How I got Plugable Dock working with Fedora 20 and Lenovo W520 laptop

I purchased a Plugable UD-160-A USB 2.0 Universal Docking Station a couple of years ago.  I use this with my Lenovo W520 laptop to avoid having to connect a keyboard, mouse, ethernet and external set of speakers.

This configuration worked fine when I ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 on my Lenovo W520.  I since switched to Fedora 20 on both my W520 and my W510 laptops.  I heard that Fedora 20 worked better with Plugable but that was not my case. 

My keyboard worked when I booted my laptop (I must use LUKs encrpytion so I must enter a password at each boot) but when I got my login screen (lightdm), the keyboard and mouse were not working and I tried searching and gave up on a solution until yesterday.  The lspci command showed my keyboard, mouse, ethernet adapter and audio sound device built-in into the Plugable device.

I found this post in on the Plugable website that contained a simple udev rule that needed to be commented out and the computer rebooted.  I applied the change and my keyboard, mouse and ethernet work.  I am assuming the speaker also works.

The solution was to to edit /lib/udev/rules.d/71-seat.rules as root user and comment the following line (second line actually):

# 'Plugable' USB hub, sound, network, graphics adapter
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="2230", ATTR{idProduct}=="000[13]", ENV{ID_AUTOSEAT}="1"

I am so happy that I don't have to plug so 6 cables into my Lenovo W520 laptop anymore when I am at home.

Custom wallpaper on Xubuntu 14.04

I am a big fan of XFCE.  So much so, it is my desktop of choice on most Linux desktops (servers, if they are mine).  I have two AcerOne laptops that have not the fastest hardware (one has 8GB memory but the poor AMD C70 dual core is not that fast) so I decided to update them to Xubuntu 14.04.  One of the things I like to do is customize the wallpaper.  I gave up on the AcerOne with the AMD C70 but the other one I finally made it a priority to figure out why I could not select my own wallpapper.

Here is what the desktop settings I get when I navigate to my wallpaper directory (~/Pictures/wallpaper):


Notice that all the jpeg files are greyed out and I cannot select one.

This post in the UbuntuForums had the solution but I did not understand the wording of the following solution at first:

It works here. Yes in Desktop settings the individual pictures are greyed out , but if you click "Open" all the pictures in the parent folder will be displayed in the desktop settings app's window, then just choose the wallpaper you want by clicking. So, you have to choose a folder instead of a picture in the dialogue, then choose the picture only after you have picked a folder.
Note the folder in the screenshot is "Pictures" rather than "Backdrops". I only have one picture so only one is displayed. I guess you should put all the wallpapers in one folder then.
Well I guess that is not very intuitive.

The solution of course is navigate to the directory ABOVE the directory that contains the image files and select the directory.

Instead of double-clicking press the Open button.  This will populate the thumbnails with the files.

This appears to be a usability feature that did not quite understand.  Too bad the developers do not support selecting individual files.   I have been using XFCE for quite some time and recall this working before.  Oh well, lesson learned.

Installing Xubuntu 14.02 on AcerOne model A0751H

I have a number of laptops.  While the Dell Inspiron 1300 is my favorite,  I just got back an AcerOne netbook (model A0751) from my daughter who had been running Windows XP on it.  Of course, I did not want to keep using Windows XP so I decided it was time to wipe it clean and install Linux on it.

I chose Xubuntu 14.02 because it looked so nice on the Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop I thought it was worth a try.  My only hesitation was the AcerOne has a strange Intel integrated graphics chip that goes by GMA500 or sometimes referred to as Poulsbo.  I recall installing Ubuntu previously on this netbook and it was a pain.  This time I did some research.

Booting the Xubuntu 14.02 Live DVD ends up in a funky graphics mode.  The entire display is scrunched up into 1/2 the screen size and it is somewhat distorted.  You can make out the desktop and the mouse is visible but installing from this is not good.  The solution I found was very simple:  at the boot screen for the Xubuntu 14.02 Live DVD, press the e key to add the following two additional boot parameters:

                 console=tty1 mem=986mb

I put these right after the boot parameters: quiet splash

The first screen will appear without any problems and all will be good.  These additional parameters will be included in the installation so there is no need to fix them (I do not recall exactly but it would not be hard to boot from hard disk and enter the parameters).

The only other problem I had was when I was listening to internet radio via VLC.  The audio was real choppy.  The solution to this problem is to add the following two lines into the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf at the bottom:

         options snd-hda-intel model=generic
        options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1

A reboot is needed to make this fix work and VLC is no longer choppy.

Fixing bluetooth on Dell 1300 laptop running Xubuntu 14.01

Last week I got tired of running the XFCE spin of Fedora 20 on my Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop (Pentium M, 2GB memory).  This is my favorite laptop because I like the solid keyboard.  It runs Linux and it is real snappy.

The XFCE spin of Fedora 20 installed without any need for tweaking the OS.  Unfortunately, Xubuntu 14.02 needed some help.  The Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller was not recognized at first.  The cause of this was it was blacklisted in the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file.  The following line was commented out and a reboot made the wireless work as expected.

# blacklist bcm43xx

The second problem that needed to be fixed was getting the USB bluetooth to connect to a paired device.  This proved to be a bit more work to figure out but the combination of the following three items resulted in being able to connect to a paired device.

1. Install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth package.
   
2. Replace the contents of  /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf with:
   
   [General]Enable=Source,Media
   Disable=Socket
   [Headset]
   HFP=false
   MaxConnected=1
   FastConnectable=false
   [A2DP]
   SBCSources=1
   MPEG12Sources=0
   
3. Every boot I must run the following command:
   
   sudo pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover
   
   

Fedora 20 update broke BCM43227 wireless on Acer laptop

I have an Acer laptop with an AMD Quad-Core processor and a Broadcom Corporation BCM43227 802.11b/g/n wireless adapter.  I had not performed updates for a while so tonight, I ran a manual update and a new kernel and lots of other packages got installed (over 100 for sure).  A reboot of my laptop and subsequent login found me with no wireless.

To make a long story short, I did some Googling on my cell phone and noticed a number of posts about having to install package akmod-wl.  The posts indicated that if rpmfusion was installed, this package should fix it.  Installing and a reboot was all that I needed to get wireless back and running.

This is one of those cases where using additional repositories might get you into trouble.   Hope this helps someone else and hope I don't need to use it again.

Configuring wake-up-on-lan on Red Hat

I have a T61 laptop in my office that I use for the following reasons:

1. have access to remotely because it is running the IBM Open Client and in case my laptop running Fedora 20 dies, I still have another alternative.  
2. When people have questions about IBM Open Client I have an place to go.
3. I know I can put IBM Open Client in a KVM but what if my laptop dies?
4. Backup my IBM Notes mail via replication.

Having this computer running full time does not make sense.  I have figured out how to set up the Wake-On-Lan feature on a Windows 7 server at home and it works very well.  The remainder of this blog post describes how I configured the Lenovo T61 running IBM Open Client (RHEL 6.5) to support Wake-On-Lan, a CLI command to put the T61 into suspend state and how to wake up the T61 from a remote server.

Here is a web page that describes how to install and configure WOL for Red Hat. 

The summary of steps (T61):

1. Make sure ethtool is installed: sudo yum install ethtool
2. Write down the interface hardware address (mac address):  Here is a sample of the ifconfig command and associated output.  The HW address is highlighted.

   # ifconfig eth0 eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1B:FC:80:27:17             inet addr:9.10.87.237  Bcast:9.10.87.255  Mask:255.255.255.0           inet6 addr: fe80::21b:fcff:fe80:2717/64 Scope:Link           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1           RX packets:110770824 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:215059219 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000           RX bytes:10476527981 (9.7 GiB)  TX bytes:321033506529 (298.9 GiB)           Interrupt:16

   
   
3. Verify wake-on-lan is enabled: sudo ethtool eth0.  You should see a value of g in one of the fields from ethtool.  If you do not, use the URL above to fix it.
4. To force server to go into suspend mode: sudo pm-suspend

Note: pm-suspend will hang a terminal ssh session.  I tried doing  "pm-suspend;exit" but that still hung my ssh terminal session.  Perhaps "pm-suspend &; exit" might work better.  Not sure.

From a remote server (not the T61 silly, it should be suspended):

1. The remote server must be on the same IP subnet.
2. Make sure ether-wake command is insalled: sudo yum -y install net-tools
3. Using the hardware address written down from step 2 in the previuos summary, send a wake-up message to the T61: ether-wake -i eth0  00:1B:FC:80:27:17
4. Wait approximately a minute for the T61 RHEL server to complete resuming from suspend mode.  Use ping to verify connection and if ping is successful, ssh or any other remote operation should be operational.