Day in, day out…

UPDATE: Please refer to a more detailed account of this installation for more information

I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10 (The Edgy Eft) on my Sony VAIO VGN-T140P laptop. It dual boots with Windows XP Professional. This installation was the best Linux installation experiences I have had. But it was not as smooth as I had expected – as compared to Mac OS X or Windows – in that basic things should work out of the box. If I am trying to get a specialty video card or a TV tuner card to work, I can expect some experimenting and googling. I was expecting that with the standard hardware that is on this laptop, the installation would be a breeze – it wasn’t so.

Here’s what is working and what is not:

Widescreen

The laptop has a 1280×768 widescreen. Beginning with the Live CD Ubuntu did not auto detect it. I thought it would detect it when installation is done – it did not. The widescreen mode was not even in the options for me to set manually. I had to install 915resolution package to get it working. I used Synaptic Package Manager to install the package. After a restart, the widescreen was detected and properly set.

Wireless LAN

This was the sweetest surprise. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve had more than my share of trouble getting Wireless LAN working in the past. This time it was almost a breeze. Earlier I was using WEP shared Key authentication. I just had to do a little googling to learn that Shared Key does not work all that well. So I ended up using Open System. But later I switched to WPA-PSK TKIP authentication. I installed wpa_supplicant and edited the wpa_supplicant.conf to read:

ap_scan=2
  network={
  ssid="my_ssid"
  psk="my_passphrase"
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  proto=WPA
  pairwise=TKIP
}

Wireless is working like charm since.

Audio

This was an unexpected hiccup. I always took audio for granted. I had never had to spend such a long time figuring this out. It turns out, the audio is muted by default! I had to start ‘/usr/bin/alsamixer’ and unmute the Headphone audio. Then in Volume Control preferences, make enough tracks visible so that headphone switch is displayed then check it. The audio works well now

DVD, MP3 Playback

Another shocker. I’d expect this to work out of the box. I had to try out Totem, Mplayer, gXine… install plugins I don’t even remember, to be able to play DVDs. Even MP3 playback wasn’t working out of the box. After unsuccessfully trying out plugins for Totem, Mplayer, Noatun, Rythmbox – I ended up installing xmms to get MP3 playback

Touch Pad

I customized Synaptics Touchpad to suit me. I turned OFF right-top and right-bottom corners, they were causing unintentional right-clicks and pastes. This is how my InputDevice section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf looks:

Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
  Driver "synaptics"
  Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
  Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
  Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
  Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
  Option "RightEdge" "950"
  Option "MaxTapTime" "225"
  Option "MaxTapMove" "160"
  Option "MaxDoubleTapTime" "225"
  Option "SingleTapTimeout" "180"
  Option "MinSpeed" "0.40"
  Option "MaxSpeed" "0.90"
  Option "AccelFactor" "0.0060"
  Option "RTCornerButton" "0"
  Option "RBCornerButton" "0"
  Option "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

Volume/Multimedia buttons

This is something that is still broken. What makes it worse is that I have no clue how to solve this. All the volume and multimedia buttons trigger an event with same keycode. There is no way of distinguishing between volume-up and volume-down buttons. Or any of DVD play/stop/Forward/Backward buttons.