LXDE Desktop on Ubuntu 11.10 on Asus Transformer

A few months ago I wrote a post detailing how to dual boot Android 2.3 and Ubuntu 11.04on the Asus Transformer TF101 tablet. This has become by far the most popular content on this blog. However, development has moved on and the process is now much, much easier than previously.

I am not going to go through all the steps required again, which may make this a short update. Basically, go to the Wiki page and follow the very good instructions there.

I did not care very much about the data already on my Android tablet, so I ignored the Backup sections, skipping straight down to “Installing Ubuntu.” Well, I did take the time to read the earlier sections very carefully, and one thing to note is that the described method is designed to be completed from a computer running Linux. Apparently it is possible with Windows too, the Wiki has a very short section on this, but if you want to run Linux on the Transformer, it is assumed you already have a machine with this operating system available. If you don’t, it may be best to create a bootable USB stick with Linux on it.

The new version of this process is as simple as downloading one 850MB file, extracting it, connecting your Transformer, running a script from the command line and following the presented instructions. The total time taken to have a dual bootable device ready for use depends on your available bandwidth for the download, but I was finished within an hour late one evening.

Despite what the Wiki intimates, I didn’t bother with building a custom kernel to activate the mousepad, this all seemed to work correctly using the OLiFE Prime download.

In terms of performance, I found Ubuntu 11.10, with the new Unity interface to be a bit slow and unresponsive at times. Instead, I installed the Lightweight Desktop Environment (LXDE). After making a few changes to the default apperances and theme, I now have a very nice looking Linux installation which performs admirable when compared with my three year old Asus eeePC netbook.

All default installed Ubuntu applications are available from the menu, and I am writing this within Firefox running in Linux on the Transformer. I have not yet tried all functions – webcam, mini-HDMI port, keyboard shortcuts etc – but I am assuming some will work, some won’t. The key thing to remember is that the Asus Transformer has an ARM processor and Linux development for this is still in its infancy.

Overall, this new process is a tremendous improvement over the old method. Steve Barker and associated developers have done a great job in making this whole thing much more accessible. And development hasn’t stopped yet! I wonder what the new Asus Transformer Prime, recently announced, will bring to the table.

From day one, it was pretty clear that my dream of using just this device was unlikely to happen. There are some things that Android does not do well. I have rooted the device and installed Prime 2.1.1 , an Android 2.3 Gingerbread based ROM, which has resulted in a number of performance gains. However, my crucial reason for doing this was so that I could install the 3GToggler application, which would allow me to access a Huawei 3G Internet dongle.

Android Gingerbread doesn’t do office productivity. Editing word processor documents or spreadsheets is laborious and time consuming with the supplied Polaris Office. It’s just really clunky. Don’t even think about trying to create a presentation. I then also tried the Google Documents App from the Android Market, which is so clearly focused at mobile phone devices, again the user experience was terrible on a tablet. Lastly, I attempted to use Google Docs online to edit documents. Sadly this was also less than a compelling experience, but I believe this was down to the web browser itself, which neatly brings me to my next point.

Web browsing on an Android tablet is a horrible experience, when compared to a laptop or desktop. The default browser is slow and doesn’t render some pages correctly. I have also installed Firefox Beta (no Flash support), Opera Mobile and Dolphin HD. Between these four browsers, I can usually make most web pages display. But why should I need four different browsers to achieve this? Javascript handling is pretty poor across the board. Most of these browsers have the ability to set the User Agent as Desktop, yet some websites still seem to deliver only their mobile version. One service I use a lot is called Hootsuite. This is a tool to manage multiple identities across multiple social networking sites. Using Hootsuite in a desktop/laptop browser is a joy. Using Hootsuit in any of the aforementioned Android browsers is a total failure. There is a Hootsuite application in the Market but….

Many of the Android Market applications are targeted squarely at the mobile phone user. That is usually someone with limited screen real estate, using their device in portrait mode. Trying to use these application on a docked tablet is a lesson in disappointment. Hootesuite for example, lacks the consolidated view across messages and requires many taps to navigate around. Other applications lack the key functionality that is usually available via the normal website. For example, if using the Google+ application, I found it impossible to access a Company Page I had created. This is simple enough from a drop down box on the Google+ website when viewed through a browser.

Just so this piece is not all doom and gloom, it is certainly worth mentioning what an Android tablet does well. Email for a start. The Gmail application is a joy, and I find it much more user friendly than the recently redesigned Gmail website. The other default mail client also does a great job of unifying a number of other accounts I have, including an Outlook Exchange Inbox. This is a much better experience than trying to use Thunderbird for this. There are also a few other email clients in the Android Market that are worth looking at, such as the Open Source K-9.

I’m sure Android tablets would be great for consuming media, if I did much of that. The only thing I have really tried is to watch a film through the LoveFilm website, but this was done via Flash in a web browser so was acceptable without being wonderful. The UK’s Sky Broadcasting has a catch-up TV player, which requires Silverlight, so again not happening on an Android tablet.

I love the battery life! A battery in the keyboard dock and one in the tablet itself provides for around 15-16 hours of cable free use. This is brilliant.

I have also quite successfully used the tablet to present PDF documents in one-on-one meetings. It’s quite a bit better than remembering to print out reams of paper. If I connected the device to a larger screen using the mini-HDMI connector, I’m sure this same process would work for larger group presentations.

Overall, without the docked keyboard of the Asus Transformer TF101, I would find the device practically useless. My main use of the tablet is to write emails, fortunately this is something Android does very well, and the keyboard enhances that experience. I would probably be much more productive with the Transformer if I didn’t want to stick needles in my eyes every time I tried to edit a spreadsheet or create a new document.

Since purchasing my Asus Transformer tablet, now complete with docking station, I’ve had a hankering to install Linux as a dual boot operating system. This was unlikely to be an easy task, as there weren’t really any builds for Nvidia’s arm based Tegra2 CPU. However, Nvidia has released nvflash and a base kernel build for Linux, so it was just a matter of time until someone worked out how to dual boot this with Android. It has been the people on the XDA Developers website that have really taken up the challenge on this.

I am currently writing this post on my Transformer while booted into Ubuntu 11.04. It does work, although there are a few things not yet entirely up and running.

Before going any further, I need to point out that the steps I will outline below will destroy EVERYTHING currently on your Transformer. It will reformat and repartition your storage. You will have all current data wiped, so back everything up. I should also point out that there is some risk of bricking your lovely, shiny tablet.

At the end of all these steps you will hopefully have a dual boot machine with Ubuntu 11.04, a rooted Android Honeycomb 3.2 running the Prime 1.7 ROM and Clockworkmod (CWM) Recovery installed.

Equipment you will need:

• Another computer running Linux
• An SDCard for external/removable storage in the Transformer
• The Transformer USB charging cable.

The XD Developers forum thread dealing with this topic is already over 21 pages long. I did not follow the instructions exactly as they are printed in the first post, so I will be deep linking directly to various posts in an effort to make things clearer.

Let’s begin….

1. On your Linux machine, download and extract the 900MB+ ubuntu.img rootfs file found towards the bottom of this post.

2. On your Linux machine, download and extract the zip file from this post, containing a flash kit and installation script.

3. From the flash kit just downloaded, you will find a directory called “Bootloaders.” In here are two files – Android.zip and Ubuntu.zip. These two files need to be moved (but not extracted) to the top level directory of the external SDCard you will be putting in your Transformer. If you don’t have a card reader on your Linux machine, it may be easier to download this file a second time on your Transformer and move the files across to the “Removable” SDCard.

4. Copy or move the ubuntu.img from Step 1. into the same directory as the extracted flash kit files from Step 2.

5. Turn off your transformer. Connect the power cable. Connect the USB end of the power cable to your Linux machine.

6. Enter APX mode. To do this, hold down the Volume UP button and the Power button together, for around 10 seconds. The screen will remain black. It will appear that nothing has happened, but don’t worry this is as expected. If something does appear on the screen, you’re doing it wrong.

7. Open a terminal window on your Linux machine and navigate to the folder where the downloaded and extracted nvflash package (from Step 2.) is located. Run the download-ubuntu.sh script. You may need superuser permissions to do this. At this point, there should be lots of stuff happening in your terminal window – partitions being created, .img files being copied across. If you look at the screen of your Transformer, there should be some small white text in the top left corner about being in nvflash mode.

Hopefully everything will copy across correctly, and ostensibly Ubuntu is now installed. If you now power off your Transformer, unplug the USB power cable and power back on, it should boot into Ubuntu. However, there are a few more steps worth doing.

8. Power your tablet off again. Now, hold the Volume down button and the power button at the same time. The machine will start to boot, but there will be some small white text in the upper left corner of the screen. When this appears, let go of the two buttons and press the Volume up button. This will now take you into the CWM recovery mode.

9. Navigate through the menus here to install a zip from SDCard. Choose the Android.Zip file and install. Then reboot the Transformer. You will boot into Android.

This is how you dual boot at the moment. Every time you wish to switch operating systems, you will need to go into CWM recovery, and install the alternate zip file. Slightly painful, but the good news is that all data and settings are saved in the actual operating system. All you are really doing each time is installing a new boot sequence.

There are still a few other things worth doing. One of these is installing some additional firmware so that WiFi actually works in Ubuntu. To do this you will need to enter ADB mode.

10. Follow the tutorial on this page, including downloading the Android SDK, and additional Platform Tools file (read the documentation included in the SDK download).

11. Download and extract the flash kit found in this post.

12. Connect your Transformer to your Linux computer again using the USB power cable. Turn the transformer on, allowing it to boot into Ubuntu. Wait at the login prompt.

13. On your Linux computer, you should be in ADB mode. From the regular command prompt run the firmware injector script from the downloaded flash kit in Step 11. If all goes well, and your are successfully in ADB mode, there should be no errors reported by the script while copying the files across.

14. After now booting into Ubuntu and setting up the general parameters, WiFi will need to be configured using WPA Supplicant. Currently Network Manager doesn’t seem to work, so this is the only known way. Follow the instructions here with regards to how to do this. You may need to change eth0 references to wlan0. You could also try the guide here, but there are lot of places online to find WPA Supplicant help.

With luck and a following wind, everything should be working correctly. The experience is a little slow, as hardware acceleration is not yet working. I am thinking of trying Openbox as an alternative window manager to see if that improves things any. Also worth noting is that the docking station trackpad does not work, nor does sound, Bluetooth or HDMI out. The touchscreen works for mouse clicks and scrolling is achieved by moving the application scroll bars (not from anywhere on the screen, like in Android). I am sure these things will be rectified or improved in the coming months, just keep an eye on the XDA Developers thread about this for up to date details.

Good luck!

Special thanks goes to XDA Developers forum members lilstevie, Jhinta and rdnetto for creating the files, scripts and instructions for making this possible.

Enter the world of data tape. The most recent advance, although at least twelve months old now, is LTO5. This format can store up to 1.5TB of uncompressed data, or 3TB of compressed data on one tape. Single tape, desktop drives are in the region of £2,500 and tapes retail around £60 (I’m sure better prices can be found if one tries). LTO data tape is an excellent, cost-effective medium for long-term archival purposes.

One of the great advantages of LTO5 is that drives can be mounted with LTFS and they simply appear as any other attached storage device. Files can be dragged and dropped to and from the tapes. Transfer rates are allegedly in the region of 140Mbps. We have secured a loan Quantum LTO5 drive from the excellent people at Era UK, via an introduction by our friends at JCA. Of course I was intending to connect this drive to a Linux machine, there was never any question about it. Unfortunately, Quantum only officially supports Red Hat and SuSe (I’m guessing Fedora and CentOS would probably work too), for which they provide compiled binaries. Now, I’m a Debian person and the best available machine had Squeeze installed. You know what’s coming next, and I love a challenge.

Start by downloading the source from Quantum. Unfortunately compiling this source wasn’t as simple as configure, make, make install. After installing the dependencies:

> sudo apt-get install libicu-dev libfuse-dev uuid uuid-dev libxml++2.6-2 libxml++2.6-dev

./configure worked without a problem. However, make was failing with the following error:

sudo make
make all-recursive
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/station/Downloads/qtmltfs-1.2.0′
Making all in messages
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/station/Downloads/qtmltfs-1.2.0/messages’
genrb number of files: 3
sh: ./icu-config: not found
pkgdata: icu-config: Could not read from icu-config. (fix PATH or use -O option)
required parameter is missing: -O is required for static and shared builds.
Run ‘pkgdata –help’ for help.
make[2]: *** [bin_mkltfs_dat.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/station/Downloads/qtmltfs-1.2.0/messages’
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/station/Downloads/qtmltfs-1.2.0′
make: *** [all] Error 2

Not really knowing how to solve this initially, I decided to see what would happen if I compiled these sources on my little Ubuntu 10.04 NBR netbook. Of course, the sources compiled without error, but a netbook is not really the device I wish to connect an LTO5 drive to. So, it seemed like there was some sort of Debian Squeeze related package error.

I’m not ashamed to say that I posted to LinuxQuestions.org and a user by the name of knudfl came up with the solution. Behold, the power of the Internet. After removing the development files for libicu44, and installing the relevant counterparts from libicu42, following the suggested directions, I was able to finish compiling the driver. Great, here we go…..

Not so fast. The next step is to format a tape. The supplied documentation from Quantum suggests the following:

> mkltfs -d /dev/st0

This returned the following error:

> Error remapping st device /dev/st0 to sg : Unable to open /proc/scsi/sg/devices

More investigation finds that /proc/scsi is a legacy way of dealing with scsi devices, and in the Debian kernel this has been disabled. The good news is that, there is an option within menuconfig to turn this on, but it does mean compiling your own kernel. A new challenge for me as I’d never needed to do this before.

More help from the Interwebs, and using a very helpful tutorial page, I was able to build my own custom Linux kernel (2.6.39 if you’re interested). It wasn’t hard at all.

Booting into this kernel and everything seems to work fine. The final problem is:

LTFS20062E Unsupported cartridge type (LTO3RW)
LTFS11299E Cannot format: unsupported medium

I guess LTO3 tapes don’t work in LTO5 drives.

In summary, to setup a Quantum LTO5 tape drive on Debian Squeeze, the following steps are necessary:

1. Download the sources from Quantum.

2. Install the necessary dependencies, including libicu42-dev files (follow the steps here).

3. Configure, make and make install the source

4. Compile your own kernel,  with legacy scsi support by selecting that option in menuconfig (follow the tutorial here).

5. Buy LTO5 tapes and format them.

6. Mount the LTO5 drive.

Simple really.

A word of warning though about the Transformer docking keyboard – buy the package of tablet and keyboard to start with! This only attracts a £50 premium over the tablet alone. Buying the docking keyboard separately has set me back almost £120. I purchased from Amazon and couldn’t find cheaper on eBay, Google’s shopping results nor Tottenham Court Road (where it was not possible to buy the keyboard as a standalone item). I’ll live and learn.

There are both good and bad points about this Honeycomb 3.1 tablet. Let’s start with the good.

The Gmail integration is stellar. It is a much better Gmail experience that I have ever had through a regular web browser. I suppose this is as you would expect from a tablet running Google’s Android operating system.

The tablet is great for having around on the coffee table, on the train, in bed etc. It’s very easy to simply pick it up to check email, read a website or research something of interest.

The “instant on” aspect, with massive hours of standby battery time, is much better than any laptop I’ve ever experienced.

Now for the frustrations….

There is another built in mail client, which can be used to connect to both IMAP and Exchange email servers. Unfortunately this has some limitations that frustrate me when trying to deal with business email. There’s no search functionality, it is only possible to synchronise up to one month of email from the server, it is impossible to create an HTML or Rich Text email signature and I also can’t figure out how to synchronise IMAP calendars (Exchange calendar works fine though).

The standard web browser is buggy and crashes regularly. I haven’t thoroughly tested, but I also think it may have a memory leak. Over time it simply slows down to a grinding halt. Using the back button to return to a Google search result often loads just a blank page and sometimes after entering a website’s URL, I am simply re-directed to Google’s search homepage. This browser has a user agent of “Android Tablet,” however many websites simply see this as “Android” and deliver a mobile version of their offering. I can change the user agent to “Desktop” instead, but that also creates a few rendering problems. Opera Mini and Firefox Mobile don’t seem to have this option, and thus you’re stuck with mobile webpage versions in some cases. I’m now trying the Dolphin HD browser. One would think, that with an excellent browser in Chrome/Chromium Google would have this area sorted out.

Some apps from the Market are OK, but it’s a bit hit and miss. Many of them are built only for Android phones, so don’t render brilliantly on the wider tablet screen. I haven’t bought any apps yet, as I haven’t found anything so compelling to warrant a purchase. I have found some nice free apps though, such as MapQuest’s OpenStreetMaps and FBReader for ebooks (I grabbed a lot of classics from Project Gutenberg).

The on-screen touch keyboard is reasonable, but still has some frustrations. For some reason at least 10% of the time my space bar presses do not register. There are also no forward and back arrows. The only way to jump to another part of the text is through very delicate and precise touches on the screen. This might improve when I have a mouse connected to the docking keyboard’s USB port, but for now so much for keyboard navigation. There’s also no Control key, which makes cutting, copying and pasting laborious.

I can’t find any virtualisation software for Android either, which I wanted to use to run a different flavour of Linux. Maybe I can do do something via dual booting, from a USB key in the docking keyboard. That will be the next project.

In summary, after a week’s solid use, I can’t see this being my sole computing device. I’m just not sure Android’s mature enough. It’s a good enough device, which I am sure I will continue to use regularly, but it is not the one device to rule them all.

My current situation is that I have a fairly new HP Pavilion dv7 as my daily work computer. While it’s a nice brushed aluminium shelled machine, it is quite big with it’s 17-inch screen and it is LOUD! The fan never shuts up. It’s currently running Linux Mint Debian edition, and I’ve tried everything to try and keep the temperature down, thus negating the need for constant fan blowing. I’ve had no luck so far. I also work in multiple locations, from my home office, to my central London office, to various client’s offices and finally quite often in Graz, Austria. Hauling this 17-inch behemoth around can be quite taxing at times. It means I always have to carry a reasonably big piece of hand luggage when flying to Graz, and even just on the train into central London, my backpack is pretty heavy. Therefore, my dream was to try and find a tablet that could be substituted for for my laptop as my daily work machine.

I don’t do much heavy lifting with my laptop anymore, in terms of transcoding video files and the like, therefore I don’t need a massively powerful i7 processor. I do a lot of web browsing, email writing, document creation, spreadsheet manipulation, presentation creation and still image manipulation. Pretty straightforward office type stuff. However, I do appreciate a large screen and decent keyboard. I already have a 10-inch Asus eeePC netbook, which is about 3 years old now. It does a decent job, but I found it difficult to work all day on it, and the single core Atom processor struggled with HD movie playback.

So my plan was to find a tablet that could be plugged into an external monitor at home, at my London office and in Graz. I realise purchasing said monitors will increase overall costs, but it’s the trade-off I was prepared to make for not having to carry around a massive laptop.

Asus Transformer ticks many boxes. It has a high quality IPS screen, the same as the iPad 2. It comes with Android 3.0 Honeycomb as standard. It has a built in mini-HDMI port, which means I can connect it to a larger screen quite easily should the need arise. It includes a memory card expansion slot, as is the case with most modern tablets. There is also an optional keyboard docking station, which includes its own battery, extending the overall battery life for this tablet to around 16 hours.

On the negative side, Asus has seen fit to include a proprietary charger, not the usual micro-USB found on most modern phones and many tablets.

I found that Currys in the UK were selling the Asus eee Transformer at prices around about the same as those found on eBay. Brilliant, I could have my new toy immediately. Picture the scene as I walk into my local Currys….

Sales Assistant: Can I help you, Sir?

Me: Yes, I’m looking for an Asus Transformer

Sales Assistant: Oh, I don’t think we sell them.

Me: It’s on your website and it says you have them in stock.

Sales Assistant: Let me just check with my colleagues. <time passes> No Sir, unfortunately we don’t sell them.

Me: I see.

At this point I wander around the shop for a while, until I find the general tablet display section. As I stand looking…..

Sales Assistant (same one as previously): Are you interested in a tablet device, Sir?

Me: Yes, I have already asked you about an Asus Transformer, but you couldn’t help me.

Sales Assistant: Oh, it’s a tablet?

Me: <incredulous> Yes.

Sales Assistant: Well, let me just go and check in our stock system. <2 minutes later> Good news, Sir, we have them in stock for just £379.

Me: That’s without the keyboard docking station. Do you have them for £429 with the docking station, as on your website?

Cutting a longer conversation short, no they did not have them with the docking station. I made them check twice. Ultimately I bought the tablet without the docking station, thinking I will pick one up later as they’re only an extra £50. How wrong I was. Once back at home and online, I discovered that as a standalone product, the docking station cannot be found anywhere for less than £100. I think buying the tablet without the docking station was my first mistake, but at least I will have the chance to assess whether an external keyboard is really a necessity.

Hopefully in the next week or 10 days I will be able to post an update regarding how this machine is working out as my primary day-to-day computing device.

Apparently the Linux version of this software does not support capture of VITC information where present. This made creating valid IMX50 (D10) files harder than it needed to be. We would capture the SD content from tape into 10-bit uncompressed at 720×576, then when transcoding using FFmbc, we needed to pad the top of the file with 36 lines of blanking, to create a valid IMX50 at 720×608. This process caused a few problems with the resulting files’ aspect ratio information.

After speaking with the support staff ot Blackmagic Design, it became clear the the Windows and Mac versions of Media Express 2.3.1 do support capture of VITC, just not the Linux version. The relevant API calls are exposed in the freely available SDK, but we would need to build our own application to take advantage of this.

My next hope was that the new version of Media Express would include this additional functionality on Linux. On April 11th 2011, Blackmagic published a press release stating that Media Express 3.0 would be available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The software would be available for free download from their website in June.

Today I went searching for the software but could not find it. Looking on the Blackmagic software download page, the latest Desktop Video download for Linux is 8.0.1 from May 13th, 2011. Clearly this would not include the new 3.0 version, as this file is what I downloaded a month ago to obtain version 2.3.1.

I phoned Blackmagic support again to enquire about where to find Media Express 3.0. They informed me that a beta version of this software was available for Mac platforms, but that was all. They were also unable to speculate regarding a formal release date for the software, nor whether the Linux version would be available at the same time as the Windows and Mac version. All in all, not very helpful.

June finished 21 days ago. I want my Media Express 3.0 software for Linux!

Recently I had an opportunity to change all that. We needed a tape digitisation solution, separate from our Avid editing suites, for a new project. I’ve know for a while that Blackmagic’s Decklink range of cards work with Linux and were pretty good for capturing from SDI. We purchased the basic Decklink SDI card, re-cycled an old machine onto which I installed Linux Mint Debian and away we went….

Things weren’t entirely smooth from the start. I upgraded the Mint Debian ISO, including the kernel to 2.6.39. This was my first mistake. The card was not recognised with this kernel. Booting into the original 2.6.32 kernel overcame this problem and the card was recognised. I had to download the relevant Linux software from the Blackmagic website, as the accompanying DVD only included Windows software. The available Linux software from Blackmagic included the relevant drivers, firmware and Media Express software. Unfortunately, other advertised items such as the drive speed test and alpha keying utilities are not available for Linux.

Once everything was up and running, it was time to capture. The Media Express 2.3.1 software was pretty straight forward to use. Setting in and out points allowed the software to control the J30 Digibeta deck and content was captured in Uncompressed 10-bit YUV formate. The other limited codec options included Uncompressed 8-bit YUV, RGB and MotionJPEG. This uncompressed file was then transcoded to IMX50 using FFMbc. The whole process seemed to work reasonably well, and I’m just now waiting to send the IMX50 sample off for technical inspection.

Unfortunately, the Media Express software as supplied did not provide options to change the SD captured frame size from 720×576 to anything else. Ideally I was looking for 720×608 so that VITC was also captured. A phone call to Blackmagic revealed that this was possible with the Windows and Mac version of their software, but not on Linux. Their Linux SDK did expose the necessary calls, but the software had not been written to include them. Essentially, if I wanted VITC, I’d need to write a capture utility myself. Somewhat disappointing.

Overall, I’m pleased that we now have an SDI capture solution running on Linux. However, the Blackmagic Decklink card still feels a little half baked and Linux was perhaps only an afterthought for them.

I finally decided to bight the bullet and buy a 3G data dongle in Austria. Originally I had thought to purchase something from 3 (Drei), however it seemed that everything advertised was on a two year contract. That’s not for me. Ultimately I went for a bob breitband package. This includes a ZTE MF180 3G dongle/stick and a SIM card. Buying the package for €50 was the easy bit. The package itself was €50 for the dongle, with 1GB data gratis, and then €9 for 9GB per month, on a 30 day rolling contract. €9 for 9GB isn’t too bad, although if you exceed this limit the cost is €4 per GB, which is bad. The other gotcha is that you need an Austrian bank account to setup a direct debit for the monthly payments. I won’t bore you with the details of how I have access to one of those.

After opening the package, inserting the SIM card and then plugging the dongle into my Mint Debian laptop, nothing happened. That’s right, nothing. The dongle showed a red light and Network Manager didn’t recognise any new modem. Cutting long stories short, I unplugged, plugged in, unplugged, plugged in, fiddled and swore for a good hour with no luck. At the point of the customer support help line answering, magically I obtained a connection. The light on the 3G dongle had turned blue. I had no idea how. All is good for the remainder or the day, except that the connection is slower than anticipated. Using speedtest.net, initially I was seeing a download speed of only 1.6Mbps and an upload of 0.10Mbps. Pretty poor. Later in the evening this increased to 2.6Mbps download and 0.3Mbps upload. Still not great.

This morning, I once again found it impossible to obtain a connection? Why? Why? WHY? I extracted the SIM card from the dongle and inserted it into my Nokia N900 phone. With the marvelous help of bluetooth, I easily obtained a data connection. The connection dropped occasionally, but in general all was good. The problem was not with the SIM.

Now that I had a connection again, I used our Googlian friends to search for “ZTE MF180 Debian” for answers. The answer was easy to find. Apparently, the 3G USB dongle is initially recognised as a CD-ROM drive. Eject the drive and everything works. Network Manager asks for a pin number to unlock the SIM, then one is able to connect. I don’t know why the dongle is recognised as a CD-ROM drive, and I don’t know why ejecting it fixes the problem, but it does. Thanks to Christian Amsuess for the information. If everything doesn’t work as expected after ejecting the CD drive, there is more help on Christian’s page.

The network speed is no better today, but at least I’m back online. I wouldn’t recommend bob breitband, even with the cool name, and I certainly would not recommend ZTE MF180 dongle. I’m sure ejecting the CD drive every time I need a connection will become annoying, but at least it works.

FFmbc isn’t packaged. It needs to be installed manually. I’ve covered doing this for FFmpeg in the past, but options and switches are always changing, plus some of these in FFmbc are quite different. Here’s how I achieved it today…..

My build system is a fresh install of Linux Mint Debian (LMDE). It’s based on Debian Testing.

First, we need to update the sources list. Depending on your distribution, you may not need to do this. LMDE already has this repository added. I use pico as my text editor. Feel free to use nano, vi or emacs if you prefer.

Go to the Debian Multimedia repository site and download the keyring package. Follow the instructions for unpackaging it about half-way down the front page. Now update your sources list:

>sudo pico /etc/apt/sources.list

Add “deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main” on a new line and save the file.

>sudo apt-get update
>sudo apt-get upgrade

Now you’re using the latest sources and packages.

I used to build x264 direct from source. I’ve found that the Debian Multimedia repository has a packaged version from February 12th, 2011 available. That’s new enough, so I just installed the library package.

Next, install all the additional libraries we’ll need:

>sudo apt-get install build-essential yasm libgpac-dev libdirac-dev libgsm1-dev libschroedinger-dev libspeex-dev libvorbis-dev libopenjpeg-dev libdc1394-22-dev libsdl1.2-dev zlib1g-dev texi2html libfaac-dev libmp3lame-dev libtheora-dev libxvidcore4-dev libopencore-amrnb-dev libopencore-amrwb-dev frei0r-plugins-dev libcv-dev libvpx-dev libgavl1 libx264-dev

Now to configure FFmbc. There’s so many options, it’s sometimes hard to know which ones to choose. The list below is my personal preference, but do try ./configure –help to assist in choosing your own.

>./configure –enable-gpl –enable-version3 –enable-nonfree –enable-shared –enable-postproc –enable-runtime-cpudetect –enable-libopencore-amrnb –enable-libopencore-amrwb –enable-frei0r –enable-libdc1394 –enable-libdirac –enable-libfaac –enable-libgsm –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libopenjpeg –enable-libschroedinger –enable-libspeex –enable-libtheora –enable-libvorbis –enable-libvpx –enable-libx264 –enable-pthreads –enable-libxvid –enable-zlib

After a successful configuration, all the enabled decoders, encoders and muxers will be displayed. There are some configuration dependencies here. If you don’t –enable-gpl things like postproc will fail at build time. Next….

>make
>sudo make install

“Make” will probably take quite a long time. Hopefully it will all proceed without any fatal errors.

In the past, I recommended manually building qt-faststart. A little utility that moved header atoms in mpeg4 files to allow for progressive downloads. This is not required for FFmbc as  -faststart is now a switch within the mp4 muxer.

Finally, it would still seem that simply typing “ffmbc” on the command line will throw an error regarding shared libraries (we did build FFmbc with –enable-shared). To fix this we do the following:

>sudo pico /etc/ld.so.conf

Add the line “/usr/local/lib” (without quotes) to this file and then save it. Read more about dynamically linked libraries here, specifically the fourth paragraph to explain what we just did. Then:

>sudo ldconfig

We’re finished! Next thing for you to do is learn how to use it…… Most FFmpeg tutorials will be valid, as FFmbc is regularly synchronised on FFmpeg, but also read the information on the FFmbc project pages about how to use the XDCAM HD and IMX/D10 presets.

I did strike one problem trying to install FFmbc with OpenCV support. It’s been reported and I’m sure will be addressed soon.