Saturday, 29 November 2008

Upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid

I upgraded my laptop (Lenovo x300) to Ubuntu 8.10 a few weeks ago. The rumour was that power management was better, and I was longing for a kernel that handled the sound on the x300 without a re-compile of the driver every time I updated the kernel.

The upgrade went smoothly, although it took a very long time. The default Ubuntu mirror for Canada seems to be very slow these days. (I've since switched to http://gpl.savoirfairelinux.net/pub/mirrors/ubuntu. It seems a lot faster.)

Two things I've had to work on. First, suspend and resume screws up the wireless until you add a line to /etc/pm/config.d/00sleep_module. First, you have to figure out which driver you're using for wireless. Do
lshw | more
Look for the line that says "wireless" by typing "/wireless" to the more prompt. Then look for the next line with "driver" in it. In my case it says "driver=iwlagn". So now edit the file and add the required line:
sudo gedit /etc/pm/config.d/00sleep_module
Add the following at the very end:
SUSPEND_MODULES="iwlagn"
The other problem was more mysterious. CBC Radio's website wouldn't play after upgrading to 8.10. It had worked for my in 8.04 after some fooling around, but I couldn't get it to work. I had given up after wasting almost a whole day on the problem. After a few software upgrades, it started to work. For the record, I'm using gnome-mplayer to play Windows Media Player material.
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4 comments:

  1. Anonymous1 December 2008 at 01:44

    Hey there,
    thanks for the tip.
    However, I think you mean "iwlagn" not "iwalgn"
    How long does your battery power last by the way? With the standard 6-cell battery mine only lasts for about 2:40 hours.
    I have brightness adjusted to half of max. possible.

    Regards

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  2. Larry Reid1 December 2008 at 06:22

    Thanks. You're right. I corrected the name of the driver.

    I haven't timed my battery life, but I suspect that I'm getting about the same as you are. Another thing that happened with the upgrade to 8.10 is that bluetooth seems to be on. Next time I have some time to fool around with my computer I'll be looking into turning that off when I don't need it.

    I'm sure the fan is also sucking a lot of power. It seems to be a known issue that the x300's fan runs most of the time with Ubuntu, but no one seems to have a solution.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous1 December 2008 at 07:54

    Well there is a quite simple solution, just run sudo apt-get install tpfand tpfan-admin tpfand-profiles, it lets you control the speed of the fan by a simple config file (after installation this is located in /etc/tpfand.conf)
    Just edit the config file to your needs. Here is an example on how this might look like

    http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ACPI_fan_control_script#ThinkPad_Fan_Control_GTK_GUI_tool

    ReplyDelete
  4. harald2 December 2008 at 08:31

    Thanks for the sources.list tip! I had noticed not only that the CA archives were slow, but that they were returning different mime-types for files, so my local squid cache wasn't caching.

    (I run a local cache so that running apt-get upgrade on four machines only downloads packages once; saves my limited bandwidth :)

    ReplyDelete