With Karmic Koala comes a new version of the Linux kernel, new drivers for the Orange HSO 225 dongle (new – not better, more on that in a sec) fancy graphics on startup and shutdown, a slightly modified openchrome display driver (no compiz, sorry) and a host of tweaks and updates to the applications. The Ubuntu One cloud storage is kind of handy for keeping files on a netbook in sync with a desktop too.
So getting it working on the funny display of the webbook is again non-trivial, but this is how to do it. For this you will temporarily need an external monitor with a sensible native resolution such as 1024×768 or 1280×1024. Esoteric resolutions such as my 2048×1152 monitor don’t work so well. Also you need a USB cd rom drive and a copy of Ubuntu 9.10 which you can download and burn to a disk on a Linux computer such as the webbook or on any other operating system such as Mac OS X. You should also go into this in the expectation that you are going to totally trash everything on the disk so do a backup of anything important first.
So plug in the monitor and boot off the CD, you may need to go into the BIOS settings and change the boot order so that it will boot from CD if yours is not already set that way. Go through the install procedure accepting all the defaults, you can dual boot or wipe the disk and use the full space or upgrade the existing install, probably without data loss, but see the previous point about backups. Ignore the screen of the webbook, the external monitor should be working OK at this point. Reboot into your Karmic desktop. At this stage if you boot without the external monitor the webbook screen will be a flashing and flickering mess with nothing remotely useable on it, so lets fix that.
Press Alt+F2 to get up the run program dialog, in here type
gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
which will bring up a text editor with an empty file. Type or paste the following:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "OpenChrome"
option "PanelSize" "1024x600"
option "ForcePanel"
EndSection
basically the same as it was for Jaunty, but with option "ForcePanel" added.
Save and exit and reboot and you should have a 1024×600 display that fits perfectly in the panel. If you want to use an external monitor or projector you can change it from 1024×600 to 1024×768 and you will be able to see the top 600 pixels on the webbook screen but the full projector screen should fit. I found some corruption around the mouse cursor on the external monitor, I think there is an option to do a software mouse cursor which should fix this.
Earlier I mentioned the new hso driver for the Orange Option 225 dongle. Well this isn’t so good, it seems to have re-introduced an issue we discovered with a particular version of the hso driver during the week and a bit of the webbook project between project start and production commencing, in that it can cause a total kernel lockup on removal of the dongle. It connects just fine, but disconnecting the dongle causes a pretty hard crash. We filed a bug about this and you can track it here
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/418499
Other than that it seems pretty nice to me, and I will see you in six months for the Lucid Lynx Ubuntu 10.04 update.
Very many thanks for that – much appreciated.
Can one make the usb cd-rom under Windows somehow? Or can one make it on the webbook itself? Can one do this with an ordinary memory stick?
I sense that my 1050×1680 monitor falls outside the definition ’sensible native resolution’. Have to borrow one. .
I still love my little Webbook, but upgrading it is always going to be a production exercise, isn’t it?
Will
Well you can try that monitor, it will either work or it won’t, if it doesn’t then try another one. You should be able to download an .iso file from windows and burn it to a CD. I think most CD burning tools will allow you to burn an image and there is a windows powertoy to burn .iso images as I recall. Upgrading the webbook is always likely to be a bit of a drag, the graphics chipset is somewhat rare and poorly supported. Most new computers have Intel, Nvidia or ATI chipsets. The S3 chrome is a bit unusual and as it is not on new devices it doesn’t get much attention.
Appreciated
I have used you help before in turning my XP webbook into an ubuntu powered one and what a delight it is.
When I upgraded and discovered the whole screen fuzz thing this was the first place I came and you sorted me right out, however I should point out that the
Device
after Section should be “Device” so the first line should read
Section “Device”
I had to use sudo nano to edit the file as I could not get the x thingy to run when I rebooted.
Thanks again though Now I am going to test run 9.10
thanks Saul, corrected it now.
Thanks, Alan, I will have a go.
Hi Alan – I was thinking of trying out the netbook remix, do you know if the same display setup problem occurs with this?
Also, rather than faffing about with external monitors, could the same changes to the xorg.conf be made from recovery mode?
Thanks
Answered my own question – yes you can do it from recovery easily. Might be easier than faffing about with an external monitor…
Now have a fully functioning, very swish looking Karmic Koala
i have updated to 9.10, but i seem to have a problem, i cannot click on any of the icons on the desktop, my keypad works for clicking on the date etc on the top bar but will not let me click on anything on the desktop, i can use the arrow keys but this very rarely works (most of the time nothing works at all) and wont let me on to the favourites at all, please help
i have the remix version by the way, is the other one better?
ah, glad you mentioned it was Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I was flummoxed until you said that!. UNR does use some of the accelerated graphics card features that don’t work so well on the webbook. I am a little surprised you got as far as you did to be honest. There is apparently a desktop-switcher somewhere that will flip it into the regular Ubuntu desktop, not sure how well that works, or where it is. You might be better off with the regular desktop edition.
thanks, i’ll make the switch, although i do like the layout of the remix version
You saved my day!
Hello,
I’m French and a 3days newbie on Ubuntu stuff.
I’ve installed Xubuntu 9.10 on an Fujitsu Siemens Amilo L7300.
I’m trying to find anywhere a solution to fix the start screen trouble :
it appears @1600*1200, blinks between black screen, the regular wallpaper, white screen and than back again to the black one. Every times it does I’m asked to enter the session password.
When it does not the automatic logon works (the start screen goes automatically from 1600*1200 to 1024*768 without blinking).
Can your tip there help me ?
I understood that I had to replace gedit by mousepad to access the text editor but I’m afraid to paste your command line there. The last time I had paste something I had to install again ^___^
Many thanks
I forgot to tell that when the screen blinks, the password is asked between 5 and 10 times before the logon works.
I tried the UNR as well. Edited xorg.conf as for 9.4, then as above, just end up with configuration errors. Time to try the desktop mix then..
iain
Ok so if you didnt read this before trying you dont have external monitor what can i do? i just have a fuzzy screen what appears to be no xorg.conf file a massive headache and all my work lost…why cant they make the upgrades less of a hassle if they want it to be user freindly you would expect to be editing things in terminals right?
@Fabrys sorry I have no idea, I suggest you try the Ubuntu forums or get on to IRC and join the #ubuntu-fr channel on freenode and ask for help there.
yes, I think UNR requires some features not supported by the openchrome graphics driver, there is some translucency and blending going on that needs a bit more acceleration than it can do.
@gregg, you should still be able to get into a recovery console by selecting it from the grub menu, when you get to the blue menu screen drop to a root shell, then you can do
nano /etc/X11/xorg.confand edit it accordingly. Ctrl+x to quit, saving the file and then type reboot to reboot. It is more of a hassle than I would like, the issue is with the hardware rather than the software I think. It should be plug and play but the EDID information that the BIOS and screen reports to the driver would appear to be a complete lie.Ok sorted now to sort out other problems thanks for that!
Well, I have to say that after three attempts to install 9.10 I have given up. The display is not the problem (with the tweak above); and the installation has been successful (but slow) each time. But the installed system has been so slow as to be unusable, freezing for long periods. I’ve tried both ext4 and ext3 for the file system, with the same result, so it’s not that, so I’ve just gone back to 9.04 … or to Mint 7 to be precise, which is based on 9.04.
Maybe 10.4 will be better.
Paul
I’ve had the same problem as Paul. 9.10 was unusably slow. I’ve reinstalled 9.04 but now can’t get the xorg.conf right (I had a copy, so I’m not sure why it’s not working but doubless I’ll get there eventually.
Thanks for the tip. I’ve tried it twice with the same results. On bootup, I get a flashing screen with two lines at the top: 1) something about ” … tty” and 2) asking for my login password. (I’m at work now, so it’s a bit hazy)
I wonder if this is what Fabrys described. I never got past the white ubuntu logo, because I assumed I’d messed up.
1) Should I continue with the login, entering my password 5-10 times?
2) Will this happen every time I login, or just the first time?
Thanks for your help!
Sophie
Hi, sorry to be a pest and go on a little tangent, but I cant seem to be able to get you tube to play under 9.10. I have tried all the different plugins about, but still no joy – has anyone got this going reasonably well on this little machine?
I’ve also had the same experience as Paul and aitchsee. I’ve tried 9.10 and found it to be unusably slow. Video from youtube was dropping frames to the extent that the whole thing looked more like a slide show.
I’ve reverted back to 9.04 and all is now well.
When using 9.10, almost every click would result in a pause during which there was a lot of 100% CPU activity. I’m not sure whether this is because some of the new stuff in 9.10 requires more grunt than my little Webbook can deliver or because it has yet to be optimised and patience and a few updates will see the problems go away.
Crossing fingers for 10.04 and wishing you all a happy 2010 !
Andy
Using the flash-plugin-nonfree fixed the flash issue – dont use the latest version from the adobe website
If anyone still reads this blog, I can report successful install Mint 9 (based on Ubuntu 10.04) using the xorg.conf above, but without the problem of freezing and unresponsiveness I had with Karmic/Mint 8. So far it seems to be working a treat.
Agree with Paul, just installed Mint 9 20 minutes ago, far better than both Karmic or Jaunty.
I have noticed a problem with it misreading the battery state and suspending the moment the webbook is unplugged, however.
I found a solution to the problem on the web (it is not unique to the webbook) – go into gconf-editor/apps/gnome-power-manager/actions and change critical_battery from “suspend” to “nothing”; then go to /general and uncheck the “use_time_for_policy” box.
You will still get a warning message when you unplug, but it will not go into suspend mode and the normal battery indicator will show you how much time you have left. In fact, I think Mint 9 is actually getting better battery life out of the machine.
Well, here I am with 10.04 LTS on the web book
FYI: I chose a “free weekend” to finally accept the gracious invitation on the ubuntu update mananger to update to 10.04 LTS. Just as well.
First time round it semed to work, downloade and installed about 1350 packages BUT About:Ubuntu still said I was running jaunty. Hmmm. Then a few days later the update manager said 10.04LTS was available “again” and this time it downloaded 1950 packages, started an install … and broke utterly.
It started, failed to load the x-windows screen, went “text only”, chucked lots of error messages about missing accounts, no network, etc etc.
Alt-F1 got me a txt login where thank god a WIRED network worked.
From there apt-get upgrade told me I needed to do a dpkg -configure or some such, THANKFULLY after that it loaded and installed lots .. and lots .. and lots .. AND LOTS of things,
And then after a reboot, it all worked ! Here I am with 10.04 LTS on the webbook !