Archivo de la etiqueta: Ubuntu

Segundo monitor en el Lenovo T400 con Jaunty

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A couple of weeks ago I upgraded the laptop I use at work to Jaunty, and since then I couldn’t get the external monitor to work properly.

This laptop has two graphic cards: an Intel one integrated on the mainboard, which uses few battery power; and an ATI one with all the bells and whistles, which of course takes more battery. On Windows the graphic driver can change from one to the other on the fly, but on Linux you can’t. You need to go to the BIOS and select one, disabling the other one.

So since I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04, I the Intel card (which is the one I always use, I use this laptop for work only so I’d rather have half an hour of extra battery than ultra-fast OpenGL… heck, I even have compiz disabled) wouldn’t even boot, X hanged while booting when using that card. And with the ATI card and the fglrx driver, getting the external monitor to work is a PITA. And I need it, as from time to time I give presentations and training sessions and need to hook the laptop to a projector.

I finally found the solution on a Ubuntu forum somewhere (lost the link, sorry): uninstall the fglrx driver! Even if I didn’t use it, even if the ATI card was disabled on the BIOS (wouldn’t even show on lspci) and on the xorg.conf file was using the Intel driver and not the fglrx one, if this driver was installed X would crash when using the Intel card. Uninstall it and voila! The Intel card works again and so does the external monitor configuration applet. Weird.

Ubuntu 9.04 en un Lenovo T400

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Un par de URLs útiles para acabar de configurar y optimizar el sistema en un Lenovo T400:

Destacar en el 1er enlace por el final, la guía para configurar el aparcado automático de los cabezales del disco duro en función de si el acelerómetro detecta movimiento (APS), al estilo de lo que llevan los MacBook Pro. ¡Funciona!

vmware en Ubuntu 8.04

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We use vmware quite extensively at work, to test different versions of the software we develop, to run simulations of a particular client’s environment, etc. I even have several VMs on my laptop just in case.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 the compilation process of vmware’s vmnet and vmmon modules gave an error. Today I needed to use it and after googling around a bit I’ve found this solution:

Actualizando a Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04

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I’ve just upgraded the laptop I use at work (a Dell Inspiron 6400) to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04. The upgrade process in itself went like a breeze, but after rebooting I’ve had two issues:

  • The touchpad wouldn’t work. In the end I’ve commented out all the Synaptics configuration from the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, both the “InputDevice” block and the line on the “ServerLayout” block. I’ve left only the “standard” mouse driver config pointing to /dev/input/mice, that gets all the Touchpad events too (the scrolling wouldn’t work but at least the touchpad itself does… I’ll have to further look into this).
  • The wifi card didn’t work either. I’ve been using it with ndiswrapper, as the old bcm43xx driver gave me problems with some wireless networks. Now neither driver was working, and there were lots of messages from a new “b43” driver complaining that I should go to the LinuxWireless site and download a new firmware from there. So I’ve done it, following the firmware installation instructions there, and now the wireless interface is working again (I still haven’t tested it against some of the networks that gave me problems in the past with the bcm driver).

Broadcom Wireless en Linux

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At work I have a Dell laptop with a Broadcom BCM94311MCG wireless card:

# lspci
...
0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 01)
...
# lspci -n
...
0b:00.0 0280: 14e4:4311 (rev 01)
...

The drivers that Ubuntu installs by default were giving me lots of headaches depending on the network’s access point: on some of them the card worked OK; on some others I kept loosing the connection every few minutes, or I couldn’t connect at all. I never found out if the problem was the encryption algorithm in use, or the wifi a/b/g/whatever protocol. Bottom line is the driver worked on some networks but didn’t on some others.

A co-worker told me he had the same problem until he switched to the ndiswrapper driver, so reluctantly I tried it. It work great. :)
More info here:

Command Line

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I start here a new section on my blog, Command Line (feed), where I will comment on UNIX commands (Linux and MacOS X mainly) that I find useful on my daily work. The articles will range from a very obscure command that I didn’t knew of until some day I needed something like it and found it and saved my day, new or creative ways to use old commands, or small shell-scripts that can make your life easier.

Unless otherwise specified, all these commands are just an “aptitude install” away on Debian and derivate distros (on Ubuntu they may be on universe or multiverse). For RedHat, CentOS, etc. there’s a good chance that you’ll find RPM packages on Dag Wieërs’ repository.

So, without further addo, the first command on the next entry. :)