grahamst
June 10th, 2010, 07:13 PM
(Apologies if you already saw this in the Acer forum.)
Last weekend I installed Ubuntu 10.4 (Netbook remix) on my new Acer Aspire 751h. The installation seemed to go smoothly, but I've noticed several things that don't work as well as on my old AA 110. I should say that I installed Ubuntu in a dual-boot setup with Windows XP, which the machine already had installed.
Firstly, the screen brightness can't be adjusted with the function key/hotkey combination. The sound volume hotkeys work fine, and the brightness hotkeys work with XP, so it's not a hardware issue. The default brightness is pretty dim, so this is an annoying problem. Is there a way to bind the hotkeys to the 'increase/decrease brightness' functions?
Secondly, the vertical scroll bar on the desktop doesn't work, by which I mean if I click above or below the highlighted area no scrolling takes place. However, I can drag the highlighted area up or down and scrolling does take place, and scrolling via the touchpad works. All forms of scrolling work normally within applications. Is there anything I can do to fix this? It's only a mild annoyance, though.
Thirdly, in the power management preferences application I don't have an 'On Battery Power' tab - just 'On Mains Power' and 'General'. There are some other peculiarities that probably follow on from this. I have a power indicator in the top panel of the desktop, but on bootup it's a 'lightning bolt' icon rather than the battery-shaped icon it should be. If I plug into mains power, it changes to a battery-shaped 'charging' icon until it's fully-charged, when it changes back to the lightning bolt. If I then unplug the mains power, I get a battery-shaped 'discharging' icon, but this doesn't survive a restart. Obviously, a battery level indicator is very useful and I'd like to get it working properly. The help file for power management preferences says something about GConf policy keys that need to be made writable in order to display some sliders and option boxes. I certainly don't have as many sliders and options as shown in the help file. I guess this might be related to the screen brightness problem.
Finally (for now - I haven't explored everything yet) the screen ratio looks wrong. Circular icons appear as ovals. It looks like the software thinks I've got a 4:3 ratio whereas really it's widescreen. I can't see where I can change this. I've looked in 'System.. Preferences. Monitors' but there's nothing I can change there. System testing shows the apparent resolution at 1024x768, whereas the hardware spec is 1366x768.
I'm wondering whether to try to fix these things individually or whether a better option might be a reinstall - perhaps without the XP dual boot. What do you think? I'm willing to change settings from the terminal but I'd need to be told exactly where to go and what to do.
Graham
Last weekend I installed Ubuntu 10.4 (Netbook remix) on my new Acer Aspire 751h. The installation seemed to go smoothly, but I've noticed several things that don't work as well as on my old AA 110. I should say that I installed Ubuntu in a dual-boot setup with Windows XP, which the machine already had installed.
Firstly, the screen brightness can't be adjusted with the function key/hotkey combination. The sound volume hotkeys work fine, and the brightness hotkeys work with XP, so it's not a hardware issue. The default brightness is pretty dim, so this is an annoying problem. Is there a way to bind the hotkeys to the 'increase/decrease brightness' functions?
Secondly, the vertical scroll bar on the desktop doesn't work, by which I mean if I click above or below the highlighted area no scrolling takes place. However, I can drag the highlighted area up or down and scrolling does take place, and scrolling via the touchpad works. All forms of scrolling work normally within applications. Is there anything I can do to fix this? It's only a mild annoyance, though.
Thirdly, in the power management preferences application I don't have an 'On Battery Power' tab - just 'On Mains Power' and 'General'. There are some other peculiarities that probably follow on from this. I have a power indicator in the top panel of the desktop, but on bootup it's a 'lightning bolt' icon rather than the battery-shaped icon it should be. If I plug into mains power, it changes to a battery-shaped 'charging' icon until it's fully-charged, when it changes back to the lightning bolt. If I then unplug the mains power, I get a battery-shaped 'discharging' icon, but this doesn't survive a restart. Obviously, a battery level indicator is very useful and I'd like to get it working properly. The help file for power management preferences says something about GConf policy keys that need to be made writable in order to display some sliders and option boxes. I certainly don't have as many sliders and options as shown in the help file. I guess this might be related to the screen brightness problem.
Finally (for now - I haven't explored everything yet) the screen ratio looks wrong. Circular icons appear as ovals. It looks like the software thinks I've got a 4:3 ratio whereas really it's widescreen. I can't see where I can change this. I've looked in 'System.. Preferences. Monitors' but there's nothing I can change there. System testing shows the apparent resolution at 1024x768, whereas the hardware spec is 1366x768.
I'm wondering whether to try to fix these things individually or whether a better option might be a reinstall - perhaps without the XP dual boot. What do you think? I'm willing to change settings from the terminal but I'd need to be told exactly where to go and what to do.
Graham