Ubuntu

ThinkPad T520/W520, NVIDIA, Wide Gamuts, and You!

17 Comments / Misc Computers and Tech

Update: Linking to a better color profile below.

Update 2: I narrowed down the ACPI issues, and have a better solution.

I recently purchased a brand new, maxed out ThinkPad T520. My old laptop was 4 years old, and while I absolutely loved it (and still do!), an opportunity came up to get a T520 with a nice discount. So I took advantage of that. I like large screen resolutions, as I tend to have a few thousand windows on screen at any given point in time, so I went with the 1920×1080 option, and put Ubuntu Linux on it.

And let me tell you, for an Ubuntu-certified laptop, it sure didn’t work out of the box.

Optimus!

It took a lot of effort to get Ubuntu working, due to some hardware problems. The biggest issue was the display adapter. The T520/W520 (and I believe the T420, etc.) come with two graphics chipsets: An Intel something-or-other, and an NVidia 4200M. By default, this is in “Optimus” mode, meaning that the OS can essentially switch between the cards for performance/power savings reasons, depending on use.

Not surprisingly, this does not work on Linux.

Your system will try to use the Intel card. You won’t have any 3D, and try as you might, that NVIDIA card just will not work. It’s maddening, but there’s a solution. One with its own set of problems, but at least it gets you there..

The trick, it turns out, is to go into the BIOS, go into the video settings, and switch to “Discrete Graphics” and disable auto-detection of Optimus. Once you do this, your NVIDIA card will work! You’ll get 3D, and it’ll be fast and smooth and so wonderful.

If you can boot, that is.

Once I switched over, I found I could no longer boot. Now this was 4:30 in the morning and my brain stopped functioning, so I wasn’t making all the connections. All I know is that booting locked up, and when I went into recovery mode, I started seeing I/O errors on my brand new 160GB SSD. Figuring it was just my luck, I decided I’d call Lenovo in the morning and get a new one. If this sounds at all familiar, stay calm! It’s not your SSD, and your system is not hosed. It’s ACPI.

(Of course it’s ACPI… Nobody ever said it was the Year of the Linux Laptop.*)

Update: I previously said that passing acpi=off in grub would fix things. That disabled battery and other stuff, though. The new solution below is far better. Suspend/resume and brightness work!

So, to fix that, go back to Intel graphics, edit your /etc/default/grub file, and set GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi=noirq"

Unfortunately, you won’t get Suspend/Resume, and I think the battery monitor is busted, but you’ll get Hibernate. It’ll mostly work. Sometimes. It’s Linux, afterall.

I’m not sure if this is needed anymore, but you may also need to add this to the “Device” section in your xorg.conf:

Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

Once you have a working X/Unity/Compiz/3D/Minecraft setup working, you may notice some problems with colors….

Wide Gamut

The T520/W520/T420/etc. line of ThinkPads have a new 95% Wide Gamut LED display. It makes everything all bright and nice. And it butchers your colors.

Applications that support color management should in theory compensate for this. Not all apps do, though. What bothered me was my web browsing experience. Every color was broken, and as someone who writes webapps, I needed accurate colors. I was about to throw out this laptop before I managed to figure out a solution.

Modern Ubuntus should come with a Color Profiles control panel under System -> Preferences. From here, you can load ICM profiles and get things working. That will solve some of your issues, so let’s start there. Note that this is in Ubuntu 11.04 (I think), but I’m running 10.10 (I thought originally 11.04 was the source of my problems), so for me I had to:

apt-get install gnome-color-manager

And here, I the Color Profiles applet was causing problems, and I couldn’t directly use it, so I installed dispcalGUI, which allowed me to load in a profile and install it into Color Profiles, and activate it.

On some site, I found a working color profile (ICM file). I don’t know where I originally found it, but you can download it here. Note that this is only tested on my 1920×1080 display, so YMMV.

I’m not confident that this profile is 100% correct, but it’s close. At least as far as I can tell.

You’re free to try that profile, but I found a better one which preserves the crispness of the display with the actual accuracy you’d want on the web. WordPress is even looking correct now.

NotebookCheck’s review of the ThinkPad W520 links to a color profile that works much better.

Firefox Color Profiles

Now, you’ll still notice problems with Firefox and Google Chrome. Chrome doesn’t seem to understand color profiles, but Firefox does. You just have to tweak it.

In Firefox, go to about:config. In there, search for gfx.color_management. Set gfx.color_management.mode to 1, and then set gfx.color_management.display_profile to the path of that ThinkPad ICM file I linked to earlier.

Restart Firefox. You should now see more or less correct colors!

Now it’s not perfect. The ThinkPad screen is very bright, and some things can get a bit washed out and perhaps slightly tinted. As I type this, I’m noticing that the WordPress UI is a bit off, and things blend together more than they should (lots of light grays on a bright screen). But it should be much better than it was!

If you use a T520/W520/T420/etc. and have other solutions or tips for color management on Linux, I’d love to hear about them! And hopefully this saved someone else hours or days of rage.

* Thanks to James Farwell for the “Year of the Linux Laptop” snark.

Ubuntu and Desktop Notifications

8 Comments / Uncategorized

This past Monday, Mark Shuttleworth wrote about their plans for an overhaul of desktop notifications (the little popup bubbles telling you someone IM’d you or there’s updates available). Many people have asked me about this, some concerned, and wanted to know what I thought. Being the maintainer of libnotify, notification-daemon and the Desktop Notifications specification, some people were concerned that this work would supersede my own.

The reality is, this isn’t a replacement of my project. This is a new joint effort between Ubuntu, KDE, and myself. What’s been written in Mark’s post may not end up being the end result. We’re still deciding how this will progress, and Ubuntu wants to experiment a bit. Aaron Seigo’s post on the subject sums up a lot of my thoughts on this, and I recommend reading it, though I’ll go further and discuss where this all started and how it’ll affect the project.

First of all, libnotify/notification-daemon isn’t going anywhere. It’s not being replaced, nor is an alternate spec being drafted. Ubuntu’s User Experience team has some new things they want to try, and that’s fine. The plan is to see how this stuff goes in their codebase, with the intention of migrating code back upstream.

A couple of weeks ago, during the Ubuntu Summit, I was invited to speak with some of the developers and User Experience guys from Ubuntu about their plans. They showed me the mockup that’s on Mark’s blog and told me about their plans. They have things they want to do that could definitely improve the experience. Some things are pretty controversial, such as the removal of actions on notifications. We sat down, discussed and debated various aspects of the proposals for a while, and I believe reached a general course of action for the project. The highlights include:

  • Actions will be removed for applications packaged in Ubuntu. The developers will try to replace them with something that they feel makes more sense, with the hope of pushing these changes upstream.
  • The released notification-daemon will, I believe, support actions, since many non-packaged applications do use them. They will, however, appear as old-style notifications and not appear in the new window stack demoed in Mark’s blog post.
  • We’ll be drafting new additions to the notification spec in order to address the needs of KDE and Mozilla.
  • The work will be done by their developers in either a fork or a whole new notification-daemon implementation, allowing them a greater ability to experiment. These changes (or parts of them) will make their way upstream. It will be spec-compatible so users won’t have to worry too much about losing features (aside from actions, perhaps).
  • In the end, it’ll likely be that the Ubuntu theme specifically works this new way, and that other themes will work differently (they may support actions more directly, for example).

Now I should point out that I don’t believe actions are a bad thing. There’s many use cases where actions are very much warranted, and it seems Aaron agrees. While the Ubuntu team has discussed the possibility of deprecating this in the spec, I believe the end result will be that actions will live on. I’m also pretty adamant that upstream notification-daemon will still support actions and some other features. Ubuntu can choose what experience to give their packaged applications, but that may differ a bit from what we decide upstream.

Time will tell how this all turns out. I personally think it’s great that there’s some momentum on this project. I know I haven’t had much time to work on it as of late, between VMware and Review Board, which is why getting some new people on board with fresh thoughts will probably be a good thing.

On a related note, I’d like to welcome Andrew Walton to the project. He’s going to be working as a co-maintainer and helping out when I’m busy (which will be a lot of the time for a while).

Over the next month or two, the project should start to pick up. We’re beginning to look at ways to improve the spec and at what work needs to be done in the near future for the project. These discussions will take place on xdg-list.

And with that, I wish everyone a Merry Christmas (or just a very good December 25th for those who don’t celebrate Christmas)!

Fixing broken key codes in VMware on Ubuntu 8.10

2 Comments / Uncategorized

I recently upgraded a system to both Ubuntu 8.10 and VMware Workstation 6.5, and while using it, I realized a number of keys were broken. The down arrow invoked the Windows Start Menu, for instance. Pressing Alt caused the key to be stuck. I knew this stuff worked in 8.04, but it certainly wasn’t in 8.10.

After some digging around, I found a forum post (lost the link, sorry) that fixed this. It’s worked pretty well for me, and so I thought I’d share for all those who have hit this issue.

Edit your $HOME/.vmware/preferences file and add:

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78  = 0x46  # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

That should do it!

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