Andrew Ferrier

I recently tried to install Windows 7 64-bit on VMWare Workstation 7.1.3 on top of Ubuntu 10.04 as a host. I found that it behaved quite unreliably once the VMWare tools were installed into the guest OS – in particular, it regularly hung on boot-up. However, once I saw this error message, which clued me into the problem:

I discovered that the solution was to disable 3D graphics acceleration – in the VM’s settings, untick Display / Accelerate 3D Graphics. The VM now works smoothly.

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.

I recently acquired a Logitech Presenter R800. It’s a beautiful device – not particularly cheap, but very slick and easy-to-use. Unfortunately, Windows XP (Service Pack 3) on my system refused to recognise it – the device was listed as USB Receiver in Windows Device Manager, but Windows kept claiming it couldn’t find the driver. It is presented to the system as a standard USB HID device, so there is no Logitech-specific driver: it uses the standard Windows HID Driver. It worked perfectly out of the box on Ubuntu 9.10.

After 3-4 hours of research, I found the answer. Running a differencing tool between the C:\Windows\Inf folder on a colleague’s PC and mine showed that mine was missing the usb.inf and usb.PNF files from that folder. It wasn’t clear why they were missing, but having copied them over from his machine, the driver installation then worked perfectly. So that’s worth trying if you encounter a similar problem with this product (or indeed any USB HID device).

Until recently, I was having problems with fullscreen video in Windows on my new T61 Thinkpad, which uses an NVidia Quadro NVS 140M display adapter. Video would regularly flicker when fullscreen was enabled in a variety of players, including Windows Media Player and various embedded Flash players, and had to be taken out of fullscreen and put back – sometimes as many as 10 times – before the image was stable.

After doing a bit of hunting around yesterday, and noticing that at least one other person had the same problem, I came to the conclusion that it was power-saving based – my suspicion is that the refresh rate is reduced under some power-saving circumstances.

The following set of steps seems to remove the problem (or, to be more exact, I haven’t seen the problem return since following them):

• Open the NVIDIA control panel (from the Start Menu or the system tray).
• Navigate to Mobile / Change PowerMizer settings.
• Select Not manage my power consumption (Disable PowerMizer).

Hope this helps someone else.