News and musings from Eric S Fraga @ UCL

Table of Contents

New project on novel nano-catalysts for CO2 conversion   news

[2010-04-04 Sun]

A new EPSRC funded project has just been announced, led by Professor Nora de Leeuw, UCL Chemistry. To quote from the grant proposal, we propose to use a robust combination of state-of-the-art computation and experiment in a grand challenge to design, synthesise, test, characterise, evaluate and produce for scale-up novel iron-nickel sulfide nano-catalysts for the activation and chemical modification of CO2. The design of the (Ni,Fe)S nano-particles is inspired by the active sites in modern biological systems, which are tailored to the complex redox processes in the conversion of CO2 to biomass. This is a completely new area for me so I am understandably quite excited!

Installing Debian Linux on a Samsung N220   news

[2010-03-22 Mon]

Recently, I had to buy a new laptop for giving presentations. The laptop I ended up with is a Samsung N220, a netbook (although not a netbook as was as these latest netbooks are really the same size as some old laptops I've owned in the past…) with a very snazzy skin. I got the red one.

Anyway, this laptop came with an operating system I find no use for, even if it's now in version 7, so the first thing I did was try the most recent Ubuntu release. I find that this is usually a good test of what is possible with new hardware. In this case, everything seemed to go quite nicely, including sound and being able to suspend to RAM.

However, I prefer having Debian on my systems. For new hardware, it's usually best to go with the testing version as the drivers will be more up to date. The current testing version is known as squeeze. I downloaded the necessary files and prepared a USB disk using unetbootin. I booted the system after having setup the bios to allow booting from USB.

Almost everything worked out of the box. A few things did not work:

wireless

to get wireless working on my system, I noticed from dmesg that the card was being recognised. The card is a Realtek 8192 and the driver is r8192_pci. However, this driver needs firmware that is not distributed by Debian. I downloaded the firmware from links given in a thread on linuxquestions.org. Placed the files in /usr/local/lib/firmware/, rebooted and everything worked fine.

However, I believe that there may be some problems with the driver which make the wireless not function correctly after suspend to ram, although not always. I'm still investigating this.

screen brightness

the next problem was that the screen was quite dim and the keys for changing the brightness level (see next item) did not work. Some searching on the Web led me to the following magical incantation for setting the brightness:

setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=xx

where xx is the level in hexadecimal with values between 00 (no backlighting) and ff (full light). I find that a value around 60 works quite well.

There is a script for making this easier to use.

hot keys
Most of the blue keys, meant to be used with Fn key, do not work out of the box. Two of them do: the suspend (top left on my keyboard) and the toggle for the touchpad (F10, again on my keyboard). The others do nothing at all. This page describes show to assign keycodes to these special function keys. Once keycodes have been assigned, you can then use whatever system your window or desktop manager of choice provides for binding these keys to desired commands. I use ratpoison which provides a very simple definekey command for this purpose.

Using org-mode for publishing news   news

[2010-03-21 Sun]

I used to use wordpress.com for publishing a blog. This worked quite well and I liked the overall system. However, I spend all of my time in emacs so found it inconvenient to have to go to a graphical web browser, such as Firefox, to update my blog. More to the point, I spend most of my time within emacs using org-mode, a fantastic outline, agenda and note-taking environment without which I would be lost!

Recently, David Maus released an add-on for org-mode which allows the automatic creation of atom feeds, a necessary component for any blog. This first post is really a test of that system.

Date: 2010.07.21 20:29:23

Author: Eric S Fraga Professor Eric S Fraga

Created: 2022-12-19 Mon 09:26

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