eang.it

Rediscovering Bikes

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 21:00:00 +0100

Every child in the world loves riding a bike. The moment when you can get rid of the training wheels and ride on your own is probably one of the first kind of freedom that a child can enjoy (and of course, their parents will probably remember that moment forever).

Yet, when we grow up and we are no longer children, the society we live in pushes us towards cars as the primary mode of transportation. This is what happened to me as well: I only rode a bike when I was a kid and only as entertainment during summer vacations at my grandparents’ place. As I grew up and my grandparents eventually died, I stopped riding a bike. In fact, I cannot even remember when was the last time that I rode a bike at all.

During mid and high-school, my parents had the task of moving me around. By car, of course. Because everyone uses a car to move around in the small city I grew up in. That, or maybe a moped which are very popular in Italy. Even in the biggest city I had near home, which was Rome, everyone uses a car or a moped to move around. So, naturally, learning to drive and buying my own car were very important goals that I had to reach as soon as possible, because that was all I know.

After I started to travel to other countries in Europe, I eventually realized that in some cities, people actually move around using bikes. And I first realized that while standing on a bike lane in Berlin without even knowing what a bike lane was.

Last year I moved to Florence, which can be described as a bike-friendly city, way more than Rome at least. There are quite a lot of bike lanes in Florence and many people use bikes. So after a few months here I casually decided to buy a bike, as I just wanted to try those bike lanes and I needed to do some sport anyway. And oh boy, it was fucking awesome.

Riding a bike is a ton of fun, even if you are not a kid. But I already knew that, I guess. What I absolutely did not know was that riding a bike is the fastest way to move around in a city. With my bike I can reach the city center in about 15 minutes (~ 5 Kilometers). I’d need at least double that time if I used public transport. If I took my car I’d probably need the same time as public transport, with the additional problem of finding a parking slot (which is usually a very hard task in most cities).

Think about this for a second:

Moving around with a bike is the fastest mode of transportation for small distances
You have fun while doing it
You burn some fats while doing it
You don’t need to spend money on tickets or gasoline
You don’t pollute the environment while doing your very important things in your life

…and I’m surely forgetting some other benefits.

Isn’t this awesome? It is. Then why aren’t more people doing it? Why people prefer to use cars and get stuck in traffic, even if they need to move only for less then 10 Km? I don’t know. I was one of those people. I didn’t know any better, so probably neither do them.

One year has passed since I bought my first bike. I lost weight, I saved money, I’m less stressed, I bought a second bike and a folding bike. I almost never use my car and I’m asking myself why I still own it.

HP Elitebook 645 G9 Review

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 19:00:00 +0200

A couple of months ago I went looking for a new laptop to replace my old Thinkpad T450s. I’ve been a Thinkpad fan for years, but I was very disappointed when I looked at the current offerings from Lenovo.

My main requirements from a laptop historically have been the following ones:

Good and durable build quality (which means, no consumer laptops)
IPS matte screen (non-touch)
User-replaceable hardware components
Good amount of I/O ports
Good Linux support

Additionally as we are in 2023, I really wanted a Ryzen cpu.

Thinkpads used to meet all these requirements, but as of 2023 this is no longer the case:

The Thinkpad T14 Gen 3 AMD has LPDDR5 soldered RAM.
The Thinkpad T14s Gen 3 AMD has LPDDR5 soldered RAM and doesn’t even have an Ethernet port.

The motivation for soldering the RAM is that the SODIMM standard is too old and bulky and cannot reach the faster speeds of DDR5. But going with an anti-consumer choice such as soldering the RAM is not a proper solution. Hopefully the CAMM modules introduced by Dell will solve this problem, but for now I was so pissed by this that I decided for the first time to consider alternative brands.

The choice was basically between Dell and HP business laptops, since Ryzen CPUs are still quite hard to find in the “prosumer” laptop market.

So, after going again through my list of requirements, the choice was actually quite simple: the HP Elitebook 645 G9 was the only one left…

Here’s a picture of the laptop from the back:

I’ve never had an HP laptop before. In my mind HP had a bad reputation because of terrible consumer laptops, but their Probook/Elitebook lines of business laptops are supposed to have better quality and should be comparable to Thinkpads. But what really convinced me was this video released by HP itself, where basically they show how you can replace pretty much everything in this laptop. I was very impressed.

In this review, I’ll show how this laptop actually has almost all the features that Thinkpad laptops (used to) have!

Hardware Specifications and Price

In the Italian market there is currently only one available model to buy (with part number 5Y3J1EA#ABZ) and you cannot configure it at all, so this is what I bought. On the HP website it’s currently listed at 889€, but third-party online stores sell it for much less. I got mine for 630€, shipping costs included.

Fortunately this model has the Ryzen 7 5875U, which is the best Ryzen variant that the 645 G9 can have.

Here you can find the full hardware specifications:

CPU: Ryzen 7 5875U (Zen 3/Barcelo, 7nm, 8c/16t).
RAM: 2 DDR4-3200 SODIMM slots, supporting up to 64 GB of RAM (came with one 8GB DDR4 stick).
Main SSD: 1 NVMe M.2 2280 slot (came with a low-tier Samsung 256GB SSD).
1 WWAN slot: supports NVMe M.2 2242 M-keyed SSDs (came empty).
1 WLAN slot (came with Realtek RTL8852BE).
Display: 14’’ 1920x1080 IPS matte screen, 250 nits, 45% NTSC color gamut coverage.
Webcam 720p with hardware shutter.
Keyboard: backlit with Italian layout. HP claims it’s spill resistant.
Battery: internal only, 42.75 Wh, 3 cells.

The following picture shows the default hardware components that came with the laptop:

I replaced the OEM 8GB DDR4 stick with 2x16GB Crucial DDR4 sticks, the OEM Samsung 256GB SSD with a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB, and the (crappy) Realtek RTL8852BE with an Intel AX200. The WWAN slot was empty and I don’t use WWAN connectivity anyway, so I bought a Western Digital SN520 M.2 2242 SSD for this slot. Unfortunately it seems that WD stopped manufacturing these SSDs, so I was only able to buy one with 256GB capacity.

The AMD Barcelo platform only supports PCIe Gen 3, so it was pointless to buy a faster PCIe Gen4 SSD for the main SSD slot. PCIe Gen 3 is fast enough for my needs though.

After these hardware upgrades, the laptop internal looks like this:

The only complaint I have about hardware maintenance on this laptop is that closing the base enclosure is very difficult, you will need a lot of pressure to put the plastic clips back in place.

I/O Connectivity

On the laptop left side, there is a Kensington lock, an Ethernet port (which is becoming a rarity even on more expensive laptops), a full-size USB 3.2 Gen 1 port, and a Smartcard reader:

Here’s a closer look to the Ethernet port in action:

On the right side, there is a proprietary charging port, a USB Type-C Power Delivery port with DisplayPort 1.4, another two full size USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, a 3.5mm audio port, and an external SIM card slot. The SIM card slot looks sealed off and I haven’t bothered to check whether you can open it by removing the top enclosure of the laptop, as I won’t ever use it.

The laptop came with a 45W charger with proprietary barrell connector, but fortunately the laptop can also be charged through the USB C port using any USB Power Delivery charger. It can also be charged while connected to a monitor that supports USB C Power Delivery.

Overall the connectivity is great. Basically the only thing missing is a SD card reader, which is a bit annoying but not a deal breaker.

Linux support

The laptop came with Windows 10 and can be upgraded to Windows 11. I did an even better upgrade by installing Archlinux on the fresh Samsung 970 Evo SDD.

I had no idea about the quality of the Linux support for this laptop, but I was quite confident that at least the basic things would work. Turns out that almost everything worked out of the box! In fact, the only hardware feature that did not work at all was the tiny LED on the mute/micmute function buttons. After digging around for a while, I realized that it was necessary to add an hack in the Linux kernel. So I did it and I submitted my first patch against the Linux kernel! Whooa!

There was an annoying 1 minute system freeze after resuming from suspend. After finding a similar issue in the Linux kernel bugzilla, I added a comment in that bug report and Mario Limonciello from AMD was able to adapt the fix also for this laptop.

Finally, another issue was that the WD SN 520 SSD was not “visible” to the kernel, but this was easily fixed with the nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=5500 kernel parameter (credits to: 1, 2).

Another thing to note is that the smartcard reader does work, but it gets powered only when you actually insert a smartcard inside it (so I was initially fooled into thinking that it was not being recognized by Linux).

Keyboard

The keyboard feels ok. The arrow keys have a weird size, but this allows a full-size PageUp/Down keys on the right edge, which is quite good actually. Key travel is shorter than Thinkpad’s keyboards, but you get used to it.

Below the keyboard there is something that looks like a fingerprint reader, but since I don’t see one neither in the BIOS nor in the OS, I suppose it is only a cover. HP itself specifies that the fingerprint reader is an optional addon. Since I don’t need to use it, I haven’t bothered to remove the top enclosure to check what is actually there and what could be added later if desired.

The keyboard backlit has three levels of brightness and can be configured in the BIOS to shut-down after a period of time of inactivity, which is a nice feature. There are 5 status LEDs on the keyboard: one on the Power button, two on the mute/micmute buttons, one on the Caps-lock button and one the FN lock button. I noticed that the LEDs on Caps-lock and FN-lock gets powered-off whenever the backlit is powered-off by the inactivity timer, while they are always on (as expected) if you shutdown the keyboard backlit. This feels like a bug but I haven’t bothered to investigate it yet.

I did not dare to test the spill-resistant feature claimed by HP.

The touchpad is decent enough, even though I’m not a fan of the category in general. There is no trackpoint, but trackpoints on non-Thinkpad laptops usually suck anyway, so probably not a big loss.

Display and webcam

The display’s brightness is only 250 nits and the manufacturer is AOC which doesn’t seem to have a good reputation, but honestly the display looks good enough for my needs. Here’s a picture of the display at full brightness:

The display hinge opens (almost) at 180 degrees, which is one of the most beloved Thinkpad features.

Unfortunately the display is only 16:9. HP offers 16:10 displays on the bigger brother Elitebook 845 G9, but keep in mind that the 845 G9 does not have an Ethernet port.

The top bezel hosts the webcam and two microphones on the sides. There is also an “IR Camera” that I believe is used by the Windows Hello “feature”. The webcam has a physical shutter ando also a LED that powers up whenever it’s active.

Performance, noise and temperatures

The Ryzen 5875U is awesome. It runs so quiet at idle you basically can’t hear it. Under heavy loads, it stays between 80 and 90 celsius degrees, which is to be expected. The double-heatsink design used by HP, which you can see from the above pictures, does the job pretty well.

As for the actual performance, it can handle almost everything you throw at it, including videogames. It even beats my Ryzen 5 3600 desktop CPU in the Blender benchmark!

Battery Life

HP claims “Up to 17 hours and 30 minutes with 42whr battery” but I doubt that’s really possible even on Windows. The KDE Plasma battery applet tells me I have around 6/7 hours left at 100% charging level, and that sounds more realistic.

The battery doesn’t support charging thresholds set by Linux, unlike on Thinkpads. There is a similar feature that can be enabled from the BIOS, but it’s only an On/Off toggle that hardcodes a 80% charging threshold and doesn’t allow further fine-tunings. If you enable this feature, Linux would still see the battery as if it had a full 100% charging level available, which is quite confusing, so I decided to turn it off.

The bad news about battery life is that there is quite a significant battery drain while the laptop is suspended. We are talking about 1.5% battery discharge per hour, on average. HP has been disabling (or at least, hiding from the BIOS/ACPI) the old S3 sleep mode in favor of the modern S0 sleep, so it’s not possible to enable S3 from the BIOS. It seems that most vendors have been doing the same thing in the last couple years, as the argument is that maintaining both S3 and S0 is too much work for them and on paper a properly implemented S0 sleep should consume even less energy than the old S3. In the S3 world it was the firmware that ensured a proper sleep state. With S0 instead, the OS is entirely responsible of putting all the hardware in the correct sleep state. This is not an easy task and not even Windows gets it right. After a bit of googling, I found this commit which should improve things and should land in Linux 6.3, so I’ll do further battery draining tests once I get on that kernel.

BIOS

HP doesn’t support BIOS updates through fwupdmgr, but according to this blog post it should be possible to manually update the BIOS even without Windows installed.

The (UEFI) BIOS on this laptop is quite minimal but I believe at least the essential options should be available. I can launch Linux from the built-in UEFI bootloader via EFISTUB, and that alone is enough for me.

Conclusions

The Elitebook 645 G9 was quite a welcomed surprise. For a very cheap price you get very good hardware, the upgradability is excellent and Linux support is also good. In this price range (< 700€) I don’t think there is anything better on the market right now.

Shared With Me files in KIO GDrive

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 19:00:00 +0200

I’ve just merged in kio-gdrive master the support for Shared With Me files. This new feature will be shipped with the next KDE Gear 22.12 release.

Your shared files and folders will be presented in a virtual “Shared With Me” folder (similar to the “Shared With Me” tab in the Google web-UI):

The properties dialog in dolphin will also show the date the file/folder was shared with you (if available):

Please test it and report any bugs you’ll find :)

New Year, New Job

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 23:00:00 +0100

Next week I’ll be starting a new job after 4 years since my last one. I’m very happy because I’m finally going to work with C++ and Qt; it was not easy to find this kind of job on the Italian market… I will also move from Rome to Florence which should be a nice quality of life upgrade.

My new employer is Develer. Some of you might know it because they organize the annual QtDay. They also sponsor other conferences such as the italian Pycon and they are in general friendly to open source.

In the past few months I had very little time for KDE stuff, hopefully this will change once I settle down in the next few weeks.

My New PC Build

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 18:00:00 +0200

Last september I upgraded my old PC build. While the previous build was still working fine, it was almost 10 years old. About time to upgrade, since modern hardware is so much better.

I was very lucky because I almost waited for the fall 2020 announcements from AMD (Ryzen 5000 series and RDNA2), but then I realized that the previous generation was more than enough for my needs, so I went with Ryzen 3000 + RDNA1. I didn’t know that a global shortage of CPUs was incoming and I probably managed to buy the last stock units at good prices, before the insane increases we witnessed at the end of 2020.

This is what I got (Italian prices):

Ryzen 5 3600 (189€)
Noctua NH-U12S black (73€)
ASRock B550 Pro4 (126€)
Corsair Vengeance 2x8GB 3200 MHz (66€)
Western Digital Blue SN550 1 TB NVME (118€)
Sapphire Radeon RX 5600 XT (290€)

If you like hardware boxes, the next picture is for you :)

Case and PSU were recycled from the previous build. After half a day of work, this is what the new build looked like:

The picture doesn’t make justice to the black NH-U12S. It’s freaking awesome.

Here’s a detail of the Ryzen 3600. Warning: might be considered porn.

Finally, this is the cable management on the back, which was not easy to achieve:

Full details on the new build are available here.

Overall I’m pretty happy with this new hardware. Compiling source code has never been faster for me. I can play pretty much any game out there at full quality with a resolution of 1920x1200. Oh and I can play Doom 2016/Eternal on a Plasma Wayland session as if it were a native Linux game. Thanks to AMD+Steam+Proton everything works out of the box, it’s just mind blowing.

Introducing User Feedback in Dolphin

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 18:00:00 +0100

I’m happy to announce that the next version of Dolphin will introduce support for reporting of some telemetry data to the KDE servers. It’s important to stress the the data will be submitted only if the user actively enables the feature from the Dolphin settings.

Telemetry data can be very helpful to developers, but it may seem uninteresting to an end user. My personal opinion is that enabling telemetry is actually one of the easieast ways to contribute to KDE, if not the easieast. You just need to enable the reporting and you go on with your usual workflow.

Dolphin relies on the KUserFeedback framework to submit the data, which is already used by other projects such as Plasma or Kate.

What kind of data will be collected?

For now only the following data will be collected:

Dolphin version
Qt version
Platform information: the name of the OS/Distro used
Screen information: to find out how many screens people use
Start count: how many times Dolphin gets started
Usage time: to find out how many regular vs casual users we have
Locale information: the language used
Number of network shares: to find out how many people have Samba/NFS shares or SSHFS mounts.
Settings information: to find out how many people enable tooltips, the information and folder panels, or the “open archives as folder” setting.

An example of collected data can be seen from this screenshot:

How do I enable the data reporting?

In the new “User Feedback” panel in the Dolphin settings you will be able to enable the data submission and to choose how much data you prefer the send: only basic data (app version, Qt version, OS) or all the collected data which I described before.

Note that surveys are currently not supported for Dolphin, so changing the “Participate in Surveys” bar actually does nothing.

If you want to read more about the KDE privacy policy, please refer to the general software privacy policy as well as the telemetry policy.

Last but not least, feel free to inspect the code that added this feature to dolphin.

Akademy & Hardware Acceleration

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 18:30:00 +0200

So today Akademy 2020 started. This year it is an online event, meaning that stuff happens on your browser with BigBlueButton.

This gave me the motivation to fix hardware acceleration with Chromium on my system. You need a browser able to do hardware-accelereted video decoding if you don’t want to hear the noise of a CPU fan alongside the voice of our fellow KDE people, or if you just don’t want to waste power. Unfortunately hardware-accelereted video decoding on Linux browsers is still a mess in 2020, to the best of my knowledge.

What I had to do to enable hardware-acceleration in Chromium on my ThinkPad T450s was:

Switch back to Plasma on X11 :(
Create ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf with the following flags:

--ignore-gpu-blacklist
--enable-gpu-rasterization
--enable-zero-copy
--disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds
--use-gl=desktop

You also need to make sure that your Chromium package has been compiled with VA-API support. And of course you need to have VA-API enabled on your system.

I haven’t tried with Firefox, but it should be possible to enable hardware-acceleration there as well (supposedly also on Wayland).

Akademy Report

Fri, 13 Sep 2019 20:30:00 +0200

“Who are you people?”

That’s what the woman selling the ferry tickets at Varenna asked me once she realized I speaked Italian. She was definitely not used to a group of ~80 people wearing a blue badge. Another woman who was selling stuff on the street asked me if we were a school.

It’s been an amazing week and a very productive Akademy. A lot has been discussed and a lot has been decided. On my side, I’ve hosted a Dolphin BoF where we discussed both boring things (e.g. where to send bugzilla notification mails) as well as the awesome new features we are getting into Dolphin. Alexander talked about the status of the KIO Fuse project, while Méven talked about his work on the kioslave for the recently used files.

On the coding side, I wish I could have done more, but I lost a lot of times fighting with Google bureaucracy which was required to create a new API key for KIO GDrive. We need to urgently sort this out because it is blocking a working Google support in Kontact. Despite that, I managed to write a simple PoC of KUserFeedback usage in Dolphin. KUserFeedback is very easy to use if you just want the basic reportings (OS version, Qt version, and so on.). Hopefully it won’t be too hard to also get more interesting information, such as which are the features that our users use the most.

And finally, a big thanks goes to the Akademy team and the local team for the organization of the event. See you next year!

I'm travelling to Akademy

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 08:00:00 +0200

I’m writing this post on the train from Rome to Milan, but I guess better late than never. I’ll be in the city all week and I will host a Dolphin BoF on tuesday.

See you! :)

PSA: Workaround for a working MTP

Thu, 16 Aug 2018 10:00:00 +0200

KDE Connect is awesome, we all know that. But sometimes you still want (or need) to acces the files on your Android phone via a good old USB cable. And to do so, you need a working implementation of the MTP protocol.

Many people on bugzilla complain that the MTP support in Plasma is just broken. And indeed the MTP implementation we have has always been ignoring a fundamental limitation of MTP: the protocol doesn’t allow parallel operations, unlike the old Android USB mass storage did. In practice, if more than one process spawns an mtp ioslave, everything breaks.

The workaround

When you need to move files from your phone to your computer (or viceversa), either use only one dolphin window (tabs are your friends!), or use only Plasma’s Folder View.

What works

If you follow the workaround above, you will be able to copy/move files to/from your phone, or delete them.

What doesn’t work

Everything else will still be broken, unfortunately:

you cannot copy MTP files from dolphin to the desktop.
you cannot open e.g. a PDF file from the MTP folder; copy it somewhere else first.
you cannot open Amarok and dolphin at the same time.
… you get the picture.

The long term solution

Every time you open an MTP URL (e.g. mtp:/Your Phone/Documents/), an mtp ioslave gets spawned. As soon as you open another MTP URL from another process (e.g. Amarok or Okular), a second mtp ioslave spawns. This model is just wrong for MTP, as there should be at most one place where the MTP implementation lives. A possible solution could be to use a KDED module for that, moving the MTP-specific code from the ioslave to the kded plugin. Then the ioslave would just act as proxy between the applications and the kded plugin.

We discussed this idea with David Faure at Akademy and we came up with a design to go forward. If anyone is interested in the technical details, there is a task on phabricator you can look at.

Cheers from Vienna!