Tag: Lenovo

Quick Tips on Installing Mint on a Laptop

A recent system upgrade gave me a spare SSD for my laptop. I decided to install Linux Mint on it given my good experience on the Ubuntu based OS.

Here are some tips/thoughts related to this install:

Gnome 3 = Full Retard mode

It’s been a while since Ubuntu introduced Unity as the default display manager and it still feels sucky. The mere fact that I can’t change the number of workspaces easily on Mint 12 Gnome was enough to make me format the drive and try again with Mint 11 (which is still Gnome 2).

So I suggest you give Mint 12 a try first for a couple of hours and see if the “simplified” desktop appeals to you. If you’re not satisfied, just go with Mint 11 or Mint 12 KDE.

Lenovo wifi bug also happens on Mint

Remember that post about wifi not working in Ubuntu on my Lenovo laptop?

The same thing happened on my Mint installs. And the same solution still applies.

Changing lockscreen and login background on Mint 11

Remember that post about changing your lock screen on Ubuntu?

While that solution works, there’s also a simpler solution:

$ sudo ln -sf /path/to/another-background.jpg /usr/share/backgrounds/linuxmint/default_background.jpg

Note that, unlike in the old post, this only changes the background and not the whole lock screen.

As for the login background, some people might say that the default background trick will work but unfortunately it doesn’t. The real solution is an old trick from Ubuntu, namely:

$ sudo cp /usr/share/applications/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow

Logout. The appearance window will appear on the login screen and will allow you to change the background. After making your changes and logging in, prevent the window from opening again at login by doing:

$ sudo unlink /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop

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

—

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.