Kubuntu on IBM Thinkpad

[Lord Sauron]

On 11/12/06, Jens Mayer <kubuntu at jensmayer.de> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> being a long-time Gentoo user, I gave Kubuntu 6.10 on my Thinkpad T41p a try,
> and I'm quite impressed - nearly everything worked out of the box (including
> suspend and hibernate and experimental DRI with the r300 driver).

Driven from Gentoo by fear of having to recompile everything all the
time?  Heh... me too.  I ended up on Fedora, which is interesting.  I
still remember enough of Kubuntu to not unsubscribe from this list
though.

> A few questions remain:
>
> -> CPU-Fan: Using Gentoo, the Fan only turned on a few times when not having a
> huge system load - now it's running most of the time. I have ibm_acpi loaded
> (v0.12a), "Dynamic Clocks" configured in Xorg and 'powernowd' installed, so
> the CPU is mostly on 600MHz. Where's the difference I'm looking for? Any
> ideas? 'rovclock' to downclock my ATI graphics card is not a solution to me,
> since it's static and not load driven.

Well, Gentoo is more efficient than Kubuntu by the very nature of it.
It's using binaries that are custom-fit to your laptop.  Kubuntu uses
less fine-tuned binaries, and thus uses more juice.  It's just a
tradeoff, though I'm positive there's a more elegant solution that
will fix your fan.  I just gave up and decided it's not worth my
effort (being a happy IBM X40 owner myself).

> -> KMilo / OSD: Using Gentoo, I installed and configured 'tpb' and 'xosd' to
> get an "On Screen Display" for Volume, Brightness and Thinklight switching.
> While Kubuntu's Kmilo looks better than plain old 'xosd', it just displays
> Volume changes - the other buttons work, but are not causing KMilo to act. Is
> there a way to configure KMilo this way (it hasn't an entry in KDE's control
> center), or do I have to switch to 'tpb/xosd'?

Yes, I have had it working (under Gentoo) and it now works under
Fedora (Core 6).  I never had it working to begin with under Kubuntu
(which I used before Gentoo) but that was because I was a total newbie
and couldn't tell a LKM from a java applet.

> -> What's the "Kubutu Way" to get Function-Buttons like Fn-F4 to suspend or
> Fn-F12 to hibernate to work? In Gentoo, I hacked myself some ACPI-scripts,
> but maybe this is integrated somewhere else in Kubuntu? After all I'd like to
> call the very same script KDE's Power Manager calls (maybe via DCOP?), since
> it just works and I want to keep things consistent.

If memory serves, once you get the first problem solved (getting the
tpd/xosd things to work) the fn-f3 stuff all comes quietly after that.

> -> Grub (strange and very low priority): Grub's frame around it's menu seems
> to be bigger or centered vertically in a different way to my former Gentoo
> installation. My Grub menu doesn't fit to my background image anymore (or
> even the Kubuntu/Ubuntu stock images), since it's overlapping the areas on
> the background picture. Anyone has a clue on this?

Rebuild your xpm.gz image to the new resolution... I don't know,
really.  I'm horrible at making grub splashes (never figured out how
many colors it needed - really funny story) so your probably already
several lightyears ahead of me there.

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