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

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The machine starts up fine, but when you try and hit the network, you can’t. Closer inspection using the ifconfig command reveals that there is no “eth0″ adapter configured. Why?

Here’s how to fix it.

Ubuntu Server keeps tabs on the MAC address of the configured ethernet adapter. Unlike Ubuntu Desktop, you can’t simply change network cards willy nilly – while Ubuntu Server does detect and automatically setup new cards, it won’t automatically replace any adapter already configured as eth0 with another one, so you need to tell Ubuntu Server that you no longer need the old adapter.

This problem can also appear if you have a virtual machine such as one from Virtualbox, and you move or copy it from one host to another without ensuring that the MAC address configured for that VM’s ethernet adapter is 100% identical to the previous one.

These instructions were done with Ubuntu Server 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope in mind, but should apply to just about any release.

1. Since you can’t SSH in, you will need to login directly on the Ubuntu Server console as an appropriate user with sudo rights.
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2. Once logged in, type in the following and hit Enter:

   $ sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

3. You are now presented with the Nano text editor and some info that looks similar to the following:

   # This file was automatically generated by the /lib/udev/write_net_rules
   # program, run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.
   #
   # You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single
   # line, and change only the value of the NAME= key.
   
   # PCI device 0x8086:0x1004 (e1000)
   SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="0a:03:27:c2:b4:eb", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

4. Delete the last two lines or simply comment out the SUBSYSTEM line on the end. This is a rule defining what MAC address should be explicitly assigned to “eth0″. Since you no longer have an ethernet card with the specified MAC address in this machine (it’s on the old PC, remember), Ubuntu Server effectively ignores your new ethernet adapter because its MAC address does not match the defined rule for “eth0″.
   .
5. Once you’ve made your changes, press CTRL + X and then Y and then Enter to save your changes.
   .
6. Now reboot your box with:

   $ sudo reboot

7. Upon reboot, Ubuntu Server will detect the “new” ethernet adapter in your PC and will automatically write a new rule into the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file, thus enabling networking over eth0 for your server.
   .
8. To verify that the new adapter is working, type in:

   $ ifconfig

   …and you should see eth0 now listed with your defined IP address.
   .

9. Test remote connectivity to the server and if all is well, then pat yourself on the back. You’re done.

This article detailed how to decrypt just about every movie under the sun except for a newer type of protection called “BD+” which I never got around to supplementing my original article with.

What is “BD+” protection? Well in short, it’s the deliberate corruption of random parts of the video track of the movie (well, OK – that is a highly simplified definition as BD+ protection can do a lot more than that, but the end result is the same – to prevent unauthorised playback which includes ripping). The idea BD+ is that when you rip the title, you can still watch the movie, but with some or all of the screen corrupt at various stages in the movie which well and truely ruins the movie-watching experience, especially since you paid good money for it and should not be forced to buy a dedicated consumer Blu-ray player when you’ve got a perfectly good PC that can do the same task.

But hang on, if the movie is deliberately corrupt, then how come it plays fine in a stand-alone consumer Blu-ray player or PlayStation3 console?

Well, let me tell you about that and how to get around it yourself.

I have to give credit to the movie studios for this one. It’s a simple, and annoying, method of protection. But as with anything, it was eventually reverse-engineered and broken, and neat little tools were developed to allow us consumer types to backup, or watch in our preferred way, our movies bought with our hard-earned cash.

So what’s this BD+ thing all about? Basically after the movie is mastered and just before being pressed to discs, an extra step is taken where by random parts of the movie data stream are deliberately exchanged with random data or removed altogether, thus corrupting the video stream. A record is kept, however, of what parts of the movie have been changed – a table listing where, when and what data needs to be put back into the movie stream in order to watch the movie back in its original uncorrupted format. This table is called a “conversion table”, and it is processed by your Blu-ray player while you watch the movie, with the correct data substituted back into the video stream before the image hits your screen, thus resulting in a proper uncorrupted picture.

An example of a corrupted video stream showing the BD+ Protection in full effect. Click for full size.

An example of the repaired video stream using the Conversion Table. Click for full size.

So how do we get around BD+? Well, all we have to do is follow this conversion table ourselves and correct the corrupted data as the title is decrypted.

As I showed in my previous article, the DumpHD application is brilliant and it has been extended by the author KenD00 to allow the “plugging in” of another program called the “BD VM Debugger”. What this program does is simple – it executes the Java Virtual Machine that runs the conversion table in concert with the normal decrypting process which happens when the disc is played in your normal BD player, patching up the stream as it goes. The end result is a clean decryption with no corrupt video stream.

This tutorial was written using Ubuntu Jaunty but should work with Intrepid and should definitely work with Karmic and beyond as well.

DISCLAIMER: This article describes decrypting BD titles using an Intel or AMD based PC with Ubuntu Linux. At this time of writing you cannot use Ubuntu installed on a PlayStation3 console to deal with BD+ copy protection because the BD VM Debugger and AACS Keys applications are not available for the PPC processor used by the PS3.

So let’s set this up, but first – since my last article, DumpHD has been updated to 0.61 so let’s upgrade this first. Go and download yourself a copy.

1. Extract the archive out by either double-clicking on it or via the terminal. You should get a “dumphd-0.61″ directory.
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2. If you are upgrading from an older version of DumpHD, copy over the “KEYDB.cfg” file, overwriting the archive copy. No point losing your collection of keys accumulated thus far.
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3. You’re done for this bit.

The AACSKeys program (which extracts the decryption key for the Blu-ray title and can automatically update your “KEYDB.cfg” file for you when you insert a new Blu-ray title) has also been updated to 0.4.0c since my last article, so go download yourself a copy of that as well.

1. Extract the archive out by either double-clicking on it or via a terminal. You should get a “aacskeys-0.4.0c”.
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2. Copy the “ProcessingDeviceKeysSimple.txt” and “HostKeyCertificate.txt” into the “dumphd-0.61″ directory.
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3. Copy over the “libaacskeys.so” file located in the “/lib/linux32/” OR “/lib/linux64/” directories (depending on which architecture you’re using) to the “dumphd-0.61″ directory. Do NOT copy or create the “/lib/linux32″ or “/lib/linux64″ directories themselves. Copy the library file only.
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4. You’re done for this bit.

Right, let’s get the BD VM Debugger installed. As of this writing, the current version is 0.1.5. Go and download yourself a copy.

1. This archive is provided as a 7zip file. Ubuntu does not have out-of-the-box support for this archive format, so install it first with:

   $ sudo apt-get install p7zip-full

   .

2. Once installed, extract the archive either by double-clicking on it like any normal archive, or via the terminal as follows:

   $ 7z e bdvmdbg-0.1.5.7z

   .

3. Copy over the everything into the “dumphd-0.61″ directory except the “changelog.txt”, “readme.txt” and “debugger.sh” files since you don’t really need them, but there’s no harm copying them anyway.
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4. That’s it!

You should now have a total of at least of 17 files and two directories inside the “dumphd-0.61″ directory (if you are setting up these tools for the first time, you will only have 15 files instead, as two of them  – conv_tab.bin & hash_db.bin – are generated by DumpHD in conjunction with the BD VM Debugger).

The prepared DumpHD folder with the tools we need. Click for full size.

Now let’s try decrypting a BD+ protected Blu-ray title. In this example, I will use the Australian release of “Day Watch”, the sequel to the Russian epic “Night Watch”.

The BD+ Protected "Day Watch" Blu-ray title I am ripping. Click for full size.

NOTE: Your ability to decrypt a given Blu-ray title, BD+ protected or not, will ultimately depend on the MKB version of the disc. As of this writing, DumpHD can only decrypt up to MKB version 10. Newer discs using version 11 or later can only be decrypted once suitable decryption keys are uncovered and added to the “ProcessingDeviceKeysSimple.txt” file in the “dumphd-0.61″ directory.

The obtaining of the decryption key of the Blu-ray title also requires the player authentication mechanism of your Blu-ray drive to be bypassed, or through use of a drive that deliberately does not have this feature such as some imported drives from China. In the case of my LG GGC-H20L drive, I used a modified firmware so that the drive always gave up the disc’s decryption key regardless of what player certificate I used – blacklisted or not.

1. Start the DumpHD program by double-clicking on the “dumphd.sh” icon. You will be asked if you want to run the script file. Click on the “Run” button.
   .
   

   Starting the DumpHD application. Click for full size.

2. When the DumpHD GUI appears, make a note of the messages in the bottom pane to ensure that AACSKeys and the BD VM Debugger was found and loaded OK. You should see the following information:

   DumpHD 0.61 by KenD00
   
   Opening Key Data File... OK
   Initializing AACS... OK
   Loading aacskeys library... OK
   aacskeys library 0.4.0 by arnezami, KenD00
   Loading BDVM... OK
   BDVM 0.1.5

   

   The DumpHD Interface. Click for full size.

   .

3. Insert the Blu-ray title into your Blu-ray drive.
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4. Next to the “Source” section at the top-right of the DumpHD window is a “Browse” button. Click on it.
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5. Navigate to the path of your Blu-ray drive (generally “/media/cdrom” will work fine). and hit the OK button.
   

   Choosing a source to rip from. Click for full size.

6. DumpHD will read the disc and will pass it through AACSKeys to identify the title’s descryption key. If it is successful, it will output some data about the disc in the lower pane. In the case of my Day Watch title, it shows the following:

   Initializing source...
   Disc type found: Blu-Ray BDMV
   Collecting input files...
   Source initialized
   Identifying disc... OK
   DiscID : 73886D08811073F45AD8C75012689097E17EBD3C
   Searching disc in key database...
   Disc found in key database

   

   Identifying the disc and getting the decryption keys to rip with. Click for full size.

   .

7. This is good. We can decrypt this. If the title is not one you have ripped before, you have the option to click on the “Title” button at the top-left of the DumpHD window to give the movie a name in your Key Database.
   .
8. In the “Destination” section on the right, click on the “Browse” button.
   .
9. Choose a place to dump the decrypted disc to. Note that most titles will dump at least 20GB worth of data and in some cases 50GB. Ensure that you have enough hard-drive space in the location you choose to dump to.
   .
10. We’re ready to rock and/or roll. Click on the “Dump” button and decryption will begin, automatically executing the BD VM and applying the Conversion Table to correct the deliberate corruption in the video stream. Here’s a small extract of what you will see in the lower pane of the DumpHD window:

    AACS data processed
    Initializing the BDVM... OK
    Executing the BDVM... OK
    Parsing the Conversion Table... OK
    Processing: BDMV/BACKUP/CLIPINF/00000.clpi
    Processing: BDMV/BACKUP/CLIPINF/00001.clpi
    Processing: BDMV/BACKUP/CLIPINF/00002.clpi
    etc...

    

    Beginning the ripping process. Click for full size.

    .

11. And after awhile it will finish with something like:

    Processing: BDMV/STREAM/00211.m2ts
    Searching CPS Unit Key... #1
    0x0000000000 Decryption enabled
    Processing: BDMV/STREAM/00212.m2ts
    Searching CPS Unit Key... #1
    0x0000000000 Decryption enabled
    Processing: BDMV/index.bdmv
    Disc set processed

    

    Finished decrypting the Blu-ray title. Click for full size.

    .

12. That’s it! You’ve successfully decrypted the disc and fixed up the corrupted video track. Identify and playback the actual movie M2TS file using a player like MPlayer or VLC, and you should now find that it contains no corruption whatsoever. In the case of Day Watch, the movie file was under BDMV/STREAM/00012.m2ts identifiable simply because it was the largest file in the directory. Using MPlayer, you can play this file with:

    $ mplayer -fs BDMV/STREAM/00012.mt2s

    Thankfully this title does not have the movie broken up into multiple files (I’ll be writing another article soon showing you how to deal with multi-part movies).

First up, you need to follow the first 15 steps of my guide on how to seutp a Nokia N95 mobile phone as a Mobile Broadband Device because we need to update the version of the Bluez Bluetooth stack and pair your mobile phone. Once you get to step 15 where it asks about connecting the phone as a dial-up networking device, you can either choose to continue setting that up all the way through to Step 22 (after all, you might find DUN to be of genuine use to you if you’re a Mobile Internet kind of guy), or choose “Don’t connect” instead and just finish at Step 15 and continue on with this article.

Once you’re Bluetooth stack is updated and your mobile phone is paired, transfrerring files is simplicity itself:

1. Do a left-mouse click on the Bluetooth icon in your system tray. The Bluetooth Devices window will appear showing you your available or previously paired devices. Your mobile phone will be one of them.
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2. Do a right-mouse click on your mobile phone and choose “Browse” from the menu that appears (or select the mobile phone with the left-mouse button and then click on the “Browse” button in the toolbar).
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   NOTE: If you get a “Could not display ‘obex://[xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx]/’.” error when trying to browse, it means that the Bluetooth connection has not re-established itself between your PC and your phone after a previous pairing (ie: “Host is down”). To fix this, click on the “Search” button in the toolbar which will “awaken” your phone’s Bluetooth awareness and then choose “Browse device” again. You should also set your PC and phone to be “trusted” or “authorised” on both sides to prevent timeouts caused by either end asking you for permission to establish the connection.
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3. If your PC is setup as being “trusted” or “authorised” on your phone, within a second or so a Nautilus window should appear showing you the content of your mobile phone, or in the case of my Nokia N95, two Windows-like folders named “C:” and “E:” which represent the phone’s internal memory and my 8GB SD card in the phone. You can browse them like any ordinary folders including copying and pasting files. An icon for the phone will also appear on the desktop (I’m using a custom icon here).
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4. When you have finished dealing with the files on your phone, you need to cleanly disconnect the phone and end the Bluetooth session. You can do this one of two ways. Either click on the “Eject” triangle icon next to your phone’s name in the Places list of the Nautilus window, or in the Bluetooth Devices window, do a right-mouse click and choose “Disconnect Device” from the menu.
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5. That’s it! Happy file transfers!

Well, it’s finally happened. While Ubuntu itself hasn’t been updated yet, the Bluetooth package that Ubuntu uses has been updated by the parent Blueman Project.

So here’s a guide on how to update your Ubuntu Jaunty installation to the latest version of the Bluez Bluetooth stack, pair your Nokia N95 and how to setup a Broadband connection to go through it.

If you’ve already updated your Bluetooth stack to the latest and greatest version, then you can immediately skip to Step 10.

1. First we need to add the Blueman Project’s PPA to your Ubuntu Jaunty installation. Open a terminal and type in:

   $ sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/blueman.list

2. You will be presented with a blank text editor. Type or copy & paste the following lines in:

   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
   deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

3. Save your changes and exit the editor.
   .
4. Now update your package lists with:

   $ sudo apt-get update

5. At the end you will see a NO_PUBKEY error because your setup does not yet have the GPG key for the Blueman repository to authenticate the packages with. To fix this, import the key with:

   $ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 6B15AB91951DC1E2

6. Update your package lists again as per Step 4 and you should find the NO_PUBKEY error is gone now.
   .
7. By now your system is probably prompting you that there are updates to the Bluetooth stack available to install. We may as well stay at the terminal and do the updates there:

   $ sudo apt-get upgrade

8. Once that completes, the Bluetooth stack is now up to date, but we now need to install the Blueman applet to replace the Gnome version of it:

   $ sudo apt-get install blueman

   (this will automatically uninstall the bluez-gnome package as we don’t want it anymore)

9. Once that completes, logout and log back in again so that the new applet loads up to replace the old one.
   .
10. Do a right-mouse-click on the Bluetooth icon in your system tray and choose “Setup new device” from the menu that appears. The Bloetooth Assistant Wizard will appear.
    .
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11. At the welcome page, click the “Next” button.
    .
12. You are shown a list of detected Bluetooth devices which should include your Nokia N95 and any other nearby Bluetooth devices. Choose your Nokia N95 from the list and then click on the Forward button.
    .
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13. You are then asked how to do the pairing. Choose to “Use a Random Passkey” and then click the Forward button.
    .
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14. You will be shown a generated PIN number and your Nokia N95 will prompt you for it. Type the number into your phone and click OK on the phone.
    .
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15. When your phone accepts the PIN, the Wizard will then ask you how you want to treat the device as. Choose “Dialup Networking (DUN)” and then click the Forward button.
    .
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16. After a brief delay, you will be prompted for your password so a DUN adapter can be setup. Type it in and hit Enter or OK.
    .
17. When the connection has finished, you will be told that the device was added and connected as a DUN unit successfully.
    .
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18. Within a couple of seconds of finishing, if you haven’t already got a Broadband Connection setup in the Network Manager, the “New Mobile Broadband Connection” wizard will appear. This part is really straight-forward, so I haven’t bothered doing any screenshots for it. Click on the Forward button.
    .
19. Choose your Country and Provider from the list shown, then click the Forward button.
    .
20. Finally, in the Summary, you are given the option to provide a custom name for the Broadband connection. When you’re happy, click the Apply button. The Wizard will finish and close.
    .
21. You can now do a left-mouse click on your Network icon in the system tray and you will see your chosen Provider’s name (or custom name if you chose something else) listed in the menu.
    .
22. Choose your provider name from the menu and after a brief moment, you will be connected!

Happy surfing!

While the Ubuntu-provided Bluetooth stack has not been updated to correct this problem yet, the Blueman Project that Ubuntu uses keeps marching on in development and the latest version of of the Bluez stack and Blueman applet finally corrects this problem.

Here’s how to employ it on your own setup.

EDIT October 2009: I have tested and found that the Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook 5000 mouse pairs and resumes successfully with the Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Beta release without any changes or upgrades required to the Bluetooth software. This HowTo therefore only applies to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

1. First we need to add the Blueman Project’s PPA to your Ubuntu Jaunty installation. Open a terminal and type in:

   $ sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/blueman.list

2. You will be presented with a blank text editor. Type or copy & paste the following lines in:

   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
   deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

3. Save your changes and exit the editor.
   .
4. Now update your package lists with:

   $ sudo apt-get update

5. At the end you will see a NO_PUBKEY error because your setup does not yet have the GPG key for the Blueman repository to authenticate the packages with. To fix this, import the key with:

   $ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 6B15AB91951DC1E2

6. Update your package lists again as per Step 4 and you should find the NO_PUBKEY error is gone now.
   .
7. By now your system is probably prompting you that there are updates to the Bluetooth stack available to install. We may as well stay at the terminal and do the updates there:

   $ sudo apt-get upgrade

8. Once that completes, the Bluetooth stack is now up to date, but we now need to install the Blueman applet to replace the Gnome version of it:

   $ sudo apt-get install blueman

   (this will automatically uninstall the bluez-gnome package as we don’t want it anymore)

9. Once that completes, logout and log back in again so that the new applet loads up to replace the old one.
   .
10. Now, switch the mouse into paring mode by holding down the pairing button on the base of the mouse until the LED on top of the mouse starts to alternate between red and green illumination.
    .
11. Now do a left-click on the Bluetooth icon in the system tray. The Bluetooth Devices window should appear. Within a few seconds of that window opening, you should see your mouse and any other nearby Bluetooth devices listed in the window.
    .

    
    .

12. Do a right-mouse click on the Microsoft Mouse entry and choose “Bond” (or ensure the Microsoft Mouse entry is selected and click on the “Bond” button in the toolbar).
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13. You will be prompted for the PIN number of the mouse. Like most accessory items, this is just “0000″, so type that in and hit Enter, or press OK.
    .

    
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14. Once the mouse is bonded, you will see some signal coloured bars appear next to the Microsoft Mouse entry in the Bluetooth Devices window (which represent the Received Signal Strength, Link Quality and the Transmit Power Level). But you can’t use the mouse just yet.
    .

    
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15. Click on the “Trust” button in the toolbar. This will allow your mouse to reconnect without prompting you for permission when you turn it off and back on again (or when you reboot).
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16. Now do a right-mouse click on the Microsoft Mouse entry again and choose “Connect to Input Service” (or click on the “Setup” button in the toolbar and follow the Wizard). After a brief delay, you should now find that your mouse now moves the mouse pointer!
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17. You can now close the Bluetooth Devices window. Pat yourself on the back. You’re done.

Your mouse should automatically reconnect upon reboot, PC or Mouse power saving events (such as suspend), and if you turn on the mouse after booting up your system.

I haven’t played with the Ubuntu Karmic Alpha yet to know if a more recent version of the Bluez Bluetooth stack is included. One presumes it will be, but if not, these instructions will probably work for Karmic as well.

EDIT October 2009: I have tested this mouse with the Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Beta release and it pairs first time perfectly and also resumes perfectly. There will be no need to use this HowTo with Karmic.

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

Anyway, the default installation of Ubuntu Intrepid picks up everything except the Fn keys, wireless LAN adapter and the audio. The wireless LAN adapter has proven to be a bit of a challenge, so if I suss it out, I’ll write up about it later. Fn keys I’m not really fussed about (and neither is the laptop’s owner), but we needed the audio.

The SigmaTel STAC 9200 has a dotted history of frustration among Linux users in general, but thankfully it was fixed in Kernel 2.6.27-7 and Alsa 1.0.15. Unfortunately a vanilla installation of Ubuntu it still is unable to autodetect the hardware 100% properly (it will find it and name it, but all you get is silence), so you have to make one tiny manual adjustment before sound will work properly.

1. Open up a terminal and type the following at the $ prompt:

   $ sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

2. This opens up the file in the GEdit text editor. Scroll to the end of the file, hit Enter to make a new line and add the following:

   options snd-hda-intel model=gateway

3. Save your changes and close the editor.
   .
4. Now reboot. When Ubuntu comes back, you will have working audio!

Note: Reader Mouhcine has suggested that if “model=gateway” does not work for you in step 2, try using “model=gateway-m4″ which may give you more success in Ubuntu Jaunty.

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

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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