Shallow Thoughts : : laptop

Synaptics horizontal scrolling (and other touchpad configurations)

My new netbook (about which, more later) has a trackpad with areas set aside for both vertical and horizontal scrolling. Vertical scrolling worked out of the box on Squeeze without needing any extra fiddling. My old Vaio had that too, and I loved it.

Horizontal scrolling took some extra research. I was able to turn it on with a command:

synclient HorizEdgeScroll=1

(thank you, AbsolutelyTech). Then it worked fine, for the duration of that session.

But it took a lot more searching to find out the right place to set it permanently. Nearly every page you find on trackpad settings tells you to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Distros haven't normally used xorg.conf in over three years! Sure, you can generate one, then edit it -- but surely there's a better way.

And there is. At least in Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu Natty, you can edit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf and add this options line inside the "InputClass" section:

        options "HorizEdgeScroll" "1"

Don't forget the quotes, or X won't even start.

In theory, you can use this for any of the Synaptics driver options -- tap rate and sensitivity, even multitouch. Your mileage may vary -- horizontal scroll is the only one I've tested so far. But at least it's easier than generating and maintaining an xorg.conf file!

Tags: linux, X11, laptops
[ 15:20 Oct 31, 2011    More linux/laptop | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Vaio tips for Debian Squeeze

I switched to the current Debian release, "Squeeze", quite a few months ago on my Sony Vaio laptop. I've found that Squeeze, with its older kernel and good attention to power management (compared to the power management regressions in more recent kernels), gets much better battery life than either Arch Linux or Ubuntu on this machine. I'm using Squeeze as the primary OS at least until the other distros get their kernel power management sorted out.

I did have to solve a couple of minor problems when switching over, though.

Suspend/Resume quirks

The first problem was that my Vaio TX650 would freeze on resuming from suspend -- something that every other Linux distro has handled out of the box on this machine.

The solution turned out to be simple though non-obvious, apparently a problem with controlling power to the display:

sudo pm-suspend --quirk-dpms-on

That wasn't easy to find, but ever since then the machine has been suspending without a single glitch. And it's a true suspend, unlike Ubuntu Natty, which on this machine will use up a full battery if I leave it suspended all day -- Natty uses nearly as much power when suspended as it does running.

Adjusting screen brightness: debugging ACPI

Of course, once I got that sorted out, there were the usual collection of little changes I needed to make. Number one was that it didn't automatically handle brightness adjustment with the Fn-F5 and Fn-F6 keys.

It turned out my previous technique for handling the brightness keys didn't work, because the names of the ACPI events in /etc/acpi/events had changed. Previously, /etc/acpi/events/sony-brightness-down had contained references to the Sony I/O Control, or SPIC:

event=sony/hotkey SPIC 00000001 00000010
action=/etc/acpi/sonybright.sh down

That device didn't exist on Squeeze. To find out what I needed now, I ran acpi-listen and typed the function-key combos in question. That gave me the codes I needed. I changed the sony-brightness-down file to read:

event=video/brightnessdown BRTDN 00000087 00000000
action=/etc/acpi/sonybright.sh down

It's probably a good thing, changing to be less Sony-specific ... but as a user it's one of those niggling annoyances that I have to go chase down every time I upgrade to a new Linux version.

Tags: linux, suspend, acpi, debian, sony, vaio
[ 11:07 Aug 27, 2011    More linux/laptop | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Of Laptops, Docking Stations and Changing Resolution

I've been setting up a new Lenovo X201 laptop at work. (Yes, work -- I've somehow fallen into an actual job where I go in to an actual office at least some of the time. How novel!)

At the office I have a Lenovo docking station, attached to a monitor and keyboard. The monitor, naturally, has a different resolution from the laptop's own monitor.

Under Gnome and compiz, when I plugged in the monitor, I could either let the monitor mirror the laptop display -- in which case X would refuse to work at greater than 1024x768, much smaller than the native resolution of either the laptop screen or the external monitor -- or I could call up the classic two-monitor configuration dialog, where I could configure the external monitor to be its correct size and sit alongside the computer's monitor. I had to do this every time I plugged in.

If I wanted to work on the big screen, then when I undocked, I had to drag all the windows on all desktops back to the built-in LCD first, or they'd be lost. Using just the external monitor and turning off the laptop screen didn't seem to be an allowed option.

That all lasted for about two days. Gnome and I just don't get along. Pretty soon gdm was mysteriously refusing to let me log in (probably didn't like my under-1000 user id), and after wasting half a day fighting it I gave up and reverted with relief to my familiar Openbox desktop.

But now I'm in the Openbox world and don't have that dialog anyway. What are my options?

xrandr monitor detection

Fortunately, I already knew about using xrandr to send to a projector; it was only a little more complicated using it for the monitor in the docking station. Running xrandr with no arguments prints all the displays it currently sees, so you can tell whether an external display or projector is connected and even what resolutions it supports.

I used that for a code snippet in my .xinitrc:

# Check whether the external monitor is connected: returns 0 on success
xrandr | grep VGA | grep " connected "
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
  xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1600x900;
  xrandr --output LVDS1 --off
else
  xrandr --output VGA1 --off
  xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1280x800
fi

That worked nicely. When I start X it checks for an external monitor, and if it finds one it turns off the laptop display (so it's off when the laptop is sitting closed in the docking station) and sets the screen size for the external monitor.

Making it automatic

All well and good. I worked happily all day in the docking station, suspended the laptop and un-docked it, brought it home, woke it up -- and of course the display was still off. Oops.

Okay, so it also needs the same check when resuming from suspend. That used to be in /etc/acpi/resume.d, but in Lucid they've moved it (because we definitely wouldn't want users to get complacent and think they know how to configure things!) and now it lives in /etc/pm/sleep.d. I created a new file, /etc/pm/sleep.d/20_enable_display which looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
    resume)
        # Check whether the external monitor is connected:
        # returns 0 on success
        xrandr | grep VGA | grep " connected "
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
            xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1600x900
            xrandr --output LVDS1 --off
        else
            xrandr --output VGA1 --off
            xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1280x800
        fi
        hsetroot -center `find -L $HOME/Backgrounds -name "*.*" | $HOME/bin/randomline`

        ;;
    suspend|hibernate)
        ;;
    *)
        ;;
esac
exit $?

Neat! Now, every time I wake from suspend, the laptop checks whether an external monitor is connected and sets the resolution accordingly. And it re-sets the background (using my random wallpaper method) so I don't get a tiled background on the big monitor.

Update: hsetroot -fill works better than -center given that I'm displaying background images on two different resolutions. Of course, if I wanted to get fancy I could make separate background sets, one for each monitor, and choose images from the appropriate set.

We're almost done. Two more possible adjustments.

Detecting undocking

First, while poking around in /etc/acpi I noticed a script named undock.sh. In theory, I can put the same code snippet in there, and then if I un-dock the laptop without suspending it first, it will immediately change resolution. I haven't actually tried that yet.

Projectors

Second, this business of turning off the built-in display if there's anything plugged into the VGA port is going to break if I use this laptop for presentations, since a projector will also show up as VGA1. So the code may need to be a little smarter. For example:

xrandr | grep VGA | grep " connected " | grep 16.0x

The theory here is that an external monitor will be able to do 1680 or 1600, so it will have a line like VGA1 connected 1680x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 434mm x 270mm. The 1680x matches the 16.0x pattern in grep. A projector isn't likely to do more than 1280, so it won't match the pattern '16.0x'. However, that isn't very robust; it will probably fail for one of those fancy new 1920x1080 monitors. You could extend it with

xrandr | grep VGA | grep " connected " | egrep '16.0x|19.0x'

but that's getting even more hacky ... and it might be time to start writing some more intelligent code.

Which doubtless I'll do if I ever get a 1920x1080 monitor.

Tags: linux, X11, laptops
[ 22:11 Sep 13, 2010    More linux/laptop | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Updated Network Schemes page

I've used my simple network schemes setup for many years. No worries about how distros come up with a new network configuration GUI every release; no worries about all the bloat that NetworkManager insists on before it will run; no extra daemons running all the time polling my net just in case I might want to switch networks suddenly. It's all command-line based; if I'm at home, I type

netscheme home

and my network will be configured for that setup until I tell it otherwise. If I go to a cafe with an open wi-fi link, I type netscheme wifi; I have other schemes for places I go where I need a wireless essid or WEP key. It's all very easy and fast.

Last week for SCALE I decided it was silly to have to su and create a new scheme file for conferences where all I really needed was the name of the network (the essid), so I added a quick hack to my netscheme script so that typing netscheme foo, where there's no existing scheme by that name, will switch to a scheme using foo as the essid. Worked nicely, and that inspired me to update the "documentation".

I wrote an elaborate page on my network schemes back around 2003, but of course it's all changed since then and I haven't done much toward updating the page. So I've rewritten it completely, taking out most of the old cruft that doesn't seem to apply any more. It's here: Howto Set Up Multiple Network Schemes on a Linux Laptop.

Tags: linux, laptops, net
[ 09:51 Feb 27, 2009    More linux/laptop | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Widescreen laptop for presentations

I've written before about how I'd like to get a netbook like an Asus Eee, except that the screen resolution puts me off: no one makes a netbook with vertical resolution of more than 600. Since most projectors prefer 1024x768, I'm wary of buying a laptop that can't display that resolution.

(What was wrong with my beloved old Vaio? Nothing, really, except that the continued march of software bloat means that a machine that can't use more than 256M RAM is hurting when trying to run programs (*cough* Firefox *cough) that start life by grabbing about 90M and goes steadily up from there. I can find lightweight alternatives for nearly everything else, but not for the browser -- Dillo just doesn't cut it.)

Ebay turned out to be the answer: there are lots of subnotebooks there, nice used machines with full displays at netbook prices. And so a month before LCA I landed a nice Vaio TX650 with 1.5G RAM, Pentium M, Intel 915GM graphics and Centrino networking. All nice Linux-supported hardware.

But that raised another issue: how do widescreen laptops (the TX650 is 1366x768) talk to a projector? I knew it was possible -- I see people presenting from widescreen machines all the time -- but nobody ever writes about how it works.

The first step was to get it talking to an external monitor at all. I ran a VGA cable to my monitor, plugged the other end into the Vaio (it's so nice not to need a video dongle!) and booted. Nothing. Hmm.

But after some poking and googling, I learned that with Intel graphics, xrandr is the answer:

xrandr --output VGA --mode 1024x768

switches the external VGA signal on, and

xrandr --auto

switches it back off.

Update, April 2010: With Ubuntu Lucid, this has changed and now it's
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768
-- in other words, VGA changed to VGA1. You can run xrandr with no arguments to get a list of possible output devices and find out whether X sees the external projector or screen correctly.

Well, mostly. Sometimes it doesn't work -- like, unfortunately, at the lightning talk session, so I had to give my talk without visuals. I haven't figured that out yet. Does the projector have to be connected before I run xrandr? Should it not be connected until after I've already run xrandr? Once it's failed, it doesn't help to run xrandr again ... but a lot of fiddling and re-plugging the cable and power cycling the projector can sometimes fix the problem, which obviously isn't helpful in a lightning talk situation.

Eventually I'll figure that out and blog it (ideas, anyone?) but the real point of today's article is resolution. What I wanted to know was: what happened to that wide 1366-pixel screen when I was projecting 1024 pixels? Would it show me some horrible elongated interpolated screen? Would it display on the left part of the laptop screen, or the middle part?

The answer, I was happy to learn, is that it does the best thing possible: it sends the leftmost 1024 pixels to the projector, while still showing me all 1366 pixels on the laptop screen.

Why ... that means ... I can write notes for myself, to display in the rightmost 342 screen pixels! All it took was a little bit of CSS hacking in my HTML slide presentation package, and it worked fine. Now I have notes just like my Mac friends with their Powerpoint and their dual-head video cards, only I get to use Linux and HTML. How marvellous! I could get used to this widescreen stuff.

Tags: laptops, X11, linux, speaking, projector, lca2009, linux.conf.au
[ 21:12 Feb 06, 2009    More linux/laptop | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Good article on laptop Linux

Linux Magazine has a good article by Jonathan A. Zdziarski on Linux on the laptop: Ten power tools for the mobile Linux user. He gives hints such as what services to turn off for better power management, and how to configure apmd to turn off those services automatically; finding modules to drive various types of wireless internet cards; various ways of minimizing disk activity; and even making data calls with a mobile phone.

Lots of good information in there!

Tags: linux, laptops
[ 19:51 Oct 07, 2004    More linux/laptop | permalink to this entry | comments ]