Please add quick Gotchas/FAQs that would be useful to other Laptop Testers under the correct heading. There are some good tips for recording buggy behaviour at ["http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/bugzilla-howto.xml"]. Also feel free to add questions to this page.

You should always ...

• Provide your kernel version, get this with

uname -a

If the output is Linux duncan-laptop 2.6.15-26-686 #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jul 17 20:14:14 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux then the kernel version is 2.6.15-26-686.

• For removable hardware run the command below and paste and text that changes as you connect and disconnect the hardware. If there is no change, please mention that.

less +F /var/log/messages

Screen & Monitors

Testing 3D

$ which glxgears | xargs strings | grep benchmark | xargs glxgears
4913 frames in 5.0 seconds = 982.508 FPS

LunaTick: From LaptopTesting - the best way to test this is to start a terminal and type the following:

glxinfo | grep rendering

This will print either "direct rendering: Yes" or "direct rendering: No"

Dropping to a lower color depth or resolution may enable direct rendering on laptops with little video memory.

X failing to start

If X is totally busted and gives you the (blue) dialogue screen stating that X is failing start, but you are unable to send any keypresses. The following may get you out of the situation enough to debug it.

• Pressing Ctrl-d (end-of-file) may send the keystrokes that you have typed but which have been buffered and haven't appeared.

• Pressing Alt-SysRq-e should kill most programs and allow you to switch to another virtual terminal using Alt-F2, where you should (hopefully) find a login-prompt.

Power Management

Battery detected

You can find help here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ACPIBattery

Hibernate

Hibernate (System->Logout->Hibernate, aka 'Suspend to Disk') will only work if have a valid and working swap partition. There kernel will complain with an error message such as:

Aug 30 23:02:35 localhost kernel: [4325496.559000] Stopping tasks: ==============|
Aug 30 23:02:36 localhost kernel: [4325496.572000] Freeing memory...  ^H-^H\^H|^H/^Hdone (68051 pages freed)
Aug 30 23:02:36 localhost kernel: [4325497.815000] swsusp: FATAL: cannot find swap device, try swapon -a!
Aug 30 23:02:36 localhost kernel: [4325497.815000] swsusp: Restoring Highmem

You can see if you have one by doing:

$ cat /proc/swaps
Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sda5                               partition       979924  211768  -1

Suspend/Sleep

If sleep button does not work, try testing Sleep from the System->Log Out->Suspend menu. If that does not work either, or the option to Suspend does even not show up, check if Sleep is enabled in /etc/default/acpi-support (uncomment the "ACPI_SLEEP=true" line to enable), and try again. ~~["Nanotube"]

Dim/Blank monitor

Bug reports should be filed against the linux-source-x.x.xx package according to your kernel version number.

Sound

Networking

Wired NIC

Wireless NIC

See what you can learn about your card from this page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessCardsSupported Gathering information about the problem Try running each of the following commands in a terminal, and add the results to your bug report.

ifconfig -a

tcpdump -i ethx

netstat -in

netstat -rn

PCMCIA NIC

Firewire

Bluetooth

Related packages

• bluez-utils
• linux-source-x.x.xx

Related info After each tip try again with your Bluetooth device.

• Are there any settings in your BIOS for Bluetooth?
• Is the device listed in /proc/bus/usb/devices?
• Restart your computer to clear away various logs and clutter, in a root terminal type

dmesg

... and post the output in your bug report.

• Test for detected hardware:

$ lspci -vv

Force start bluez-utils:

$ /etc/init.d/bluez-utils start

Test again for detected hardware:

$ lspci -vv

... add all that to your bug report, it shows whether after forcing bluez-utils to start the hardware was then detected'

• Maybe it's in hid mode and should be in hci mode, try switching with

hid2hci

... add the output to tour report

Modem

Touchpad & Mice

Docking Station/Port Replicator

Additional Hardware

Function and other keys

Hotkeys Bugs

Please file bug reports at:

• https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/hotkey-setup/+filebug

following the instructions:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/HotkeyResearch

Needs categorising

If you know what category this/these should be in please move it/them and delete this section.

ACPI DSDT replacement

If you have a buggy DSDT on your machine and the ACPI isn't working, it's possible to extract and fix it. A new one can be loaded at boot-time to override the one in the BIOS by placing it in:

sudo cp my-fixed-dsdt.aml /etc/mkinitramfs/DSDT.aml
sudo mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r` `uname -r`

CategoryLaptop