1. Go to System > Administration > Language Support > Install / Remove Languages
2. Select Chinese (simplified) and check all the components available
3. From Synaptic Package Manager, install scim and scim-pinyin
4. Start Terminal and run im-switch -c and choose “scim-bridge”
5. Reboot
6. Use control-space to toggle the Chinese/pinyin IME 就可以写中文了！

Help gleaned from here mainly.

sudo apt-get install vim

For starters, this will allow you to use the cursor keys (up/down/left/right) properly in insert mode and you will be able to use custom colour schemes for syntax colouring. My favourite scheme so far is the wombat.

There are probably much better editors available if you do a lot of coding. I use Eclipse when I need a full IDE, but for my dabble-ish codes on the laptop, vim is usually quite sufficient.

Karmic Koala popped out of the oven recently, and I decided to do my first upgrade. My gut told me that it was not a great idea to jump on Karmic so early, but my itchy fingers got ahead of me.

It was a Bad Idea™.

I should have done a trial run with the Live CD, but against my better judgement, I decided to do a direct upgrade. Unfortunately, the upgrade through the Update Manager did not work for some reason (some silly reason I cannot remember). I then downloaded a copy of the alternate installer and upgraded from the mounted iso.

Perhaps it was the tweaking on Jaunty that did me in, but the new 2.6.31-14 kernel just wouldn’t go beyond the loading screen, not even in Recovery mode. I was able to get further with the original 2.6.28 kernel but had strange problems like the screen occasionally blanking out on me after logging in. Hibernate also stopped working completely. No amount of tweaking helped.

Sigh, not good. My only option was to do a fresh install; but will it be Jaunty or Karmic?

Being a sucker for punishment, I grit my teeth, backed up my home folder and started with Karmic from scratch. With a little hindsight from my previous Jaunty install, I set aside a swap partition this time to save myself a little heartburn and it seemed to have worked. Hibernate/sleep worked perfectly this time. I had to install configure-trackpoint again to fix the sluggish trackpoint but a major consolation was that settings stayed this time! No more lost settings after waking up from hibernate. Yay!

Lots of little stuff here and there I had to tweak again.

• configure-trackpoint
• Shiki-Colors – theme
• tp_smapi – for HDAPS (Thinkpad only)
• tpb – for hotkeys (Thinkpad only)
• Workaround to turn off the laptop backlight
• msttcorefonts – fonts
• Compiz Config Settings Manager
• Media streaming
• Google Chrome

There’s probably more to do over the next couple of days, but I am grateful for the little improvements I’ve noticed in Karmic over Jaunty:

• Boot up / hibernate / wake seems a little faster After a couple of reboots later, no it was not really faster. If anything, it actually felt slower. And there’s still a weird momentary flicker now and then
• Intel graphics worked better – no hack needed so far
• Windows key worked OOTB
• No more irritating beeps!

I am slightly bummed that there’s no option to customise the login screen anymore in Karmic, and I am not too comfortable with having the username displayed by default.

Overall, Karmic does feel a little improved over Jaunty, probably due in no small part to the Hundred Paper Cuts project (I love this definition of a paper cut). I really wished the upgrade wasn’t such a disaster personally, but I did know better than to jump in so early.

Fortunately, this was my personal laptop and didn’t really have that much data or software installed. So a wipeout upgrade was more annoying than painful for me. Still, I can’t recommend that if any “Joe Schmoe” do this without some technical assistance on standby.

In the meantime, if you intend to upgrade to Karmic, earn some karma points first and go read the release notes will ya?

If you’re multibooting, you may need to tweak Grub / System > Administrator > StartUp-Manager (tutorial).

As a side effect of the kernel cleaning, I had to rebuild the tp_smapi / hdaps modules for the updated kernel. Good tutorial here worked for my X60. I took the chance to also install the gnome-hdaps-applet (instructions) to get a visual indicator of the APS in action. Yay!

So I decided to give it another stab at reverting drivers. I don’t know what’s different, but for some reason, it worked this time. No 100% CPU scaling or overheating. Hmm. Oh well, at least it works now!

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.

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?

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

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

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…