Fingerprint Reader Working Again!

I had some problems with my fingerprint reader for quite some time, probably since upgrading to Jaunty. It took multiple attempts to read my fingerprint

Upgrading to Jaunty

Recently I updated my laptop to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty.

It went pretty smooth; the only drawback was

Upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid

Today I upgraded my Dell laptop to Intrepid. After downloading 1.3 GB of data it started the installation and asked about several configuration files it thought I had manually changed. Besides that everything went uneventful, and a reboot also worked.

However, not all things are working:

• Compiz is disabled
• Fingerprint reader no longer working
• Cursor keys not working; up-arrow key opens screen shot app

No Sound after Kernel Upgrade

After I upgraded to the current kernel version (2.6.24-21) the sound suddenly stopped working on my Dell D830 laptop running Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.

Dual Head on Ubuntu Hardy with Intel GM965 (Part 2)

Now that I had dual head working on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 with my D830, I wanted to be able to undock and automatically get my workspace only on the internal laptop screen. When I put my laptop in the docking station I want it to extend over both the external monitor and the internal laptop screen. And when I boot in the docking station I want my workspace automatically on both screens.

Dual Head on Ubuntu Hardy with Intel GM965 (Part 1)

Yesterday I got a LCD monitor that I plugged in to the docking station of my Dell D830. Using cloned mode where both the laptop display and the external monitor display the same, worked right away. But I wanted to use extended mode so that I can have a bigger workspace. Here’s how I got it to work.

Getting the Microphone to Work

Today I tried to set up Skype on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 on my Dell Latitude D830 laptop.

I quickly found the Skype package in the Medibuntu repository, installed it – it started up, I was able to login on Skype. Then I tried a test call: sound output worked, but not the (internal) microphone.

More on Fingerprint Reader

I had the fingerprint reader working on my Dell Latitude D830 laptop running Ubuntu 8.04. However, there was still one big problem: after resuming the laptop from suspend it only showed a black screen – I could do nothing. The same thing happened when I logged on, switched to another user and then switched to the first user again (or logged out the second user).

I noticed that everything worked when I had Compiz disabled. So obviously the password dialog wasn’t working.

Recently I discovered an error message in /var/log/auth.log and was able to track down the problem.

Wireless Woes

One thing that I wanted to get to work was my wireless network on my Dell D830 laptop with Ubuntu. The first hurdle was that I had turned off the wireless network switch. Took me a while to figure that out

Unfortunately afterwards it still didn’t work. A lspci revealed that I have a Broadcom BCM4327 wireless card. A search on Google showed that Ubuntu Hardy Beta still has a problem with the order in which modules get loaded.

When I do the following commands I can get it to work:

sudo rmmod ssb

sudo rmmod ndiswrapper

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

sudo modprobe ssb

I think that for now I’ll do these steps manually (since I need wireless LAN only occasionally) and hope they will fix this problem for the final release.

Update: it seems that this got fixed. I don’t have to do these steps manually to get my WLAN to work.

Getting the Fingerprint Reader to Work

Here’s more on my experiences with Ubuntu on my Dell Latitude D830 laptop.

I tried to get the fingerprint reader to work so that I’d be able to authenticate with my fingerprint.