Category: OS

Fix disabled wireless in Ubuntu on Lenovo laptops

2014 edit: If you’re experiencing problems on Ubuntu 14.04 with wifi on your Lenovo laptop with a Centrino wifi chipset, try disabling wireless N.
See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2208210&p=12943350#post12943350

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Just updated my laptop to Natty Narwhal and I may write something about it in the future (spoiler: Unity sucks). Anyway this post is just about the solution I found for the broken wireless network manager applet in Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 in Lenovo B450 and probably most other Lenovo laptops.

Ever since I upgraded my laptop to Maverick Meerkat, my wireless isn’t automatically enabled on startup. It was no big deal back then since I could just simply tick the Enable Wireless in the network manager applet. But when I upgraded to Natty Narwhal, my wireless was permanently disabled.

After hours of trial and error, I found out the culprit. Running sudo rfkill list showed that I have an “acer-wireless” even though I wasn’t using an Acer machine:

bry@Abraxas:~$ sudo rfkill list
0: acer-wireless: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: yes
        Hard blocked: no
...

The solution to this was simple: disable it by adding blacklist acer-wmi at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.

Select Best Download Server for Ubuntu Packages

I just learned recently that there are no local download servers for Ubuntu packages here in the Philippines. In other words, for the past few months (or years), every apt-get install I do downloads the packages from the main Canonical server in UK.

And I thought my slow download speeds were just caused by this country’s crappy internet.

Anyway, the solution is simple. In Synaptic Package Manager, go to Settings -> Repositories and choose Other… from the “Download from” dropdown. This will open the Choose a Download Server window. Just click the Select Best Server and Ubuntu will ping all download servers, choosing the best server automatically.

select best server

This will probably select a Singaporean or Malaysian server depending on your connection.

Dual Boot Jaunty Asus Eee PC 1005HA + Globe Tattoo

screenshot of finished setup

Yesterday I bought an Asus EeePC 1005HA netbook and a Globe Tattoo wireless broadband dongle for my portable computing needs (my laptop was too bulky and there aren’t enough WiFi hotspots in the metro for my iPod Touch).

Being the geek that I am, I immediately converted it into a WinXP + Ubuntu dual boot machine. For this, I simply followed the steps at:

This post will just cover the various nuances surrounding the installation process.

BitTorrent link for Netbook Remix

Recent PLDT line work on my street has borked my net connection preventing me from direct downloading the netbook remix of Ubuntu 9.04. Unfortunately, there are no direct links to the torrent of the netbook remix.

With a bit of searching, I found the torrent here listed along with the other releases.

Partitioning

Unlike the walkthrough above, I did a dual boot of the netbook. In order to do that, I simply deleted the partition for drive D using Disk Management under Computer Management (run compmgmt.msc).

Since I did not delete the EFI partition, I only created the /, /home, /boot, and swap partitions, with the first 3 formatted in ext4. I also didn’t need to do his final step — I just re-enabled EFI with no problems.

DON’T UPDATE YOUR PACKAGES YET!!!

After installing and setting up the networking, the Update Manager will prompt you to update some packages. DO NOT UPDATE THEM YET because there are some problems with the scrollkeeper xml files. Run the following command first to correct scrollkeeper’s database:

sudo scrollkeeper-rebuilddb -v

Disabling your Touchpad while Typing

The installation walkthrough only discusses how to allow other applications to access the touchpad but it doesn’t exactly specify how to disable the touchpad while typing (which can be annoying).

Sure 1005HA has buttons to disable the touchpad but the better option would be to use syndaemon.

Bridged Network not Working in VirtualBox

Problem

The Ubuntu VirtualBox instance I use for Rails development can’t connect to the network unless you do some funky sudo ifconfig eth0 up/down and sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart magic.

Cause

I upgraded to Windows 7. Apparently, the Windows 7 adapter is buggy.

Solution

Thanks to this thread, all I needed to do was to change the adapter to “IntelPro/1000 T server” in the network settings.

Upgrading 32bit Vista to Windows 7 64bit

Windows 7

Problem

As a last ditch effort to deal with my motherboard problem, I’ve decided to upgrade my OS from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 RC1 (Ultimate).

Problem is, I’d like to upgrade to the 64bit version of Windows 7 (so that I could take advantage of all of my 4GB of memory). But as the upgrade chart from Microsoft states, you can’t do an in-place upgrade from 32bit Vista to 64bit Windows 7, keeping all of your files and settings intact.

Solution

Fortunately, there is a way to keep a good portion of your files and settings intact via the Windows Easy Transfer utility. I just used Method 3 and transferred my entire C drive to my 1TB hard drive.

As an extra precaution, I made a copy of my “user” directory (in my case it’s C:\Users\bry\ folder) in the backup hard drive. We’ll see a use for this backup later.

After backing up via Windows Easy Transfer, I went ahead and reformatted my C drive and installed Windows 7 64 bit on it.

Once I finished installing Windows 7, I restored my settings via Windows Easy Transfer again, following the “Copy files from the source computer” section in Method 3.

After that, I went ahead and installed new drivers for all of my devices. Windows Easy Transfer only backs up settings so I also had to re-download and re-install all of my old programs like Firefox, Chrome, Yahoo Messenger, etc.

Turns out that some of the files and settings were not properly transferred to the new OS installation. Here’s how I restored my settings to various programs:

  • Firefox 3.5 – I copied the contents of my old profile from [user backup folder]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default to the newly created C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\yyyyyyyy.default folder.
  • Chrome 2 – similar to Firefox, I copied the contents of my old profile from [user backup folder]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default to the newly created C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default folder.
  • Yahoo Messenger – most of the important data (e.g. contacts, current display icon) is already stored in the Yahoo servers. The main reason why one would want to restore their old profile would be their Message Archive. To restore your profile, copy [user backup folder]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\[your Yahoo ID] to the newly created C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\[your Yahoo ID] folder. Don’t forget to set the Archive Preferences to “Yes, save all of my messages”.
  • FileZilla – Copy [user backup folder]\AppData\Roaming\FileZilla to the newly created C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\FileZilla folder.