Inspiring the touchpad and dealing with the Narwhal...

We all are secretly in love with Ubuntu. For several reasons, including the fact that we have heard it to be open-source (although few of us possess the prowess to make use of this) and that it is open for customization( again, the same fate as the previous reason). How ever, it is still a daunting task when it comes to installing and configuring Ubuntu, or any other Linux system; it still is, the average windows users' nightmare.

One of the best releases of Ubuntu is undoubtedly the Nutty Narwhal release (11.04). Let's face it, it's flashy, it's nice-looking, and it is , well, still not that friendly... One of problems I had (yes, I had more than one, I'll come to that in a separate post. ) is configuring the touchpad. I am using Dell Inspiron N5110 with factory set Windows 7 and it simply doesn't register to Ubuntu as a laptop. (Pun intended). You can't turn it off, you can't type because it doesn't turn itself off automatically when typing. So went about the web to find some stuff for this. Here's what I found.

The Alps touchpad in this type, is not directly supported at the installation. But then there was a DKMS package (Dynamic Kernel Module Support Package) which included the new drivers. Installing it using the Synaptic manager, and restarting the machine, should solve the problem. But there are some interesting points we need to think about here. Please do someone answer me these questions.

My friend, RH641 ( nothing short of an expert user of Linux, among other talents of course) pointed out that Linux does not really 'Shut down' but 'log out'. In this spirit, we tried logging out and logging in to the account to see if the changes are applied. Needless to say, it didn't work, however, restarting the machine did the charm.

Next, I tried installing restricted extras, and this rendered my machine slow as snail, both in linux, and Windows. Now I was under the impression that Linux was less prone to errors like this, but it came to be a wrong assumption.

However, I am sure that replacements most of the buggy hardware drivers, for both the Narwhal and Ocelot releases are there in the form of DKMS packages, and just a small amount of Googling around should put you right across the right ones. This link, however, should provide the relevant dkms package.