New laptop arrived and set up!
The day before yesterday, my new laptop arrived. That was very good, as I had only got the dispatch notification the day before, so it was next-day delivery. Yesterday, I got the dispatch notification for my new portable harddrive, so I’m hoping that will arrive today or tomorrow. Now I just need to go to PC World and buy this mouse. Anyway, this new laptop is great! Unfortunately, I don’t have a camera with me so you’ll have to cope with screenshots of how I’ve set up Arch until I can take some pictures of it. I’ll list a few things I haven’t got working yet first:
- Volume wheel Well, I’m assuming it’s a volume wheel. Rotating it to the left gives a keycode 174, and to the right, 176. I’ll probably have to make some keybindings to set the Pulse output volume (if I can figure out how on Earth to do that).
- Touchpad Judging from the markings on the touchpad, it also doubles up as a volume wheel and application launcher in Windows. I have no idea how to do this in Linux either.
- Webcam I’m not sure if this works in Linux or not; both the Toshiba and Currys websites failed to mention this laptop had a webcam, and none of the pictures showed it (in fact, none of the pictures really looked like the laptop anyway).
- A dead pixel There is one dead pixel, stuck on green. Unfortunately, I can’t get the screen replaced unless I have (a) 10 dead pixels or more, (b) 6 dead pixels of the same colour or more, or (c) 2 horizontally-touching dead pixels of the same colour or more.
- Media keys I haven’t yet tried to get these working, but I imagine I can do it.
- Windows Media Centre remote I know for a fact that these remotes work with MythTV, and I’ll be installing that at some point, so I just have to hope that the bluetooth or whatever it is works so I can use the remote.
On with the screenshots!
Edit: After playing with the GNOME keyboard shortcuts magic thingy, I now have all my media keys and volume wheel working EXCEPT the launch media player button, which the kernel doesn’t seem to see. Oh well, I use MPD, I only open a media player when I want to change song or mute it - which I can now do with my keyboard.
Did you put Arch i686 or Arch x86_64 on this beast?
If you put x86_64 on it: Good Show. x86_64 for the win; it knocks 20 mins off of a 1 hour 20 min transcode on my laptop.
If you put x86_64 on it: Cow. Just for the extra compatibility with a handful of things, you sacrifice system-wide responsiveness. Especially since you’re using GNOME (Overhead + i686 > [in terms of cowishness] > Overhead + x86_64).
About the dead pixel, that’s a real bummer. I read somewhere that dead pixels in DSs can sometimes go away if they’re left for a few days, inactive. It could be worse: it could be a 3D monitor with a dead voxel. ;)
Nice spinney-roratey though; I’m sure all the various cows at school will be inspired to convert to Linux (en masse, clearly). :P