sudo update-manager -d

This will kick off the update manager, and provide you with a single button to upgrade to version 9.10. After 30 minutes or so, you should be rebooting into a new kernel, and the new ubuntu.

The usual suspects that needed attention in the past (read: the touchpad and wireless networking) were both still working, and had obviously remained configured from the previous version.

Whilst I say “working”, the wireless adapter is connecting to my home wireless access point however the signal is still low and not picking up neighbouring APs.

There has been some improvements though. The physical wifi button is no longer a “glorified light switch“, as it was so well put by Andrew. Pressing the button results in the card shutting off.

The second welcome surprise is the return of “resume from suspend”. After changing the wifi card recently myself and others discovered the netbook would not resume from suspend. This now appears to have resolved itself.

The netbook remix interface is looking much fresher, as you can see in the screenshots attached below.

The only qualm I have so far with karmic and the netbook remix itself is that I cannot seem to locate the shutdown icon in the menus or interface. This may be because I upgraded from 9.04, but as it is beta I will wait and see, and use the physical netbook power button to bring up the shutdown options.

Another note to add – GRUB2 and EXT4, whilst being the new defaults in ubuntu 9.10, are not automatically upgraded:

ext4 by default

The new “ext4″ filesystem is used by default for new installations with Ubuntu 9.10 Beta; of course, other filesystems are still available via the manual partitioner. Existing filesystems will not be upgraded.

GRUB 2 by default

GRUB 2 is the default boot loader for new installations with Ubuntu 9.10 Beta, replacing the previous GRUB “Legacy” boot loader. Existing systems will not be upgraded to GRUB 2 at this time, as automatically reinstalling the boot loader is an inherently risky operation.

A comment in a previous blog entry on this site asks how to configure the touchpad in GRUB2. I am yet to investigate this, however is anyone has any info, please post below.

References

• http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/beta

It is only the low-end agora, so for $299 you get a 10″ netbook with 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard disk and a 3 cell battery.

There does however appear to be issues with the wireless network capabilities – you can read about this in other blog entries:

• kogan sent me a replacement wireless network mini card
• kogan agora wireless performance vt6656 via arena adapter

To purchase the kogan agora for $299, use the discount code NEWSLTR093 when you purchase online.

A support representative emailed me back rather promptly (6 minutes later!) and acknowledged the under-performance of the VIA wifi card. They also offered to send me a replacement card, which is now being used in the agora netbooks.

I quickly took up the offer, and a week later, the new Ralink wifi card arrived in my mailbox (see the picture gallery below).

Change over of the card was very easy – power down, remove battery, remove single screw for the back panel and slide open the panel. Next I used small pliers to carefully lift off the two antenna connectors, and then after removing the single screw holding the card down I was able to pull it out. Installation of the new card was the reverse of the removal of the old.

Upon rebooting I was delighted to see the new wifi card worked out of the box – no driver installation required (unlike the VIA card). It also connected to my wireless network at home, just like the old card had.

I then checked to see what networks were available – knowing after a quick check of another laptop that three networks were in range. Unfortunately, there was still only my network available.

The next day I tried to connect to the wireless network at my workplace. Again I had the same issues that I had faced with the old card. The netbook associates with the wireless access point, but cannot obtain a DHCP lease.

I am now pretty much convinced that this is a issue with ubuntu, and dhclient. More investigation is required though – I will keep you posted.

I do recommend that anyone who has an early kogan agora or agora pro netbook with the VIA wifi card to email kogan with your original order number, and request a replacement wifi card. I was offered the option to have the card mailed to me, or to send in my netbook to have the new card installed.

With the new wifi card, you do not have to worry about drivers in ubuntu, and also the card apparently performs better than the VIA card, so it is worth the email!

• kogan support email – support@kogan.com.au

My kogan agora pro has just returned from six weeks abroad, where is was regularly put to the test booking flights, trains, accommodation and other general duties.

There are many great things to like about travelling with the agora netbook – it is light and easy to carry in a backpack, the battery life was good and only needed charging every few days, and on flights it makes a great video player to pass the time.

There is also a downside – the under-performance of the wireless network adapter. On many occasions at hotels and in pubs and restaurants I was unable to connect to the free wifi on offer. Some networks were visible in the network manager but I could not connect to them, whilst other networks would simply not appear in the available list. Very frustrating!

Viewing the syslog often revealed that dhclient struggled to receive a DHCP response from the access point (AP), even though connection negotiation had commenced. dhclient would timeout, and end the connection negotiations. The following is an example from syslog:

NetworkManager: Activation (eth1) starting connection ‘Auto FreeWifi’
…
NetworkManager: Activation (eth1/wireless): connection ‘Auto FreeWifi’ requires no security. No secrets needed.
…
NetworkManager: Activation (eth1/wireless) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) successful. Connected to wireless network ‘FreeWifi’.
…
dhclient: Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.1.1
…
dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 18
dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 20
NetworkManager: Device ‘eth1′ DHCP transaction took too long (>45s), stopping it.
NetworkManager: eth1: canceled DHCP transaction, dhcp client pid 3410

Often if I moved closer to where the AP was physically located, I would be able to connect – but I had to be within around 10 meters. This is wireless, not bluetooth! The difference between 20 meters and 10 meters should not limit my ability to connect.

Now that my agora pro is home, I have done some simple tests and compared them to a Dell laptop. Looking at the available wireless networks on each laptop side by side, I immediately noticed that whilst the Dell could see my AP as well as the APs of three neighbours, the kogan agora could only see my AP (see screenshots below). Even though I live in suburbia and the neighbours are only over the fence, their APs are out of range for the agora.

Also, using the iwlist program, I was able to check the signal strength of my AP from each laptop. First up, the Dell:

ESSID:”g.kayno.net” Quality=39/100 Signal level=-77 dBm
ESSID:”BigPond7178″ Quality=31/100 Signal level=-81 dBm
ESSID:”Sky Captain” Quality=33/100 Signal level=-80 dBm

Followed by the kogan agora pro:

ESSID:”g.kayno.net” Quality=25/100 Signal level=-80 dBm

The agora comes in slightly lower, however no matter how many different locations around my home I try, I cannot see the neighbour’s APs.

I have been told by Neerav Bhatt that the latest batch of agora netbooks from kogan have a new wireless card with a Ralink chipset that addresses the performance problems. If anyone has recently brought a kogan agora netbook, and has the new card, please comment below on performance. I’d love to hear how well it works, and also see a photo!

UPDATE: I have just tried the kogan agora netbook coupled with a borrowed 3 USB mobile broadband internet key, and the setup was exactly the same as described below.

The kogan agora netbook is designed to be taken anywhere – on the road, on the train, down to the local, etcetera. And being a netbook, its primary use is the internet – email, the web, instant messaging, etcetera.

So it’s safe to assume that people are going to want to use mobile internet devices with the agora – be it a 3G USB dongle or mobile phone – to connect to the internet. So safe to assume, that Matt has already asked how this can be achieved.

Thanks to the gnome NetworkManager applet, connecting to these devices is easy! First off, connect your USB dongle or mobile phone (by USB – my Nokia 6120 works fine, just select “PC Suite” when you connect the USB cable). Next, from the Preferences menu click Network Connections, and then select the Mobile Broadband tab.

Now you need to add a new connection. Click the Add button, click Forward, and then select your mobile broadband provider. Click forward again, and then click Apply. You can now click the Close button on the Network Connections window.

The final step is to connect. Left click the NetworkManager icon in the top panel (next to the clock – see the last screenshot below), and select your mobile provider. After a few seconds, you should be connected and ready to roam!

Coming soon – connecting to your phone via bluetooth! I have been working on this the last couple of weeks, and whilst it’s a little hit and miss, I hope to post some information once I am confident it will be useful.

I had some feedback from at least two readers who could not enable SHMConfig, and when they tried to use gsynaptics or syndaemon, they were met with the error “You have to set ‘SHMConfig’ ‘true’ in xorg.conf or XF86Config“. The instructions provided in the post to enable SHMConfig using the /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi method did not appear to be working.

After a lot of troubleshooting work with Travis, we were able to determine why this was occuring, and how to resolve it.

Firstly, and briefly, the why. The HAL daemon (hald) keeps a cache in /var/cache/hald/fdi-cache. For some reason, hald was using this cache file, and not picking up the newly created shmconfig.fdi file.

Now the important part – how to resolve it! This is easy, you just need to remove the cache:

sudo rm /var/cache/hald/fdi-cache

Provided you have created the shmconfig.fdi file as described in the gsynaptics post, reboot your machine, and you should be able to load gsynaptics and setup syndaemon without being told SHMConfig needs to be set to true. The fdi-cache file will be recreated when you reboot, and you shouldn’t have any more problems.

A big thanks to Travis for helping to troubleshoot this one!

I used unetbootin to create a bootable USB drive, and it booted to an Ubuntu/gOS boot menu fine. I didn’t want to overwrite my UNR install, so I chose to boot ‘live’ – i.e. run gOS from the USB drive, and not change my hard drive in any way.

The kogan spash screen appeared and eventually it booted to the ‘koganised’ gOS desktop, which only lasted a day the last time it was installed on my agora! What I didn’t have, semi-unexpectedly, was a functioning touchpad.

Unless the fixgOS2.bat or makeboot.bat files described in the manual do something other than copy the gOS iso to the USB drive and make it bootable (I couldn’t use the method described in the agora’s manual, as I do not have windows installed), than I don’t think the factory restore instructions will help you to easily restore the kogan to its original out-of-the-box self.

I would love to be proved wrong though, and would love it if someone could follow the instructions on page 36 of the manual, create a USB drive with the kogan gOS image boot live to gOS (this will not erase any data currently on your agora’s hard disk) and see if the touchpad works. Any takers? You may be the first to crack the touchpad mystery of the kogan agora!

wget http://www.viaarena.com/Driver/VT6656_Linux_src_v1.19_12_x86.zip

This will download the driver. Now you need to unzip it:

unzip
VT6656_Linux_src_v1.19_12_x86.zip

Now change into the newly created directory:

cd VT6656_Linux_src_v1.19_12_x86

The driver needs to be compiled next. You may need to install gcc (it is in the build-essential package) for this:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo make install

The final step is to load the driver/module:

sudo modprobe vntwusb

After a few seconds, you should be able to connect to your wireless networks.