Archives for February 2007
Gateway M460 laptops, Ubuntu, Xfce and you
27 February 2007 | Ubuntu | No Responses
Want to get your M460 media keys working in Xfce on Ubuntu? Turns out it’s easier than any of the guides seem to suggest.
If you’ve played around, you’ll know the volume keys work already, but the Play/Stop/Previous/Next keys do now. The trick is to make an .Xmodmap file.
How To: Improved Chinese fonts on Ubuntu
24 February 2007 | Ubuntu | 2 Responses
Since this is only on the Chinese Ubuntu wiki, I figured some people might miss it.
Shawn Ling wrote up a guide on how to get Vera Sans YuanTi working in Ubuntu. The steps are pretty simple.
How To: PHC undervolting in Feisty
19 February 2007 | Ubuntu | No Responses
Well, it only took me two weeks and five unanswered posts on the Ubuntu forums, but I finally got it working. Oh happy days. Now I can actually have battery life in Linux! This goes well with my last post on fixing the CPU monitor panel applet.
Why do you want to undervolt? Undervolting allows you to send less juice to your processor while running at the same clock speeds. Less juice means less heat, which means less energy wasted, which means longer battery life. You get a cooler-running laptop and a longer battery life for your time and effort.
Undervolting hacks only work on Pentium M systems. Not sure if you have a Pentium M? Try running ‘cat /proc/cpuinfo’. If you see something like “model name: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor ?.??GHz”, then you are able to undervolt.
How much can you undervolt? A lot. The factory setting on my Pentium M 2.00GHz (0.80/1.07/1.33/1.60/2GHz steps) is 800MHz at .988V and 2GHz at 1.308V. Through underclocking, I can run 800MHz at .700V and 2GHz at 1.116V. In other words, I can run at maximum clockspeed at less voltage than it would normally take me to run at 1.33GHz (third step).
Fix for CPU Scaling panel applet
19 February 2007 | Ubuntu | No Responses
If your GNOME CPU Frequency Scaling panel applet does not give you scaling options when you left click, there’s a simple fix for this.
The reason this option is blocked out is because your user lacks permissions to access cpufreq-selector. Punch in the following command in your favorite terminal:
sudo chmod +s /usr/bin/cpufreq-selectorAll set, now when you left click you can select your favorite frequency or governor.
VMWare and the 2.6.20 kernel
7 February 2007 | Jargon | No Responses
If you’re running VMWare on the 2.6.20 kernel, it’s virtual FS monitor will crash and fail when you copy files.
And it crashes in a most brutal way …
You cannot destroy it because it’s a driver, and because it’s a driver not handled automatically by the system, it will never unset on bootdown. Trying to remove it the way you remove normal function drivers fails too.
However, with a little creativity, you can still get files onto your virtual drive without needing a network connection.
Running NANA on Linux
5 February 2007 | PHP, Ubuntu | No Responses
Neil Corlett’s NANA is still the best tool around for finding graphical data in a binary. Unfortunately, it’s DOS only.
If you’ve been around my site, you’ll see I’ve written a loader for using NANA on Windows via DOSBox. That code, however, relied on Windows “DIR” for detecting the DOS8.3 name of the file to ‘nana’.
I tweaked the code to work on Linux with Linux DOSBox.