Mouse like Numberpad

The other day my number pad stopped working. Then I notice it was acting like a mouse and I remembered that I'd used this once before a long time ago. It can be handy if you are setting up a computer or trouble shooting things and don't have a mouse. Usually I prefer the number pad to act like a number pad and not a mouse. Here is how to toggle it back and forth press ctl-alt-numlock.

Firefox Speedup on Linux

Here is a neat little trick that I found at TomBuntu to increase the speed of reads and writes to the cache for Firefox under Linux. There are many other tips relating to SSD drives but I found this one could be used with any system.

"Firefox puts its cache in your home partition. By moving this cache in RAM you can speed up Firefox and reduce disk writes. Complete the previous tweak to mount /tmp in RAM, and you can put the cache there as well.

Open about:config in Firefox. Right click in an open area and create a new string value called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. Set the value to /tmp."

Found at TomBuntu

Ubuntu meets ASUS F3Sa

As I mentioned in my previous entry I'm working on getting Ubuntu installed on my ASUS F3SA-A1 laptop. Initially I had some problems with the discs, I kept getting errors. I finally resolved this by burning the disc with ISORecorder on the laptop under Vista. The install appeared to have smoothly at first, but there were two major problems: the video and audio drivers.

The screen resolution was 1024x786 not the full wide screen resolution. Upon further investigation this was due to the fact that XF86 was using the vesa drive instead of the ATI Radeon driver. After several failed attempts I finally got it working using ENVY a handy little utility that can help you install ATI and NVidia drivers for XF86.

The next issue was getting the sound to work. I'm still working on getting it to work completely but so far I've at least gotten it working via a suggestion from Luke Hollins to set model=lenovo in the alsa-base file which doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it works. I haven't tested the mic yet. The speakers work but not the headphone jack. I'll have had a chance to test the micphone yet.

I've been installing Linux since 1995 and found Ubuntu to be the easiest install so far. It feels a lot more responsive than the previous install of Vista on this computer. I was even able to get a few windows applications installed with Wine. I'll post more about that later.

At this point the todo's are as follows:

• Finger Print reader
  
• WebCam
• Explore the TurboMemory options