[gobolinux-users] Useful things for laptops

[Rohan Nicholls]

Yeah, yeah I'll get back to work.  However I thought before I do that I 
would share a recent experience.

I have started in the last couple of months working for a large (you 
have probably heard of them) company.  So you have to use a supplied 
laptop and on this laptop is windows and you are not allowed to mess 
with this. :-(

So I have vmware running on here for development, but having been forced 
to use windows I have noticed some nice things M$ have managed to get 
(almost) right.  And yes I know that Apple have managed to get it much 
"righter" on their laptops, but they won't give me one of those.

I was thinking that these are things I would like to have just work on a 
linux laptop, or at least be able to get configured REALLY easily (ie. a 
good howto). Here is the list, and I am thinking I will experiment with 
my other laptop to see if I can get this sorted out, and will have 
questions on how this is done.  On linux I tend to use a pretty bleak, 
for some, window manager (ratpoison/stumpwm) so maybe some of this is 
already implemented in KDE, but I don't think so.  Please correct me if 
I am wrong.

* Consistently (mostly) if I close the lid of the laptop it suspends.  I 
think it starts out suspending to ram and then to the hard drive after a 
certain amount of time.  Open the lid, wait a bit, login and continue 
where you left off.  Btw. vmware can suspend the virtual machine 
flawlessly, so this must be possible.

* If I plug things in they become available automatically.  Mostly this 
is various usb devices: usbsticks, mice, keyboards.  I am sure there are 
other things but I cannot think of them at the moment.

* Multiple displays.  The laptop we have (dell latitude d410) has quite 
a small screen, and you plug it into a docking station at which point 
you have access to a 17 inch display.  Yes it is a bit of a pain to have 
to do it all the time, but at least it is accessible: display options, 
set the resolutions for the displays, drag the display icons into the 
placement you want (extend desktop from big screen on left, to laptop 
display on the right), hit apply and everything is handled on the fly. 
There is much room for improvement (remember a variety of settings, 
detect the screen settings on the fly and pick an intelligent default), 
but it is really handy to have and not having to restart the Xserver to 
make it happen (losing all your open apps).  This last one is probably 
mostly my ignorance of X, but having this easily available would be 
really great.

I guess that is it.  Linux is way ahead on virtual desktops, and being 
able to configure your X environment, but these things I have found 
handy and almost automatically handled for you on windows.

I think figuring out a way to have this configure itself or have an easy 
gui to handle it would be one of the biggest wins for linux making 
progress in the laptop/desktop market (along with the cool xgl stuff I 
saw in the demo recently), and I have no idea how difficult it would be 
to figure out.

Thanks for listening. ;-)

Rohan