Andrew Ferrier

I use dm-crypt on all my machines now, including laptops, to provide full-disk encryption. I also use it to encrypt swap partitions with a randomly-generated key. All of these are features that Ubuntu 10.04 provides out-of-the-box, at least when you use the alternate CD to install.

I also recently installed µswsusp on one of my laptops, a userspace hibernation facility. I didn’t really connect the dots until one day I left the laptop running, coming back to find it hibernated. When I tried to resume, the boot process hung as the kernel complained it couldn’t resume the image. After a facepalm moment (of course this wouldn’t work – the encryption key isn’t constant across boots -  you have to use a constant key if you want to get hibernation working), I eventually figured out how to book the machine: use the noresume parameter when booting the kernel.

The only thing blocking me from using this now was getting the Grub menu to come up so I could change that kernel boot line. It appears that in the switch to Grub 2, the key to do this changed to the Shift key, from the Esc key as it had been in Grub 1. After I managed to bring up the menu, I could boot the kernel without resuming the image. I then deinstalled µswsusp.

I just acquired a new Vodafone Mobile Broadband modem to replace an aging ExpressCard version I had that wasn’t working too well. It came in the form of a Vodafone-branded Huawei K4505 USB stick. It didn’t work completely out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 10.04, at first appearing unrecognisable. After some hunting, I discovered that these sticks initially present themselves as USB Mass Storage to allow you to install the Windows drivers. You have to give a few magic incantations on Linux to make them switch into modem mode:

sudo aptitude install usb-modeswitch
sudo usb_modeswitch -v 0x12d1 -p 0x1521 -M \
 55534243123456780000000000000011060000000000000000000000000000

Once the modeswitch command is executed, the USB stick will present itself as a modem and you can use the standard Ubuntu NetworkManager mechanisms to define your service provider and set up the connection. The stick should remember its state, and so you should only ever need the above utility (and command) once.

I recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my Thinkpad T61 and set about disabling the touchpad, which I always find irritating. There seemed to be lots of guides to this, including this one, but none of them seemed to work for me. Eventually I figured some fairly simple steps which did work:

1. Install two packages if they aren’t already installed (gpointing-device-settings is the more modern version of gsynaptics and will uninstall it if it’s installed):

   sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics gpointing-device-settings

2. Start gpointing-device-settings from the command line and select “Touchpad off”, as shown here:
3. Exit the tool and reboot.