I just set up one of my old computers up in the corner of the living room so that there’s nothing but the bare necessities there. I SSH into it and do my stuff and then get out. It’s a lot of fun, really. While setting up SSH, I discovered that you could login to that SSH server without using a password if you used a pair of keys to handle the login. I’ve already been using Seahorse for a while now to handle my GPG keys and I noticed it could create a pair of SSH keys too. So I went through the process and it was super simple. All I had to do was:

1. Go to Key » Create New Key…
2. Choose SSH key
3. Enter a description and go to the next step
4. Enter a passphrase twice
5. Allow it to set up the other computer by supplying my login details

That was all, and now I have paired-key authentication and don’t have to enter the password every time I log in to that computer. Hurray!

If you have a default install of Ubuntu and you enabled Desktop Effects you’ll have trouble when you try to play a video. The video itself will play just fine normally, but if you try to combine that with a couple of Compiz effects, like trying to make it a bit transparent or trying to move the video while it’s playing, or rotating the cube while the video is on you’ll get a blank screen, sometimes green, sometimes grey. The way to fix this is:

Totem:

The inbuilt player. Open a Terminal and copy paste the following command:
gstreamer-properties
Then change the default output plugin to X Window System (no xv)

mplayer:

The process is essentially the same, you change the output plugin to x11. It’ll be okay so long as you’re not using xv. If you’re using the command line interface just add -vo x11 to the end. So a command to play abc.avi would be:
mplayer abc.avi -vo x11
If you’re using the GUI, you can change the settings there.

If you’ve played around with installing a lot of distributions you’ve made a mistake atleast once, and broken your partition table. Or atleast I hope so, because I’ve done it more than my fair share of times. The most recent was when I was installing Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit and I crashed GPartEd while partitioning. My problem was that I already had four partitions [1] on the hard drive and I also wanted a swap partition but I made a mistake somewhere along the line and ended up with a logical partition outside of an extended partition. This is very bad stuff.

What happened next was terrifying, both GPartEd and Ubuntu’s ubiquity installer claimed the entire drive was empty. Now this is very bad, because there are files on this computer that I adore and would hate losing. I was just about ready to kill myself when I found a forum thread on the Ubuntu Forums[2] that mentioned testdisk. It’s in the universe repositories and you can get it by enabling Universe in System » Administration » Software Sources and then running:
sudo aptitude install testdisk
It also creates a backup of your partition table if you want. I had a broken one but I wanted more than one shot at it so I emailed myself the backup and got ready to put my hope to the test. When it happened it was almost anticlimactic, three menus later (all in a simple user friendly style) I had my partition table back! And all the data stored on the drive was accessible once more. I was incredibly happy about that, and made a small donation to the software author. The single most useful piece of software I’ve ever used on Linux.

[1] Ankit Chaturvedi on Partitions
[2] My Forum Thread with the problem.

The laptop works perfectly with Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit.

The same model number sometimes has different processors and RAM configuration, so the one I have has
1. An Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2Ghz processor.
2. 1GB of RAM
and is straight from HP.

Connectivity:

1. Wireless - It worked right off the bat. All I had to do was select the network and enter my WEP key. Very simple, and really nice. Intel 3945 PRO Wireless.
2. Bluetooth: Bluetooth worked perfectly and pairing/bonding works straight off. However you’ll have to install the gnome-vfs-obexftp package to be able to transfer files by obexftp. I hope this is fixed in the next release. You can find the bug here: 131530. Until then, open a terminal and type in:
   sudo aptitude install gnome-vfs-obexftp
3. Ethernet: Broadcom card, works perfectly out of the box.
4. Firewire: I don’t have a firewire device, but they’re rumoured to be compatible.
5. USB: All ports work.
6. Modem: I no longer have a dialup line so I can’t test this. However the modem is recognised.

Input:

1. Touchpad: It’s a Synaptics touchpad and works perfectly. You can even enable a horizontal scroll option even though the touchpad doesn’t have such a place marked. I like to turn off tap-to-click. It’s annoying while typing.
2. Keyboard and buttons: All the buttons work perfectly including the volume controls and the bluetooth/wireless button. Power button brings up the ‘Shut down, Restart,…’ screen by default.

Display:

1. Graphics work well. 1280×800 out of the box. Desktop Effects work perfectly (except for Blur - which you shouldn’t turn on. It nearly freezes the desktop, supposedly a bug in the Intel driver. The driver itself isn’t great but it works just fine unless you want to play something like Spring). There is one bug, there are 2 or 3 flashes before GDM hits the right resolution and starts up. I’m not sure how to fix this but I don’t think it’s hurting the monitor.
2. Dual monitors are still a pain. If I remember right they were easier to set up on the 32-bit version of Gutsy and that makes no sense. Anyway, if you boot up with another monitor connected it will be recognised and your laptop screen will be set to that monitor’s resolution and one will mirror the other. In this setting you can use Desktop Effects. It’s a lot of trouble getting the two monitors to be separate screens and I don’t think you can get Direct Rendering then, so Compiz is out of the question.
3. If you use the Fast User Switcher tool to switch users, or if you switch users any other way, the second user will not have hardware acceleration. If you have Compiz enabled you’ll get a grey screen or a white screen. Some people have suggested increasing the VideoRAM through an xorg.conf setting but it hasn’t worked for me at all. I believe it’s a limitation of the Intel driver.
4. The dimming-when-off-battery works, and you can also set the brightness using the Fn key and the brightness keys, but I think that’s a hardware setting anyway.

Processor:

1. CPU scaling works. If you want to scale the cpu yourself (instead of letting the computer automatically shift) you will need to reconfigure the CPU scaling applet for the Gnome Panel to be root.
2. The CPU allows Virtualisation, but you will have to enable it in the BIOS. Hit F8 while the boot screen with HP logo is showing and then go to the advanced settings (I forget what they’re called, it’s one of the right most menu items) and enable VT or virtualisation technology or whatever it’s called in your firmware version.

Sound:

1. Output works fine, I don’t have a mic or headphones to test though I suppose they’d be fine.

Power-saving:

1. As above, frequency scaling works just fine.
2. Suspend works perfectly.
3. Hibernate works but it’s slow, take around 20-30 seconds to return from hibernate. It also displays a lot of text (errors?) before hibernating, but restores just fine.

It worked nice and neat out of the box. But then, this laptop has always worked fine with Ubuntu (and probably with other distros too)