Submitted by j.a.watson on August 27, 2009 - 2:35am
I have just installed the new (8.0.10) distribution on my various notebook and netbook systems. As always, I am pleased and impressed with how smoothly it installs, and how well it works. I ran into one small problem on each of the systems that I installed, so here are a few notes about what the problems are, and how to get around them:
- Fujitsu Lifebook S6510: After installation, the resolution of the laptop display is wrong - 1024x768 rather than 1280x800. I have seen this before with other Linux distributions, and I suspect it is actually caused by confusion over the different internal/external display resolution possibilities with the Intel 965 display controller. I was able to get around it by simply commenting (or removing) all of the Display Mode specifications in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. If you are determined to keep that file as instact as possible for some reason, you can also just add "1280x800" to each of the "Mode" lines, just before the "1024x768".
- HP 2133 Mini-Note: The MEPIS distribution still doesn't include the openchrome drivers for the VIA Chrome 9 display controller. This is not a huge problem, because both the installation process and the installed system use the VESA drivers at 1280x800 resoultion, which is slightly larger than the 1280x768 resolution of the display on my Mini-Note, and then they scroll the entire desktop when the mouse is moved to the top of bottom. That gets a bit tiring, though, and seeing the "clipped" desktop can be irritating. The solution is to download and compile the latest openchrome sources, of course, and there are ample instructions for doing that on the web. The whole thing takes about 5 or 10 minutes, and then it works perfectly.
- ASUS N10J: There is no keyboard layout selection for Swiss German! I was surprised at this, and even more surprised when I saw that there is a Swiss French selection. The problem can be mostly avoided by selecting Swiss French (which should be the same as Swiss German except for three keys) during installation, and then after booting the installed system edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and changing XKbLayout from "fr_CH" to "ch(de)". However, this only changes the keyboard under the X Window System; if you use any of the text consoles (Ctrl-Alt-F1 etc), the keymap is still wrong there.
jw
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