Monday, July 21, 2014

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.



Saturday, July 19, 2014

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