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If you’ve been following my attempts to get the brightness up/down and other fn-keys on my Samsung Q320 laptop to work in Linux, you might like to know the saga has reached a happy conclusion. Previously I published a hack to the atkbd kernel driver to get these problematic keys to send key release events. […]

Earlier I posted a hack to get the Linux kernel to send synthetic key release events for the Fn-keys on a Samsung Q320. But I forgot about actually submitting the patch to the kernel developers until today. However, it looks like this hack will be unnecessary as of 2.6.32: Hi Nick, On Sep 19, 2009, […]

Argh! Another problem! Over the last couple of days I’ve being trying to figure out why the brightness fn-keys on my laptop don’t seem to work: they either set the brightness to maximum-bright or maximum-dim. (Although they inexplicably sometimes work.) At first I thought it was a problem with my earlier HAL hackery, but this […]

You know how GNOME/KDE have “shutdown” and “reboot” buttons that normal users can use to turn off the computer? Rather than using sudo or making /sbin/shutdown setuid, they use HAL which provides a nice power management interface. Turns out this is pretty easy to call from the command line so you can use it in […]

I’ve been playing around with powertop trying to reduce power usage. I’m using laptop-mode to spin down the disk when its not needed (it automatically activates when on battery power). I’ve also added these two powertop suggestions to /etc/rc.local # Reduce the frequency of disk flushes echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs   # Turn off the […]

I wasted today playing UFO: Alien Invasion. It’s unusually polished for an open source game. The graphics are very nice, especially in the battle mode. The storyline is also quite engrossing and surprisingly well written – I like the non-linearity of it too. Recommended. Going to stop now and do something useful like add scenery […]

This morning I have learned a lot about HAL. Have been trying to get the brightness up/down controls on my laptop to work (they need to use a non-standard Nvidia interface). If you have the same laptop then these are the steps I went through to get it work. Disclaimer: your mileage may vary; no […]

VGA and HDMI out are now working nicely. I couldn’t get xrandr to work (I suspect I could with more fiddling though). Instead I’m using Nvidia’s TwinView which supports multiple monitor configurations nicely. I’ve tested it on an external TFT monitor and a widescreen TV (via HDMI) and both worked fine. Turns out that some […]

Progress is good. I have wireless working (using the ath3k driver). GNOME’s network manager (nm-applet) works fine in fluxbox. Suspend/resume works too, but it’s not automatic on lid-closing. Need to fiddle with the ACPI event handlers I think. EDIT: works fine with gnome-power-manager. The normal ACPI brightness controls for the backlight do not work. You […]

Argh! The Debian installer worked perfectly, but the installed system was fail: no network drivers for wired or wireless, no X, … After several hours of frustration I gave up and installed Arch Linux. It’s not bad! The installer is a little more primitive than Debian’s, and it dumps you into a terminal without X. […]