Hi, everyone! 
I am rather new to Kubuntu, having just installed it Friday on my new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1520 (Intel). Thanks to many tips mentioned in a thread on the Ubuntu forum, and the fact that I grabbed the alternate Gutsy CD instead of Feisty, many problems people have had with this laptop were not problems for me. Wired networking, CD burning, even compiz (heh) are working. USB sticks and SD cards, no problem.
For the last few years I've been running Gentoo on other machines, so this is a bit different from what I'm used to. The last distro I used with pre-packaged stuff was Mandrake, back when it was still called that.
I'm hoping not to do much compiling on this thing, though it doesn't scare me.
Anyway, like I said this thing is "mostly" working. By that I mean the essential stuff I mentioned above, enough that I can sit here and type this on it. However, there are a few things that are still bugging me:
I'm certainly going to keep poking around and searching, but I thought I should post here in case somebody has solved one of these problems recently and can point me to a quick solution. I'll post back if I find the answer before you do!
Thanks for taking the time to read all the way down to here, and even more if you've got some clues for me!
Edited to change subject; maybe people are skipping it because of the "Dell" or something. I dunno.
I am rather new to Kubuntu, having just installed it Friday on my new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1520 (Intel). Thanks to many tips mentioned in a thread on the Ubuntu forum, and the fact that I grabbed the alternate Gutsy CD instead of Feisty, many problems people have had with this laptop were not problems for me. Wired networking, CD burning, even compiz (heh) are working. USB sticks and SD cards, no problem.
For the last few years I've been running Gentoo on other machines, so this is a bit different from what I'm used to. The last distro I used with pre-packaged stuff was Mandrake, back when it was still called that.
I'm hoping not to do much compiling on this thing, though it doesn't scare me.Anyway, like I said this thing is "mostly" working. By that I mean the essential stuff I mentioned above, enough that I can sit here and type this on it. However, there are a few things that are still bugging me:
- First, every few seconds while on AC power (but not while on battery), I hear clicks from the hard drive. This is the sort of sound that, if you've spent much time listening to hard drives, you may recognize as head parking. It sounds like the system (or maybe the drive itself, quite likely since it's a laptop) is trying to keep the drive stopped and parked, but something accesses it every few seconds and causes it to wake up. Does anyone know what's going on here? While on AC, I wouldn't mind if the drive stayed in an active state, and its behavior while on battery seems fine to me, so it's probably an easy tweak. I've looked at the various services, though, and runlevels, but nothing jumped out at me.
Edit: I was reading my kernel logs (looking for something else, of course) and something finally jumped out at me: "kjournald ... commit interval 5 seconds." That's about how often I hear, if I listen carefully, hard drive sounds. The "parking" noise isn't quite as frequent or regular, but it seems that what I'm hearing is a fight between the ext3 journaling (delayed writes, about every 5 seconds) and the drive parking its head because it thinks it is idle. Pretty much immediately after it parks, along comes another write and I get to hear another loud noise. Well, "loud" in the context of laptop hard drives, anyway!
This also explains why I never notice such a thing in Vista: When I'm booted into Vista, the hard drive is constantly grinding away! It's either searching, or de-fragging, or super-fetching, but whatever it is, it sure keeps my drive busy.
- Now for everyone's favorite, WiFi! This machine uses a wireless card from Intel, the "4965 AGN," which works quite nicely in W****ws V**ta. Here, it is recognized as "wlan0" and shows an IP address, although not the one I've configured my router to assign it. I also cannot get it to connect to anything. (The blue light stays off all the time, even when kwifimanager shows a signal from my WLAN.) Besides kwifimanager, I've also tried kwavecontrol and one panel applet.
Even if I had to configure them manually, I'd settle for that as long as I could connect, but (though I hate to ask) is there any way to approximate the wireless functionality I have in Windows? That is, (1) if a wire is connected, use that; (2) if not, use my home WLAN if present; (3) otherwise, let me pick a public WLAN if I'm roaming. There are at least eight other WLANs reachable from where I sit, yet the various wireless monitors claim they find none.Code:
rassilon@hazuki:~$ lsmod | grep iw iwl4965 101860 0 mac80211 171016 1 iwl4965
- Last but not least, I would like to have sound. Right now I have none; not a beep, squeal, or even badly-distorted noise as I've seen in other threads. lspci shows "00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)". The entire module list is very long, so here is a short one:
Code:rassilon@hazuki:~$ lsmod | grep snd snd_hda_intel 263712 0 snd_pcm_oss 44672 0 snd_mixer_oss 17664 1 snd_pcm_oss snd_pcm 80388 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm_oss snd_seq_dummy 4740 0 snd_seq_oss 33152 0 snd_seq_midi 9600 0 snd_rawmidi 25728 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event 8448 2 snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi snd_seq 53232 6 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event snd_timer 24324 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 9228 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq snd 54660 9 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_seq_oss,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device soundcore 8800 1 snd snd_page_alloc 10888 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
I'm certainly going to keep poking around and searching, but I thought I should post here in case somebody has solved one of these problems recently and can point me to a quick solution. I'll post back if I find the answer before you do!
Thanks for taking the time to read all the way down to here, and even more if you've got some clues for me!
Edited to change subject; maybe people are skipping it because of the "Dell" or something. I dunno.
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