Nienhouse

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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Inserting Charts/Graphs

I have recently been asked how to insert a graph in Apple’s iWork Pages program, so here is a short post about inserting a chart or graph in Pages.

Inserting Graphs

To insert a chart, just simply click on the “Charts” button on the tool bar then you can select what type of chart you would like.

You can also go to the “Insert” menu then go to “Charts”. This will give you a list of different charts you can insert.

Editing Graph Data

Once you add a graph, the “Chart Data Editor” should comes up. This will allow you to edit the data that the graph displays.

The "Chart Data Editor"

Formatting the Graph

Along with the Data Editor, the “Inspector” also comes up which gives you options for formatting how your graph looks.

The "Inspector"

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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After easily setting up your Gmail IMAP account in KMail (perhaps using a tutorial like the one featured on Jatecblog) you may wonder how to set up your outgoing SMTP acout too.  After some looking around, I don’t see much of anything on this subject other than people having problems setting it up, so I sat down to figure it and and I believe I have figured it out. Here’s how I went about doing it.

1. First off, open up KMail and go to “Configure KMail” under the Settings menu. This will bring up (as you might have guessed) the settings for KMail.

KMail: Settings > Configure KMail...

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I just moved over to KDE 3.5 (the good old days) and was migrating everything over to Kontact (which includes Akregator) and decided it would be nice to import my Google Reader feeds into Akregator. I’ve compiled steps on how I did this myself.

1. Head over to Google Reader (http://google.com/reader/) and go to the “Import/Export” tab under your settings.

Google Reader : Settings > Import/Export

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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

Windows Seven is Microsoft’s latest creation which is expected to be released by the end of 2010. I’ve been doing a little bit of messing around with it lately, so here is what I have seen. (Click on the screenshots to view them in their original size.)

The Installation (Screenshot1)

The installation was as easy as normal. All it requires you do during installation is select your language, keyboard layout, and time zone. Also, it sets up the user accounts and it asks what the desired computer name and partition layout is.

Over all, the installer interface looks nice and doesn’t take too long. The longest part of the install is copying and expanding the files that are used during the installation. After that, it is pretty fast. The only thing I have to say about the installer is that the window border doesn’t match everything else, perhaps having a full screen installer would look nicer.

Screenshot 1

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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.)

This tutorial explains how to set a specific default ALSA device for Amarok and Kaffeine. (This was tested in Amarok 1.4.9.1 and Kaffeine 0.8.6 both using xine on Kubuntu 8.04 [Hardy Heron]) The main advantage of this would be having your media go through one set of speakers and the system sounds going through another.

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