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 as root

$ sudo /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

$ sudo hid2hci

... add the output to tour report

Still not working?

Attach the output of the following three commands to your bug report, the files will be put into your home directory.

$ lspci -vv > lspci-vv.txt
$ lspci -vvn > lspci-vvn.txt
$ lsusb -v > lsusb-v.txt

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