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For quite some time I simply couldn’t get Ubuntu to recognize my bluetooth adapter! I knew it worked because when I got the adapter and tried the provided software (Which just happened to be Bluesoleil) everything worked. After deciding not to use the proprietary software i removed it and the adapter stopped working.

Running the general command to start up bluetooth only gave a cryptic message..

After googling around lead me to the fact that some kernel modules wern’t loaded for bluetooth. “Heh” I though since it WAS working fine before. So I tried to enable the missing modules as per some other instructions:

again.. more head scratching.. so after going to where the missing bluetooth.ko file should be located i find bluetooth.ko.bak instead. since there is no bluetooth.ko file I just removed the .bak extension and retried modprobe again.

Success! As to why it was a .bak file I had NO idea until i googled it. I found another user with the same .bak file which commented on bluesoleil doing the move. So I finally find the culprit of my bluetooth despair!

If you’re trying to install Zend Studio on a 64 bit install of Ubuntu you will run into trouble unless you install the libc6-i386 and ia32-libs. Here is the command you need:

(This information came from the ubuntu forums)

For some reason the Pidgin messaging program that comes with Ubuntu seems to think users want to receive messages from the entire world. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but there are too many spam bots out there to make this particular feature quite annoying.

Luckily it’s a simple fix to turn off said spam (thanks to Techtites article)

1. Run pidgin and open the buddy list window.
2. Go to Tools > Privacy.
3. Choose the account that’s bothering you with spam (in my case MSN) and select the desired contact options (again, in my case it was Allow only the users on my contact list)
4. Enjoy spam free living.

If you’ve ever used the GNOME CPU Scaling Monitor before you will know that it does not allow the switching of stepping speeds or governors off the bat.

Thanks to Carthik it is only a matter of entering one command in your console and selecting the option ‘Yes’ to enable said scaling:

enjoy

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 comes a relatively radical change from the norm; The obsolescence of the xorg.conf file!

The xorg.conf file is now replaced with the use of .fdi files that can be “plugged” and “unplugged” without the need to restart the computer.  More information on the usage of these fdi files can be found on Ubuntu’s wiki site. Overall they provide more flexibility then the previous xorg.conf syntax, make use of XML, and allow for “matching” or “pairing” if the system has enabled components.

Here’s a .fdi file I whipped up for my touchpad that I called touchpad.fdi and placed in the /etc/hal/fdi/policy folder as per the wiki’s instructions.

I enjoy using Ubuntu as my OS of choice.  But there are always a few quirks to work out to make things “just right”.  Here’s a short list of changes I’ve done to make Ubuntu work better for me.

Wireless light

The wireless light always remains turned off.  My laptop (and probably most other dv4000′s) uses the ipw2200 wireless card made by Intel.  This card is actually supported very well in the open source community thanks to Intel releasing the driver code.  Here is the command to get this working:

Mute light

The Mute LED never worked on my laptop.  The muting itself worked fine, but the light never turned on.  Here\’s a fix to solve this problem.

More information on different quirk options is available on this forum topic.

More information to follow as I remember / do it!