Ubuntu 12.04 on Lenovo Q150 with OCZ vertex 2 SSD and 4Gb of Memory

See my old post about about Lenovo Q150, OCZ vertex 2, 4gb of Memory and Ubuntu 11.04 installed on a SSD and using 4Gb of mem.

For ubuntu 12.04 on the Q150, I used a usbdrive flashed using "Startup Disk Creator" from ubuntu 11.10. to save the SSD from constant writes, I did not create a swap partition. I created only one partition and rely on 4Gb of real memory for all the memory needs.

Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop

This build detects all the hardware without problems, I recommend installing the nvidia drivers for better 3D and flash performance.


This new version boots faster and feels faster on the Q150 when compared to ubuntu 11.10.
I recommend the update since the install is a breeze and all hardware is setup without any fuzz. The sound, hdmi video out, wired network, wifi, a Logitech bluetooth keyboard, a usb wireless Logitech mouse, logitech usb sound bar speakers, blue-tooth dongle for the keyboard, all works great. I didn't found time to test hdmi sound out, but it should work since it worked on 11.10.

Software

I installed flash, chromium, banshee and hplip  for my wifi hp photosmart c8180 All-in-one printer using "Ubuntu Software center".

banshee and chromium

Hulu desktop

http://www.hulu.com/labs/hulu-desktop

Hulu Desktop

DropBox

https://www.dropbox.com/install?os=lnx

Dropbox and Google Music Manager

Google Music Manager 


https://play.google.com/music/listen


Select upload music, download 64 bit version, and double click on it to install it.

Also add it to startup from shutdown menu.

You can also get Google earth, chrome, gtalk plugin:

• http://www.google.com/chat/video/download.html
• https://www.google.com/chrome
• http://www.google.com/earth/download/ge/agree.html

Skype

run command:

sudo apt-get install skype

Since this is so basic, I don't think there is much more to write about Ubuntu 12.04 installation and compatibility with the Q150, it all works great.

Older Posts

•  Lenovo Q150, OCZ vertex 2, 4gb of Memory and Ubuntu 11.04  

• Lenovo Q150 pics 

• Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick on Lenovo Q150

Ubuntu 11.10 on Lenovo Q150

New related post Ubuntu 12.04 on Lenovo Q150 with OCZ SSD and 4Gb of Memory.

Jan 22 2012: I updated the post and added instructions to describe the sound settings for HDMI using Ubuntu 11.10. This post instructions should work on 11.10 and 11.04, but I recomend using 11.10.

The Lenovo Q150 comes Atom D510 and the nvidia Ion gfx, 2GB of ram and a 250 GB HD, but mine  is running with a OCZ Vertex 2 disk and 4 Gb of memory to improve the speed.

I decided to install the 64 bit version of Ubuntu. I also installed:

• ubuntu tweak
• miro
• minitube (youtube player, without flash)
• huludesktop
• skype
• chromium

How to add Ubuntu-tweak

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak

XBMC install:

# Install the nvidia drivers to be able to start xbmc, the open source drivers won't work. You can do that by going to "System Settings" and run the "Additional drivers" app on Ubuntu followed by a reboot. After this install xmbc 

sudo apt-get install xbmc

You can get all the other applications from Ubuntu Tweak or Ubuntu Software Center.

The latest version of Ubuntu contains updates to the kernel, alsa and nouveau nvidia drivers.

- The new opensource video drivers seems as fast as the proprietary drivers when playing video and this is great, but flash is a little bit faster with the nvidia drivers.

- It also detects the nvidia HDMI sound card and sound works out of the box.

- Basic installation from a USB key works fine.

- HDMI/VGA and sound out, little USB keyboard/mouse works fine.

- Dual boot with Windows 7 works fine. But since I got a SSD installed on the Q150, I removed windows.

- Video acceleration at 1080p works great for Miro, mplayer, minitube, vlc, xmbc with the opensource drivers. Sound works out of the box for xmbc, with default settings.

- Wireless card works out of the box as well as the Ethernet drivers. In the Ubuntu 10.10 and 10.04, I had some problems to get the Ethernet driver to work without a cold reboot, but now it seems to work flawless.

Problems I found:

- Flash video acceleration does not work as fast as in windows, it uses more CPU, I think this is because flash on linux does not have gfx acceleration.

- With the the nvidia opensource drivers Ubuntu sometimes freezes, this normally happens when using Unity or playing Videos. I assume this is related with 3d or video acceleration stuff since using just the browser does not seem to create problems. You need to reboot Q150 if this happens. With video nvidia drivers seems to be stable. I'm currently using the nvidia drivers.

Wake up from usb wireless keyboard

You need to enabled USB wake up, in /proc/acpi/wakeup

# cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

sudo -s

echo USB0 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

echo USB1 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

echo USB2 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

echo USB3 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

echo EUSB > /proc/acpi/wakeup

This will allow you to suspend the machine use the wireless usb keyboard to wake up.

Wake up from at certain time

# Check alarm is not step

cat /proc/driver/rtc

# clear alarm, is need before setting

sudo sh -c "echo 0 > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm"

# Set alarm

sudo sh -c "echo `date -u --date "Aug 9, 2010 00:05:00" +%s` > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm"

# Check alarm time

cat /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm

cat /proc/driver/rtc

How to use sound over HDMI 

If you install nvidia drivers sound should work out of the box for HDMI, the open source drivers don't support sound over hdmi. After installing the nvidia drivers and a reboot, just go to sound Preferences and select Hardware->"High Definition Audio Controller" to "Digital Stereo (HDMI) nr 4 Output", and disable the other sound devices. In my case I had to play with that setting, it looks like only one setting works for me: "Digital Stereo (HDMI) nr 4 Output". None of the others produce a sound. This was done using Ubuntu 11.10.

Reference for timed wake:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ACPI_Wakeup#Using_.2Fsys.2Fclass.2Frtc.2Frtc0.2Fwakealarm

Older Posts

• Lenovo Q150, OCZ vertex 2, 4Gb of Memory and Ubuntu 11.04 

• Lenovo Q150 pics 

•  Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick on Lenovo Q150

Bluetooth Headset on Ubuntu

Pulse audio device choser:

sudo apt-get install paprefs paman padevchooser

Switch to PulseAudio by going into System -> Preferences -> Sound. Go into the Devices tab and change the Sound playback option for everything from Autodetect to PulseAudio Sound Server.




Use the gnome Bluetooth device wizard to pair your headset to the desktop


When the device is in pair mode you can type to learn the device unique ID
$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
00:1F:82:28:XX:XX DR-BT101

create the file in $HOME/.asoundrc with the correct device ID:

pcm.bluetooth {
type bluetooth
device 00:1F:82:28:XX:XX
profile "auto"
}

type to test if the it's working:

mplayer -ao alsa:device=bluetooth ANY_MP3_FILE.mp3

Ubuntu Jaunty 64 bit:

You need some extra 32 bit libraries to make skype bluetooth work on Ubuntu 64 bit.

getlibs:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790

Skype:

getlibs -p bluez

getlibs -p bluez-alsa

A more sophisticated Bluetooth Manager (not needed):

Add this source
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Do not update your system with the new version of bluez from this source.

type to replace default gnome bluetooth applet with blueman type:

sudo apt-get install blueman

Disable this source.

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick on Lenovo Q150

New related post Ubuntu 12.04 on Lenovo Q150 with OCZ SSD and 4Gb of Memory.

The Lenovo Q150 comes Atom D510 and the nvidia Ion gfx, 2GB of ram and a 250 GB HD.
I decided to install the 32 bit version of Ubuntu since flash more stable under 32 bit linux. I also installed:

• ubuntu tweak
• xbmc
• miro
• minitube (youtube player, faster than flash)
• huludesktop
• boxee
• skype
• cooliris
• chromium
• shotwell

The latest version of Ubuntu contains updates to the kernel, alsa and nouveau nvidia drivers. The new opensource drivers seems as fast as the proprietary drivers when playing video and this is great. It also detects the nvidia HDMI sound card out of the box.

So the biggest difference compared to 10.04 is that using the opensource drivers you can play video at 1080p full-screen without problems and HDMI sound card works.

- Basic installation from a USB key works fine.

- HDMI/VGA and sound out, little USB keyboard/mouse works fine.
- Dual boot with Windows 7 works fine.
- Detects the nvidia HDMI sound card.

- The open source nvidia ubuntu drivers, NVidia proprietary drivers, and the new drivers from nvidia web site work fine.
- Video acceleration at 1080p works great for Miro, mplayer, minitube, vlc, xbmc with the opensource drivers. You don't need to install nvidia proprietary drivers, unless you want 3D and HDMI sound. Flash is as fast with opensource drivers as the nvidia proprietary drivers.

- Hulu desktop plays fullscreen in high quality, with the opensource drivers and the proprietary drivers but you need to right click and select quality low on the context menu of hulu desktop. I thinks this use a decompress routine that is less CPU intensive (see the picture).

- When playing hulu, boxee, cooliris, youtube in full-screen it uses 100% of all CPUs. You can play youtube videos up to 720p without full screen with a good frame rate, but youtube 1080p is slow even in a small window.

Problems I found:

- Wireless card works, but requires compiling some code for now.
- Flash video acceleration does not work as fast as in windows, it uses more CPU, I think this is because flash on linuc does not have gfx acceleration.

- HDMI sound card requires nvidia video drivers and some tweaking see below.

XBMC install:

Add key on command line:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0x6d975c4791e7ee5e

Adding the XBMC Repo

• Adding the XBMC Repo tells your system where to look for xbmc for installation and future updates
• From the Desktop, click System -> Administration -> Software Sources.
• Click the "Third Party Sofware" tab.
• Click "Add" for each of the following. For the Apt line type the following:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc/ppa/ubuntu lucid main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc/ppa/ubuntu lucid main

Reference:

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO_install_XBMC_for_Linux_on_Ubuntu,_a_Step-by-Step_Guide

HDMI sound instructions

sudo apt-get install alsa-utils

on alsamixer press F6 to select the nvidia card enable all s/PDIF devices

# list the devices

aplay -l

# my sound gets enabled when I play on device speaker-test -D plughw:1,9 -r 44100, after that the sounds starts to work. It's important to use the -r 44100 since the drivers are not setting up the correct frequency.

speaker-test -D plughw:1,3 -r 44100

speaker-test -D plughw:1,7 -r 44100

speaker-test -D plughw:1,8 -r 44100

speaker-test -D plughw:1,9 -r 44100

In case you want to make a permanent change for the hdmi sound as the deafult card you can update /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf and change these lines:

defaults.ctl.card 0

defaults.pcm.card 0

defaults.pcm.device 0

to this:

defaults.ctl.card NVidia

defaults.pcm.card Nvidia

defaults.pcm.device 9

Wireless driver

Q150 uses a Realtek USB RTL8191SU 802.11n USB 2.0 wireless card.

There are 2 drivers for the wireless card, instructions described below:

Download the RTL8191SU driver from Realtek:

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=21&PFid=48&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

The one I got was dated 2010/6/30. Unzip the file.

Go into the "driver" sub directory:

cd rtl8712_8188_8191_8192SU_usb_linux_v2.6.0006.20100625/driver

Extract the driver:

tar -zxf rtl8712_8188_8191_8192SU_usb_linux_v2.6.6.0.20100625.tar.gz

Add this line:

{USB_DEVICE(0x13D3, 0x3323)},

to rtl8712_8188_8191_8192SU_usb_linux_v2.6.0006.20100625/os_intf/linux/usb_intf.c at line 96 or so.

This adds the vendor / product ID for the adapter the Q150 uses. I found out the correct numbers by doing a sudo lsusb -v and looking for the network device.

# download compiler and kernel source

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-source linux-headers-generic

cd /usr/src

sudo tar -xvjf linux-source-2.6.35.tar.bz2

sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.35 /usr/src/linux

# get a root shell

sudo bash

./clean

make

make install

modprobe 8712u

/etc/init.d/NetworkManager restart

exit

Note: these instructions where provided by Doug S.

Another driver you can use is r8192s_usb non stable driver, instructions below:

# get the realtek firmware

sudo apt-get install linux-firmware

wget http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/kernel/dists/trunk/firmware-nonfree/realtek/RTL8192SU/rtl8192sfw.bin

sudo mkdir /lib/firmware/RTL8192SU

sudo cp rtl8192sfw.bin /lib/firmware/RTL8192SU

# load the driver

sudo modprobe -v r8192s_usb

# the device should show up on network applet

# you can run dmesg|less and look for r8192s_usb to see if the driver loaded correctly.

Some other references for the wireless card:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+source/linux-firmware/+bug/595455

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=21&PFid=48&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

Dlink DWA-131 usb wireless chipset use a similar chipset as the Q150, some guides on the DWA-131 available here:

http://samiux.blogspot.com/2010/05/howto-realtek-8192su-usb-dongle.html

http://ukstokes.com/blog/2010/05/12/d-link-dwa-131-and-ubuntu/

Wake up from usb wireless keyboard

You need to enabled USB wake up, in /proc/acpi/wakeup

# cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

sudo -s

echo USB0 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

echo USB1 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

echo USB2 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

echo USB3 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

echo EUSB > /proc/acpi/wakeup

This will allow you to suspend the machine use the wireless usb keyboard to wake up.

Wake up from at certain time

# Check alarm is not step

cat /proc/driver/rtc

# clear alarm, is need before setting

sudo sh -c "echo 0 > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm"

# Set alarm

sudo sh -c "echo `date -u --date "Aug 9, 2010 00:05:00" +%s` > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm"

# Check alarm time

cat /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm

cat /proc/driver/rtc

Reference for timed wake:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ACPI_Wakeup#Using_.2Fsys.2Fclass.2Frtc.2Frtc0.2Fwakealarm

Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid on a Lenovo Q150

The Lenovo Q150 comes Atom D510 and the nvidia Ion gfx, 2GB of ram and a 250 GB HD.

I decided to install the 32 bit version of Ubuntu Lucid since flash is more stable under 32 bit linux. I also installed:

• ubuntu tweak
• xbmc
• miro
• minitube (youtube player, faster than flash)
• huludesktop
• boxee
• skype
• cooliris

Added this repository to enabled sound thru HDMI port
I upgraded upgrade alsa packages to 1.0.23 and kernel to 2.6.35-6-generic and the nvidia drivers 256.35, using the following repositories:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ricotz/unstable/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ricotz/unstable/ubuntu lucid main

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu lucid main

After the kernel, nvidia and alsa update and a reboot, start alsamixer and unmute the S/PDIF devices on the HDA NVidia sound card.


Status with lucid out of the box:
- Basic installation from a USB key works fine.
- VGA and sound out, works fine.
- Little USB keyboard/mouse works fine.
- Dual boot with Windows 7 works fine.
- HDMI out works great, but HDMI sound does not.
- Video acceleration works great for Miro, mplayer, minitube, with nvidia drivers from lucid.

Problems I found:
- Ethernet seems to work but sometimes the Ethernet card driver does not deteced the cable, sometimed a power off cycle to fixes this.
- HDMI sounds does not work with the latest Nvidia drivers from their web site. It requires a new kernel and and the latest alsa drivers to be detected. (See my other post on ubuntu 10.10 where the HDMI sound is working)
- Flash video acceleration does not work as well as in windows, it uses 100% of all CPUs, hulu, boxee, cooliris, youtube for full-screen, you can play it without full screen, but youtube 1080p is slow even for regular size, youtube 720p works.

ForUbuntu 10.10 Maverick Alpha (see my blog post on Ubuntu 10.10 and the Q150)

Windows 7 note:
- Flash acceleration is not enough to run 1080p even on windows 7, but flash seems to use less CPU usage on windows 7 compared to lucid or maverick. Hulu, Boxee, Hulu Desktop, Amazon, Youtube video all have problems on windows, dropping frames and some times affecting sound quality when in fullscreen at 1080p.
- HDMI sound works fine on windows.
- Wireless works out of the box.

- I had to install new drivers for ethernet to work.

Ubuntu 3D Desktop Howto

Small video tutorial to enabled 3D effects and add a application dock bar in Ubuntu Karmic 9.10.




This video was created in Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha, using a ATI RS480 built-in gfx chip-set on a Shuttle ST20G5. It's kind of slow because the recording software brings the frame-rate to it's knees, on this box. Otherwise it is fast enough when I'm not recording the desktop to a video.

This also works without problems with Intel or nvidia video chip-sets in Ubuntu 9.10. But for nvidia you need to install the proprietary drivers first.

Ubuntu Intrepid screenshots