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?

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…

I kept the old XP partition (part nostalgia, part just-in-case) and carved out a new partition using GParted from the free space left after purging out my data from XP. After a not-so-quick defrag, GParted run without a glitch but was 12am really a good time to start laptop surgery? Probably not. But I digress.

Fast forward 2 hours later (the Ubuntu install itself didn’t take long), I was looking at a spanking new install of “Jaunty”.

For the most part, the install was similar to my previous install. Audio, video, wireless worked right out of the box but the default trackpoint settings was terribly slow. I am pretty certain this wasn’t a problem when I was playing with Hardy Heron on the same laptop. I messed around with the Mouse settings a little but it had no effect at all. WTH? I decide to leave the good fight for another day and shut the laptop down… which promptly brought me my next WTH? moment. For some reason, Jaunty shuts down with a freaking beep through the PC speakers. At 2am in the morning, it gave me a pretty good scare.

Why is Jaunty using the PC speaker in this day and age? And for a simple shutdown? Completely annoyed, I started up the laptop again to try to turn it off via System > Preferences > Sound. No dice. WTH? After some furious googling for the issue, I chose to disable the pcspkr module in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf (not /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist) hoping to cut off the PC speakers completely. Still no dice. Half-a-dozen reboots with the corresponding beeps later, I surrendered and went to bed, with echoes of the beeps ringing in my ears…

A fresh day but not so fresh brain later (try sleeping 3 hours and then going to work), I gave it another stab. I am telling ya, this beep was taunting me. I decided to take a more drastic option. Kill the pcspkr module.

$> sudo rmmod pcspkr
$> ERROR: Module pcspkr does not exist in /proc/modules


Ah ha! Let’s take a look at the modules.

$> sudo cat /proc/modules


Hmmm snd_pcsp looks suspect. Could it be? I added “disable snd_pcsp” to blacklist.conf and 2 reboots later to be sure. Silence. BWAHAHA…. Take that PC Beep! Girl Geekery wins again.

That left the trackpoint settings to fix. I got it sort of working after much mucking around. But still not quite perfect. I will write it up once I get it working.

I drew up a to-do list before I can use this install on a regular basis. At least I knocked one out.

• 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

Update: I am not alone. I like how someone called it “the most annoying sound known to man”… Indeed.