I’ve measured the reboot time after the Lucid install on the ASUS UL20A. That’s what I call progress.
Jaunty Lucid -------------------------------------- from power-on until login 19 s 20 s from login until ready 15 s 5 s power off 12 s 5 s -------------------------------------- overall reboot time 46 s 35 s
Well, Jaunty was not able to use the full (you know what I mean) resolution of my new TV, so I thought it was time to upgrade. I started Lucid Lynx from a live USB, attached the TV and, to my utter amazement, I was immediately presented with 2 073 600 deep purple pixels.
Upgrade time! Or even more than that. Time to reorganize my partitions. All I left was the original 200 GB home partition, now mounted as “/public”, mainly for my strictly legal (in Hungary) music and movies. If you live in the US of A, do not do this! The monopolists will confiscate your possessions, kill your family and jail you for 2000 years.
Anyway, 65 GB of unused Windows 7 (which I had no other choice than to pay for) was permanently removed, replaced by a new “/home” partition. The remaining 50 GB became “/” (root for starters).
Installation went like a breeze, as usual with Ubuntu. WLAN connected immediately. The telly as an external full high definition monitor? You betcha. Import stuff from old user profile, apt-get all the important packages (gimp, development stuff, openarena), compile and install the freshest hypest midnight commander, and there you go.
One thing. The bloody LCD brightness buttons. They did not work at all. Nor could I set brightness any other way, including the GUI and my Jaunty hack. Nice. This is the point where most people start thinking about suicide.
Others, however, use Google. Which reveals the solution immediately in the form of an Ubuntu wiki page:
acpi-backlight=vendor
has to be added to the GRUB kernel command line. Since then it works beautifully, even the flickering of my Jaunty hack is a thing of the past.
Finally. I’ve picked up my US keyboard for the ASUS UL20A today. Installation was surprisingly easy, with no warranty-void-if-removed stickers anywhere. Time to play again with keyboard settings. Default layout became US International (with dead keys). I kept Hungarian (qwerty) as well for the occasional őŐűŰ. And now to the most interesting part, the Layout Options.
Ctrl Key Position, Make CapsLock an additional Ctrl.
Hurraaaaah!!!! The bloody CapsLock is eliminated at last!
Key(s) to Change Layout, Both Shift keys together.
A combination of keys far away from each other, never normally used together.
Use keyboard LED to show alternative layout. CapsLock.
Of course. As the bastard is dead, I can use its LED to indicate if the Hungarian layout is active.
This incredible abundance of keyboard settings is amazing. A good reason alone to choose Linux over Windows.
As I’ve mentioned before, ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty has been running fine on my ASUS UL20A laptop. Except the screen brightness buttons, Fn-F5 (down) and Fn-F6 (up).
Fn-F5 was setting brightness to the darkest value while Fn-F6 to the second darkest one. I’ve managed to create a crufty workaround, detailed below. It’s all about hacking the configuration of acpid (the ACPI daemon).
There is a special file called /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCDD/brightness which lists the available and the actual brightness values. Brightest is shown below.
szg@OG3:/proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCDD$ cat brightness levels: 10 16 22 28 34 40 46 52 58 64 70 76 82 88 current: 88
Setting brightness is done by writing a number into this file, the example shows darkest possible.
echo 10 > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCDD/brightness
Start the program called “acpi_listen”, which will print power-management related events when they happen.
When hitting Fn-F5 (Brightness down):
video LCDD 00000087 00000000 hotkey ATKD 00000020 000000fc
When hitting Fn-F6 (Brightness up):
video LCDD 00000086 00000000 hotkey ATKD 00000011 00000106
So each hotkey generates two events. Now let’s see how these events are handled. (Hard to see, as by now the screen is very dark. Bugger.)
The configuration of “acpid” is in the “/etc/acpi/events” directory. Each file here handles one event type, line “event=regexp” defines the event, where the regexp shall match something like above, while line “action=command” the callback.
Fn-F5 (down) video LCDD 00000087 00000000 is handled by file “video_brightnessdown”:
event=video.* 00000087 action=/etc/acpi/video_brightnessdown.sh
Fn-F5 (down) hotkey ATKD 00000020 00000000fc is handled by “asus-brightness-down”:
event=hotkey (ATKD|HOTK) 0000002[0123456789abcdef] action=/etc/acpi/asus-brn-down.sh
Fn-F6 (up) video LCDD 00000086 00000000 is handled by file “video_brightnessup”:
event=video.* 00000086 action=/etc/acpi/video_brightnessup.sh
Fn-F6 (up) hotkey ATKD 00000011 0000000106 is handled by “asus-brightness-up”:
event=hotkey (ATKD|HOTK) 0000001[0123456789abcdef] action=/etc/acpi/asus-brn-up.sh
As you can see the callback scripts are in “/etc/acpi”.
Running all four callback scipts directly from the command line revealed they don’t work at all. Absolutely no effect on brightness. That’s why I now ignore their contents completely.
The test revealed something else as well: the broken function of both hotkeys comes from outside of this acpid-config mechanism. Probably the kernel. Which I won’t try to fix, I’ll just create a workaround.
I linked the fixed callbacks to the second event for each hotkey, “hotkey ATKD 00000020″ (down) and “hotkey ATKD 00000011″ (up). Configured by “asus-brightness-down” and “asus-brightness-up”, respectively. I’ve removed the other two config files (video_brightnessdown/up) completely, which were handling the first event for each hotkey.
The new callback script for brightness down reads the actual value from a new config file (/etc/acpi/brightness), decrements it by 6, and stores it to the config file AND the “/proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCDD/brightness” file as well.
#!/bin/bash if [ ! -f /etc/acpi/brightness ]; then echo 88 > /etc/acpi/brightness; fi BRIGHTNESS=`cat /etc/acpi/brightness` if [ $BRIGHTNESS -gt 10 ]; then let BRIGHTNESS-=6; fi echo $BRIGHTNESS > /etc/acpi/brightness echo $BRIGHTNESS > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCDD/brightness
The new brighness up script is similar, just increments the value by 6.
#!/bin/bash if [ ! -f /etc/acpi/brightness ]; then echo 88 > /etc/acpi/brightness; fi BRIGHTNESS=`cat /etc/acpi/brightness` if [ $BRIGHTNESS -gt 10 ]; then let BRIGHTNESS+=6; fi echo $BRIGHTNESS > /etc/acpi/brightness echo $BRIGHTNESS > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCDD/brightness
The final touch: the callback script for AC/battery events (power.sh) also writes the config file to guarantee we always start changing the brightness from the actual value.
...
for x in /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/*; do
grep -q off-line $x/state
if [ $? = 0 ] && [ x$1 != xstop ]; then
for SCRIPT in /etc/acpi/battery.d/*.sh; do
. $SCRIPT
done
echo 52 > /etc/acpi/brightness
echo 52 > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCDD/brightness
else
for SCRIPT in /etc/acpi/ac.d/*.sh; do
. $SCRIPT
done
echo 88 > /etc/acpi/brightness
echo 88 > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCDD/brightness
fi
done
Now, when hitting the brightness hotkeys, the screen switches to the darkest setting for a moment, but then it works. Perfect. Nearly.
I’ve just purchased an ASUS UL20A-2X022V notebook. Or netbook. I don’t know. It’s actually the best of both worlds. On one hand, it has a small 12″ display, weighs in at 1.5 kg, has no CD/DVD drive, and runs 5 to 7 hours on battery. On the other hand, its small display’s resolution is 1366×768, it has a Core 2 Duo ULV SU7300 processor, 3 GB RAM, a 320 GB hard disk and a fully functional keyboard with all the special keys on the right side.
A short summary of how the different hardware components work with ubuntu:
Component Status Notes ------------------------------------------ Intel Core2 Duo ULV SU7300 OK 12.1" WXGA LED display OK resolution autodetected Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics OK 3 GB RAM DDR2 800 MHz OK HD 320 GB 5400rpm SATA OK install with manual partitioning battery Li-ion 5600 mAh OK power management OK battery life 5-6 hours ethernet Atheros 8131 OK see below WLAN Atheros 9285 802.11bgn OK see below Bluetooth OK Sound AC'97 16bit OK Audacious mp3, speaker or headphone Synaptics touchpad OK scrolling OK too, see below webcam OK see below card reader OK Linux kernel 2.6.28-17
It came with Windows 7 Home Premium, which is a joke. A huge monster of an OS with the functionality of Google Chrome OS: it has a web browser.
First thing was to install ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. As the laptop has no CD drive I had to create a bootable Ubuntu 9.04 LiveUSB on my other ubuntu-box. The tool to use is usb-creator, which uses the iso image of the ubuntu LiveCD.
I installed ubuntu with manual partitioning. I shrank the Win7 partition from 80GB to 50GB (automounted to /windows), added a 2GB ext3 swap partition, a 50GB ext3 root partition and the rest as a /home partition. The boot menu was added, and even Win7 ran fine after a chkdisk.
The network cards were not detected upon installation. Neither LAN, nor WLAN. So there I was with no connectivity, reading with a sad irony all those posts about fixing this with apt-get xxx-backports and the likes.
I ended up downloading compat-wireless-2.6.30.tar.bz2 on another box to a USB stick, and then unpacking and compiling it on the laptop. I realised too late these kernel modules were for a newer kernel. Nevertheless I did “make install”, I did “make unload” and I did “insmod ath9k.ko”. It did not work due to incompatible kernel versions. I sadly rebooted to Windows, but later gave it another try. Miraculously, all network cards worked like a breeze! Don’t ask me why…
Touchpad: everything works, but it’s hard to feel where is the scrolling area. And the left button is too hard.
Keyboard (Hungarian): OK, but it will be swapped for a US layout, whose Hungarian is worse, but speaks better Code.
Webcam: I installed the UCview package to record videos with it. Skype works too.
I downloaded all the updates, then SynapticPackageManaged Rhytmbox/Evolution out, Audacious/Thunderbird in, I installed basic development stuff, and last but not least git-cloned and compiled the newest Midnight-Commander master with utf8-support.
One more thing: it is very very quiet. Summary? Bloody marvelleous!
