The Time Is Near. . .

YEEEAAAHHH!!! In 15 days the new and improved Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 is coming home! I know I've been talking a lot about this lately, but today I want to help Toshiba Satellite owners with some bugs that were found in hardy...and luckily have been fixed in Intrepid!

Well, mostly Toshiba is not very friendly with Linux, at least on some models that use Atheros and Intel hardware. As I've stated before I own a Toshiba Satellite A135-S4527, and I must add it is a very nice laptop for the price. But with Ubuntu it tends to get a little freaky.

First off, the sound is extremely low or non-existent, and if you use the common fix found in other blogs and forums, chances are the headphones won't turn off the internal speakers when playing sound. Well, I have just the thing for you!

Simply fire up a Terminal and type:

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base/

Once inside that document that will open go to the very bottom and type this in.

option snd-hda-intel model=lenovo

Now hit "Save" and close gedit. Now check that in Sound Control (double click the speaker icon on the notification area) and make sure HDA Intel (Alsa Mixer) is selected as the playback device, and that the PCM and FRONT levels are all the way up. Also check that the Headphones switch (in the Switches tab) is ticked. Reboot and you should have sound!!!...but a very harsh and tinny sounding one though!...

To fix this issue you must play around with PulseAudio...and since I'm gonna reinvent the wheel here you can check this great tuitorial psyke83 published on the ubuntuForums!

Ok, another issue that Hardy had was a violent overheating whenever the laptop got busy...I never guessed how the heck to fix that completely, but here is a sweet fix!

Open a Terminal and type:

gconf-editor

Now go to "Apps>gnome-power-manager>ui" and check the unchecked box that says something about the processor. Now you can go to the Power Manager in System>Preferences and decide the processor speed policy...to avoid overheating make it "Based on processor load" and that should cool it down quite a bit! Thank God this was fixed in Intrepid...no need for this fix since the Power Management on Intrepid is a whole lot better and keeps the laptop ice cold!

Another few fixes are:

- No more proprietary/restricted drivers for Atheros Wi-Fi cards.
- Xorg now uses Xrandr and that helps speed up the dual-monitor process. Now you can use the laptop's S-Video and VGA outputs with ease! (Still under testing though).
- The video resolution improved quite a bit, now the screen looks more crisp than on hardy.
- The overall system performance and stability feels stronger and a whole lot smoother.

These last fixes were made on Intrepid Ibex, almost no way to make them on Hardy, since they're very difficult.

Anyways, if someone has questions, suggestions or corrections for this post, just let me know by posting a comment below! I hope this has helped someone!