I wrote the first half of this on the train back from the city on Saturday night, so if tenses and time references are confusing, that’s why (though I tried to correct all). After a rough start (missing the 8:40a train by two minutes & having to wait for the 9:40, meaning I didn’t get to Baruch ’til 11:30, missing the morning panel I wanted to see), the first day turned out to be very nice. After lunch there was something I wanted to go to every timeslot, which to me makes the day a success.
So what panels did I go to, anyway?
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My Weekend @ WordCamp NYC
Ubuntu 9.10 on MSI Wind
Apparently it just doesn’t work.
There’s a bug in the uvcvideo driver that kills the other USB ports, and causes suspend and hibernate to fail. You can apparently fix this by being ninja and hitting fn+f6 before it loads, but I’m not that good, so I just blacklisted uvcvideo. If you’re having the same problem, you can stop the driver from loading by blacklisting it.
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
and add the line
blacklist uvcvideo
anywhere in the file (to the end would be easiest, so if there is a fix you’ll be able to find it & unblacklist it). Of course, this disables the webcam. On one hand I’d been using 8.04, which also lacked (native) driver support for the webcam, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything really (after I reinstalled the OS I didn’t bother recompiling the driver, so I’ve been without it for a while). Still rather annoying, and I can’t tell if they’re working to fix it or not -but I certainly hope so.
The other main issue I had was a very, very annoying bug in the screen brightness. On startup, and whenever I adjusted the brightness, it would oscillate between the set brightness and a level or two below, making the screen flicker. There was apparently some magic where you could hold your right mouse button down for a while & it’d stop, but I’m not doing that every time. The fix mentioned in the release notes worked for me, which was to “edit /etc/default/grub and add nomodeset to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX, then run sudo update-grub“. Restarted, and there was no flickering. I could change my brightness, and no flickering. What a relief. I have yet to figure out if doing this has any negative effects.
Positives and some screenshots…