Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

Yes, I am back to having multiple posts in a single blog entry — I figured that this is better than having several dozen smaller entries.

DemoCamp Cincinnati

Thursday evening was DemoCamp Cincinnati, which was quite fun. A bunch of folks showed up and we had a couple of talks, one of them by a new startup called Mercury Grove. They presented their neat product called Collab which was rather interesting. They seem to have some very interesting people working there, and I just found out that they have a blog, too.

Click to see more pictures from DemoCamp Cincinnati

Ubuntu Adventures on a Dell e1405

So, I decided to upgrade my Dell notebook from Dapper to Edgy Eft. I have a Dell e1405, which like all notebooks, has the most obscure devices you can ever find (and ergo, is the hardest to find device drivers for). Now, I could not get a lot of things to work on Dapper, so I figured that Edgy Eft would be better.

In a lot of ways, it is. I got just about everything working. And as you can tell from the screenshots, it also knocks the pants off most other Linux installs I have seen.

So, the three things that I could not get to work on Dapper were — multimedia (mp3s, DVDs and AVIs), my wireless and my monitor at its native (highest) resolution. Here is a brief overview of the solutions I found.

• Multimedia on Ubuntu: For the mp3s, despite ALSA working and despite downloading the right codecs, I could just not play any mp3s and nor could i play any DVDs or AVIs. I found this Digg article on “How to Get Full Multimedia Support in Ubuntu” to be immensely useful. Which of course begs the question — just why isn’t Ubuntu shipping all this with its desktop install?

• Wireless on Ubuntu: While I could not get my wireless to work on Dapper, it magically started working with Edgy Eft. To me, this was the greatest benefit of this upgrade. Now, if this does not work for you, the “Dell E1405 and Broadcom 4311 wireless HOWTO” is extremely useful.

• Getting E1405’s LCD to work on its native resolution on Ubuntu: This was a slightly harder problem. To solve this, I basically followed the instructions given here on getting the Dell e1405 WXGA+ to work on Edgy Eft — but please note that I had the Section “Device” read Driver: vesa instead of i810. After making the changes mentioned there (including changing vesa to i810), I installed 915resolution (sudo apt-get install 915resolution). I then restarted X, went to my preferences and viola! There was 1440×900, which I then changed to. It works like a charm. Beats the days when you had to mess with XF86Setup and the like.

Now my final problem resulted from the Firefox upgrade. It turns out that there is a problem with Firefox release candidates and various Linux flavours/versions, where a lot of people have had trouble getting https to work. After the upgrade, Firefox would just throw up an error for any https page, which totally sucked. Funnily enough, Opera would work just fine, without any problem.

To fix this, I basically wrote the following script and have it stored in my home directory:

#!/bin/sh
killall firefox-bin
mv .mozilla .mozilla-old
firefox &

Surprisingly, after the very first time, I stopped having this problem. But I have the script there anyway, just in case.

So, now I have a perfectly functional Ubuntu install that can pretty much do everything that Windows could, and I am extremely pleased with it! The best part about the whole setup is that I can hibernate Windows and work in Linux and vice-versa.