Chris Moates' adventures in the land of Mox » Ubuntu

Installing Ubuntu on a Gateway LT3103u

cmoates — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:18:43 +0000

The next OS (and last) that I care about getting working on the Gateway LT3103u is Ubuntu. This is the OS that I use day to day, and so the most interesting to me.

Unfortunately, the current release of Ubuntu, 9.04, is currently using kernel 2.6.28, which isn’t new enough to have working wireless drivers for the chipset in the LT3103u. Fortunately, Ubuntu has a very clean way to upgrade to their “testing” release:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

After having done this, wireless works perfectly. The beta of 9.09 Karmic Koala includes kernel 2.6.30. Other devices seem to work well, so far, with one exception: video.

Video was working fine until I closed the lid, at which point it never recovered. So, based on some data I read elsewhere, I disabled DRI using the following in xorg.conf:

Option “DRI” “off”

This is highly suboptimal, as DRI dramatically increases X11 performance. However, this does seem to have fixed the problem. I’ll do some more research to see if I can figure out a better solution. But in short, Ubuntu works well if you’re willing to run pre-release software. If I figure out anything else of note, I’ll be sure and update this post.

Numeric keypad madness in GNOME

cmoates — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:01:56 +0000

I’m not sure if it is a GNOME default or an Ubuntu default, but in the Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty alpha, my numeric keypad was not working. Further examination showed that it was working perfectly, as an alternate mouse movement device. That’s not nearly as useful to me. Thankfully, reading a little bit led me to find the System->Preferences->Keyboard applet. In the “Mouse Keys” tab, there’s a checkbox for “Pointer can be controlled using the keypad.”

I unchecked this and voila, I have a working numeric keypad again. Posted in hopes of saving other people the same grief.

Change is hard

cmoates — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:51:16 +0000

After mucking around all morning with Fedora 11, I ended up putting Ubuntu 9.04 onto a disk so that I’d have something to work with tomorrow.

It’s not that Fedora 11 is bad, but it’s different. Different in that way where you switch which cabinets have the cups and plates, and you’re just annoyed that you keep looking in the wrong place for something. I didn’t erase the Fedora 11 disk, so I’ll try it out some more some other weekend, but I needed a workable system for tomorrow, that wasn’t causing me grief.

In other news, I purchased Left4Dead on Steam, and I see why people like it. It’s a bit gory for my tastes, but man, it’s just a lot of fun to knock down wave after wave of zombies with an assault rifle.

Maggie (my wife) finally figured out what pictures she wants in frames, so I spent half the day cropping, printing, and framing. Now we just have to decide how they go on the wall.