The World of a Penguin

It is my duty to inform you all that Pluto, my dear MSI S271 Laptop with Ubuntu has past away after an accident earlier this week . My attempt to bring Pluto to life has failed. He can't get any new power. I had hoped that his life should not end so fast.

Monday evening I accidentally dropped my laptop on the floor. At a first glance everything worked. But yesterday I observed that I was running on battery and that it did not charged. I checked the power adapter and it worked. First I run a new backup before further investigations. Afterwards I started unassemble the laptop. When I finally saw the power connector the positive poles sold were broken. When I dropped the laptop the power connector must have taken the hit. Today I started glue the plastic parts of the connector. Later I will solder the connector. I can only hope it will work. Wish me luck! Until the laptop is fixed I have to use my wifes laptop Piglet which also uses Ubuntu.

I wrote yesterday that hibernate did not work for me in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). The solution was easy, I changed from the closed source fglrx to the open sourced driver ati. After that can my MSI S271 hibernate again. Information about the bug in fglrx can be found here . I continue to play around with Gutsy. Network-manager is now working. Entered the configuration dialog and activated roaming configuration and then restarted the networking init-script: sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

After have used Ubuntu 7.10 a little more than a week I have got some experiences, bote positive and negative. I have not spend any time to try to fix the problems I have, yet. So there may be solutions to them. The computer I have used Ubuntu 7.10 is my laptop MSI S271 with a AMD-CPU and a ATI graphics card. Lets start with the bad things. Hibernation have stopped working and I have found on the forums that I am not alone. This is definitely my biggest problem so far. I got disappointed that I can't use Compiz. It may work if I change driver I have not tested that. Both the new open source driver xgl and the older one may be candidates. Currently am I using fglrx Several sites have written today that AMD/ATI has released a new driver, that may be another solution. The network manager seems still not working for me, but thats no big deal for me. I can use wireless and it is not to big deal to change SSID and network in the old fashioned way. Finally I have some problems with pid...

As I wrote a few hours ago it would be nice to be able to have a keyboard shortcut to enable/disable the touchpad. So when I started eat a chocolate cake I decided to fix the problem for Ubuntu and MSI S271. It should work in most GNOME-based Linux distributions and for most touchpads. First I wrote a script to toggle the touchpad ( download here ): #!/bin/bash if lsmod | grep "^psmouse " > /dev/null ; then /usr/bin/sudo /sbin/rmmod psmouse ; else /usr/bin/sudo /sbin/modprobe psmouse ; fi No rocket science here. Put the script some where on your harddrive, like /usr/local/bin. Add the following line in the end of your /etc/sudoers file: ALL ALL=(ALL)NOPASSWD: /sbin/rmmod psmouse, /sbin/modprobe psmouse This gives all users the right to enable and disable the touchpad. Register your the script as a keybinding command in gconf: gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 "/usr/local/bin/toggle-tp.sh" Register in the same way...

I have sometimes been frustrated on the high sensitivity of the touchpad at the MSI S271. Since its not a synaptic I have not had any way to disable it, I thought. Stupid me, it is very easy. I read this blog today and got annoyed why I did not thought of this my self. To disable it: sudo rmmod psmouse You will still be able to use any USB pointer device. To enable the touchpad again: sudo modprobe psmouse I have verified this on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), but it should work on any modern Linux. Once in the future I will connect this to some key combination.

This week I got a mail from a guy that wondered about CPU-scaling on MSI S271 running Ubuntu. Since I have had a lot to do I have not had the time to answer it yet. Today I planned to answer the mail, but I can't find it. It's gone, cant be find in my gmail-box. So if you who wrote it read this, you are welcome to contact me again. The mailer had some problems to get CPU-scaling work with Ubuntu using a AMD-CPU TL-56, which is the same CPU I have. There may be more people interested in this issue. For me the CPU-scaling worked out of the box. To check the CPU-scaling add the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor to the panel. In the kernel used in Feisty and earlier Ubuntu versions there is only support to for two speeds of AMD CPU:s, full and half speed. I have read somewhere that more scaling is on its way. It would be nice if someone could confirm this. As far as I know the CPU-scaling is included in AMD Powernow-technology. I have to scripts starting in my runlevel 2, check the /et...

When I ordered my MSI S271 I ordered it with 1GB of memory. When I bought more memory to my and my wifes cameras I also bought 1GB more to my laptop. Yesterday when the memory arrived I discovered that I not had the right Philips driver. A PH-00 screwdriver is needed. I bought one today and have now installed the extra memory in the laptop. I got a lot of help of the assembly guide from MSI. The assembly guide was a bit tricky to find since it was written for the MSI S262 (MS-1057), which is more or less the same computer as MSI S271(MS-1058). You need to go throw step 1-1 to 1-11 to expand the memory. Be very careful when you remove the keyboard in step 1-7 to 1-9, the keyboard cable is very fragile. Then you will see were to put the memory. It was covered with some aluminum foil in my computer. How to put the memory into the slot is described in step 3 in the assembly guide. The MSI S271 has two memory slots and can, according to the documentation , have 2GB of memory. The memory ty...

I have now installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on my wifes laptop from Zepto . It's a 6014W . I do my installation, as usual, through network boot (PXE). I noticed that Zepto has the same bug as my MSI S271 in BIOS for PXE-boot. It will only bot through PXE some times, with no clear pattern when. Unfortunately, I do not like the LVM-configuration in the text based installation. The installation worked smoothly, except the LVM-part. The cause was that I wanted to change what partitions to create. The resolution for the screen got right in the xorg.con-file, but not in the reality. The xorg.conf said 1280x800 but the display showed 1024x768. The solution, which is not obvious, is to install the package 915resolution. I would like to see this installed by default. No extra configuration needed. The default volume control must be remapped to work to another controller in the mixer. The sound worked out of the box. Other things we have tested are: The wireless and network manager works...

I tried to use earphones with my MSI S271 running Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) and it works. Yay!!! It did not work when I used Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) and now it works with no extra configuration. I can now listen to presentations and look on videos when traveling with train.

I installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) yesterday evening. I have tried it out a bit more today and continuously new nice features. One of the features I like most is that suspend works out of the box on my laptop (MSI S271). Another feature that I feel is very important is the suggestion feature where the desktop suggest what software you should install to be able to open a file. I will not repeat what every body else on the web are writing at the moment. The reception from boot the community and the press has been enormous. I have loved each new Ubuntu release more than the previous and 7.04 is not an exception. I already look forward for the next release, Gutsy Gibbon. I will also try to provide a more complete packaging of AppArmor for Ubuntu.

There have been a lot of discussion about Dell and Linux for a while. Both at Dell's Idea Storm , different news and blogs. It had not only been at Linux and Open source news sites, but also in major computer magazines. Dell seems and confess that they are confused about Linux and how to fit in their business model. Mark describes it pretty well in his blog . He also mentions that taking part in Microsofts marketing budget is important money. This is impossible for the suppliers to admit officially, but several suppliers have told me this of the record. When I bought my new laptop this Christmas, I looked for a specific configuration but also for the possibility to buy one without an OS or with Linux pre installed. Any Linux is better than Windows, even if I replace it with Ubuntu. At a fair here in Sweden early last fall a Dell representative told me that I could buy a laptop without Windows if I called them, but not on the site. When it was time for me to buy my laptop mailed Del...

I played with bluetooth on my MSI S271 yesterday. Ubuntu Feisty does not identify the built in bluetooth device out of the box, but it identified my old MSI bluetooth USB-stick. Bluetooth seems to work but I have to investigate some to see if I can get the internal to work.

In birthday present I gave my wife a new camera (Nikon Coolpix L5) which use SD-cards. This gave me a reason and a possibility to test the SD-reader in my MSI S271. It worked out of the box with Ubuntu Edgy. I also bought a card reader to my wifes computer. Its even had a Linux-support notice on the package and works fine with both Ubuntu Edgy and Dapper.

I have now had my laptop for a month. The laptop is great in size, weight, and speed. Most hardware components I have tried works. So I am happy. Okey, but what is not working? I have noted three things. First, the earphone connector does not work. According to some info on the net there are a patch for Alsa that should make it work. Maybe it will work in Feisty. I have not been digging deeper into this, my need have not yet been that big. The second thing is when you want to have dual head. I have had dual head running for years on Matrix and Nvidia cards on my desktop. But I do not get the ATI card to handle two screens with different resolution. It works fine if I have the same resolution, I can switch back and forth between only laptop and dual head. There are newer releases of the ATI-drivers on ATI's web site, but I have not tested these. I have until now only tested the drivers in Edgys multivers. I am using the closed source drivers since I want to use the hardware acceler...

I have tried to get the Network-manager working, but it does not want to. I have no problem at all to get the wireless net to work with the normal network configuration tool, it worked out of the box. But then when I install the Network-manager I do not get any wireless connection. It sometimes finds the network but can't connect. My laptop is a MSI S271 running Ubuntu Edgy and have a MSI wireless network card with a RaLink RT2500 chip. According to the hardware listing it should work with WEP and unencrypted. I also have a feeling that I only have 802.11b working, but not g. My router is a Linksys WRT54GS. Update: I have 54mbit/s according to: $ sudo iwlist ra0 rate ra0 12 available bit-rates : 1 Mb/s 2 Mb/s 5.5 Mb/s 11 Mb/s 18 Mb/s 24 Mb/s 36 Mb/s 54 Mb/s 6 Mb/s 9 Mb/s 12 Mb/s 48 Mb/s Current Bit Rate=54 Mb/s

Today, I did an upgraded of the BIOS in my laptop (MSI S271). I took a FreeDOS-image from the net and run dd to put it on a USB-memory-stick. I copied the unziped BIOS-files from MSI to the stick. Booted the laptop from the memory stick and run the BIOS update program. It is important to take the BIOS for the right type of hard disk and to have the computer connected to the power net. (Do not run on the battery!) Unfortunately, the problem with PXE-boot was not solved. All hardwarecomponents I have tested so far had worked without any configuration; wireless, sound, screen, touchpad, ethernet. Except that the screen resolution was not correct detected during the installation of Ubuntu Edgy. I have not tested firewire, bluetooth and the SD/MMC/MS-card reader yet. I have identified some activities that I have to do, to get things working like I want: encrypted home directory encrypted swap smoother switching between wireless and ethernet synchronization of the home directory and some oth...