Josh Saddler

Right, I'm almost done setting up the Thinkpad.

The keyboard is still taking some getting used to -- I hate having the Fn at the far left, where the Ctrl key should be, and I hate not having the Del/Home/End keys vertically aligned with the right edge of the keyboard. I also keep forgetting I have a working middle mouse button for Firefox. Too used to having to Ctrl-click tabs on the Toshiba. And . . . I love the scroll function on the synaptics touchpad. Love it. The pad itself I don't use much; I'm too used to trackpointers. Plus it's too easy to turn a drag motion into a sudden click. I do like the IBM trackpoint more than my Toshiba; the IBM one is more accurate and has a nicer surface.

Fingerprint use: for the time being, I've uninstalled fprint, and installed thinkfinger instead. Why the switch? Because thinkfinger works out-of-the-box with SLiM, and pam_fprint doesn't work with it at all. If it worked with SLiM, I'd switch back. Also, thinkfinger's enrollment seems to work better. I'm getting far fewer rejected scans. I'd like to file a feature request bug with fprint upstream to get SLiM supported, but its bugtracker mails aren't getting through to my devmail. dsd, you reading this?

I still haven't bothered playing with hdaps yet or finding out why it thinks my disk is unsupported. While on the subject of disks, it occurs to me that I really should have created a /usr/portage partition and formatted it as ReiserFS. ext3 is just too slow for Portage ops.

I at least solved my networking issues by adding a couple of required modules and undoing parallel startup. I also fixed a typo in conf.d/net. I don't plan on using NetworkManager any time soon, as it requires lots of Gnome dependencies. For now, I added a second network block to wpa_supplicant.conf:

network={
        key_mgmt=NONE
        priority=-9999999
}

I haven't tested it yet, but I think this should work for unsecured public access points. Actually, I think this was probably in wpa_supplicant.conf before I deleted everything and added my own config.

My desktop and development environment are just about complete; got my keys imported and my firewall setup and everything. Still haven't setup my system for Bluetooth or audio production yet. Or games.

As promised, I've made my working kernel config available. For all you Intel X3100 users, this may be of use in setting up uvesafb. Also, if you've got an IPW3945 ABG network card, this may be useful if you're using the in-kernel iwl driver. I've enabled the appropriate statistics options to use powerTOP, which is a very nice way to monitor power usage. I get about 2.8 hours doing basic wireless internet, docs work, etc. with my screen almost at full brightness. Not bad. I think I waited too long to get an Ultrabay battery; SCALE 6x is less than a week away!

Speaking of SCALE, I'm going. So I should probably get tickets & registration for me and my wife, yeah? Oh, and a hotel reservation. My new laptop has been such a distraction.

I've discovered a really unusual bug/behavior. I removed alsasound from the boot runlevel, in case I'm running on battery. Now, unless you blacklist them, your sound modules will still get loaded regardless, taking that much more power (even with aggressive soundcard power management enabled.) So what I had been doing was starting and stopping the ALSA initscript once my desktop was loaded. Here's the bug:

Starting and stopping ALSA this way actually kills all GTK theming in Xfce. The decorations revert to GTK defaults, the window colors go to their GTK defaults, the panel becomes ugly, you name it. All I have to do to re-apply the default (pretty) Xfce GTK theme is open one of Xfce's configuration utilities. Any of them. Isn't that bizarre? I have no idea why the hell that happens. Every time I stop ALSA. It's a minor nuisance, I guess.

On thinkpad_acpi and hotkeys:

It's a known bug that the brightness hotkeys don't work, but echoing values directly to /proc does. There won't be a fix for this any time soon, either. I've been in contact with upstream, submitting reports to their database, etc. Still have to go through and test the rest of my hardware (Bluetooth, etc.) and submit another report, but the outlook is not favorable for hotkeys. I still need to find a good program that will recognize the Fn-Home/Fn-End key command for brightness adjustments. xbacklight works, but I need keybinds to call it. Xfce has a built in keybind program, but it can't see Fn key combos. I'll have to find a sane xbindkeys setup (or similar app); there's probably something on ThinkWiki or the Gentoo Forums.

Signing off for now . . . maybe I'll see ya'll at SCALE? Come on by the Gentoo booth! Devs, users, groupies, etc. are all welcome.