cyli's blargh
( Ubuntu )
Intrepid Ibex on MSI Wind

Notes to myself on upgrading my MSI wind to Intrepid Ibex.

Fri 06 February 2009 - Ubuntu, laptop

I upgraded my MSI Wind laptop from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex. It didn't really fix any problem - my wifi drivers don't seem to be packaged with Intrepid and I have re-download the kernel module every time my kernel gets upgraded. My webcam still does not work. And my hard drive is clicking again.

Editing /etc/hdparm.conf doesn't seem to work anymore. So I edited the following files:

  • /etc/acpi/resume.d/90-hdparm.sh
  • /etc/acpi/battery.d/90-hdparm.sh

I set DO_HDPARM=n. Basically, I'm saying "don't park my drive heads."

I could also install laptop-mode-tools, but all I really want to do is to stop the drive heads from parking. This is an inelegant solution, but simple.

My new MSI Wind and Ubuntu

Notes to myself on installing Ubuntu on my MSI Wind

Mon 22 December 2008 - Ubuntu, laptop

I just bought a MSI Wind U100-420US netbook to replace a dying Sony Vaio. I got it for several reasons:

  1. I like small things that are easily portable - I suppose I am out of shape, but regularly sized laptops are actually fairly heavy. I do not want to carry a backpack everywhere I go, and a messenger bag or other bag with one strap, when a laptop is in it, causes my shoulder to cramp up.
  2. There are no other laptops out there right now that I find particularly interesting or desirable. The new Apple MacBook is nice, but not much of an improvement over their older MacBook (which Matthew has), and the Sony Vaio VGN-Z530N is pretty great spec-wise as well as light, but not quite worth $1600 to me (almost though - this was a pretty serious contender).
  3. Has a greater-than-16GB hard drive. I'd like to actually have space to download photos from my camera to, etc.
  4. There is a nice wiki on how to install Ubuntu on it.
  5. Was the cheapest Netbook I could find.
Once I finishd installing Ubuntu, it was time to try to fix all the little bugs. This part is mostly for me, to remember what I did in case I have to undo it or if I need to do this again for some reason.
  1. First I needed to get wireless working. Currently, the Realtek 8187 wireless card is not natively supported in Ubuntu, but you can compile them from source provided by Realtek. I chose to just install the .debs someone else made.
  2. I had a hard drive clicking problem which I fixed by turning off drive power management. (I used hdparm -B 255... 192 didn't fix the clicking for me.)
  3. Fixing the hard drive clicking is part of the fix for suspend - I also changed alsa as specified in that wiki article above, and suspend seems to work now.
  4. The Adobe Flash Player 10 .deb works just fine.
  5. I also installed Netbook Remix packages. It's quite nice, although there are some bugs. For instance, netbook-launcher (formerly ume-launcher) does not play nice with compiz.
There are still issues I would like to fix: for instance, I'd like to be able to modify the touchpad settings, and haven't bothered trying the webcam tweaks (I don't really need a webcam).