Søren Vind

For the sake of everybody in the band

Optimizing Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

As I mentioned in my previous post, a lot of improvements have been introduced in Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”. Not all of them had a nice effect on the compatibility with my Dell D620 laptop, though. As a future reference, I have decided to document what improvements i have made on the laptop to improve battery life and the general user experience.

The most important specs for my laptop is as follows:

The screen resolution was detected correctly, but 3D acceleration was (of course) not enabled by default, as it relies on a restricted driver. As mentioned in the previous post, I downloaded the driver using these commands in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-new

You just have to enable the driver in System -> Administration -> Restricted Drivers to make 3D acceleration work – desktop effects are enabled in System -> Preferences -> Appearance. The touchpad was reacting very slow, so I needed to configure it to make it work properly. This is done by typing the following in a terminal:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Find the part of the file containing “InputDevice” and “Synaptic”, and insert (in the end of the “InputDevice” section):

Option       "LeftEdge"              "130"
Option       "RightEdge"             "840"
Option       "TopEdge"               "130"
Option       "BottomEdge"            "640"
Option       "FingerLow"             "14"
Option       "FingerHigh"            "15"
Option       "MaxTapTime"            "180"
Option       "MaxTapMove"            "110"
Option       "ClickTime"             "0"
Option       "MaxDoubleTapTime"      "100"
Option       "EmulateMidButtonTime"  "75"
Option       "VertScrollDelta"       "20"
Option       "HorizScrollDelta"      "20"
Option       "MinSpeed"              "0.60"
Option       "MaxSpeed"              "1.10"
Option       "AccelFactor"           "0.030"
Option       "EdgeMotionMinSpeed"    "200"
Option       "EdgeMotionMaxSpeed"    "200
Option       "UpDownScrolling"       "1"
Option       "CircularScrolling"     "1"
Option       "CircScrollDelta"       "0.1"
Option       "CircScrollTrigger"     "2"
Option       "SHMConfig"             "true"
Option       "Emulate3Buttons"       "on"

Optimize battery-life

To optimize battery-life on the laptop, i installed and ran powertop by running these commands:

sudo apt-get install powertop
sudo powertop

Powertop proposes a couple of optimizations for your particular computer. Most of these can be entered in a .sh file, which you should put in the directory /etc/init.d – it should be run every time the computer boots. This is accomplished using the command:

sudo update-rc.d YOURSCRIPTNAME defaults

YOURSCRIPTNAME should obviously be replaced by the name you have chosen for your script. I will post a sample script tomorrow, to give you an idea of how it should look like.

Powertop should gain you a lot of battery-life. One of the big wake-up causes on my laptop was the nVidia card, waking up about 60 times a second, to check if the screen had to be re-rendered instead of syncing to vblank. This can be solved by inserting a line in xorg.conf:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Find the part named “Device” that contains the name of your graphics card. Insert the following line in the section:

Option "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts" "on"

Please note, that the option is experimental, and could cause system freezes. It should be noted, though, that I have not had any problems using it.

This concludes this small optimization reference. For further reference, see the ubuntu wiki, which have helped me a lot:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/DellLatitudeD620

Posted in Software | October 28th, 2007 | Comments

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon released

Yesterday Ubuntu 7.10, codename “Gutsy Gibbon”, was released – I installed it on both my desktop and my laptop to see if any improvements have been made to the system. And – tadaaa: Several major improvements have been introduced in this version! The inclusion and integration of Compiz Fusion mean that it is pretty easy to get it working – on my desktop, desktop effects were working on first boot – but because I have a ATI Radeon 9800 graphics card, it was a bit tough to get 3D acceleration working (that’s my own fault for buying ATI and mixing it with Linux). On my Dell D620 laptop, I just had to download the nvidia-glx-new driver  using the package manager, and enable it in restricted drivers to get 3D acceleration working.

The system feels more integrated, more slick and more user friendly. It took only 30 minutes to install, and using the package manager, I was enable to completely reinstall my system in around 1½ hours – the extra time was caused by a slow repository from which I were downloading additional packages. The only problem I have now is that my Audigy 2ZS sound card in the desktop is not working (oddly enough), but that is going to be solved tonight.

Posted in Software | October 19th, 2007 | Comments (2)