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:
- Intel Core Duo T2500, 2ghz CPU
- nVidia Quadro 110M graphics
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: