PieroCampanelli.info

As holiday geek-fun I installed Ubuntu 7.1 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) on my Toshiba Satellite Laptop A100-022 (a laptop which surprisingly is difficult to find information online). It was a great pleasure for me to note that Ubuntu is the first 100% (or 99%:) laptop friendly Linux distribution. Most of laptop functionalities worked out of the box and I had to do only minor tweaks for having a production-ready development system.

As someone wrote Ubuntu has mitigated most of linux geeky edges while polishing it for the desktop. I used Linux since 1995 (Slackware 1.0) and during the years I used several distributions on servers and on desktop machines. Every distribution I have used didn’t perform progresses that I got with Ubuntu 7.1. This is the first desktop-distro that has satisfied all requirements and desiderata of a laptop mobile user (mine at least …).

Following table show functionalities working at the moment and a brief description of tweaks that I needed to do:

LCD Brightness

To get it working I needed to compile a kernel module from the Omnibook Project. I can see a list of allowed values for LCD typing:

pc@ubuntulaptop:~/$ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness
levels:  75 35 10 25 35 50 60 75 90 100
current: 0

I can set LCD brightness with the following:

sudo echo 35 | sudo dd of=/proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness

…a bit rough but it’s work !

Bluetooth

Bluetooth doesn’t work by default. I found a solution reading comments of this blog. Again Omnibook project comes to rescue.

Here are the steps:

• Install "bluetooth", "bluez-gnome","bluez-utils","gnome-bluetooth" from Synaptics
• Compile and install Omnibook module according instructions from the website [link]
• Try a "modprobe omnibook" and see if module is loaded correctly
• Add "omnibook" to list of modules started at runtime (edit /etc/modules for this)
• Try an "hcitool scan" to see a list of detected devices
• Now try to pair your phone/device with the laptop using gnome available tools (cfr. gnome-bluetooth)

Blueetooth PAN

I launch Internet Connection Sharing on my Windows Mobile 6 mobile phone. Then I launch following script from console:

modprobe bnep
pand --connect HARDWARE_ADDRESS_MY_PHONE # for example mine is: 00:17:E3:99:8E:46
ifconfig bnep0
dhclient bnep0  # WM6 Internet Connection Sharing runs a dhcp server

….now I am connected !!! (it’s a pleasure to note that connection is more stable than Windows Vista…..)

VMWare

I got a compilation error with the vmnet module using VMWare workstation.

I found a solution on Ubuntu Forums at this thread