Robert Jacobsen

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu 10.04 onto my MSI Wind U100. Earlier on I experienced problems with this, as many the laptop’s devices, in particular network adapter and video card, were unsupported by the Linux kernel, and the workarounds were unstable.

This time, however, it seemed to work much, much more flawless. I installed the Netbook remix, as this contains a GNOME version that is much more optimized for lower resolutions. The installation flawless, as I simply downloaded the ISO image, used UNetbootin to get it over onto a USB Memory Stick and then booted the computer from it. Very simple, very fast and very much working.

However; there are some things that I simply am not very fond of. The first thing is the Sentelic mousepad goes maniacly by tap-to-click, scrolling and whatnot. Fortunately, there’s a nice hack possible to remove at least its tap-to-click functionality, in addition to, in theory, scrolling.

Edit your /etc/rc.local file and include these lines just before the line saying exit 0

# Disable tap-to-click:
echo -n c>>/sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/flags

# Disable vertical tap scrolling:
echo -n \0>>/sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/vscroll

# Disable horizontal tap scrolling:
echo -n \0>>/sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/hscroll

Then run the /etc/rc.local file to ensure that these changes will be live before your next reboot:

sudo sh /etc/rc.local

However, this doesn’t remove the tap-to-scroll functionality, as it seems to be something the window manager enforces on you. If anyone knows how to fix this, please add a comment telling me how. It’s driving me nuts.

EDIT: I've now solved this problem! The script I originally picked up used echo -e \0, which didn't work as intended. Basically it just added a nil value to the end of the line. However, when I added echo -n \0 instead, it worked as intended by adding 0 as the value in those files. Joy!

The other thing is the stability of the wireless network. My wireless network adapter uses the Realtek RTL8187SE module, but it’s very unstable. This is due to our network using WPA-PSK as encryption, something which the RTL8187SE module. I read that it should be fixed in the 2.6.33 or 2.6.34 modules, but they’re not in the Ubuntu repository yet, and I don’t feel for recompiling the kernel myself right now. I’ll give it a shot later on, but for now it’s just annoying.

It’s peculiar, though, that I seem to lose the connection to the DNS, while it semi-works by using IPs. I don’t thin there’s anything wrong with the router, as I haven’t experienced these kinds of problems on any other computer in our house (and we have plenty).

All in all, I’m quite pleased with the installation, and if I can just smack these two annoyances down, I’ll be more than pleased.

Today I thought I'd get up to date with my Ubuntu installation, which has been more or less defunct since I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 in October. Ubuntu has always been a pain in the ass to set up, except the upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 which went smoothly. I had a hope that 9.10 would keep the stability from 9.04, but... No. It's bad.

Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu has done plenty of stuff that I like. For instance the new loading screen - it's great. But... It fails. When I try to log into the box. When I'm logging into my user, it just flashes and occupies only 1/4 of the screen, and looks severely bugged.

The problem is apparently that I have an ATi HD Radeon 2XXX XT (don't recall the number), and ATi's drivers is baaad. I mean, baaaaaaad. How come I can get 15000 images / 5 seconds in glxgears while it lags when I do simple things such as moving windows and minimizing/maximizing. But still... It worked close to perfect in 9.04.

I figured that I got some better responses when disabling Xinerama, which is needed for two screens, but then I got two distinct window managers on the different screens, and I hate that. That means that if I get a link passed on one screen and I click it, it opens a new browser there instead of passing it to the browser window already open in the other screen. It sucks.

Then I figured, “Hey, perhaps it will work better in KDE?”. I can't believe I even thought that. Of course it wouldn't work. It's KDE, it doesn't work per definition. It's also bloated and ... meh. I feel that GNOME is turning that way as well... More bloated than I'd like it. Why doesn't gnome-light have a meta package in Ubuntu? It's great, lightweight and awesome, just as it should be.

So I quickly uninstalled KDE and tried Xfce 4.6, and to my astonishment... It worked nicely. It loaded like 10 times faster than GNOME (which again loaded at least 10 times faster than KDE), and it had slick themes that complemented its lightweight feel.

Why is it that Ubuntu seems to be getting worse and worse? When I started using it way back, it actually worked and did what I expected it to. Now it's supposedly getting more and more generic, but for me it seems it's just losing more and more support for the hardware on the computers I use. The work computer is even a well-known generic brand, so there's no excuse for it not to work.

You might consider me a Mac fan for saying so, but I don't find any of the other operative systems on par with Mac OS X. Well, Windows has the slight advantage of games being mainly developed for it, but other than that, I think Mac OS X is the best operative system of them all.

Dear Robert Jacobsen,
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*jumps up and down*

I am testing out Google Chrome right now. Yes, that's right. It's available for download! And I must say, it's dazzling fast. Kind of scary. Simple and powerful.