strange symphonies

Ubuntu 6.10 on ThinkPad R52

Warning: You’ll be getting alot of these in the next few days…

So I’ve finally got it running, my IBM ThinkPad R52 is running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft! Since around 4-5am this morning, don’t ask…

Mostly everything works out of the box, cd, or iso. This includes suspend, hibernate, wireless, and AIGLX (with Beryl)! I started of with a clean install. Backed up all my stuff, and reformatted my hard drive.

Some comments…

Its interesting to note that Ubuntu now uses the official Firefox icon, as the Debian team forked Firefox due to logo/trademark issues. So Ubuntu got into some ‘deal’ with Mozilla to let them use it, I don’t see why Debian could have done that as well? It maybe running the new-hot-off-the-press Firefox 2.0, but half my extensions aren’t working! I hope they get fixed soon :(.

The new init system is nice, I get to a login screen within 30 seconds! Which is great, considering previously it was 1 minute. Yes, if I was such a speed freak I may as well turn to Gentoo. To be honest, I feel like it…

But there have been some quirks here and there, which I’ve had to fix.

Hardware clock set to UTC

Previously Ubuntu had always adjusted itself, or I believe even asked if the hardware clock was set to UTC. This time round it didn’t. Fix? Edit /etc/default/rcS and change the UTC option to yes.

Xorg

For some reason my keyboards Right Alt wasn’t working, very peculiar. Similarly goes to my mouse scrollwheel, but thats common. So I opened up my Xorg.conf ( /etc/X11/xorg.conf ) and modified the InputDevice section for my mouse by adding the options “EmulateWheel”, and “EmulateWheelButton” as such:


Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
Option “CorePointer”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Protocol” “ExplorerPS/2″
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″
Option “Emulate3Buttons” “true”
Option “EmulateWheel” “on”
Option “EmulateWheelButton” “2″
EndSection


Interesting enough while perusing through it I found this:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Generic Keyboard”
…
Option “XkbOptions” “lv3:ralt_switch”
EndSection


That last option “XkbOptions“, I’ve never seen, or heard of this option before. Thus I commented it out, and restarted my xorg. Look

Eyecandy: AiGLX

You can easily find the instructions on how to setup AiGLX. Works out of the box, but default settings are icky so I’ve changed them.

VIM

I’m a heavy user of VIM, and I was looking forward to using VIM7 (yes, I know it came out ages ago, but I was lazy to upgrade). Knowing it comes with the machine by default, I started messing around with VIM, only to find out that there exists not one, but multiple versions of VIM. By default the VIM installed with ubuntu 6.10 is vim-tiny, which had no syntax highlighting what soever, not good for me.

A list of the available VIMs:

• vim-common - Vi IMproved - Common files
• vim-full - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor - full fledged version
• vim-gnome - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor - with GNOME2 GUI
• vim-gtk - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor - with GTK2 GUI
• vim-gui-common - Vi IMproved - Common GUI files
• vim-latexsuite - View, edit and compile LaTeX documents from within vim
• vim-perl - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor - with Perl support
• vim-python - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor - with Python support
• vim-ruby - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor - with Ruby support
• vim-runtime - Vi IMproved - Runtime files
• vim-scripts - plugins for vim, adding bells and whistles
• vim-tcl - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor - with TCL support
• vim-tiny - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor - compact version
• vim - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor

Now lets see…I thought I would be smart, and so installed several of these, but most importantly vim-full. After installation, it took ages to start VIM. I’ve mixed and mashed the setup, but I still couldn’t figure it out, so right now I am just running using the vim package, except there appears to no gvim damnit! Hope to solve this issue soon.

Update
VIM has been fixed, one of my plugins was screwing up somewhere, so check those. Got my gvim with vim-full.

Other issues?

At the moment there aren’t any other issues which I can think off…I’ll write more about it when I do find them though.

   Post in IBM ThinkPad R52, Ubuntu