Category: hardware

Smaller brightness steps with the Asus N56VB and Ubuntu

Ubuntu on the laptop is definitely maturing. We're way past "at least it boots" and now that survival is ensured, it is time for luxury illnesses. One of those on the Asus N56VB is handling of screen brightness which, for my taste, comes in too steep steps. Especially the minimum brightness is still too bright … Continue reading Smaller brightness steps with the Asus N56VB and Ubuntu →

Running windows games with steam on a hybrid graphics card

I don't play much, but when I do, it's Sid Meier's Civilization on a Windows installation boxed into a VM. Earlier this year I got tricked by a Humble-Bundle offer into buying Civilization V, which came with the "trojan horse" of a steam account. Had I known the prerequisite of a Steam account before hand, … Continue reading Running windows games with steam on a hybrid graphics card →

Automatically regulating volume on a USB headset with Ubuntu

When you connect an external speaker or headset to your computer you normally expect the sound to play over those and you'd also expect the integrated speakers to mute. Windows does that well and you'd expect that Ubuntu can do that as well, unfortunately it doesn't. Not without some scripting. So here we go: The … Continue reading Automatically regulating volume on a USB headset with Ubuntu →

Reducing power consumption on the HP Probook 4720s and Ubuntu 12.04

As said earlier, Ubuntu 12.04 does a good job with power management on the 4720s. With some manual settings power consumption can be further decreases, albeit not much this time. I wrote this script which takes a parameter: on: enable power management settings off: disable power management settings extra: on + enable extensive power management … Continue reading Reducing power consumption on the HP Probook 4720s and Ubuntu 12.04 →

Reducing HP 4720s power consumption under Ubuntu Linux 11.10

Mainly annoyed by the loud fan I looked into ways of reducing power consumption of the HP Probook 4720s and came up with this script: #!/bin/sh -e # Increase filesystem write cache timeoutecho 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs # Enable power management on all PCI devices find /sys/devices/pci* -path "*power/control" -exec bash -c "echo auto > '{}'" … Continue reading Reducing HP 4720s power consumption under Ubuntu Linux 11.10 →

HP Probook 4720s on Ubuntu 11.10 64bit Oneiric Ocelot

The new Ubuntu 11.10 is out as of yesterday, and naturally it is time for another upgrade. Because of the many tweaks [1], [2] I decided for a fresh install, this time directly on the notebook harddisk instead of a flash card. The live ISO worked nicely from the USB stick except for the WLAN, … Continue reading HP Probook 4720s on Ubuntu 11.10 64bit Oneiric Ocelot →

Updating the Galaxy Mini to Android 2.3.3 under Linux

The Samsung Galaxy Mini S5570 comes with Android 2.2 and can easily be updated to Android 2.3 if you are running Windows on your computer and if you get Samsung's fragile Kies application to run. If you have been following this blog you know that any Windows installations reside safely banned inside Virtualboxes so my … Continue reading Updating the Galaxy Mini to Android 2.3.3 under Linux →