Troubleshooting the Dell Inspiron 5100 on Ubuntu

[bornagainpenguin]

First off, thank you bornagainpenguin, i've been browsing forums forever and nothing seemd to work, but then i just copy/pasted your xorg.inf (since i have the same graphics card as you) and WallA the effects work!

Glad I was able to help!

But, there's one thing that is bothering me, and that is the fact that the effects when enabled, are laggy and buggy. Does anyone know if there's anyway to fix this? Perhaps its because my direct rendering doesn't work.

That I can't say for sure... Have you tried installing driconf and enabling Hyper-Z? Just do a search in Snyaptics and it should come right up! That might help you quite a bit right there. Another thing that would help is lowering the color depth to 16, but that comes with its own set of problems....

--bornagainpenguin

[starcannon]

To get CPU Frequency Scaling working on this laptop you'll need to

sudo modprobe p4_clockmod

Put it in your /etc/modules list as well

gksudo gedit /etc/modules

add p4_clockmod to the list, save, exit.

Now follow this guide
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-chan...in-ubuntu.html

I'd write the instructions, but that link includes pictures and everything, very nice guide.

Now you can set it to "on demand" which should help keep it a bit cooler, and allow the battery to work a bit longer

Enjoy and thanks for the great post on this great laptop, they still get plenty warm, keep a can of compressed air around, that heatsink sucks in dirt fast.

Oh and I'd put a thankyou on your post but the blue ribbon isn't showing up for some reason, so anyway THANK YOU this is an excellent thread.

[rsay]

Thanks for you post. I have used it more than once.

I have posted how I got my extended desktop working on my 5100 under 8.10 here. I don't use compiz but I do like to have an extra monitor sometimes. For some reason I was always stuck in clone mode.

[Hasmarth]

I have two things i need help on.

First off, let me say this is an awesome thread, and i didn't think getting compiz would be this easy. Anyways, in compiz, how do i enable it to i can rotate up and down on the cube? so far, i can only go left to right or right to left.

Secondly, after i install gkrellm and gkrellm-18k, how do i launch them? Any help would be gratly appreciated, thanks.

[JoshuaRL]

I have two things i need help on.

First off, let me say this is an awesome thread, and i didn't think getting compiz would be this easy. Anyways, in compiz, how do i enable it to i can rotate up and down on the cube? so far, i can only go left to right or right to left.

Secondly, after i install gkrellm and gkrellm-18k, how do i launch them? Any help would be gratly appreciated, thanks.

To make the cube rotate freely and not just to different desktops, enable Rotate Cube in the Advanced Settings (those are just fun to mess around with anyway). Then either click and drag with the scroll wheel on an empty section of desktop or do Ctrl+Alt+Left mouse click to grab and rotate. Should work.

To launch a process or application from the command line, just type the name of the application. There are only a few instances where this is wrong, but it should work almost always.

[Hasmarth]

Ok i got Gkrellm working, and i8k is fine too, but how can i make it so i can launch gkrellm from like the application bar without having to open up terminal?

And i can't seem to find the advanced settings lol, where are they in compiz?

[anotherdisciple]

You can use the menu editor to add it to the applications menu... or you can right click a panel and add an application and use the command "gkrellm", but I prefer to leave gkrellm on all the time to keep my computer cool, so I open (System > Preferences > Sessions) and add Gkrellm with the command "gkrellm"... that way it starts every time I start ubuntu.

[Hasmarth]

I don't really like gkrellm, it makes everything run alot slower, processer is constantly at 100% Another thing is that i can't find where to disable that tracker thing.

[cyberspike]

I've hesitated posting my woes until after exhausting everything, but I still can't get proper Compiz working on my Dell Inspiron 5100.

Correctly followed all of the guides; glxinfo shows direct rendering = yes and glx vendor string = SGI; tried the stock xorg.conf in this thread; even did two separate clean Ubuntu installs (Intrepid 8.10); glxgears working fine.

compiz --replace kills all window decorations (yes, I've tried disabling decorations in ccsm), and gives these errors & warnings:

Warn: No GLXFBConfig for depth 32
Error: Couldn't create cairo context for switcher

Have reduced resolution to 1024x768, and tried reducing depth from 24 to 16. All combinations produce the same thing, i.e. lost window decorations.

Is this more of a problem with Intrepid and the 5100? I understand that compiz is still a very finicky beast, but I am totally amazed at how difficult this problem is being, especially if other people are successfully using compiz on this machine. I'm not a newbie at all, so something must be missing from the equation.

Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

[bornagainpenguin]

Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Have you tried using DRIConf to enable "HyperZ" support?

You can get it via synaptic and find it on the System->Settings menu IIRC...

Also you might want to try seeing if you can recreate the default xorg.conf and see if that helps anything--these instructions were written more or less for the Gutsy version of Ubuntu with some overlap towards Gutsy. I haven't really used my Inspiron 5100 lately in favor of my new ASUS EeePC 901...I'll give it a look over soon and see if there is anything new that causes hicups in Intrepid for me. I'm planning on giving it to my younger sister anyway, so I need to make sure everything checks out any way...

--bornagainpenguin