Results tagged “Alps touchpad” from CLICK

I turned on touchpad tapping today in Debian Lenny on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and I had forgotten the one thing that makes the tap-to-click function work so well in Lenny:

Double-tapping.

By that I mean it takes two taps to count as a left-click. That way, every time I use the touchpad to move around the screen, I'm not mistakenly left-clicking on things and screwing up everything I'm doing

I also turned on touchpad scrolling, by which sliding a finger down the far right of the touchpad mimics scrolling up and down with the arrow keys.

Note: Double-tapping only seems to work if the settings are just right. I will report later on just what those settings are.

I turned tap-to-click back on for the Gateway Solo 1450's touchpad in Debian Lenny. At first tap, it seemed like it wasn't working.

But that I discovered that I had to double-tap to click. That means regular tapping -- such as when simply moving the finger on the touchpad -- doesn't inadvertently lead to clicking things I don't want clicked.

So intead of tapping, now I'm double-tapping. It's curious because I see no way to go from double- to single-taps. Must be a GNOME "feature."

In any case, I approve.

I generally don't run beta releases, let alone review them, but I'm having a hard time waiting to find out what Ubuntu 8.04 LTS -- nicknamed Hardy Heron and set for an April 24 release -- is all about.

Why am I so excited about Ubuntu 8.04? First of all, I'm very much in favor of the LTS -- Ubuntu's long-term support release -- which will receive updates for three years on the desktop and five years on the server. And since the Ubuntu team is intent of packing this new LTS with as many bleeding-edge packages as possible -- the Firefox 3 beta for instance -- 8.04 LTS should remain comfortable for a lot longer than other distribution releases that offer long-term support.

I'm just a user and wordy blogger, and I find it fascinating to learn how bugs are dealt with in software projects like Debian. I do hope my 2.6.24 kernel-related sound problem gets resolved (even though I can just use an older kernel and have all the sound I want).

The other bug that's bugging me is this one, in which the Epiphany browser (but not Iceweasel/Firefox) always starts in the "working offline" mode, no matter whether I have the Internet connected or not.

I don't know whether or not the Debian team is going to get around to "fixing" this bug, since there's a fix out there that anybody can do. Curiously, I had to find it in another Debian bug report.

Here it is: If you launch the Epiphany browser, and can't get a Web page to come up (or you get a version of the page from the time you last had Epiphany working properly), check under the File menu to see if the "Work Offline" box is checked. If it is, you've got the bug.

You can just uncheck the box every time you launch Epiphany, or you can fix it this way, using Debian's gconf tool (and no, you don't have to be root to do it):

$ gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/epiphany/general/managed_network false

That's it. Epiphany is now behaving itself.

I'm not opposed to the occasional long line of code at the console, but if you're trying to get new users, this ain't the way to get it done. These things need to be fixed so the users don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they run into a problem.

Not a bug, but an annoyance easily fixed: I added my 4-year-old as a user on the Debian Lenny laptop, on which she loves using Gcompris, Tuxpaint and Childsplay. But her account didn't have working sound by default. It turns out that Debian is very conservative when it comes to granting privileges to new users; I turned on sound for her under System -- Administration -- Users and Groups. I clicked open her account, went to Properties and clicked the box for "Use audio devices" under the User Privileges tab.

So I solved two Debian problems I've had for a few weeks (the sound in my daughter's account and the Epiphany browser issue), one I've had for months (by discovering the touchpad settings app in Lenny), and was confronted with a new one (the new kernel's lack of a driver for my sound chip) and solved it by using a different kernel.

It's nice to get everything working right, but it's also nice to have everything working right.

The Linux kernel is a funny thing. A new kernel should mean increased functionality, but for me and my old-and-getting-older machines, the newer the kernels, the more functionality I lose.

I hadn't updated Debian Lenny in a while on the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450). When I did it today, I noticed a new kernel being added to the system: 2.6.24-1.

Now I have three kernels in Debian: 2.6.18 (a holdover from Etch), 2.6.22 (my first Lenny kernel) and now 2.6.24.

I didn't think about the new kernel when I next booted into Lenny, but when I did, I soon discovered that my sound card didn't work anymore. I looked at all the settings, tweaked a bit here and there, but still nothing.

Then I had an idea. I rebooted and loaded 2.6.22, and sound returned.

That's a curious thing. The Gateway uses the ESS 1988 Allegro PCI sound chip, so I imagine that anybody who also uses this chip and is running Lenny will run into problems.

Here's a bug report on the problem via Google Groups. It's Bug No. 464191. Here's the same thing on the Debian site.

If some of the commenters are correct, it appears that sound quit working due to removal of a binary blob:

I am also left with a mute laptop, a HP 6100 with ESS Technology ES1988 Allegro-1 (rev 12) sound chip. Matìj Laitl seems to be spot in his post since in I found this in Debian kernel changelog :

linux-2.6 (2.6.23-1) unstable; urgency=low

* Remove binary only firmwares for:

- ESS Allegro/Maestro3

While I understand and support the whole "up yours, binary only
firmwares" view, I also do like having sound. Is there any chance of
getting the needed firmware in kernel or as a module in Debian.
Package alsa-firmware-loaders doesn't seem to handle a module for
these chips.

Cheerio,
Mikko Nurminen

And here's a subsequent message:

So now I've got to recompile my kernel just to have sound? How nice. I haven't had to do that since about 1998. I guess this is good enough reason as any to remove Debian from my laptop. Sad too, it's been Debian since before Woody was released.

...Rob

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In Debian Etch, the 2.6.18 kernel controlled the Gateway's CPU fan without intervention. CPU fan control can be implemented in later kernels with a line in /etc/rc.local that shuts the fan off, after which it is managed fine by ACPI. Dropping the line into rc.local is not as easy as doing nothing, but it's not the worst thing in the world, either.

Luckily going from Debian Etch to Lenny made the laptop's Alps touchpad work pretty much close to perfect. There were a few bugs in Etch in regard to this touchpad that are probably never going to get fixed, and Icredit the GNOME and Debian teams with addressing these bugs and making the most recent versions of the GNOME desktop in Lenny a joy to use on this very laptop.

Note: The best distros so far when it comes to configuring the Alps touchpad in the Gateway are Ubuntu (7.10 and 8.04 beta), Debian Lenny and PCLinuxOS 2007. The best Linux kernel for the Gateway Solo 1450 is 2.6.18 (although later kernels can be tamed, as I say above). Honorable mention goes to Puppy Linux, all recent versions of which don't allow tap-to-click, which is better than not allowing tap-to-click to be turned off.

---------------------------------

But back to sound in Lenny. Will anybody else notice? Will the Debian team patch the kernel? I certainly hope so. Just this morning I was thinking about how stable Debian (even the less stable Testing branch) is on this laptop.

And then my sound goes away.

It's enough to send one running into the arms of Ubuntu. I'd hate to think that Debian is going to tell users with these specific sound chips to take the proverbial long walk off a short pier.

In other news: My initial excitement in regard to FreeBSD 7 managing the Gateway's CPU fan with no intervention has given way to slight dismay. Today when booting into FreeBSD, the fan blasted away as if my previous computing sessions with the OS had never happened. Come to think of it, the same thing happened to me with DesktopBSD recently. There's something about FreeBSD and this laptop that makes working ACPI a very intermittent thing.

Along the same line: I tried to get ACPI working in OpenBSD 4.2 on the Gateway. I don't have OpenBSD installed on this hard drive, so I used the live CD (which, by the way, is not easy to find but is a very useful tool). I followed instructions elsewhere to implement ACPI. But as far as fan control goes, nothing happened, and I have no clue as to how to proceed. I'll wait for OpenBSD 4.3 and try again. Or maybe a solution of some sort will fall into my lap(top).

Let's just say that if I could get OpenBSD to tame the Gateway CPU fan, I'd be using the security-rich OS a whole lot more. It's been great on the $15 Laptop, which has neither ACPI capability nor a noisy fan. The old Compaq has a relatively quiet fan that runs all the time; and yes, I prefer that to one that is silent 95 percent of the time, and loud the other 5 percent (or loud 100 percent of the time with no ACPI control).

And finally: It's time I fixed the broken PCMCIA slot in the Gateway. The part only costs $20, but I remember the last time I opened up the laptop's case. It's not exactly a fond memory. After pulling about 20 screws out, I still couldn't get the thing all the way apart.

I was able to do what I needed to pull out the broken power plug and solder leads to a new one to the top of the PC board, which, if I could get out of the case would probably never get put back in.

I wonder if I can even get the old PCMCIA card slot out of the damn thing. Still, $20 is worth gambling. I'd love to take my Orinoco WaveLAN PCMCIA 802.11b card out of the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, circa 1999) and use it with the newer and faster $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450, circa 2002).

Absolutely final note: Here at the Daily News, we've been trying to get the comments working properly in Movable Type 4. The whole point is to not allow anonymous comments, since this blog, in particular, gets probably 500 spam comments a day, and all the legit comments are mixed in between. It makes a lot of work for the blogger. To see how it's supposed to look, go to our new pro wrestling blog.

We're moving to a sign-in-only comments model with many choices of sign-in: Movable Type native (new in MT 4), Typekey, OpenID, Live Journal, and a few others I've never heard of. But at this point, we can't get the code working due to blog-rebuild issues.

Any of you who use Movable Type heavily probably know the pain of which I speak. But things should be resolved by mid-April. That's the plan anyway. Until then, I'm sorry that you can't comment on the blog itself. But if you do have a comment, please e-mail me at steven.rosenberg@dailynews.com, and I will either turn it into a new post, or attach it to the relevant post itself.

Coming up: A review of Dru Lavigne's "The Best of FreeBSD Basics," and a look at the Ubuntu 8.04 beta (yes, I'm reviewing a beta release; I usually don't run beta software, much less review it, but the anticipation of Ubuntu's forward-looking LTS release made me do it).