a wanderer in transit

I have been wondering why my Ubuntu install was somewhat slower than I expected. After some digging around, I figured it was due to a regression bug in Jaunty’s new Intel graphics drivers.

I first tried reverting the Intel drivers and after the downgrade, graphics performance was really good and the whole desktop was very snappy. BUT, and a large one at that, I noticed that the CPU was permanently scaled up to 100% and the CPU temperatures climbed pretty quickly. The fan was definitely working overtime. It didn’t look good when it went from 60°C to 90°C in about 15 minutes. It almost broke my heart to rollback the changes, but I didn’t think it was worth the risk of a meltdown.

This guide to Jaunty Intel graphics performance worked better for me. For what it’s worth, mine is a “Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME” and I did not define the tiling option. It was not as snappy as reverting the drivers, but I am reasonably happy with the improvement.

A friend asked if he should give Ubuntu a spin as a desktop OS. I was a little hesitant because to be painfully honest, it was not the easiest thing in the world if you are starting from zero Linux experience. Because of work and personal interests, this is not my first dip into Linux and I grateful for the little knowledge I had.

I realised that it’s one thing to ssh into a Linux server to setup up stuff every now and then, it’s a very different game to have Linux as your full-blown daily desktop system. Despite a much improved GUI, you need (or are willing to acquire) a certain level of comfort with a command line interface because it is often faster to do certain things from the terminal. I was in terminal alot during the first 2 days of setup to edit configuration files or troubleshoot through the logs. Ubuntu does provide a GUI-based log viewer and text editor, and Synaptic works well for add/removing programs. Almost 80-90% of the help I have used online assumes that the user is comfortable in terminal and solutions were often provided in the form of terminal commands or configuration files to be edited.

All that said, my experience of the whole installation process was fairly smooth sailing. What a difference a decade makes. Back in ’99, I literally sweat buckets trying to install Red Hat 6 on my then one and only family computer. I had chosen to upgrade the PC with an additional harddisk AND set the PC to dual boot Red Hat. Without enough money to get a replacement computer, I was worried sick that my dad would kill me if I were to accidentally destroy the PC. To his credit, Dad didn’t bat an eyelid when he saw me on the floor of his home office with the PC insides exposed and Red Hat materials strewn all over.

Fast forward back to today. Once I got configuration out of the way, it was a very pleasant surprise how little time it took for me to get fairly comfortable in Ubuntu as my main day-to-day home desktop OS. The experience is best described as… liberating. Shocking almost for this Windows user from the days of Windows 3.1.

I am still keeping my Windows installs because 90% of the day job requires that I stay on the Windows platform. Plus not all the software that I use actively are Linux-compatible or have comparable alternatives, and I am not quite willing to go with wine or the virtualization route unless I absolutely have to. Since no one is twisting my arm, Windows stays. For now at least.

So should you do it? Yeah, why not?

Trackpoint.Configuring the trackpoint sensitivity and speed settings was a piece of cake once you install configure-trackpoint but I am having this annoying problem with losing the trackpoint settings on resume (after a suspend/hibernate). Coming out of suspend/hibernate, the trackpoint will go back to its default extremely sluggish behaviour. And it’s not just me. I have tried everything I could think of (admittedly not much at all) which includes mucking around with the scripts in /etc/acpi/resume.d/ but nothing worked.

After working on this for 3 days, I am raising the white flag. As a workaround, I created a script in the home directory so that I can quickly jump into terminal and re-set the trackpoint settings on resume. This will have to do until something better comes up.

Hotkeys. Getting the hotkeys to work was pretty easy, just follow the instructions at ThinkWiki. FWIW, thinkpad-acpi works for me.

Talking about keys, I have had to re-learn a plethora of keyboard shortcuts. I have always been a keyboard kind of person so mentally re-mapping the Windows keyboard shortcuts (of which I have been using for some 10 odd years) does take a wee bit of effort.

I haven’t decided if I should enable the Windows key on the Thinkpad to make it usable. After a weekend of constant usage, I have, for the most part, worked out most of the keyboard shortcuts I regularly use. But it would be so much more economical to go Win+D than Ctrl+Alt+D just to jump back to Desktop, so I guess I will chalk that down in the new todo list.

I realise that it’s not a balanced view of the whole setup if I didn’t at least note down the stuff that did work.

Stuff that worked

• Flash – this worked right of the box for me.
• PDF – Didn’t need to install pdf reader at all, which is a nice change from Windows.
• Java JRE – Installed it with these instructions.
• Media Streaming – Excellent guide.
• Fonts – I did install msttcorefonts because for some reason the Google Reader fonts in Firefox were really ugly (IMHO) and installing msttcorefonts fixed that instantly. And wow, what a difference a little tweaking does.
• RAR – Just follow this. I used unrar.
• Upgrade to Firefox 3.5 – I am on the daily ppa using these instructions but I might switch out to using Proposed Updates since 3.5 is apparently there

To be honest, I wouldn’t have made it without some awesome resources online. My favourites are: Ubuntu Forums and ThinkWiki for Thinkpad-specific help.

After all the initial setup, I have drawn up a Nice-to-Have Todo List. This should set me up properly for the tinkering I like to do on the side.

Nice-to-Have Todo List

• Make vi/vim friendlier
• Setup svn client
• Install LAMP
• Setup WP nightly builds install
• Enable Win key. Or not.
• Install Skype, hopefully get webcam to work
• Install Eclipse

Hibernate. Suspend/sleep (suspend-to-ram) worked beautifully out of the box but hibernate (suspend-to-disk) wasn’t working. It would do an immediate resume once I put the system to hibernate from GNOME. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, until I initiated a pm-hibernate manually from terminal. Something about a swap file error came up and that was my ah-ha moment, quickly followed by a oh-duh moment.

This very clear and well-written HOWTO on the Ubuntu forum worked great for Jaunty as well.

Battery Thresholds. I wanted to set the Thinkpad battery charging thresholds to maximise the life of the laptop batteries. It was pretty simple because I had tp_smapi installed already when I was setting up hdaps. The instructions to edit /etc/sysfs.conf for the thresholds values are detailed in this HOWTO.

My settings are:
devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/start_charge_thresh = 40
devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/stop_charge_thresh = 90


To-Do List Updated

• Turn off super annoying shutdown beeps
• Fix trackpoint settings
• Get hot keys working (display brightness, volume control, display off)
• Verify that sleep / hibernate works properly (or fix it)
• Set battery charging thresholds

Still no luck with getting the trackpoint settings to stick after a suspend. While researching a fix for the trackpoint, I got distracted trying to get APS to work.

APS is sort of a harddisk shock protector available in recent models Thinkpads. This post worked great for me (kernel 2.6.28) to get the hdaps module running. For the hdapsd daemon, I did have to edit /etc/default/hdapsd to turn on FORCEENABLE. YMMV.

I had my 15 minutes of fun smacking my new Smackpad around. Now back to those damn trackpoint settings…