Saturday, August 29, 2009

Summer Update (one of few)

Hello,

I know I've been doing a terrible job of regular updates, but I was living with dial-up until about a week or a week and a half ago, most of that time was then spent updating all the stuff that needed to be updated. Now I'm spending my days trying to fix up my laptop a little. I've written scripts to manage brightness, volume, wifi (on/off), bluetooth, etc. on my Samsung N110 since it's running Openbox and I want to avoid gnome-power-manager (and it's good practice). So far my battery life is about 5.5 hours-6 hours in linux (Windows is 6.5-7 hours), but I'm quite happy with it. The only thing I need to fix now is the fact that laptop-mode-tools seem to no longer want to do anything (I have a few scripts set up to run on battery to adjust brightness and whatnot). I haven't found any fixes online yet, but it seems there are a few people suffering from the same problem. Also, I'm going to try to fix suspend to ram on this computer (LCD stays off, non-responsive, etc. on wakeup). I'll be sure to post the solution if I find one.

Also, I'm thinking of writing my next FCM article on how to use xev/xbindkeys/showkey to create custom shortcuts/get Fn keys working. Unless someone tells me "NO!!", I'll be writing it later this week. Later this week I will also update my blog with the scripts I've written for my N110, in case anyone else wants a notify-osd script for brightness and volume, or a notify-osd battery info script, or a notify-osd wifi on/off script.

Any suggestions or fixes that worked for you on any of the above listed issues would be much appreciated (always easier to start from somewhere instead of from scratch).

Hope everyone had a good summer,
Lswest