Fixing strange hard disk noises with power management

My recently acquired Laptop made some strange noises several times a minute. With some help I was able to identify the hard disk power management as the source of the problem. This was easy to fix with some power management system scripts.

My recently bought new Laptophad had one problem: a strange noise bugged me. It came up several times a minute, even in idle mode. With some very helpful comments of some friendly readers (thanks Chris, Rui and Michael!) I was able to identify the hard disk as the main problem: the Load Cycle Count went up much too often per minute.

# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
/dev/sda: ST9160821AS: 37°C
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       2330
# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
/dev/sda: ST9160821AS: 37°C
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       2333
[...]

I went through the comments and through several bug reports and howtos to determine the best way to fix the issue: the fix should be easy, should work with suspend/resume and should be as native as possible, so should use the tools which are thought to be used for such cases.

The (for me) optimal solution was explained in the OpenSuse Wiki in the article “Disk Power Management”: a script is dropped at /etc/pm/config.d/disk which defines the parameters for the disk disk for the powersave mode and the normal mode. The explanation is easy to understand and does not use distribution-specific tools, so it should work on every distribution out there - it dead certainly work here at my Fedora machine.

The only question left now is if I should report my specific hard disk model anywhere to make sure that this problem is fixed automatically in the future.

The new one in town

Sometimes old ones have to be replaced - with something fresh and new. I’ve got a new laptop.

The old one

I’ve had my old laptop now for over three years. Back then it was state of the art: A Cebop T900 (the company doesn’t exist anymore, but the series is comparable to Siemens Amilo series of that time) with fresh 1,8 GHz Centrino (Pentium M 745, Dothan core) with - at that time quite large - 1 GB RAM and a 80 GB Hard disk. The graphics card was an ATI 9600 mobile with 256 MB RAM which actually was more of a desktop graphics card then a laptop card. The wireless card was an Intel ipw2200, and there was even a card reader installed, though I never got that one working. The screen was a 1280×800 15.4″ wide screen. Some benchmarks can be found here

The old one - called Perricum, btw. - served me well. However, due to the ridiculous oversized graphics card (and probably due to the entire construction at all) the fan never stopped working. And the fan was really, really noisy. Additionally, the entire chassis was not very stable. Still, the laptop accompanied me during the last years (and to several countries, btw.). For the distribution interested person: I started back then with a pre-release version of Mandrake/Mandriva (because it was the only one which started on that machine at that time due to kernel problems), later on Fedora and also for some time OpenSuse followed. The virtual machines started inside of the system run almost everything, from Ubuntu over the already mentioned distributions to even some BSD versions I gave a try. Also, for some time a virtual machine contained a Windows copy.
Speaking about Windows: besides the virtual machine that computer never saw a a Windows Kernel. The machine came along without a preinstalled operating system, and I was already in a state where I didn’t need any Windows. The need came later up for some months due to some specialized Windows-only program, but that was all.

The new one

In 10 years my mobile phone will most likely have more power than my new laptop - but today it is state of the art: A Dell Latitude D630 with a Intel T9300 with 2.5 GHz Dual Core (6 MB Cache, btw) - yes, that’s the new Penryn, Intel’s new 45nm processor series. Again, the RAM is quite high even for today: 4 GB. The hard disk is comparable small, just 160 GB, but for me power consumption was more important than size. And I do have an external hard disk.
But I also from the problems with my old machine: the graphics card is not a desktop card this time, but a Nvidia NVS 135M, a business card from Nvidia’s Quadro series. I could have also taken the laptop with Intel’s X3100, but since this machine is supposed to serve me for a longer time I wanted to have at least a bit more power. The wireless card is a 4965, and the screen is a 14.1″ with a resolution of 1440×900. Some benchmarks can be found here.

Additionally, this is a business notebook: so there are less fancy things (no card reader for example, no TV out, etc.), higher costs, but also more reliability: a much, much better and more stable chassis, high quality hardware (the speakers for example), and so on. And it has docking station support, which I plan to use quite often in the near future.

The operating system choice was a lit more difficult in this case, however. Dell doesn’t sell its flagships with Linux - at least not to usual customers. Additionally, since I am an author for technical magazines sometimes I am asked if I could do a story on some Windows related topics - like “Connect Windows to Linux” or “Compare xyz on Windows against abc on Linux”. Since I didn’t have a Windows copy in the past I had to pass on these tasks. Also, having a look at Vista once in a while makes me able to compare it against Linux distributions.

So I payed money for a Windows Vista copy. The disadvantages are now that that Microsoft earned some money and that my hard disk is littered with a lot of crap - almost two GB are taken by the problem that I only got a “Recovery DVD”. Sigh…

Sooo…

As a result I will publish more posts about the new computer - for example the task of installing Linux on it was much more difficult than I have thought! Also I will install a more recent KDE on this machine - one way or the other. But for now I’m just happy to have a new computer which is strong enough to do all the things I would like it to do but is not too noisy to work with or to heavy to carry around.

KDE 4.1 feature plan and release schedule published, KDE 4.0.1 tagged

The full release plan and the feature plan for KDE 4.1 have been published, with the official release date July 29th, 2008. In the meantime, the first bugfix release of the new KDE, KDE 4.0.1, was tagged.

KDE 4.1 release plan and schedule

After the initial announcement to release KDE 4.1 in July this year there is now a full release plan available. According to the plan, the first important date will be the end of March: at March 31st, 2008, trunk will be closed for new features. The development of the already added (but just not ready) features will still be possible, even with binary incompatibility, but new features will have to wait for KDE 4.2 afterwards. The first real freeze will be at April 22nd, 2008: everything which is not basically ready until then has will not be included. After that the usual dance of Alphas, Betas and Release Candidates will begin, until KDE 4.1 final will hopefully be released at July 29th, 2008.

The current expected and planned features for that release are listed in Techbase under Release Goals, while the current status of these features is monitored at the Feature Plan page. These lists are not final yet, however they do resemble the already well known lists flying around the blogosphere.

The remaining question is which distributions will pick up this new release first: maybe OpenSuse 11.0 will ship it as a preliminary version with final updates shortly after the 11.0 release, but that was just mentioned with a big maybe. The other distributions which have releases in Fall 2008 (like Fedora which will have its 10th release at that point) will for sure include it - or maybe even the first bugfix version, 4.1.1. In any way, in Fall 2008 every larger Linux distribution will most likely ship KDE in a 4.1 version.
Also, since this is a big aim for the KDE 4.1 release, packages for two other “distributions” will be available: Windows and Mac OS X. I’m looking forward to equip my windows friends with Amarok, Akonadi-kmail/kontact and Dolphin (to replace Norton Commander).

KDE 4.0.1 tagged

In the meantime, the first bugfix release for the KDE 4 series was tagged: KDE 4.0.1. The changelog for this version can be seen in an XML file (or at this web page), and the multitude of entries shows that the developers were indeed working quite hard. Since these are only bugfixed and are not supposed to brake anything or to introduce new features it can be expeceted that the distributions will ship this update pretty soon.

NetworkManager enterprise encryption (Eduroam style) works again

NetworkManager was recently updated in Fedora 8. The newest version now works well again with a specific but widely used enterprise encryption method.

One of the major regressions in Fedora 8 was that the new NetworkManager was not working with a specific encryption method used by the European Eduroam (wlan) project. This network uses a certificate based TKIP-TTLS-PAP encryption system to allow or deny access to wireless university networks across Europe and is therefore at home at almost all larger universities in Europe (and Australia, btw.).

The proper solution to handle that situation was to configure wpa_supplicant manually or to run other tools or home-made scripts.

Two days ago, after more than two months, an update of libnl required a rebuild of NetworkManager and libdhcp as well. And with these updates, the login works again without any further problem.

It is not entirely clear why the bug is now fixed but it looks like the libnl package had some serious problems which might have caused the problem. I hope that NetworkManager soon reaches a state were all promised 0.7-features are available - and where I have a KDE gui to configure them

While the issue is solved the bug itself raises some valid questions: If the bug hit all Eduroam users, which are mostly students or academic people which have a high percentage of Linux users, why did so few people care? Is it because most European users don’t use Fedora but Opensuse, Mandriva or Ubuntu which all did not ship that specific NetwokManager version?
Or did the system work for most people and failed only for some odd reason for me and a couple of others? Strange in any case.

I’m an author. Like, official.

That’s it: I received my first paycheck for writing stuff. So I’m an official author now. The articles I write deal with all kinds of FLOSS, but the first article was about KDE.

Writing!

Thanks Troy for encouraging me to answer a call by a German Linux magazine for a needed article about KDE’s Kontact: that started it all. The next thing I know was that I was writing for a specialized, high profiled German Linux magazine about Kontact’s groupware/enterprise features from an Administrator point of view. After some days of reading, local testing and chatting with the developers (thanks for the review, Tobias!) I finished the article and sent it in - and the editor was very pleased. Well, at least he told me so

Anyway, the article was published (the magazine is really specialized, one issue costs more than 80,- €, so unfortunately no link here), and I was paid. At that point another magazine was already waiting for more articles, and I wrote them as well. This time it was about the basics of building rpms (on OpenSuse, with some hints for Fedora) and the basics of the screen recorder recordMyDesktop. And the next article is already on the desk of the editor, again about a KDE topic.

How did it start?

I never estimated that I would really get money out of writing: I started blogging almost a thousand days ago just for myself. The blog was a place to write down my own thoughts and opinions and was mainly used to form them into real words. Also, it was simply fun.
Later on I transformed it into a place to improve my English language skills while I was abroad anyway. That was a great training, and I kept on blogging in English since the audience is much larger. As a result more and more people picked up the blog, left comments and encouraged me to write more and more. This made me a bit a “part of the community” - not as a coder but more or less as some kind of a “reporter”. One of the side effects was that my blog - and therefore also my name - got known in certain communities.

This again lead to get in contact with these communities - the best example is most certainly the KDE community. Another good example is the Fedora community were I am also a small package maintainer.
And finally Troy told me that an author for a computer magazine article was searched.

The blog?

Of course this has influence on my blog: writing in more professional ways helps me to improve my skills. Also, it forces me to stay informed and therefore continue my work on this blog. Also, I already used some of the money to buy a webcam and wrote about my experiences here.
But since I’m not allowed to post the stuff I’ve written for the magazines here in the blog I wonder myself if that influences the content I post here. This might be, I’m not sure. But then I have a long, long queue of to-be-done blog posts anyway and I have only very limited time due to the fact that I’m close to handing in my final thesis. Also, the articles I write for computer magazines are either high specialized, long and need much of time (and therefore are not suitable for blogs) or are howtos explaining things which most of my readers know anyway.

In the long term?

Until now I’ve just written a set of articles due to the already mentioned thesis. (For the same reason I blogged less and less in the last weeks and even months, btw.)
However, I realized that I can really imagine myself as a reporter/writer/journalist for tech related media: in Germany we have several big, high quality publishing houses with printed magazines but also online news and I could imagine myself working for these. Also, there are some English media out there and I would love to continue writing in English! Besides, while I’ve studied physics now for years and really enjoyed it I think that a break for like 6 months wouldn’t be that bad. My experiences in writing my final thesis are quite manifold and a pause from all this could do me well.

Anyway, I could make some money in this way to fill in the gaps after my thesis but before I get a real job. The money I get depends on the needs of the magazines and the ideas I have myself, and as you can imagine I have several ideas in the line all the time, so the problem is more my own time and of course the needs of the magazine publishers. So maybe after handing in my final thesis I will check around for more Linux/FLOSS related magazines and ask them if they need articles. Would be a nice change, actually.

Last but not least, one of my dreams was and is to work at an Open Source company. Since my coding skills are not good enough for working as a developer, writing articles could make it easier for me to apply for a job as a consultant or similar at some point. Who knows?

Thanks!

First and foremost I’d like to thank Troy - he was the one who encouraged and supported me to get it started. Second I’d like to thank my girlfriend JuVlai for also supporting and encouraging me in the difficult thesis time to take this article job to get a feeling of it.
And of course thanks to all the other people and community members who encouraged me, gave me constructive feedback and just visited my blog and enjoyed it. There are much too many names to list them all here, but to all of them:

Thanks!