Installing Kubuntu 12.04 LTS on Acer Aspire One D270

I finally bought a new netbook, an Acer Aspire One D270.

• 10.1" display
• Dual 1,6 GHz Intel Atom N2600 processor
• GMA 3600 graphics chip integrated on processor
• 320 GB hard drive
• 1 GB RAM, extendable to 2 GB

It appears that the D270 model has many variants. I accidentally purchased a model with a 3-cell battery, as there was another model with the same designation in another shop, but with a 6-cell battery. I read the specs from the other shop, and bought the machine from the shop with the inferior machine. Oh well, can't take it back anymore. On a positive side, it's a bit lighter and smaller with the 3-cell battery. There were a few other alternatives, but this was the cheapest and I thought they were so cheap that I could buy a new one later. There's never enough netbooks lying aroung.

The nasty trade-offs with the D270 are:

• A glossy screen (oh I hate them)
• No Bluetooth
• No built-in 3g
• The small battery in this model

But it was cheap, so.

The machine came with Windows 7 Starter. It's actually the first Windows I've ever paid for myself, which is kind of shameful. Unfortunately, it's no longer possible to find a netbook/laptop without Windows (Update: Looks like they sell D270 with Linux in Germany). My EeePC 910 was quite great, with almost same performance as this one, but unfortunately they don't sell those any longer. Too bad I managed to soak it in pear juice.

It should be noted that there are no vendor-provided drivers for the GMA 3600 graphics controller in Kubuntu. (Update: Looks like Intel has published a Linux driver last month! But it's only for 32-bit Fedora...)

Some of the configuration given in this article are specific to the Aspire, but perhaps most are quite generic, especially the KDE configuration.

About KDE

I'm a long-standing KDE user and wouldn't really use anything else. The problem is that KDE has been getting worse over the years, not better. I guess it's because KDE imitates Windows a lot, and Windows has gone worse. The problems started with the redesigned KDE 4, which had all sorts of bells and whistles that still don't work some 5 years after the first version. The window manager crashes occasionally, and there are other issues, some of which I will mention later.

One of the most annoying issues is deteriorating keyboard support, some of which issues I mention later. While I initially switched to KDE because of its excellent keyboard support, it has been getting worse. Shortcuts disappear, and no one seems to care about it. I imagine there is nowadays a newer generation of developers who went to school learning to always use mouse for everything. Despite using the keyboard for writing a lot, they nevertheless seem to stick to mouse a lot. Not good.

Mounting the Cow

In any case, Kubuntu, the KDE version of Ubuntu, was my choise. Downloading the ISO image was just a minute. The trouble started with writing the image on USB memory. The instructions give a "normal way" to use "usb-creator-kde" application. The problems started while using it, as it crashed the first time I used it. Trying again, I managed to write the image to the USB drive (or actually an SD card with an adapter). However, trying to boot from it consistently failed and the system dropped to shell prompt. I first feared that it might be a display driver issue, but going through the errors gave me a hint that the USB image might have some issues. It couldn't even mount the system in read-write mode, which caused everything to fail.

The problem was that it couldn't mount a cow. More technically, I got "Can not mount /dev/loop1 on /cow". It has something to do with an overlay filesystem where there is a read-only filesystem on the bottom and a ramdisk read-write filesystem on top of it that takes any modifications. Anyhow, I didn't get the cow error consistently, so it took a bit time to figure out. Well, the installation instructions actually mentioned the issue and adviced to use UNetBootin, another application to create bootable USB disks.

The problems didn't exactly end with UNetBootin, I have no idea why. I managed to boot once, but subsequent attempts didn't work, the boot just got stuck. At this point, I gave up and went to sleep. On the next day, I went to a supermarket and bought a real USB drive instead of the SD+adapter, and tried that. Worked, excellent.

The installer allowed to repartition the 320 GB drive nicely so that it preserved the Windows 7 installation. Not sure what I could use it for, perhaps for some games or something. Not that the machine is fast enough for games. Even basic use with Windows 7 Starter is horribly slow. But I did pay for it! Installing Firefox instead of the IE made browsing much faster though.

Installing Kubuntu was a breeze initially, nothing much to say about that.

The Biggest Task: Basic Configuration

While KDE is great, it unfortunately is not great out of the box. In fact, it appears rather broken in many ways.

Using Regular Desktop

Kubuntu seems to start the "Plasma Netbook" workspace by default. It might be nice for your grandmom or your kids, but for you it isn't. To use a regular desktop, select in the Control Panel "Workspace Appearance and Behavior / Workspace Behavior / Workspace" and select "Desktop" in the Workspace Type. Click Apply and you're much happier.

Tree View in Control Panel

The KDE Control Panel originally had a tree view. In some 3.x version, it was changed to a more "iconic" view, for worse I think. It is still possible to get the tree view simply by clicking Configure in the Control Panel and selecting the Classic Tree View.

With trees or icons, the KDE Control panel is really a huge forest and it can sometimes take ages to find what you want. Sometimes the search functionality helps, sometimes you have to resort to Google to find the settings you want, sometimes it's somewhere else.

Traditional Start Menu

At some point in recent history, KDE wanted to mimick the Vista start menu, which is just as awful in KDE as it is in Windows. To replace it with a traditional start menu, right-click the panel and select Panel Options / Add Widgets. Drag and drop the Application Launcer Menu to the panel. To reposition it in the panel, click the Panel Tool Box at the right end of the panel, select the button, and move it to left. To remove the default launcher, right-click it and select Remove this Application Launcher.

While you're viewing the Panel Tool Box, also select More Settings / Auto Hide. This gives you plenty of more space in the already too small screen.

Desktops and Keyboard Navigation

One of the most important features in KDE is built-in desktop navigation. It has multiple desktops in which you can group windows. These were actually disabled after installation for some reason. To configure them in Control Panel, select Workspace Appearance and Behavior / Workspace Behavior / Virtual Desktops. Often the default is four desktops, I like to use eight. After using same configuration for 15 years, navigation has come pretty easy.

Very importantly, you can navigate between the desktops quickly from keyboard, just like you can navigate between windows with Alt+Tab and Alt+Shift+Tab. The keyboard navigation was actually the reason why I switched to it some 15 years ago from fvwm2 (don't even ask what that is).

The problem is that the proper desktop navigation keys are no longer enabled by default. In fact, because of a bug introduced in Kubuntu 11, they can't be configured from any of the settings at all! The only way to set them is to edit
.kde/share/config/kglobalshortcutsrc and set the following:

Walk Through Desktop List=Meta+Tab,none,Walk Through Desktop List 
Walk Through Desktop List (Reverse)=Meta+Ctrl+Tab,none,Walk Through Desktop List (Reverse)

("Meta" means the "Win" key.) Strangely, the issue was fixed in last October (2011), but the fix was apparently not included in Kubuntu 12.04.

Because of another bug, it's no longer possible to use Win+Shift+Tab in KDE. The keyboard combination simply doesn't work. It was quite annoying to lose that shortcut, as I used it for al-most 15 years, until it was broken in KDE 4.

To get the settings in use, you need to restart KDE by logging out and in again.

Basic Window Management

Unbelievably, KDE windows do not have a "Minimize" button by default! The only way to minimize them is to click the window menu (at the top-left corner) and select Minimize. To enable a Minimize button, you have to customize window buttons. In the Control Panel, select Workspace Appearance and Behavior / Workspace Appearance / Window Decorations, then Configure Buttons. In the dialog, you can drag&drop buttons, such as the Minimize, to the window title bar.

To be able to minimize windows from the keyboard, the shortcut is defined entirely elsewhere in the Control Panel. Select Common Appearance and Behavior / Shortcuts and Gestures / Global Keyboard Shortcuts, and then select KWin in the KDE Component. So, I have to know that this simple shortcut is part of this "KWin" thing, reall obvious. There, set the Minimize Window button to Win+- (Meta+-). While you're at it, you could also set the "Maximize Window" to Win++ or something.

Forcing Windows to Particular Desktops

Normally, when an application opens up a child window, for example a warning, it appears in the current desktop. This is not normally desirable, as it messes up the grouping of windows in desktops. For example, if you have Skype pop up chat windows automatically, you soon have them in every desktop. It becomes a problem.

You can force the windows of a particular application to always open in a fixed desktop. In Control Panel, select Workspace Appearance and Behavior / Window Behavior / Window Rules. The configuration is somewhat complex so I won't go into much details.

You can actually do really many things with the functionality, it's almost like
programming. You can control the desktop, size, positioning, and countless other parameters of windows.

And of course, KDE allows saving the "session", so that after you shutdown the computer and start up and log in again, it restores the session with all the windows. The behaviour can be configured in Control Panel in System Administration / Startup and Shutdown / Session Management. You can choose to save the session automatically when logging out, or just manually, or not at all. Restoring does not restore the applications to the same state though. For some applications, it can save some state parameters, such as the current folder and such, and even which document you were editing. How much state information is restored depends on the application.

Optimizing Performance

It isn't really meaningful to have flashy graphics effects when using a slow netbook. While the basic 2D hardware acceleration seems to work quite well with the GMA 3600 graphics adapter, some effects can be really hard on the poor GPU. In the Workspace Appearance and Behavior / Desktop Effects, disable Enable desktop effects at startup and "Various animations".

You could set the "noatime" option in /etc/fstab. Normally, Linux keeps record of the latest access time for each file and directory. You can see the access times for example with "ls -lu". That recordkeeping requires writing to disk, which takes a bit time, and with flash disks would also consume the prescious rewrite cycles. Just edit the file (with sudo) and add the "noatime" option in the options column, separated with a comma. The setting is used after the next boot.

I am sure there are tons of other optimizations you could do, so the above are just the starters.

Update: The D270 came with just 1 GB of memory, which seemed to fill up pretty fast with KDE 4 and especially when running Java stuff. I got a 2 GB comb and now it works much faster.

Remaining Issues

The remaining problems are:

• External display (VGA or HDMI) does not work and I have found no mentions how it should work. Apparently it is possible to get it work if they sell the D270 preinstalled with Linux.
• The keys for changing display brightness do not work. The issue is known with the Aspire One and should be solvable.
• Kwin has crashed once or twice during a day. This issue is really annoying on my home desktop computer as it can occur several times in an hour. I hope it isn't as bad.

Theme Development in Liferay

After installing a portal system (or web server), the first thing you want to do is create a simple web page and start customizing the theme. Unfortunately, Liferay's documentation is terribly unclear about that.

Well, its suggested normal method is to choose from a number of ready themes. Umm, NO! Nobody wants to use a theme like that. Every organization has their own colors and graphics and if not, you nevertheless want to have something that you have in your mind, not what some others have.

So, the "advanced" method is to develop a custom theme, which you can then deploy in Liferay. The Liferay plugin for Eclipse supports that. However, that method is way too heavy for me at least. I don't want to run a separate development Liferay on my machine, as I don't have enough memory in my home computer to do it fast enough. I want to work directly with the production server. I also suspect that deploying a theme takes longer than a second.

So, what I wanted to do was to just edit some CSS in the web server, save, reload, and see the result. This method of themeing does not seem to be documented anywhere, or at least it's hard to find. Anyhow, the easy way seems to be to edit the custom.css file in "classic" theme. The full path to the file is tomcat-x.x.x/webapps/ROOT/html/themes/classic/css/custom.css.

The problem with that was that just editing it did not reload it immediately, or actually ever. Even restarting the serve does not reload it. I found some suggestions for properties that would need to be set in the portal-ext.properties, but they didn't quite work in my case.

Finally, I found the solution right there in the Liferay's installation package. The file tomcat-6.0.29/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/portal-developer.properties has the following settings for development:

theme.css.fast.load=false
theme.images.fast.load=false

javascript.fast.load=true
javascript.log.enabled=true

layout.template.cache.enabled=false

browser.launcher.url=

combo.check.timestamp=true

freemarker.engine.cache.storage=soft:1
freemarker.engine.modification.check.interval=0

openoffice.cache.enabled=false

velocity.engine.resource.manager.cache.enabled=false

com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.cache.CacheFilter=false

com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.themepreview.ThemePreviewFilter=trueroot

I don't actually know which of the settings are really necessary, but now it seems to work great. Just edit the file and it's reloaded immediately.

Installing Liferay on MySQL

I'm installing a new web server for the astronomical association Turun Ursa. As we support Liferay at work, using it for this purpose may have some synergy so that I don't need to learn yet-another-portal. Well, not that Liferay is the easiest to learn. Anyhow, it also makes it possible to develop some portlets if I ever need one. I think I may need to redo my planetarium application again in Java - the old C++ version for Sparc stopped working some time ago after some upgrade at the university.

Anyhow, the instructions for doing the proper installation were rather unclear as they didn't really tell much details about creating the database. They referred to a "Chapter 6", which didn't exist at all. I guess they referred to these instructions, which were more helpful. Anyhow, below is a brief summary.

The setup is done here using the database root user. Some Liferay example used that though I don't really see why. Creating a separate Liferay user might be nicer. Well, I have Liferay running as a root anyhow to get it running in port 80, so the database user probably doesn't make it significantly safer.

1. Shut down the server

   # ./tomcat-6.0.29/bin/shutdown.sh

   ...and wait for a bit.

2. Move the 7Cogs demo data generator away

   # mv tomcat-6.0.29/webapps/sevencogs-hook/ .

3. Create the database with a database command and not using the mysqladmin to be able to set the character set. It's probably important.

   # mysql -prootpassword
   mysql> create database lportal character set utf8;
   Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

   The MySQL configuration stuff is explained in this wiki.

4. Create a portal-ext.properties file in the Liferay installation directory with content:

   #
   # MySQL
   #
   jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
   jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false
   jdbc.default.username=root
   jdbc.default.password=rootpassword

5. Start up the server

   # ./tomcat-6.0.29/bin/startup.sh

6. Follow that it starts OK

   # tail -F tomcat-6.0.29/logs/catalina.out

Well, rather trivial but took me a bit time as the documentation was a bit...hazy.

Other notes:

• When first logging in, create a new user account with your own name. Then log out and log in as user "test@liferay.com" with password "test" (this information was not really obvious in the instructions either). Go to Control Panel -> Users and give yourself the Administrator role. You need to remove or disable the "test" account at some point...

Cross-Site Embedding Vaadin Applications

I've been recently testing the embedding of Vaadin applications.
Here's the Vaadin Sampler embedded:

Well, the application isn't made for this narrow columns, but it works, and runs on a completely different server. And isn't in an iframe.

Essentially, all you need to embed an app is:

    <script src="http://demo.vaadin.com/xsembed/getEmbedJs" type="text/javascript"></script>

However, if the app has 100% vertical size, you must put it in an element with a defined height. You may also want to set the width in some cases, such as in the example above:

<div style="height: 600px; width: 400px; overflow: auto;">
  <div style="height: 500px; width: 800px;">
    <script src="http://demo.vaadin.com/xsembed/getEmbedJs" type="text/javascript"></script>
  </div>
</div>

Vaadin Refcard updated

I made a few minor corrections and additions to the Vaadin Refcard, which was released last week at DZone. If you already downloaded it, you might to get the new version.

• Vaadin is available under Apache License 2.0
• For Item editors, such as the Form component, you can set the item data source with setItemDataSource()
• For Container editors, such as the Table or Tree components, you can set the container data source with setContainerDataSource()
• The book cover on the last page was updated - the cover for Vaadin 6.2 edition is blue
• The text in the last page was reordered to be more correct

The refcard could be updated next after Vaadin 6.3 is released in the late spring. The major features are use of GWT 2.0 for the client-side, drag'n'drop, and support for portlet flat mode.

Vaadin Refcard is out!

The Vaadin Refcard is finally out at DZone. Download yours now or browse the card on-line.

If you're a newcomer to Vaadin or interested in finding out what it is, the Refcard offers a great introduction to Vaadin. Much of the reference material should be also useful to those already familiar with Vaadin.


The six pages of the Refcard present a well thought summary of the most essential features of Vaadin, which are covered in detail in the Book of Vaadin. Much of the reference information is presented in tightly packed diagrams; just look at them for a moment and I hope you'll see the genius of Vaadin as I do.

The contents are:

• Creating an Application
• Components
• Layout Components
• Themes
• Data Binding
• Creating New Components

As Vaadin is developing fast, I hope to make updates to the card occasionally. So, especially after update releases (Vaadin 6.3 is coming next), please look out for an update of the card.

More Information:

• The Vaadin Refcard at DZone
• Vaadin Homepage
• Book of Vaadin On-Line

Playing in Order

I've been fighting with my E90 for a few hours to get it play the MP3s of the Lord of the Rings audio books in proper order. It's not so easy.

First, I had to set proper track and disk information in the MP3s. This was easy enough with the Amarok music player for KDE. It allows easily editing the metadata, also in a group of files. There was some hand work to edit the track numbers, which took about half an hour for the 20-disk set.

Another and a more strange problem was that my E90 orders the MP3s to play in the directory order. The directory order is a low-level technical order in which files are stored in a directory (folder), and is not necessarily the same as the alphabetical order. Apparently, in FAT, the directory order is the order in which the files are written. In Linux, however, the directory order can be about anything, depending on the file system. In the EXT3 filesystem, the order seems pretty random and is probably the order of some hash table.

Unfortunately, every copy program, such as Konqueror, scp, or the command line "cp", copies the files in the directory order, so it's not possible to trivially copy files to a phone or MP3 player in alphabetical order. One solution is to use a specially ordered copy operation from command-line.

In my case, I had the MPs of the 20 CD audio book ordered under per-disk directories, so I had to use the following somewhat complex copy command:

for dir in `ls /home/magi/data/mp3/Sormuksen\ ritarit/`; do
    echo `ls -Q /home/magi/data/mp3/Sormuksen\ ritarit/$dir/*.mp3` "/media/Magi\ 2G\ u1/Sounds/Digital/Sormuksen\ ritarit/$dir/" | xargs cp -v
done

An alternative would be to first write everything to the player in any order and then use the "mv" command to move the files to a temporary directory, and then remove the original directory and rename the temporary directory as the original.

Moreover, if you have earlier written the MP3s to E90 in one order, it remembers the order even if you rewrite the files in another order. You first have to remove them from the player application, then write them again in the proper order, and only then you can play them properly.

References
Some other solutions in Linux Forum: Change the order of files in a directory.

N900 vs iPhone

Hi, I collected a rough list of some features. The list is not exhaustive and there may be some important features in software and interoperability that are not covered. Please comment and I'll add new notes.

	N900	iPhone 3GS
Basic stuff
Size	111x60x18mm	116x62x12mm
Weight	181 g	133 g
Screen Size	3.5 inch	3.5 inch
Screen Resolution	800x480	320x480
Screen Colors	65536 colors?	262144 colors
Screen material	plastic?	glass
Touchscreen tech	resistive	capacitive
Touchscreen fingers	one	two
Built-in keyboard	yes	no
Screen keyboard	yes	yes
Computing
Processor	ARM Cortex A8	ARM Cortex A8
Processor speed	600 MHz	600 MHz
Graphics accelerator	PowerVR SGX	PowerVR SGX
RAM	256 MB	256 MB
Virtual memory	768 MB	none
SSD storage, internal	32 GB	16/32 GB
External storage	up to 16 GB (MicroSD)	none
Software
Operating system	Linux-based	Darwin-based
Web Browser	Mozilla-based	Safari
Zooming	yes, one-finger	yes, two-finger
Adobe Flash support	Flash 9.4	none
Java	possibly	none
Skype	yes	no
Video formats	mp4, .avi, .wmv, .3gp	mp4, m4v, mov?
Video codecs	H.264, MPEG-4, Xvid, WMV, H.263	H.264, MPEG-4?
Music formats	.wav, .mp3, .AAC, .eAAC, .wma, .m4a	m4a, ...?
Open application development	yes	no
Music/software store	Nokia Ovi	iTunes, App Store
Operator lock	no	yes
Misc hardware
Camera	5 Mpix	3 Mpix
Video recording	yes, 16:9	yes
Video size and rate	848x480 @ 25fps	640x480 @ 30fps
Microphone	stereo	mono?
Geotagging	yes	yes
GPS	A-GPS	A-GPS
Cell-based navigation	yes	yes
Accelometer	yes	yes
Wireless network	802.11 b/g	802.11 b/g
Video out	yes (PAL/NTSC, WLAN/UPnP)	yes
FM transmitter	yes	no
Headphone connector	3.5 mm	3.5 mm
Compass	no	yes
Replaceable battery	yes	no
Other
Designed in Finland	yes	no
Jesus uses it	no	yes

More experiments with gigabit

My previous experiences regarding my new gigabit network were disappointing. I studied the problem further by using iperf to generate raw traffic between my two Linux PCs and using KSysGuard and iftop to monitor the traffic. Now I got a whopping 950Mb/s, near the theoretical maximum. Well, it should have gone over 1000Mb/s, so there's still something lacking a bit.

The gigabit LAN with 1000baseT/FD link mode is supposed to be full duplex, so I tried two-way traffic with iperf. The result was, however, roughly a gigabit in total, so in effect it was half-duplex. This may be due to the PCI bus that the integrated network card uses. Normal PCI is a 32-bit bus and operates at 33Mhz frequency, giving (32*33M) roughly one gigabit of capacity. But, that is the entire bus capacity, it is shared with other devices, and full duplex gigabit would need twice that. So, ok, I got near the maximum.

The performance of Buffalo LinkStation still feels strange. With KDE's file manager as well as with smbclient, I got some 10MB/s. By actually mounting it as a filesystem with smbmount, I only got a fraction of that, perhaps some 1.5MB/s. That's 1.5% of the "gigabit" capacity! With Windows XP under Vmware, I got about the same as with Linux smbclient, some 10MB/s. I'm yet to test it with non-vmware XP more accurately, but it may be a bit faster.

Assembly of Ungoliant

I updated my hardware recently, so I'll tell all the interesting details here.

I first bought a new case with 500W power supply for a motherboard I planned to buy from my fellow worker. Unfortunately, the chipset fan on the motherboard had gone bad and created great amount of problems when playing games, so I made a quick purchase at local hardware store.

• Intel Core 2 Quad q6600 G0 2,4GHz processor
• Abit IP35 ATX motherboard with Sata2, Gigabit LAN and so on
  
• MSI GeForce 8800 GT 512MB OverClocked graphics card
• 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM
• DVD-RW drive (I needed a new one in black - oh the vanity)
• Antec Sonata III case with 500W power supply
  

The Quad is the model with G0 stepping, making it ideal for overclocking. In even simple tests, some have gotten some 35% overclocking. I might overclock it to 3GHz (+25%) at some point. The MSI 8800 GT is factory-overclocked by 10%.


The Antec Sonata case was a really pleasant surprise. First of all, it looks good, which its shining black finish -- the primary reason for naming the machine Ungoliant. Unfortunately, the black finish is very tender and I got it badly scratched very easily. Maybe I should have bought some lacquer to protect it from the environment. Another pleasant thing was the organization of hard drives so that they are loaded on sleds and are easily accessible from the side. The side panel opens easily with a handle. On the back there is an adjustable case fan. On the front panel there are two beautiful blue leds, one for power and one for hard drive. This case is a dream.

So, I got the stuff, piled it on my desk at work, and started unboxing.

The Core 2 Quad processor was really small and had an enormous fan. Here, I have removed the bottom cover and all the connectors are visible. In the center, there are some small components.


The cooler element had interesting pattern. At the bottom, it had the paste already spread, so I just needed to attach it on the processor.

Mounting the processor in the socket was easy. Mounting the cooler+fan on the processor wasn't. It had to be fastened to the motherboard with four hatches and I have to say, it was really hard and needed a lot of muscle. Fortunately, my fellow worker with more experience in assembling machines helped me with the cooler a bit so I got it fastened safely.

The rest was easy. Below is the motherboard with just the graphics card missing. The chipset is cooled with a heat pipe. I later noticed that the 2x2GB RAM combs were actually just 1GB. I returned them to the store and got my 2GBs.

Below is Ungoliant ready to be transported to its lair:

Gigantic disappointment in gigabit

I bought a cheap 35€ gigabit switch on saturday and some more cat-6 cables, in an attempt to get my home network upgraded to gigabit speeds. It failed.

I found out that my new "gigabit" 500GB Buffalo LinkStation was not able to provide more than one tenth of the gigabit, about 10MB/s with Samba from Linux. With FTP, I was able to get enormous 15MB/s. With Windows XP, the access may have been a bit faster, though I did not measure that more accurately, because Windows doesn't report transfer speed when copying files. Between two Linux PCs, I got a maximum of 35MB/s with scp. Curiously, with KDE file transfer over sftp connections, I got only about 10MB/s.

It appears that I was a bit too blind expecting that gigabit upgrade would be as painless as 10Mbps and 100Mbps upgrades were years back. Apparently, the current PC hardware simply can't deliver gigabit. The integrated "gigabit" network cards apparently use PCI bus, which has theoretical maximum of one gigabit (32 bits * 33 MHz). But that's only in one direction, while gigabit ethernet is usually Full Duplex, so it would require two gigabits of bus.