In order to optimize power consumption PowerTOP can be utilized in its recent version 2.0. Ubuntu 12.04 ships with 1.97 so if you want to benefit from the latest and greatest you’ll have to compile for yourself. However this is not a big deal.
(install everything configure complains about, then rerun configure)
After everything else works out of the box with a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 I realized that brightness control via FN key doesn’t. The problem seems to be somewhere located in the Nvidia driver for GT330M and can easily be solved by adding one line to the “Device” section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Hit ALT-F2
gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
add
Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
to the “Device” section so it looks somewhat like this
Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection
save file and finally reboot or restart lightdm with
sudo service lightdm restart
and brightness control is back in your hands!
Last week I posted about my connection problems with iwlwifi and network manager. For the duration of a week I have tested wicd as an alternative connection tool on two Intel machines and must say: no disconnections or any problems whatsoever so far! iwlwifi options can be set to N speed and no modifications other than stopping the LED from blinking are necessary.
First install dconf-tools with
sudo apt-get install dconf-tools
start dconf-editor
dconf-editor
and change org > gnome > shell > overrides > button-layout to
close,minimize,maximize:
Done!
Wireless is traditionally troublesome on Linux. The other day I transferred a lot of data over my wifi. After iwlwifi is finally stable for Intel devices using wicd, ath9k for Atheros wasn’t. It nearly passed out a couple of times leaving me with unusable connection speed.
I’m still testing if the culprit is hardware encryption or maybe power saving. For now I disabled hardware encryption with
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/ath9k.conf
adding
options ath9k nohwcrypt=1
and rebooting.
No further problems until now.
Although the new Unity experience is a smooth and snappy one desktop wise, video playback is a little choppy and sluggish. Even when using GPU powered VDPAU compiz is using a lot more CPU than it should and playback all in all is not enjoyable for me. Unlike earlier releases tearing is not a problem though.
Installing Gnome Shell works much better for video. But the new 3.4 desktop feels not as good as 3.2 did. So not a real option either.
Fortunately there is xbmc with its great media center software. For the first time available from standard Ubuntu repositories. Using it from within either Unity or Gnome suffers from the underlying desktop environments. Choosing the xbmc session from lightdm however delivers what any media enthusiast would want. Playback is smooth, CPU is very low and I’m happy again.
I have one laptop running over night sometimes. That requires a stable wifi connection which I found out Ubuntu 12.04 with iwlwifi could not offer. Often I returned to the desktop in the morning and network-manager disconnected hours ago without establishing a new connection. So no down and uploads since then. Manually trying to reconnect doesn’t work either. One either has to switch off and on wifi or unload and reload the iwlwifi module.
I experimented with iwlwifi options 11n_disable and swcrypto as some people on the net suggested but no luck. Wifi kept disconnecting unpredictably. Then I stumbled upon one bug addressing this misbehavior to network-manager suggesting to remove it and install wicd. That was what I did last week and had not one disconnection since then!
sudo apt-get install wicd
sudo apt-get remove --purge network-manager network-manager-gnome
Caution: you will lose your network indicator and wicd will not show anywhere in Unity. Doesn’t matter to me since I monitor my network along with other information with Conky.
Although being in beta state Ubuntu 12.04 LTS runs great on my Acer 1810t already. There are just three annoyances I had to tinker with.
Fan always on and too loud (AC)
With an AC cable plugged in the fan is always on which is very audible in a quiet environment. This can be controlled using kernel module acerhdf which is loaded by default but lacks finetuning. So all you have to do is create a configuration file
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/acerhdf.conf
and paste in the appropriate settings
options acerhdf interval=5 fanon=65000 fanoff=60000 kernelmode=1
and here comes silence! Use temperature settings at your own risk. The example above turns the fan on at 65° C and off at 60° C.
Noisy harddisk spindowns
Second thing is hdparm settings when running on battery. Former apm (Advanced Power Management) default for the harddrive in Oneiric was 128. It is now 127 which allows the drive to spin down resulting in frequent spin downs and wakeups which are audible and annoying. This can be avoided by setting apm back to 128 when running on battery
sudo hdparm /etc/sda -B 128
In order to make apm settings permanent add this to /etc/hdparm.conf
/dev/sda {
apm = 254
apm_battery = 128
}
Constantly blinking wifi LED
Well, for the LED to stop blinking when active but rather be just on it needs just an option to Intel’s wifi module. This however is not iwlagn as in Oneiric but iwlwifi in Precise. So create a config file
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf
and paste
options iwlwifi led_mode=1
and reboot or unload module with
sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi
and reload with
sudo modprobe iwlwifi
Done!
Every now and then a casual game run with wine crashes on my girlfriend’s rig. She’s just a regular Ubuntu user and cannot be bothered with WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/game wineserver -k and probably some xrandr voodoo to correct screen resolution.
Hence putting the following in her .bashrc as an alias or a script helps a lot:
for i in ~/.wine/*; do WINEPREFIX=$i wineserver -k && xrandr -s 1366x768; done
Having set up VA API like mentioned before compiling XBMC with support for hardware decoding on Intel G45 is pretty straight forward. No other steps have to be taken than to compile as mentioned in the README.ubuntu at http://gitorious.org/xbmc/xbmc/blobs/HEAD/README.ubuntu.
I installed the dependencies and downloaded the source into subfolder xbmc with
git clone git://github.com/xbmc/xbmc.git xbmc
compiled with
./bootstrap && ./configure && make -j2
and after compilation successfully finished
sudo make install
Works like a charm at least for 720p content in H.264.
