[gobolinux-users] Useful things for laptops

[Rohan Nicholls]

Well, just found the HAL HowTo in the knowledge base so that should take 
care of one item... :-D


Rohan Nicholls wrote:
> 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
> 
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