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Ubuntu Lucid Lynx

Well We are now around to Ubutu Lucid Lynx (10.04) and it looks like nothing has changed support wise, so to get the backlight to adjust, just add:

nomodeset acpi_backlight=vendor

to the “GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT” section, right after “quiet splash” and before the closing quotation mark. Now run

sudo update-grub

and you will be good to go! Reboot and try out your freshly brewed screen backlight adjustments!

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Gateway T-6345U

Ubuntu Karmic is out and many updates have lead to great improvements in compatibility with this laptop. Karmic runs perfectly out of the box except for one thing – screen brightness adjustment doesn’t work. The fix for this is quite simple though.

1. Open up /etc/default/grub in your preferred text editor as root (For a nice GUI interface, press Alt+F2 then enter the command “gksu gedit /etc/default/grub” and press enter.)

2. Once you have the file open, add “nomodeset acpi_backlight=vendor” to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT entry, save, and exit.

3. Now run (in a terminal – Applications menu > Accessories > Terminal) “sudo grub-update” and reboot your computer. Once started up you should be able to adjust the screen brightness!

Not using Karmic yet? Try the Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) Tutorial for getting this laptop working in Jaunty (9.04).

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AZ-Tucson_Flier-0, originally uploaded by tycheent.

The flyer says it all!

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What’s new in Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)?

I’ve been running the next version of Ubuntu in a virtual machine to test it and report my findings in an easily read list of things to come. Also, some more in depth information for those who want to know. Along with that I’ve been following the updates mailing list and will be using 9.10 in a VM as if it were my main OS.

Screenshots can be found here: http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/

After this post, I will be posting updates as they come in weekly. If they are important, however, I will post them the day they come out.

What’s new up in 9.10 as of today: (ordered by personal importance)

• Updated GDM with a new login screen – includes a session type switching menu and battery meter for laptops. http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/gdm.png
• Firefox 3.5!
• Empathy is used for Instant Messaging instead of Pidgin. The only downside is Empathy can’t combine contacts as far as I can see. http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/empathy.png
• New version of ALSA (1.0.20)
• Kopete has Facebook Chat support.
• Easy, seamless encryption of home directory is optionally available.
• Comes with UbuntuOne Sync tool pre-installed.
• The user switcher has been updated
  • Only contains Account Information, System Settings, Lock Screen, Switch User, and Quit (logout) buttons.
  • System Settings brings up a settings control panel with the contents of the System>Preferences and System>Administration menus.
  • Shutdown buttons were placed back in the System menu.
• The Accessories sub menu has a Swiss Pocket Knife as it’s icon

What needs to be fixed, added, updated:

• Nautilus crashes when you view “Computer” or any network folder.
• New Default theme (the screenshots are of a personally set theme)

Things I haven’t tested, but are in the upcoming release release:

• New Intel drivers (Accepted)
• New NVIDIA drivers

Next Release – Alpha 3 on July 23

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A Karmic Koala

Today I’ve decided to take a look at the Daily Release (07/15/09) of Ubuntu and Karmic Koala and post my findings on it to show you what too look forward to in October!

Due to its early stage, this version of Ubuntu does not have a graphical installer, so I won’t post any screenshots for the installation. There is a new feature, however, to seamlessly encrypt your home directory which I will be choosing for the purpose of testing new features. Unfortunately, I got an error saying it could not encrypt my home directory, but on the up side, everything else went fine. Edit: After boot up, it asked me if I would like to try and encrypt it again, and all went fine.

On first boot up, I see several things. For one, the version of the GRUB boot leader has been updated, along with Gnome.

The new version includes a nice looking login screen which is somewhat like that of OS X, and has a couple of changes. 1) The fast user changer no longer has shutdown functions because those have been placed into the System menu as they were before the fast user switcher came out. 2) Ubunutu has sub menus items!!! WOAH! There’s a Logic Games sub menu in the Applications menu under games. 3) Empathy is used as the default IM client.

There are also a couple of things that haven’t changed that might should be such as Firefox hasn’t been updated to 3.5 and also the Wallpaper is still the Jaunty defauly, but that probably won’t change till late betas or even RC.

All of my screenshots so far, and ones soon to come are/will be in http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/

I will be posting updated articles about the new features of Karmic Koala

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Gateway T-6345U

I recently got a new Gateway T-6345U laptop and (being a Linux lover) I installed Ubuntu Jaunty on it right after I made sure it all worked.

Installation

Installing Ubuntu was as easy as usual, though it went a little slow due to Gnome’s power manager’s lack of using the maximum CPU speed. Fortunately, there’s a panel applet that is installed by default to help with this. It’s called “CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor”. Due to the face that the Laptop has two CPUs, you will need two instances of this applet each set to monitor a different CPU.

First Run

When you reboot after installing it, everything works perfectly… well, almost everything. Three (sometimes vital) things don’t work right out of the box. These three are the desktop effects, adjusting the screen brightness, and the headphones and microphone jacks on the front. Don’t panic if your headphones or microphone doesn’t work, it’s a software issue which I have also found a fix for. Oh, ad you will probably want to add the CPU scaling applet to your panel.

EDIT 06/06/09: I have also found that when a memory card is put into the reader, it is recognized only as generic storage media. I will post a fix for this when/if I find one.

EDIT 07/14/09: I have added the steps to get the headphone and microphone jacks on the front to work properly.
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I’ve recorded a tutorial on how to set up a Wii Remote as a mouse in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), and also written a text version below the video if you would prefer to use that. There is also a text version of this tutorial for those who like to copy and paste below this.

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ATI

(Edit: this tutorial does not work with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and I will unfortunately not be able to update it for Karmic because I do not have the time nor hardware.)

(Edit 03/14/10: I no longer have the hardware to work on this issue. -This tutorial is no longer officially supported by myself- I personally suggest finding a way to get new hardware (NOT ATI – the driver aren’t worth it) and upgrading to the latest release of Ubuntu.)

Information on how to fix this issue in newer releases of Ubuntu is available.

Joseph Crowell
4/6/2010

Help with the open source ATI legacy drivers on Ubuntu 9.10:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

Follow that guide to the point where it links to “KMS with a Radeon card” then follow the link to here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/KernelModeSetting

and follow the instructions in the section KMS with a radeon card.

This worked perfectly for me on my ATI Radeon Xpress 200M.

With the newest realease of Ubuntu (9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) came a major problem with support for older ATI graphics cards. Though these cards work with generic drivers, the ability to use dual heads and more advanced configurations has been lost. You may think that you can simply head over to AMD’s ATI driver page and get a driver, but the latest version of Catalyst does not support the older cards. “Maybe I can just download an older version of the driver,” might be what you are thinking, but the old driver is not compatible with the new version of xserver that is included with Ubuntu Jaunty.

The only way to use the old driver is to downgrade your xserver, which is actually not too hard. As long as you have an internet connection and some terminal skills, you are set.

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Sometimes a corrupt installation package can corrupt your package management system leaving your Linux unable to install or on remove any packages (Software). Here is the message error I got from apt-get after trying to install ndas-admin for Ubuntu.
$sudo apt-get install mplayer   (or any package)
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: The package ndas-admin needs to be reinstalled, but I can’t find an archive for it. (this is the error)

I got stuck with this problem and this article fixed it right up!

Original post by ITechLog > Fix Broken package – Ubuntu

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The popular community developed Linux distribution “Ubuntu”, which releases every six months (a month after each GNOME) is having it’s 10 release this month! This upcoming release is version 9.04 which is named “Jaunty Jackalope”

Here I’ve compiled a list of all of the Ubuntu releases with their release dates, names, and version numbers.

1. October 26, 2004 – Ubuntu Warty Warthog (4.10)
2. April 8, 2005 – Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog (5.04)
3. October 12, 2005 – Ubuntu Breezy Badger (5.10)
4. June 1, 2006 – Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06 LTS*)
5. October 26, 2006 – Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10)
6. April 19, 2007 – Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04)
7. October 18, 2007 – Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10)
8. April 24, 2008 – Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04 LTS*)
9. October 30, 2008 – Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10)
10. April, 2009 – Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04)

(*LTS – Long Term Support. Releases with long term support are released every two years, and supported for three years (Desktop) or five years (Server) after the release.)

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