Tag: thinkpad

Ubuntu 10.04 on a T60 – flickering and wifi dropping

Ubuntu 10.04 runs pretty bad out of the box on a Thinkpad T60. There was a lot of random screen flickering and the wifi connection would drop under heavy load. One way to make the wifi drop happen was to start watching a full episode of the daily show and then start copying a file over your network to your computer.

Thinkpad T60
ATI Radeon x1400
iwl3945

It seems the screen flickering has to do with the ATI drivers, which are really poor in linux. Surprisingly the wifi problems are related.
I found a post on the ubuntu forums detailing the fix. The fix is to turn off the kernal mode settings (KMS ). To do this edit your /etc/default/grub file and edit the contents:
sudo vi /etc/default/grub

# ORIGINAL: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=””
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”nomodeset”

Follow this up with a sudo update-grub and reboot.
Also from the same thread it mentions you can also set kernal parameter radeon.modeset=0. I choose nomodeset, the option above which as worked for me.

Either nomodeset or more specific radeon.modeset=0 kernel parameter made it as responsive as 9.10 and fixed suspend and hibernate.

I also replaced NetworkManager with Wicd and am very pleased with it.
ATI Pink Flicker Bugs
Wifi Drop Bugs

Enabling Thinkpad Trackpoint Scrolling in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

This information was from thinkwiki.
Add the following to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file

   Option          "EmulateWheel"          "on"
   Option          "EmulateWheelButton"    "2"
   Option          "YAxisMapping"          "4 5"
   Option          "XAxisMapping"          "6 7"

Here is my xorg.conf


# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
#   sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
 Driver  "kbd"
 Option  "XkbRules" "xorg"
 Option  "XkbModel" "pc105"
 Option  "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier "Configured Mouse"
 Driver  "mouse"
 Option  "CorePointer"
 Option  "EmulateWheel"          "on"
 Option  "EmulateWheelButton"    "2"
 Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
 Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
 Driver  "synaptics"
 Option  "SendCoreEvents" "true"
 Option  "Device" "/dev/psaux"
 Option  "Protocol" "auto-dev"
 Option  "HorizEdgeScroll" "1"
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier "Configured Video Device"
 Driver  "fglrx"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
 Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
 Identifier "Default Screen"
 Monitor  "Configured Monitor"
 Device  "Configured Video Device"
 Defaultdepth 24
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
 Identifier "Default Layout"
  screen "Default Screen"
 Inputdevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection
Section "Module"
 Load  "glx"
EndSection