[ale] Basic Laptop for presentations question

[scott mcbrien]

Comments in-line

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Richard Bronosky <Richard at bronosky.com>wrote:

> I'm pretty sure it was a T60. I know that is was Intel everything
> (cpu, video, wireless). My issues (from memory of early 2007)
> included:
>  hibernate/suspend


This has traditionally been an issue with linux laptops, though RHEL 5
(CentOS 5), this issue got some attention from some developers at Red Hat.
 Because it's been an issue for so long, I just turned these features off in
the bios, so that when the lid closes, the machine still runs.  I know that
there are some settings around this that you can customize in GNOME power
management...

 power management/battery life


I never had a problem with this, but didn't suspend/hibernate either.


>  dual head without reboot [1] [2]
>  finger print scanner


You can get the pam library called bioapi which you can configure your
fingerprint reader, or you can use another library called thinkfinger.  I
used bioapi because it also supported a text login, vs thinkfinger which
only worked for console logins or su's in X.


>  extra/media keys


Never had a problem with this.


>
>  video playback weirdness after getting dual head to work


Turns out with the intel graphics card shares system memory for graphics
memory.  I used to have a lot of problems with video playback as well,
generally with totem (the included media player).  If you go into your
xorg.conf and add more ram (I upped mine to a rediculous 120MB) the problem
would go away.  I think the default setting for memory in the xorg.conf is
something like 16MB.


>
>
> [1] Luckily at MySQLConf07 Stewart Smith http://www.flamingspork.com/
> introduced me to Jeff Waugh http://bethesignal.org/about/ who along
> with Ross Burton http://burtonini.com/ and Keith Packard
> http://keithp.com/ got me working. That's a lot of fire power required
> for such a common need.
> [2] I interviewed 70+ of Linux laptop toters are the conference and
> only 3 of them could use an external display without rebooting. JW was
> the only one who knew what he did to make it happen.
>
> .!# RichardBronosky #!.
>
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