Aron Rotteveel's questions

I am currently experimenting with using Ubuntu as a my main OS instead of Windows 7. So far, pretty much everything is working fine, except for an issue that I am having with my touchpad.

I have a Dell XPS 16 (1640) with a Synaptics touchpad. It works out of the box, but it seems that it stops working after returning from hibernation mode.

This problem has also been addressed in an earlier bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317270 but judging from this bug report, it should be fixed by now.

I am running the 2.6.35-23-generic-pae kernel.

Any ideas?

I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 and now my dual monitor support seems broken. When booting, I see the screen duplicated just fine on both my laptop as my external monitor; after logging in, however, the external monitor disables and cannot be enabled.

Hardware:

• Dell Studio XPS 1640 laptop
• GFX: Ati Mobility Radion HD4670
• Extenal monitor: Acer P193W

I get the following error message when applying screen settings:

The selected configruiation for displays could not be applied requested virtual size does not fit available size: requested=(3040,900), minimum=(320,00), maximum=(1600,1600)

lshw output:

  *-display
        description: VGA compatible controller
        product: ATI Technologies Inc
        vendor: ATI Technologies Inc
        physical id: 0
        bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
        version: 00
        width: 32 bits
        clock: 33MHz
        capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
        configuration: driver=fglrx_pci latency=0
        resources: irq:50 memory:d0000000-dfffffff ioport:2000(size=256) memory:cfef0000-cfefffff memory:cfe00000-cfe1ffff

Screenshots:

It seems Guake terminal is not aware of the Unity sidebar being hidden. Even when the sidebar is hidden, it still shows with a left offset that is based on the width of the sidebar.

Additionally, the width of the terminal is not decreased by the width of the left offset, which causes the terminal to appear on my second monitor as well.

Is there a way to fix this?

I find the sidebar to appear and disappear terribly slow. How can I change the delay?

I created a new partition on my hard drive because my /tmp partition was too small. I changed the mountpoint in /etc/fstab and rebooted.

Every time I reboot, I get the following error message at the login screen:

There is a problem with the configuration server. (/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check-2 exited with status 256)

When I log in, /tmp is mounted correctly and everything seems to work fine. When I reboot, the error shows again. When I change the /tmp mountpoint back to the old partition, the error message disappears.

What could be causing this and how can I solve this issue?

I am a Dutch user and prefer the my local date & time format, system wide. I have no trouble speaking or understanding English and find it very useful to have the rest of my system configured in English to make my life easier when I need to Google a term, for example.

Is it possible to apply the a local date/time/currency/etc. format to the system, while maintaining English menu & dialog captions?

Possible Duplicate:
Why does my computer get less battery life with Ubuntu compared to Windows?

I am running Ubuntu 10.10 on my Dell Studio XPS 1640 and have about one hour of battery life in it, compared to about 2.5 hours running on Windows 7.

This is with wireless and bluetooth on, but still, the difference seems incredible.

What could be causing such a difference and is there a way to close the gap without losing core functionality?

EDIT: here's some output from powertop. This is with bluetooth turned off and Wifi turned on. The output seems pretty normal to me, but as indicated, this is about 1 hour of battery life on a full battery...

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 476.2    interval: 10.0s
Power usage (ACPI estimate): 2.5W (1.2 hours)

Top causes for wakeups:
  30.0% (167.2)D  chrome
  21.0% (117.3)   [extra timer interrupt]
  13.9% ( 77.4)   [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
   3.4% ( 18.9)D  xchat
   7.1% ( 39.8)   [iwlagn] <interrupt>
   5.9% ( 32.9)   AptanaStudio3
   3.9% ( 21.6)D  java
   2.7% ( 14.9)   [TLB shootdowns] <kernel IPI>
   2.5% ( 14.1)   docky
   1.8% ( 10.0)   nautilus
   1.6% (  9.0)   thunderbird-bin
   1.0% (  5.5)   [ahci] <interrupt>
   0.9% (  5.0)   syndaemon
   0.8% (  4.3)   [kernel core] hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)

EDIT: after changing /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode to 5 (it was set to 0), wakeups seem to have decreased, although usage still seems far too high:

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 263.8    interval: 10.0s
Power usage (ACPI estimate): 2.6W (0.9 hours)

EDIT: I seem to have discovered the main cause: I was using the open source ATI Drivers. I recently installed the official ATI drivers and laptop battery life seems to have doubled since.

EDIT: last edit. The previous 'solution' of installing the official ATI drivers turns out to be a non-solution. Although it does increase battery life, my laptop resolution is maxed out at 1200x800 after a reboot. (Please note that this problem does not need answering in this question as it is a seperate case)

EDIT & SOLUTION:

After more trial and error I finally found a custom PPA that patches Maverick's 2.6.35 kernel. My wakeups have now decreased from 450-1100 to a maximum of 120 (!).

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 110,2    interval: 15,0s
Power usage (ACPI estimate): 2,7W (0,7 hours)

Top causes for wakeups:
  19,2% ( 25,7)   [extra timer interrupt]
  17,0% ( 22,7)   java
  13,9% ( 18,6)   [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
  10,5% ( 14,0)   docky
   8,8% ( 11,7)   [iwlagn] <interrupt>
   7,5% ( 10,0)   nautilus
   4,3% (  5,7)   [kernel core] hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
   3,7% (  5,0)   syndaemon
   3,0% (  4,1)   [ahci] <interrupt>
   3,0% (  4,1)   ksoftirqd/1
   0,1% (  0,2)D  flush-8:0
   1,6% (  2,2)   mysqld
   1,2% (  1,7)   python
   0,7% (  1,0)   [kernel core] iwl_bg_monitor_recover (iwl_bg_monitor_recover)

I own a Dell Studio XPS 16.

The media keys work fine when logged in, but stop working after the screen is locked. Although I can imagine this being classified under the 'feature, not a bug' class, in some cases it could still be a very handy option to be able to to mute the sound when the screen is locked, for example.

Is there a way to use the media keys, even when the screen is locked?

I have never used a Linux system in an AD environment before and am trying to join my laptop running Ubuntu to join our Active Directory (DC is a Windows Server 2008 machine) using Likewise-open.

• Using the GUI wizard, I have joined the domain.
• I can mount network shares using CIFS

My fstab entry looks like this:

//server/share  /mnt/foo    cifs    auto,iocharset=utf8,rw,credentials=/home/aron/.smbcredentials   0   0

Problem:
I only have read access to our fileserver. What more is needed to get the AD to recognize me as a user who has the appropriate rights?

Any help is appreciated.