Monthly Archives: January 2010

Ubuntu 9.10 on Clevo M76T laptop

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mostly harmless

Hardware

 

  • 15" screen
  • webcam
  • modem
  • LAN
  • keyboard and surround, screen surround are white.
  • 250GB hard drive: Toshiba MK25555GSX
  • optical drive: HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GSA-T50N

Minor issues:

  • optical drive tray wouldn't open — needed to be pressed closed until it gave an extra click; seemed to be easier after a while.
  • power button is slow to respond when running on battery only

Installation

Installed 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10 from the 'alt' CD

No problems.

On start-up, offered the slmodem driver as a 'restricted driver' (see below).

Sound

aplay -l lists the sound chip as ALC622 rev1

typewriter computer sample keyboard

XP Repair Install vs Internet Explorer

XP repair installs often require re-activation. Problems occur if the CD used has an older version of Internet Explorer than the PC. For example, if the PC has IE8, but you use a standard-issue SP2 CD with IE6, then the 'repair' will break internet explorer. That's a big problem because the activation dialogue uses IE: if it's broken, the activation will silently fail and you'll be stuck. The solution: slipstream IE8 into your XP CD. It's easy with RyanVM Integrator or nLite.

MythTV vs lircd

I’ve got an IR receiver plugged in to the serial port, which works with minimyth, but lircd keeps saying
Jan 2 18:33:32 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[2516]: caught signal
Jan 2 18:33:32 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[2516]: closing '/dev/lirc0'
Jan 2 18:33:32 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[3144]: lircd(devinput) ready, using /var/run/lirc/lircd
Jan 2 18:33:34 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[3144]: accepted new client on /var/run/lirc/lircd
Jan 2 18:33:34 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[3144]: initializing '/dev/lirc0'
Jan 2 18:33:34 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[3144]: can't get exclusive access to events coming from `/dev/lirc0' interface
so I followed the instructions at http://www.lirc.org/html/devinput.html to make HAL ignore the IR device (in fact it will ignore any serial device) by creating the following in a new file called /etc/hal/fdi/preprobe/10-ignore-lirc.fdi:






true


 (after getting clues about what key to use from lshal).
Restarting hal and running lshal confirms that HAL is now ignoring the IR device.
Restarting lirc … gives the same result as before. It still doesn’t have exclusive access to /dev/lirc0. Even after a reboot.