In my previous post I complained about Nexenta not working on my ThinkPad. For the sake of fairness, I should say that that was Alpha 6, and the Alpha 7 which has now been released does in fact install successfully. Having installed it, however, I have removed it again to make space to try out Arch Linux.
Posts Tagged ‘ThinkPad’
Nexenta does like my laptop
Thursday, May 31st, 2007Nexenta doesn’t like my laptop
Monday, May 7th, 2007I wanted to try out NexentaOS (aka GNU/Solaris) on my laptop (a Thinkpad T43). But when I tried to install it, it got stuck at the “Detecting available partitions” stage – OK, not stuck, actually, it just seemed to be going round and round in some kind of infinite loop. Anyway, Googling brings me nothing, except for vague hints that it may have something to do with the fact that my hard drive is on a SATA bus. Someone else got OpenSolaris to work on a T43, so I guess I’ll try that out, just as soon as I can download all the CDs.
How to make ThinkPad volume keys work properly in Kubuntu
Monday, April 2nd, 2007I really like Ubuntu. I mean, I really, really like it. But it exhibits one really irritating behaviour on most IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads. You see, ThinkPads (except for some in the R series) have a hardware sound mixer, and the volume control buttons operate the mixer directly in hardware, without any interaction from the operating system. This is unusual; most other laptops have software buttons which the OS must interpret and use to control the software mixer.
Now, on most distributions, I would just run tpb, and it gives a little on-screen display when I press one of the buttons. Ubuntu, however, is different. It has a special hotkeys subsystem which interprets the button presses on all sorts of laptops and passes them to a generic control program. Unfortunately, this system doesn’t know that the ThinkPad interprets the keys on its own; so every time you press a volume key, it gets interpreted in hardware and in software. This is really irritating, because the volume jumps in huge steps every time you press the button. And if you change the volume in software, they get out of sync and it all gets really complicated.
The appropriate behaviour, of course, would be to just display a notification without changing the software mixer’s volume; and I hope the Ubuntu folks will eventually implement this. For the meanwhile, anyway, there is a fix at least for Kubuntu. (Sorry, GNOME users, I don’t know what the equivalent solution is for you).
- Install the package
kmilo-legacy. - Arrange to have read access to the device
/dev/nvram. On Feisty, at least, this required setting up a customudevrule by creating a file/etc/udev/rules.d/50-user-custom.ruleswith contentsKERNEL=="nvram", MODE="0664"and runningchmod 0664 /dev/nvramto fix the permissions without rebooting. - Run
kcmshell thinkpad, and then tick the “Run Thinkpad Buttons KMilo Plugin” option and untick the “Change volume in software” option. - Remove the file
/usr/share/services/kmilo/kmilo_generic.desktop. (Or move it somewhere else, or rename it to something that doesn’t end in.desktop, or whatever else will stop KDE from seeing it.) - Log out and log in again.
- Voila!
One useful side effect is that you will now get on-screen notifications when the other ThinkPad special buttons – like the brightness controls, the ThinkLight button, and so on – are pressed.