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AZ-Tucson_Flier-0, originally uploaded by tycheent.

The flyer says it all!

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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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 01/05/10: I am currently testing Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) and in the process I will see if it is possible to accomplish the chore of getting  these older cards working.)

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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