Friday, March 14, 2008

powertop & disable cdrom polling

I installed a nice tools called powertop to have a clue
what was consuming the most battery waking up the cpu in sleep times as i am not really doing heavy work on it.

powertop gives hints:

Suggestion: Enable the CONFIG_NO_HZ kernel configuration option.
This option is required to get any kind of longer sleep times in the CPU.

Suggestion: Disable 'hal' from polling your cdrom with:
hal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdrom 'hal' is the component that auto-opens a
window if you plug in a CD but disables SATA power saving from kicking in.

so I disabled polling the dvd rom doing the following:

root@debian:~/apps# hal-get-property --udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_PIONEER_DVD_RW_DVR_K17RS --key storage.automount_enabled_hint
true

root@debian:~/apps# hal-set-property --udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_PIONEER_DVD_RW_DVR_K17RS --key storage.automount_enabled_hint --bool false

I have yet to see if it gets any better, or maybe the differences a not big so that I would even notice it...

then i restarted dbus

Monday, March 10, 2008

Orbicam down !

Finally I could make the orbicam work. Guess what?
it flips the image as you turn the camera around !!! :D


root@debian:~# lsusb
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 5986:0100
This is a usb 2.0 orbicam.

I tried the gspca driver but couldnt get it to work.
So I read about uvc video and everything works out of debian testing repositories.

Install the kernel module
root@debian:~# m-a a-i linux-uvc

and then
root@debian:~# modprobe uvcvideo

then check dmesg to see if everything went ok.
You should an output like this if it is:

uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB2.0 Camera (5986:0100)
usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)

then start luvcvideo and have fun ;-)

The bad thing about uvc video is that it uses a very low resolution thus not using the whole potential of the cam. The GUI to the cam isnt that good either.

Current amsn version works allright with the cam, although it is still quite buggy.