I was about to roll back to Fedora 8, which performed well on the hardware, when I thought, why not give Ubuntu Hardy Heron a try.
In the Linux realm, I have always chosen Red Hat or other RPM based distributions over the others. So this is slightly unfamiliar territory for me, being Debian based.
Power Savings
Since this is a laptop, I wanted to get max performance when on AC power and max battery when off of AC power. I did so by following these steps.
I also modified /etc/X11/xorg.conf from
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection
to
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
Option "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts" "True"
EndSection
And added a new script to Sessions (System -> Preferences -> Sessions) called "Nvidia Power Settings" with the following code:
#!/bin/bash
while true; do
if on_ac_power; then
nice /usr/bin/nvidia-settings -q all > /dev/null
fi
sleep 25;
done
The following are the steps I took to get Ubuntu to play an off the shelf copy of Pink Floyd the Wall DVD (which would not play with the default install of Ubuntu 8.04). The DVD is apparently of the encrypted variety.
Useful links:
- http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=828342&highlight=dvd+xinelink
- http://ubuntutip.googlepages.com/multimediaubuntustep1
- http://ubuntutip.googlepages.com/multimediaubuntustep2
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc libdvdcss2 ubuntu-restricted-extras w32codecs
Firewall
I ran into an issue with the default policy for the Firestarter firewall where it wouldn't allow traffic on my VPN connection. Using this page as a reference I was able to get VPN traffic to pass through the firewall. Here are the settings that I used in /etc/firestarter/user-pre:
I ran into an issue with the default policy for the Firestarter firewall where it wouldn't allow traffic on my VPN connection. Using this page as a reference I was able to get VPN traffic to pass through the firewall. Here are the settings that I used in /etc/firestarter/user-pre:
iptables -A INPUT -j ACCEPT -s IP_OF_VPN_GATEWAY -p esp
iptables -A INPUT -j ACCEPT -s IP_OF_VPN_GATEWAY -p udp -m multiport -sports isakmp,10000
iptables -A INPUT -i tun0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -o tun0 -j ACCEPT
This Ubuntu forum post covers the steps to configure nVidia notebook GPUs for maximum performance while on AC and max power savings while on battery.
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