Sam Lesher

Via Mais on Ubuntu Forums:

Purpose: For many of us, our laptop touchpads get in the way of our typing quite often and can actually cause us to highlight or minimize things we didn’t intend. So, this will help to alleviate that by making a small delay in the response of the touchpad after typing.

NOTE: Please read this guide entirely before attempting to do it. There is a section where you must restart X and thus close down your internet browser. The best way to do this would be to print this guide! I hope this works as well for you as it has for me!

Procedure:
1. Turn on SHMCONFIG
A. Open a Terminal. Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal
B. Type sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_synbackup

C. Type gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf Enter your password if it prompts you.

Note: The second command in the picture is typed wrong. Please see C.

D. Search for a section that looks like this:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
…
End Section

E. Add a line above the End Section line and put this into it:

Option “SHMConfig” “on”

F. Save the file and close gedit and the terminal window
G. Write these commands down just in case this screws up your window system: sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf_synbackup /etc/X11/xorg.conf and sudo killall gdm and sudo gdm
H. This next step will restart your window system, so save any work and close any open applications. Press: Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. This should take you back to your login screen. If it does not, press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and login at the terminal window. After logging in, type the commands that you wrote down from step F in order hitting return after each command.
I. If your login screen came up the first time, continue on to part 2, if not, look over waht you did carefully and see if you can spot any mistakes.

2. Add the Startup Command
A. Open the sessions manager: System -> Preferences -> Sessions
B. Click the far right tab labeled Startup Programs
C. Click the Add button
D. Type in the following: syndaemon -i 1 -d

E. Hit ok then hit close

Congratualations, you are done! Note that this will not take effect until Gnome is restarted or you type the command from 2D in a terminal window. You can restart Gnome with the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace trick (make sure to save everything first!) or you can open a terminal by going to Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to contact me through this board, or more easily through email or AIM.

I installed Second Life 1.18.4 (3) on Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10. Everything seemed fine for the most part, however the audio from music streams in the game was very crackly. Second Life is the only application with crackly audio, all my other applications seem fine so far.

I corrected this by installing the “esound” package, and then rebooting my machine.

$ sudo aptitude install esound

After rebooting and trying again, sound now works perfectly in the game.

I’ve been experimenting with Ubunty Gutsy 7.10 on my (relatively) new Asus A7T notebook. For the most part, everything works well after the install, but there are two annoying problems that I ran into:

1. No sound. My laptop uses the ALC882 codec.
2. When I boot up, there is no bootup screen, or splash screen. All I see is a black screen until GDM starts. Also, if I switch to a TTY terminal screen using CTRL+ALT+F1 (through F6), the resolution is incorrect; everything is huge and off the screen by several lines, which renders it pretty useless.

Here is how I have fixed both of these issues:

Fixing Sound

I was able to fix my sound issue using the alsa-base package installed by default (version 1.0.14-1ubuntu2 at the time of this writing). Here are the steps:

A. Create a new file called “/etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.modprobe”:
$ sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.modprobe

Add the following line to the file and then save it:
options snd-hda-intel model=w2jc

B. Edit the file “/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base”:
$ sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Add the same line to the end of this file and then save it:
options snd-hda-intel model=w2jc

C. Reboot. After I rebooted, I had sound.

Fix TTY and boot-up resolution

A. Edit the file “/etc/initramfs-tools/modules”:
$ sudo gedit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules

Add the following two lines to the end of the file, then save it and close it:
fbcon
vesafb

B. Edit the file “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer”:
$ sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer

Comment out the blacklist vesafb, so that it looks like this: #blacklist vesafb

C. Set the height and width values in usplash.conf to 1024×768:
$ sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf

Change the values to 1024×768, save the file and close it.

D. Edit the grub config file to add a vga value to set the resolution of the bootscreen to 1024×768:
$ sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Find the commented out #defoptions line. Leave it commented out, but add the following to the end of the line:
vga=773

Save the file and close it.

E. Regenerate initram file:
$ sudo update-initramfs -u

F. Update grub:
$ sudo update-grub

G. Reboot. After I rebooted, I saw the bootsplash, and my TTY terminals were at a better resolution.