows will complain over the smallest of changes.

Not fussed, I figured I’d just do a fresh installation of XP Professional with SP3. I decided to give the VM 2GB RAM, 128MB video memory, enabled the SATA controller, enabled 3D acceleration and give it a network card that went through the Host’s Eth0 adapter (no NAT).

During the graphical component of the installation process, I got this…

(Click for full size)

Oh dear again…

So I shutdown the VM and started disabling options one at a time in a bid to see if it was one of the new features that was killing the installation process. I started with the obvious: 3D acceleration. I switched it off and began the install process again. Bang: BSOD again.

OK, so I reduced memory to 1GB and video RAM to 32MB, then restarted the installation process from scratch again. Bang: BSOD again!

Fine, I switched the network config back to a NAT-based setup and restarted the installation process yet again. I made absolutely sure that we were not installing over the top of the old install and that the drive was properly formatted instead of quick-formatted. Another BSOD. What’s the go here?

I decided to go hard-core. I disabled everything that wasn’t really necessary: SATA controller, network, audio and USB. This time, when I restarted installation, it successfully got through to the first stage of the graphical installer prompting for the regional and language options! I shutdown the VM.

I changed the VM settings again, re-enabling components one at a time until I got a failure. After some trial and error, I finally had the VM BSOD again when the SATA controller was enabled! Looks like there are some bugs that need to be sorted out there. I left that disabled and continued installing Windows without incident.

Once the Virtualbox Guest Additions were installed, I immediately looked for something OpenGL related – the screensavers. The OpenGL screensavers such as the FlowerBox ran and rendered well, though there was a slight amount of choppyness to them, but nothing serious. At this stage I figured that the OpenGL works, so when they iron out the bugs, this may get smoother.

I decided to dare to test something a bit more complex, on the expectation that the VM would crash or lockup – an OpenGL GAME. Since the screensaver suggested that the translation was slow, I decided to go old school and install the original Quake on my XP VM, using ProQuake to render the GL version of it. This is where I got a virtual slap in the face…

Quake in OpenGL runs perfectly – fast and smooth! In whatever resolution I throw at it!

(Click for full size)

I discovered the same with just about every other OpenGL title I threw at it, including Serious Sam 2 and Doom 3 – all ran at fluid full speed, at whatever resolution. Great stuff, but I did discover one bug – only in Serious Sam 2, for some reason 10 minutes into gameplay, the video card would just stop – the monitor would switch off and the machine would lock. I could only get it back by resetting the physical host, and even then the video card still did not initialise again until I power cycled the PC. This wasn’t a one-off either. I managed to reproduce the bug three times in an hour. But this is a new feature, it’s off by default because it is experimental, and I have to say that it’s so far a resounding success. With time, the bugs will be ironed out and we will quite literally be one step closer to banishing the concept of dual-booting Windows on PC’s for games! I look forward to Sun’s implementation of DirectX translation.

Outside of all this, I also found that VM’s generally boot up a bit quicker (especially Win XP guests – hellishly quick) and that tiny things such as the icons at the bottom-right of each VM window provide slightly clearer information about what is currently being employed.

So 2.1 is indeed a big step up. Sun have made great strides with Virtualbox, and even better still it remains a free (as in beer) product! I can’t wait for the next release!

EDIT: If you’d like to see Serious Sam 2 and ProQuake in action in Virtualbox 2.1, I’ve knocked up a video and stuck it up on YouTube here.

Download the application’s .deb file from the GetDeb website and install it with:

$ sudo dpkg -i subdownloader_2.0.9-1~getdeb1_all.deb

(or if you’re afraid of the command line, just double-click it within a window to launch the GUI version of the Package Installer instead – either way will take care of the QT4 and Python dependencies for you)

…and that’s it. now just fire it up from the Applications->Sound & Video menu, browse to your movie folder and let the app find the subtitles for you. Sweet!

You don’t have to search by your collection, though – you can do a regular title search as well.

The selected subtitles are then downloaded into the same directory as your source video, allowing you to execute them in Totem or other subtitle-supporting player right away.

Simple, yet effective. This really should be in the Ubuntu repositories.

Title aside, this is one of yet another series of pre-packaged drive & enclosure solutions being bandied about the market today. These solutions are gaining interest with a lot of consumers because they generally manage to undercut the combined cost of buying the same hard-drive and enclosure separately, so much in fact that many users who only need the drive, buy the solution package, rip out the drive and discard the case because in some cases (pun not intended), it can be cheaper this way.

Cost aside, what if you simply need to have a cost-effective external portable backup solution with minimal hassles? That immediately calls for a notebook hard-drive that can be powered by the USB data cable.

A quick trip down to the weekly gatherings of some of my favourite vendors saw me come across Fujitsu’s answer to the masses – the intriguingly named Dynadisq III unit, available in several sizes. I am using the 320GB model for this review.

For AUD$130 you get:

• A single 320GB SATA 2.5″ notebook-sized hard-drive.
• Smart-looking matte silver enclosure with mini-USB, 5v external power and a small “Backup” button with some moderate styling and the Fujitsu logo embossed on top (the hard-drive is already pre-installed in the enclosure). The top side also features two LED’s – one green one for power and a red one for the obligatory activity notification. No blue LED’s in sight.
• A nice fake-leather pouch with a pocket and elastic strap to hold the drive, and several side pockets for cards and, er… stuff.
• A USB to mini-USB data lead.
• A USB to 5v-power lead.
• One-page “getting started” instructions (for Windows users only despite saying the unit will work on a “range of different computer operating systems”).
• A 50MB backup application installation CD-ROM (again, for Windows only).

The components come all packaged in a neatly presented and protected cardboard package.

The drive and case itself is lightweight and generally attractive to look at, with the fake leather pouch putting a bit of sophistication into the package, but then again, who buys an external hard-drive to be sophisticated?

Unfortunately, while the idea seems nice, the pouch just ain’t big enough to hold both the drive and cables together.

Plugging it in

Upon plugging it in to my Ubuntu Intrepid desktop, dmesg reported the following:

Nov  9 14:59:49 lamaar kernel: [ 1018.916011] usb 8-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
Nov  9 14:59:50 lamaar kernel: [ 1019.055454] usb 8-6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Nov  9 14:59:50 lamaar kernel: [ 1019.056230] scsi9 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.060657] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access     FUJITSU  DYNADISQ III     1.95 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.062645] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] 625142445 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.063018] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.063640] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] 625142445 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.064017] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.064023]  sdf: sdf1
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.084377] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI disk
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.084467] sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0

So far so good, but not less than a few seconds later when GNOME tried to present the drive, the following dialog reared its ugly head:

Well, that confirms that it’s formatted for Windows out-of-the-box. Shame on Fujitsu for not properly unmounting the drive during factory testing! And what an exciting volume name they gave it too. Rather than shamelessly promote themselves, Fujitsu simply left it as the Windows-standard “New Volume”. Yay.

I was curious to find out if there was any included software on the drive itself. Maybe If I was lucky there would be random photos of factory workers testing the drives? Maybe I could find secret launch codes for Ballistic Nerf Missiles in the Southern Atlantic? Who knows what I could find?

I quickly fired up Virtualbox, setup the Fujitsu drive as a USB device for my Windows XP Virtual Machine and fired up. Upon checking the content of the drive, I was presented with… nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Totally empty. What a disappointment.

I did a proper disconnect on the drive and shut Windows down. I then fired up GParted to repartition the drive for Ext3.

GParted reports the drive as only containing 302GB of physical storage space, which follows the whole 1,000MB versus 1,024MB in a GB debate that always surrounds drive sizes.

Repartitioning the drive into a single giant 320GB partition took just over 3 minutes to complete.

Turtle or Hare?

So let’s try some real-world file read/write tests.

I decided to go with the following basic tests involving the copying of data:

1. Copy from my desktop hard-drive to RAM
2. Copy from my desktop hard-drive to my aging Samsung 160GB IDE external USB notebook HDD
3. Copy from my desktop hard-drive to the Fujitsu Dynadisq III 320GB SATA external USB notebook HDD

Timing was done by hand with a stop watch from the triggering of the copy action to the closing of the file transfer progress window.

First up, let’s copy a single 2.2GB DV video file.

Figure 1: Time to copy a single large file

According to GNOME’s Nautilus, RAM was pulling a transfer rate of 85.4MB/s, the Samsung drive was pulling 30.2MB/s and our review Fujitsu was pulling 40.5MB/s – a notable difference over the Samsung.

Next up, we copy 7,762 small files all between 10K and 25K each (total 146.9MB) comprised of various image thumbnails:

Figure 2: Time to copy a series of small files

Nautilus didn’t have much time to evaluate the speed. RAM took less than a second to complete the copy, my Samsung drive took 3.65 seconds, and the Fujitsu took a paltry 2.98 seconds.

Finally, we go and copy 2,987 medium-sized files comprised of digital photos in various subfolders all between 250K and 1.5MB in size (2 megapixels max resolution).

Figure 3: Time to copy a series of medium files

Nautilus reported RAM pulling a transfer speed of 71MB/s, my Samsung drive did 32MB/s and the Fujitsu triumphed over the Samsung with 39MB/s.

So the Fujitsu shows an average 21% performance benefit over my little Samsung IDE unit. Not bad.

The Backup Button

Earlier I pointed out that there was a “Backup” button on the back of the drive labelled simply “Backup”. The intended use is to perform a one-touch backup of all your important data onto the external unit. Sounds great, except that it doesn’t work. Well, at least under Ubuntu it doesn’t work. The system does not recognise any press of the button – not even as a keyboard multimedia button.

The supplied CD-ROM contains the driver and backup application for use with the Backup Button, but unfortunately, it’s Windows only.

This is hardly a concern, though. You can easily throw an icon on your desktop to execute a script to backup all your important data and Linux in general has unparalleled methods for regularly backing up large volumes of data with ease, such as rsync.

Aesthetics

So what more can be said about this drive? Well, it’s quiet – barely a chirp from it. It also gets a little warm, but not overly hot when doing large file copies. No biggies.

It certainly looks like a nice unit – clean design, not trying to overtly stand out. The power and activity LED’s are non-intrusive as well unlike the bright blue LED’s you find on some units.

Probably the only real downer I can say about it is the juice consumption, but this is probably unavoidable, really. The main reason I still like my little 160GB IDE unit is that it is one of the last capacities to not really require additional power. Whilst conducting my tests on the Fujitsu, I did encounter moments where the drive was reporting back to the system hard-errors and at one point simply unmounted itself. Disconnecting and reconnecting it fixed these issues and a quick run of fsck showed that there were not any actual errors on the drive. Once I had hooked up the second USB power lead, the problems never manifested themselves again.

Conclusion

One of the main reasons people use notebook USB drives for portable storage is for their convenience. Not only for their size, but for the fact that you can do data and power over one lead. This one requires two for any major file operations, and while that may be an inconvenience for some, it’s still a helluva lot better than having to hook up a power brick to run a 3.5″ desktop drive.

SSD’s (and to a lesser extent, USB flash drives) are still a long way off from completely replacing hard drives, and at this stage are far more expensive GB for GB, so until then, this little drive suffices nicely. It’s small, tidy, fairly quick, had a good pouch which will offer some knock protection, and while not as small as a USB flash drive, it easily fits into most pockets.

All up, this is a drive worthy of notice.

Review score: 8 out of 10

Many thanks to fellow Ubuntu compatriot Blinky who supplied the unit for review.

For this comparison, I have pitted the following versions of Ubuntu and Vista against each other:

• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1 and all system updates to 29th October 2008
• Ubuntu Linux 8.04.1 Hardy Heron with all system updates to 29th October 2008
• Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Release Candidate with all system updates to 29th October 2008 (just for kicks)

The tests would be simple. A fresh vanilla install of Ubuntu and Vista doing four of the most common things a typical user might do everyday:

1. Nothing
2. View a web page
3. Listen to an MP3 music track
4. Play Solitaire

To keep things as fair as possible, I used Virtualbox 2.0.4 and created three VM’s each sporting 1GB RAM, 32MB video RAM and an 8GB HDD file each, except for Vista which needed more HDD estate, so it got a 20GB HDD file instead (this is not boding well for Vista already!).

The Ubuntu installs each had a 512MB swap partition created while Vista went ahead and stormed in with an automatically-created 2GB swap file. Shouldn’t be an issue as the tests are not going to tax the OS’ anyway.

All installed OS’ are the 32-bit versions. All had the Virtualbox Guest Additions drivers added, but since these drivers do not support acceleration, OpenGL and DirectX eye-candy (such as Compiz in Ubuntu and Aero in Vista) were automatically disabled by the system.

The host hardware for the VM’s is an Intel Quad-core Q9450 based machine with 8GB RAM running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy Heron.

Installed Disk Usage

So let’s start with the simple stuff  – how much disk space does a vanilla install of each OS chew up? The following table shows a completely stock installation of each OS, including subsequently downloaded update files:

Ubuntu has been dubbed by some to be the “Windows” of Linux distros in terms of its overall weight, but it’s anorexic compared to Vista. Why does any OS need over 10GB of disk space just for itself? Consider also that Ubuntu’s installed space also includes a full office suite – not even Vista has that, yet it’s so much bigger.

It was interesting to note that Ubuntu Intrepid consumed a whole 400MB less disk space than Ubuntu Hardy, however part of this could be attributed to possibly less extra update files downloaded compared to Hardy. In any case, both are well under 5GB, let alone 10GB!

So far one point to Linux and a big fat zero to Vista.

Idle RAM Usage

With disk usage now established, how does the RAM stack up? Each desktop was at its standard setup with standard wallpaper, panels, widgets, etc and only the resource manager window on-screen:

Vista SP1	411MB
Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy	122MB
Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid RC	142MB

Another win for Ubuntu by a good 250MB. Also, again a surprise showing by Intrepid that despite the smaller HDD footprint, its resource usage was 20MB greater than Hardy, but what was alarming was that Vista was already using 387MB of its 2GB swap file while both Ubuntu installations had not touched theirs…!

Two points for Ubuntu, none for Vista.

Browsing a Common Web Site

Now to up the ante – all three installations now used their default web browser (Firefox 3.0.3 for Ubuntu, Internet Exploiter, uh, Explorer 7.0.6 for Vista) to view a common website containing Flash, animated GIFs, lots of frames, blocks of formatted text and graphics – the Sydney Morning Herald homepage.

All three OS’ do not have Flash installed as standard and thus did not play any of the Flash content, however the rest of the page did load and render successfully.

The memory usage now stands at:

Vista SP1	490MB
Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy	179MB
Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid RC	198MB

A notable jump by all three candidates in this case, as one might expect, though while Ubuntu jumped up some 55MB, Vista jumped up an extra 80MB.

Curiously, Vista’s CPU usage jumped up and down a lot while the site sat idle and the spike of usage you see at the end of the graph is when the site automatically refreshed itself. No such major jumps from Ubuntu.

Another point for Ubuntu for a total of three. Vista is yet to score.

Listening to an MP3 Music Track

Browsing any website would just not be fun without some background music. Using the default music player (Totem 2.22.1 and 2.24.2 for Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid respectively, Windows Media Player 11 for Vista), I perused the SMH website (without clicking on any new links) and listened to the same 3.3MB MP3 music track for 1 minute to allow memory usage to level out.

Vista SP1	560MB
Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy	211MB
Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid RC	237MB

Memory usage has increased by nearly 40MB on Ubuntu but by 70MB on Vista. This is not really too surprising given the heavyweight that is Media Player versus the simpler Totem, though Totem did prompt me to download and install the GStreamer Extras MP3 codec, so there’s extra memory usage there too.

The observant among you might say that it would be a fairer comparison to compare Windows Media Player with Rhythmbox, however I decided to go with whatever launched as the default MP3 player and at the end of the day, all that matters is that I can hear my music and Ubuntu has delivered 30MB ahead here.

Four points for Ubuntu, still none for Vista.

Playing Solitaire

Surfing the ‘net is hard work and what better way to unwind than with a relaxing game of Solitaire. In this test, I played Solitaire for two minutes whilst listening to my MP3 track and leaving the web browser open with our self-refreshing homepage.

Vista SP1	605MB
Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy	224MB
Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid RC	244MB

Really, Solitaire isn’t a terribly complex application and Ubuntu’s Solitaire bears a remarkable resemblance to all the Windows versions… except Vista which was drastically revamped with extra visual effects, new card textures, etc. No wonder the memory footprint is so much bigger, but a 45MB difference??

Ubuntu Hardy went up 13MB and Intrepid didn’t even break double-figures with only a 7MB increase.

We could keep testing common applications until the cows come home, but I think it’s pretty clear that the established pattern is that Microsoft Vista uses up much more memory and disk space on average than Ubuntu Linux.

Probably what was the most worrying here was that Vista’s swap usage had increased to 692MB and there was an unusually high amount of CPU usage, while both Ubuntu’s had left their swap on the plate, uneaten.

So the final score is five points for the trim and healthy Ubuntu and still nothing, nada, zip for the obese whale that is Vista.

Conclusion

I think some people might say all I’ve done is confirm what everyone already knew, and perhaps that is the case, but it still made for an interesting comparison and certainly highlights that Microsoft need to do some serious fat trimming.

For those that are interested, the host machine used up a total of 4GB RAM to run all three VM’s simultaneously plus a bunch of other apps that I had running at the time of testing, and it only nibbled at 44MB of swap.

Click for the full-size version – 681K

So there I was, at the Atomic Live 2008 event at Sydney’s Olympic Park in Homebush, and AusPC Market were selling two versions of these displays at a price of $240 for the T2200 and $250 for the E2200 – the only real differences being refresh rate (2ms on E-series vs 5ms on T-series) and an HDMI port on the E-series. As soon as I saw them, I instantly dismissed them as typical low-cost 22″ displays no higher than 1440×900 resolution, but as the day went on, I observed that there seemed to be a helluva lot of picture information on-screen, and it looked crisp too. After asking a few questions and quickly getting on-line myself (on my EeePC via my Nokia N95) to review the model specification on Benq’s website, I suddenly discovered that this was no cheapo 22″ display – it was a new range of monitors from Benq that offer the full native high-definition resolution of 1920×1080 (as opposed to 1920×1200) for a sub-$300 price! I couldn’t believe it! Best of all was the price $240 ($270 RRP) for the T-series and $250 ($280 RRP) for the E-series.

Benq E2200HD Widescreen monitor	Benq T2200HD Widescreen monitor

I grabbed two E-series models for myself. Bargain.

The specification is pretty good – The E-series features a widescreen 1920×1080 native pixel resolution, 2ms grey-to-grey, inbuilt stereo speakers, plastic snap-on stand with tilt adjustment (but no height or rotate adjustment, however it feels pretty sturdy), On-Screen-Display (OSD) functions, a single HDMI, DVI (single-link) and VGA input, a headphone output, and no USB ports (though the bezel design is identical to the USB model, except where there should be USB ports is just a blank face). The monitor has a piano-black gloss finish (which is naturally prone to fingerprints) with matte silver trim and highlights, there are four buttons down the right edge of the bezel for screen and volume controls and a flush power button with orange and green illumination for standby and on modes respectively. All buttons have a responsive, but soft click action to them. At the back, there is a clip-on cable tidy that is large enough to accomodate the VGA, DVI, HDMI and power leads simultaneously. There are also four VESA-standard screw holes on the back panel to allow you to fit an aftermarket monitor stand, which would also permit you to mount the monitor vertically if you required it, as the provided stand does not allow screen rotation.

The T-series is pretty much identical other than the fact it has 5ms response time and no HDMI input, plus a slightly different bezel design.

So, how do they look under Ubuntu Linux? Two words? Bloody fantastic.

The E-series monitors come with a single-link DVI-D and VGA cable in the box (no HDMI cable). I connected both monitors to my NVidia GeForce 8800GT PCI-E graphics card DVI outputs using the provided cables and powered up.

Ubuntu Hardy booted up with one screen on and one screen off (as expected at this point). I noted a small degree of light bleed at the top and bottom of the panel when the screen was completely black, but it wasn’t intrusive. A quick dip into the screenmode preferences app showed that Ubuntu immediately recognised the resolution of the monitors as 1920×1080, though the screen mode was still in 1280×1024 from my 17″ settings, so the picture looked horizontally stretched. I changed the screenmode to 1920×1080 and the native screen mode instantly popped into place.

It was at this point that the extra screen real-estate became very apparent. All the icons I had dotted on the right-side of the screen now had vast expanses of space next to them – a good 700 pixels worth. Vertically the difference was less pronounced at an extra 60-odd pixels, but you could still see space.

I had already previously installed the NVidia settings application, so I fired it up and found that both monitors were recognised by the system. I activated the second monitor by enabling “TwinView” and restarted X. The second monitor came to life, but was still black while the first monitor showed the GDM login. After logging in, the picture on the second monitor suddenly appeared. My wallpaper had been drastically zoomed in (not stretched) to fit both screens, but everything else looked fine. The menu panels restricted themselves to the first monitor and the second was completely bare bar the wallpaper. A test drag of icons and windows to the right monitor worked perfectly.

First thing was first, fix that wallpaper. I have a small collection of dual-screen wallpapers and stuck one on – now that looks cool.

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Man, the freedom having a second display gives you is uncanny. I use two 22″ Dell displays at work and every time I’d come home I’d feel so cramped on the single 17″ display. My work displays are only 1680×1050 each, however, and while you wouldn’t think it, 1920×1080 really IS a lot more screen real-estate than 1650×1050, let alone the 1280×1024, and with the two displays, I now have 3840×1080 at my disposal – mmmm.

Compiz operated as expected and I did not observe any slowdown in any animations including full-screen animations like Expo and Desktop Cube, however the desktop cube did not work as expected. I use the typical four workspaces and instead of a four-sided cube, each screen is treated separately, but joined together and you get this 8-sided polygon rendered to both displays, offset from each other by one side. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to correct this with the various tweaks I tried, but I’ll look at this in more detail later as I didn’t have time to do more research.

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EDIT – 21st December 2008: I should point out that the version of Compiz Fusion included with Ubuntu Intrepid has fixed the above problem. You can now elect to have a giant cube fill both screens, or in my case now, a giant cylinder (which optionally can be rendered as two cylinders on each screen as well like the above pic).

Cylinder:

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Cube:

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Expo, as always, looks the biz, and is probably genuinely useful now with the extra resolution to properly be able to see things on each workspace.

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The next thing I tried were games like Nexius, Warsow, OpenArena and so forth. The low-resolution softness of the textures was very apparent, however I also observed other issues, such as Nexius with its hard-coded list of screenmodes – I couldn’t actually select 1920×1080 – only 1680×1050 and 1920×1200, and it also refused to switch to full-screen too. OpenArena only ever saw a screen of 3840×1080 and instead of rendering it that large, it just centered a single-screen-sized 4:3 version smack bang between the two screens with the rest of the display black. I was no able to select other modes in the graphcis options – it was stuck at one size only. Half-Life 2 running via Wine was a bit problematic as well – it too only saw a single screenmode of 3840×1080 and only rendered to the first screen and not the second.

I tried some smaller games too, not that I expected anything special from them – Pingus is fixed resolution and looked somewhat tiny, Frozen-Bubble is also fixed resolution, but refused to go full-screen, preferring to stay as a window, and a remake of the C64 classic Wizball (see above screenshot) doesn’t have the option to go full-screen either or change res, but you can see is dwarfed by the enormity of the display’s resolution.

I keep a dual-boot installation of Windows in order to play some of my favourite games until true Linux ports of them appear, so I rebooted into Windows to see how some more modern games would look. First up, my all-time favourite Half-Life 2. HL2 Episode 2 frankly looked bloody gorgeous. I wasn’t able to get the game running across both monitors, but at 1920×1080 with all graphics options to their highest settings plus 4xAA, I almost swore I could step into that screen. This is a marked improvement over my 17″ bar none. Again, the left & right visibility made the game feel that much more immersive and more comfortable to play, and the high texture resolution really shows up well. Bioshock also looked equally gobsmacking. This was definitely a game designed for widescreen. My Geforce 8800GT rendered both games happily at a smooth framerate without breaking a sweat.

Trackmania Forever was a game that was more than happy to switch to a dual-screen mode, though it was a bit awkward to play given the focus of your driving ends up being where the two monitors meet in the middle (you really need three monitors for this). What was interesting to watch was the enhanced super-wide play environment, were you had so much visibility left & right of you. It really added a lot, especially the opening preview sequence of the track before you begin your race. If I were a more active gameplayer, I’d probably go out and buy a third monitor right now, but I do more programming and web surfing than games nowadays, so I won’t.

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Back into Ubuntu now and it’s time for one of the biggest tests – High Definition VIDEO. I watch TV using MythTV streamed from a Mythbuntu server, and have long gotten used to the black bars presented by shrinking a 16:9 broadcast into a 4:3 display. When I fired up Myth, I was presented with my selected Retro theme looking decidedly out of place on the screen. Time to change it to a widescreen theme! The widescreen version of Blootube works a treat and is so much more readable when there’s extra screen real-estate available!

I picked a pre-recorded high-definition broadcast and sat in awe. Holy cow, the image detail! I was always aware that I wasn’t watching true high-definition on my 17″ being scaled down and all, but it was always notably sharper than a standard-definition broadcast, but looking at the same stream on a true high-definition display was certainly drool-worthy. Here was a level of crispness I have not enjoyed outside of a computer game. The colours were crisp and dynamic, the 2ms response time was clearly evident in the very visible lack of blur in fast-moving scenes that my 12ms Compaq 17″ was prone to, and did I mention the image crispness? No fuzzy edges, no interpolation, this was true high-definition. No more black bars either! I was in heaven. The same was equally said of some high-definition 1080p PlayStation3 trailers I had handy. The only thing I have to get used to now is watching my TV and video on the side of my desk instead of the centre of it. I found that switching the video to the other monitor occasionally helped to offset any awkwardness. It’s also fun watching TV whilst playing a game or surfing the ‘net on the other monitor at the same time too.

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Now what about the other end of the scale? Traditionally low-resolution video and games look horrid on high-definition displays. How would these monitors go? I fired up a DivX’ed SDTV recording of Doctor Who Series Two and was pleasantly surprised. The low pixel resolution and bitrate of the video already showed up some minor compression artifacts on my 17″ before, but on the large Benq display it didn’t seem to be any worse. In fact, it seemed to be better, presumably because the higher 2ms refresh rate reduced overall motion blur and thus made the artifacts more tolerable!

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The image scaler on the Benq is impressive. Low-res games run at full-screen such as MAME arcade emulation looked perfectly fine. I could not fault the image presented to me and the anti-aliasing of the image did not look overly soft or distracting. In a similar vein, full-screen text terminals look perfectly readable and sharp, and the 1920×1080 resolution makes viewing Apache logs in an X terminal session soooo much easier!

About this time I had a break for dinner. Whilst away, the screensaver kicked in and interestingly I observed that it rendered two separate screensavers to both displays instead of one giant one, and the two screensavers were not simply clones of each other either – they were animating completely autonomously of each other. The unlock login box appears on whichever monitor had the last window focus. (The blue line in the middle of the screenshot below is the application window shadow. Mine is set to blue instead of the usual black).

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Input testing: As already mentioned, my Ubuntu desktop is connected via DVI, but the monitor also features VGA and HDMI inputs.

DVI as always, looks great. Colours were strong and vivid. This is a pretty good TN panel.

VGA was equally impressive, again the image scaler smoothly scaling low-resolution text-only displays nicely and the auto-screen adjustment does an admirable job of centering and adjusting the image size. I could see no image noise either.

I was unable to test the HDMI input due to, well… not having any HDMI equipment, including PS3. I’ll get one eventually, though…

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EDIT – 27th February 2009: I finally got my own PlayStation3! Hooked it up to my E2200HD straight away with an HDMI cable and positvely drooled. The PS3 automatically detected a full 1080p display and the monitor had absolutely no quibbles displaying everything with a rock-solid image. No stripes, no fuzzy bits, not image shake. Dead-set rock solid. The E2200HD seamless switched between 576p, 720p and 1080i/p modes with no visible image jump like most TV’s do. On occasion, the display would be a few seconds late displaying a synced 1080p image (such as when restarting the console or toggling inputs) and on two occasions displayed a horizontally double-stretched opening PS3 sequence, but restarting the console, or toggling the monitor to DVI and then back to HDMI fixed that. Playback of Blu-ray movies at true 24fps is something to behold – not a single frame skip, and 60fps visuals such as that from WipEout HD look awe-inspiring. Colours remained sharp and vibrant, edges looked crisp and anti-aliased edges looked perfect. Fast (racing) games looked great with no obvious blurring except for what the game itself provided (there is some SLIGHT blur with slow-panning game scenese, but you have to be looking for it really), and platform games looked strong and colourful. Nothing was overscanned, nothing was off-centre – it all came together perfectly. Also, the monitor’s OSD only appears when you first enter HDMI mode and when you switch off the PS3 to advise of no signal – outside of that, changing modes from 1080p to 720p does not cause the OSD to appear. One minor annoyance was that when the HDMI signal was lost when the PS3 was switched off, I had to wait for the OSD message advising of no signal on HDMI to disappear before I could switch it back to DVI for my PC (I later discovered I don’t need to manually change it – it will move to the next available signal automatically after a few seconds). I also observed that the monitor does not break connection on the DVI port whilse in HDMI mode. Restarting Ubuntu still has it automatically detecting and setting the monitor even though it was in HDMI mode displaying an active image from the PS3.

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The HDMI cable I used was a Belkin cable that appears to have a slightly longer-than-usual HDMI connector body. I found that there was almost not enough room to plug in the HDMI lead into the monitor and I was a bit worried I was going to bend something, however once connected everything is fine, though I won’t be disconnecting and reconnecting that HDMI cable again anytime soon for fear of bending the cable or damaging the HDMI connector on the monitor – it’s more or less got a permanent home there now!

The HDMI passed through the PS3′s audio to the E2200HD’s speakers without issue, though I quickly changed the PS3′s config to output the audio over the standard RCA’s for my PC’s sound system instead of the HDMI cable – the E2200HD’s speakers have absolutely no bass to them whatsoever.

All up, I have to give a very big thumbs up to the HDMI implemented here on this monitor. It works, and it works brilliantly.

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The on-board stereo speakers are typical of any monitor speaker these days – lacking oomph. In fact, I daresay they’ve never heard of the term, so I’ll use the technical term and say they’re crap. There is a complete lack of bass and while the higher end of the frequency range actually comes through quite clearly without distortion, cranking the volume all the way up to 100 isn’t very awe-inspiring. You could liken it to being able to listen to someone else’s headphones whilst on the train. Needless to say, I switched back to my external sound system fairly quickly.

There are actually two audio inputs – one for the PC stereo jack and one for HDMI. By default the monitor auto-selects where audio is coming and plays it accordingly, of you can manually switch using the OSD controls.

The OSD controls feature the usual gamut of settings such as preset image types, input selection, general image controls such as contrast, brightness, and horizontal and vertical size. The monitor can also tell you what the current input resolution is as well as the refresh rate. The only real annoyance I had with the OSD is the two second delay between pressing the input toggle switch and the screen actually changing to that input, for example, when changing from the DVI input to VGA input.

Conclusion: There’s really nothing truely bad that I can say about this display, mostly because of the price. It’s been a long time coming, but we finally have sub-AUD$300 high-definition PC monitors! While I’d have preferred to get a 24″ (or let’s be honest, a 30″), the price is still high on these displays and at the end of the day, 22″ is still a pretty big monitor and makes 1920×1080 more than readable. It would have been nice to have an SD-card reader or USB ports, but this isn’t enough to detract from the value of these displays. The speakers, well… you don’t buy a monitor for its speakers now, do you?

Review score: 9 out of 10

EDIT: After reading some concerns about motion blur from people on other forums, here’s my 2c about it: I have no idea what they are talking about. I find this monitor to be sharp and crisp with absolutely no input lag or motion blur. If I move my mouse slowly, I can see some ever-so-slight ghosting from black to white, typical of any LCD, but moving quickly it looks fine. When I animate my desktop, I do not see any obvious blur, and even moving the cube (or cylinder now) quickly, I can still easily read text on it – it does not look blurred to me. If I play full-screen 1080p high-definition movies, I cannot see any blur other than what the movie uses itself. Now if I go and play a game like FarCry2 or Bioshock, you see blur there, but that’s because the game uses blur as a FEATURE – that’s not the monitor doing that. If I compare my Benq displays against my old Compaq 12ms unit, yes, I can see an obvious difference between the two in refresh speed, but other than that, I think people are getting just a little too picky! Comments on the issue are welcome!