phees' dissections - thinkpad

My transition to Ubuntu 8.04 (Conclusion)

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:00:00 +0200

I must say that my recent system upgrade from Ubuntu/Xunbuntu 7.10 to 8.04 went with astonishing little fuss. As I described earlier, I had the usual problems with my broadcom WLAN driver and some trouble getting Compiz to work on my outdated graphics card, but all together the transition was easy and smooth.
And I like a lot of the changes:

Xfce

As for now I'm running Ubuntu on my not too young T40 Thinkpad, I am using the xfce desktop environment. It proved faster than gnome (which seems to have become better with 8.04, though) and I like the xfce panels better.

Compiz

I described in another post how I got compiz running on my old and unsopported ATI Mobility 7500. All it needed was some sieving of ubuntuforums.org. I would have liked a commandline option to force compiz to start without checks and a more informative comment, why compiz wouldn't start, but for any user who would risk using compiz on unsupported hardware it shouldn't be too hard to find the solution. As far as I think, it's too bad, ATI doesn't provide linux drivers for their old hardware.
Another point was, that the compiz-settings from 7.10 didn't seem to work under 8.04 (especially the window-rules in the animation settings). The solution was to click the default setting buttons, apply and re-insert the rules from before. That's considered a bug, and will be corrected, I think.

The applets have become more userfriendly. The nm-applet, for instance, launches the network-admin application without the usual gksudo password dialog. If you need, you can unlock it with a button. The Edit Wireless Networks-option, which let's you edit the preferences for all known networks used in DHCP mode, is well done. There is a small icon in the tray to safely unmount removable drives and media. The CPU graph applet (xfce) is much improved and launches the top command in a terminal as default on leftclick.
A lot of the software is updated, a major libc update found place, to let packages like flightgear-1.0 finaly find their way to Ubuntu.
My overall sensation is, that everything is a bit more tidy, neat and grown up.

Problems

All together I experienced no major problems (other than those mentioned above). Some minor things were corrected by reinstalling the according software packages or mostly resetting some preferences.

Conclusion

Considering, that I run linux on a heavily unsupported platform (not the Thinkpad itself, but my broadcom wireless and ATI graphics cards), in retrospect, the update process felt less risky than a Windows XP service pack installation. Much less!
If you don't mind fiddling with some settings, just do the upgrade. If you do, read the Ubuntu forums, check for problems with your hardware and wait for the moment it feels safe enough to make the change (maybe wait for 8.10). Since Ubuntu 8 is a long time support version, it should be worth a wait.

My transition to Ubuntu 8.04 (Compiz)

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:02:00 +0200

After having solved the WLAN problem, I am now trying to get Ubuntu 8.04 (or hardy heron) to deliver what version 7.10 did on my T40.

Getting Compiz to work

I loved Compiz. Using xfce for speed, it worked very nice and fast and some functions make work a little easier (not wobbly windows but the zoom feature and some other plugins are great).
Now, what happened? My T40 laptop has an ATI Mobility 7500 graphics card and that is blacklisted for Compiz in 8.04. It wasn't in 7.10. After an hour of surfing the ubuntuforums, I found a solution from a user named Rocket2DMn. I tried it and without a hitch, compiz works on my machine.

UPDATE: The Ubuntu developer RAOF explained how to solve the problem in a more secure way: [...] editing /usr/bin/compiz is fragile; your edits will be lost if and when compiz is updated. The other sticky describes a better way - namely, to add SKIP_CHECKS=1 to your user's configuration with


mkdir -p ~/.config/compiz/
echo SKIP_CHECKS=yes >> ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

Now compiz runs without a hitch.

The original idea to forbid users of the open source ati and radeon drivers the use of compiz is, that these drivers are not officially supported by compiz. Too bad!
But, well, now it's working for me, again...

Please be aware, that even if it works with my machine it might not work with yours and - who knows - might even damage your computer or empty your fridge. Don't make me responsible, it's your decision to try!

My transition to Ubuntu 8.04 (Broadcom/WLAN)

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:47:00 +0200

I recently upgraded my Ubuntu distro to 8.04 and lost my wireless. Broadcom wireless card drivers are not installed automatically, I think, because of copyright stuff. I'm glad I found a blog entry at davidwatson.org which tells exactly what to do:

Broadcom BCM4306 on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

(...) If you're using a wireless laptop with Feisty, and like me, you've got a Broadcom bcm4306 card, you actually don't have to do much of anything to get wireless working with Feisty.
Simply install the package bcm43xx-fwcutter from your favorite package manager (synaptic, adept, or good ole apt-get or aptitude) and it will prompt you to download and install the firmware required for the Broadcom chipset. Once this install is complete, just reboot and the wireless chipset will connect without issue.
UPDATE
Thanks to Thomas who commented on this post below:
Just wanted to update everyone on bcm43xx-fwcutter. Because the boredlinks.googlepages.com/wl_apsta.o is no longer existent the setup is not automatic as it was before. Now you must download the driver yourself and extract the firmware and place it in your /lib/firmware folder.
Link to driver:
http://sidulus.textdrive.com/bcmwl5sys.zip
Command:
sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware ~/Desktop/bcmwl5.sys

The whole thing took me about 5 minutes and finally WLAN is working again!

Update: The link of the blog entry isn't usable anymore (http://davidwatson.org/2007/05/broadcom-4306-on-feisty-fawn.heml" title="broadcom and linux), that's why I copy/pasted the main part from David Watson's site.

Xfce on a cube

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:05:00 +0200

I tried out gnome on my T40 laptop, but after being used to the quick xfce4 desktop environment, it's reactions on events and input felt too slow and so I switched back.

But I missed compiz! Damn, it's addicting!
I tried to run it after starting a standard xfce session and it worked perfectly. Based on that, this is how I made xfce/Compiz/Emerald my default setup:
After surfing the web on how to make Compiz/Emerald the default window manager, I decided not to fiddle with the /usr/bin/startxfce4 settings but made a short script which I added to the autostart list. The script (I called it start-compiz) looks like this:


#!/bin/bash
#start compiz
compiz --replace &
#sleep a moment to ensure compiz had enough time to step in place
sleep 3
#start emerald
emerald --replace &

Now make it executable (in xterm enter chmod +x start-compiz), add it to the autostart list at Programs > Settings > Autostartd Applications.
And that's all. No Xgl-starting problems, no hassle with the startup scripts.

It's true, in some way it's stupid to let the fxwm window manager startup just to kill it again and start emerald instead, but the time taken by this procedure is too short to bother me. And this way is definitely the easiest way to get compiz/emerald working on xfce, that I could find.
If you know an even easier one, please let me know.

tpb can look good

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:15:25 +0200

I love tpb!
It's a linux program to manage the Thinkpad's buttons. Agreed, in default configuration it is an ugly blotch on your screen, but with a bit of tuning, it can look quite nice and nearly sexy.

Let's work on that:

Launch a terminal and open your tpb config file with sudo gedit /etc/tpbrc (or use your preferred editor insteat of gedit) and scroll down to the line named ##OSDFONT.
The first thing you would change is the font size. I can live with lucidatypewriter, lucida itself is another nice looking font. Usage and configuration of fonts were extremely tricky on my machine. I use this setting:


## OSDFONT
# Defines the font for the on-screen display. You may use "xfontsel" to choose
# one. Default is the default font of the xosd library.
#
OSDFONT     -*-lucidatypewriter-*-*-*-*-*-70-*-*-*-*-*-*

Now let's adjust the colors. As stated use the little program "xcolors". It should be available via your linux distribution, just start it from a terminal. If you don't have xcolors, try some color names, even with the more exotic hues such as salmon, you might guess just right.
I have a window decorations theme with orange in it, so a darker kind of orange is my main color for tpb:


## OSDCOLOR
# Defines the color of the on-screen display. You may use "xcolors" to choose
# one. Default is BLUE.
#
OSDCOLOR    DarkOrange1

I don't like a shadow beneath the text. By setting the shadow offset to 0, it will be just under the text which means, not visible. The shadow color doesn't matter now.


## OSDSHADOW
# Defines the offset of the font shadow in pixels. Default is 2.
#
OSDSHADOW   0

## OSDSHADOWCOLOR
# Defines the color of the shadow of the on-screen display. You may use
# "xcolors" to choose one. Default is BLACK.
#
OSDSHADOWCOLOR grey12

Now I set the outline to 1 pixel of grey


## OSDOUTLINE
# Defines the width of the font outline in pixels. Default is 1.
#
OSDOUTLINE   1

## OSDOUTLINECOLOR
# Defines the color of the outline of the on-screen display. You may use
# "xcolors" to choose one. Default is BLACK.
#
OSDOUTLINECOLOR grey12

Save the file, kill a possibly running tpb with sudo kill `pgrep tpb` and restart it with sudo tpb -d.

And that's it. Suddenly the big and clumsy tpb on screen display looks sleek (and nearly sexy). Try it!

To compare with my settings I include my own config file: tpbrc, it should be located in /etc/
Please be aware, that I do not give any guarantees that it couldn't harm your system, but as far as I can say my T40 is running just fine with it.

Thinkpad buttons and gnome DO mix!

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:35:48 +0200

With me switching from xfce to gnome desktop, synaptic automatically removed tpb, a program that manages the special buttons of my T40 Thinkpad. The reason I could find on ubuntu forums was a comment, it would interfere with the internal hotkey management of gnome. Distrustful as I am, I chose to verify that issue...
As the volume buttons controlled the mixer and my T40's internal hardware mixer simultanously, I just removed the bindings for volume control in System>Preferences>Keyboard Shortcuts. But now I missed the sleek and decent (and with my settings black/orange! :) on screen display provided by tpb.

Reinstalling tpb using synaptic would have resulted in removing the gnome desktop (!) what I didn't generally think of as a great idea. At last I downloaded the source of tpb from the tpb homepage and installed with configure; make; sudo make install.
At startup of my gnome session tpb is called by tpb -d (-d to run it as service). Just add this as a startup program under System>Preferences>Sessions.

And what can I say? It works like a charm, no problems with the gnome hotkey settings, even with volume hotkeys assigned. After all, I am really not sure why the dependencies force synaptic to uninstall tpb.

One little trap I stepped into was to bind xterm to the Thinkpad button in my /etc/tpbrc config file. Since tpb is called in sudo mode, the launched terminal window was called as root (without password check).
Not good. For now the button stays unused.