laptop

For those of you running Gnome, this will help you tweak your power management settings.

Ubuntu provides a nice little power management utility in System + Preferences + Power Management, and it includes a checkbox to tell it to dim your backlight when on battery power to save your battery time. By default, it will drop your backlight by 50% from your regular setting. I find that my backlight is bright enough that I can run as low as 30% brightness on battery and be happy, but I like full backlight strength when I'm running on AC power.

There's a quick and easy tweak you can do to change how far to drop the backlight when you're running on battery power. To do this, open Applications + System Tools + Configuration Editor. Be advised that you can do serious damage to your system setup in here, so be careful to only change what you understand.

Once you're in the Gnome configuration editor, browse down to:
/apps/gnome-power-manager/backlight
and look for "brightness_dim_battery".

This setting is the percentage to dim FROM whatever it's at before you lost AC power. In other words, if you normally run 100% and want to run at 30% when on battery, enter 70 here.

If you run a wireless network and Linux, Kismet is a tool you must have.

More than just a wireless sniffer, Kismet will let you list all access points in range and what channel they are running on. That's great information to have when you're deciding what channel to set your wireless access point to.

Configuring Kismet may seem a bit confusing at first, but there's really only one line you need to change in /etc/kismet/kismet.conf

source=iwl4965,wlan0,iwl4965

That's driver,device,name - I believe the name is arbitrary and can be set to anything, but I set mine to the same as the driver.

This line sets the source for packets. I found the iwl4965 (my wireless card driver) through a couple of steps.

Using the following command:

dmesg | grep Wireless

I was able to determine that I was running the Intel 4965 wireless chipset. From there, I simply looked on the Kismet website to find that iwl4965 was the correct driver name. Note I did not find this information in my lsmod results.

After adding the appropriate line to the /etc/kismet/kismet.conf file, simply run:

sudo kismet

That will start both the server and client and log the client into the server. While running, I was unable to do normal wireless activity, and actually had to reboot or use the wireless button on my laptop to cycle the wireless state before the wireless would work properly again.

Once Kismet has started, press "q" to close the help screen, arrow down to any access point and press "i" to get more information about the network.

Check the channels of all the other access points in range and make sure your access point won't conflict. The only channels that don't overlap are 1, 6 and 11. In my case, my two neighbors are using 1 and 6 so I chose 11.

Kismet can do much more than this, and is a great analysis tool. It will track rogue MAC addresses that are probing your network, allow you to integrate with WEP security programs and much more.

I had three more issues that occurred after upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10. First, it switched the sound system over to "pulseaudio" which broke the mic input and made audio output somewhat scratchy. I didn't realize this until I tried to use Skype. The solution:

sudo apt-get uninstall pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound
sudo reboot

I usually use an external mouse so I also didn't realize that the touchpad worked perfectly at the GDM login window, but after logging in it would stop and no amount of coaxing would bring it back. Turns out the upgrade disabled the checkbox under System + Preferences + Mouse + Touchpad. Just plug in a USB mouse and check that box again and the touchpad worked beautifully.

One last thing is that my changes to X to enable the media buttons on the side of the laptop no longer functions. I haven't found a solution to this one yet, but probably is related to the changes in the way X handles all the input devices.

On a whim I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 8.10 on my Acer Aspire 5920 laptop. Mostly it went smooth but I had two problems.

First, Macromedia wouldn't respond when it tried to download the Flash plugin. Unfortunately the installer wouldn't give up and after 19 automatic retries to connect to fpdownload.macromedia.com (each taking 3 minutes) I finally hit CTRL-C and killed it. After the upgrade I had to open a console and "sudo dpkg --configure -a" to finish the setup and then reboot. What's weird is that Flash still worked after the failed install.

Upon reboot, my wireless wouldn't work. The network manager applet wouldn't even show in the panel. Doing ifconfig from a console showed the wlan0 device but nothing would bring it online. I fished my 30' long network cable out of the closet that I use for these circumstances and hardwired my laptop to the router.

A little research found that some people having this problem manually downloaded linux-firmware from the repositories and reinstalled it. After download, from within the directory where the .deb file is located simply do:

dpkg --install linux-firmware*

After that, I rebooted and my wireless asked for my wep password again. All is well in the world.

Follow this at your own risk. It's pretty involved and you could screw up your X installation to the point that your xwindows won't start.

This tutorial was written for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy.

The Acer 5920 has a beautiful big touchpad. Big enough that your hands will hit it while typing. The typical tutorial in Ubuntu of how to fix that doesn't work because the Acer 5920 actually contains TWO touchpad devices - the media buttons on the right side are also a touchpad, and they report as the default touchpad.

So, here's a tutorial I've patched together from various sources that will help you do two things. One, it will let you configure the media keys. Two, it will let you set things up so that when typing the touchpad tapping is disabled for two seconds (while still allowing the buttons and movement.)

First, install the following:

sudo apt-get install xbindkeys

Then, backup your xorg.conf file:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.original

Now we need to make some changes to your X configuration:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Within this file, we need to do a couple of things. We want to replace the default touchpad and mouse setup. Comment out your original "Synaptics Touchpad" input device section like so:

#Section "InputDevice"
#       Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
#       Driver          "synaptics"
#       Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
#       Option          "Device"        "/dev/psaux"
#       Option          "Protocol"      "auto-dev"

I just picked up an Acer Aspire 5920. I did a bit of research and people seem to be having good luck with them with Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.

Being brave, I never even booted into Vista. I went straight to Ubuntu.

First, I downloaded and installed from the 64 bit Alternate install CD. I used the alternate install because I wanted to encrypt the hard drive and the installer has full support for installing to an encrypted partition. Being a laptop, I don't want my files floating the Internet if someone steals it.

After install, I opened the volume control and enabled the "Surround Sound" output and set the volume on it. I also installed the restricted nVidia driver. The wireless worked out of the box, once I figured out where the button was on the laptop to enable it. The webcam worked perfectly.

The screen on this thing is gorgeous. The only downside I see is that my palms constantly hit the touchpad (which is HUGE) when I'm typing.

The wireless strength is amazing. It's got full bars where other laptops I've used in my office would only have 1/2 signal strength. It does put off a bit of heat, though.

All in all, the best Linux laptop decision I could have made I think. Literally no hassles to set up Ubuntu 8.04.

I went looking for a new laptop. Whatever I get, it's going to run Linux, so I thought I'd look at Newegg first for anything with Linux pre-installed. I know there have been advances in retailing for Linux machines, and was hopeful.

Boy was I surprised that every Linux laptop (not talking about Eee PC's) was significantly underpowered. It's like they assume if you want a free OS that you want a nearly free laptop. Sure the prices were great, but there was nothing with more than a GB of RAM or a decent sized screen. I'm also not willing to pay a premium to get a Linux laptop, I just want something with a comparable price to a Windows based laptop in the $1000 - $1200 range.

And, I actually looked at Mac laptops, but c'mon Mac fans... you've got to admit they are seriously overpriced.

So I've ordered an Acer Aspire AS5920 that comes with Vista Home (32 bit.) The first thing that will happen is that I will repartition the hard drives wiping what's there entirely, and install Ubuntu Linux (64 bit.) Then I will very carefully remove the Vista serial number from the bottom of the laptop and hold a ceremony while I burn it by candle fire.

So there. What a waste of money buying an OS I'll never use, but I'm sure Microsoft doesn't put any pressure on laptop manufacturers to include their OS. They wouldn't do that, would they?