Hugo Jonker

I’ve looked a bit, but there doesn’t seem to be a stable solution yet. (there’s a bug report, so it might get fixed). My solution:

1. cat /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness when brightness was at desired level for startup
2. in /etc/rc.local, echo this value back to that file.

This is not portable (default is 456 now…), but hey, it works :)

I would prefer to boot in “flight mode” — that is, all wireless devices turned off. I know where and how to turn them on (or at least, I think I do ;-). Plus, I’d prefer to, by default, save battery. (In that respect, I need to find out how to start with the brightness turned down a bit :s).

So far, this seems a hassle – every time I turn on the laptop, I’m greeted with a prompt for a WiFi password. Adding rfkill block all in /etc/rc.local/ (as suggested on various sites) doesn’t work.

Apparently, there are two independent processes that both can switch WiFi on during boot. You read that correctly: there are two processes which are independent, each of which sets the state of WiFi on boot. (to be precise: rfkill restore and networkmanager. They both try to recreate the setting they stored from last time – which can be conflicting.)

This gives a race condition. To address, you can create two scripts in /etc/init/: one to change the saved states of these processes, and one to run before either starts.
Hope this works!

*edit* hmmmmms. After reboot, no WiFi popup…. but also no NetworkManager running. So plugging in Ethernet does not work — I need to start NetworkManager myself.

Probable cause (from stackoverflow):

The ‘start on’ section lets you know which events need to be emitted before upstart will start network-manager.
In this case it’s:
– local-filesystems
– dbus
– static-network-up
Odds are the first two have already been emitted if you have booted to a desktop.

static-network-up is emitted by the /etc/network/if-up.d/upstart script, crucially, the event will not be emitted unless every interface configured as ‘auto’ in /etc/network/interfaces is up.

Trying to fix this by adding service network-manager start to rc.local…

*edit2*: that didn’t help. I’ve played around a bit and reverted to rfkill only. For some reason, the race condition worked out in my favour the last few times – likely because I manually switched off wireless, so both processes stored all wireless states as “off” now…

(I couldn’t find if I had posted this, so here’s the deal)
Getting Ubuntu to run side-by-side on my Z930 was a major hassle – to the point I had to call in assistance (Thanks, Piotr!!).
After that, I had it running, but the brightness keys did not work. Kind of silly – the screen was at full brightness, which is less than ideal for a laptop on battery…

Took a while to fix it. Below is what I can now reconstruct that we’ve done — this includes both the tips from http://www.linlap.com/toshiba_portege_z930 and this workaround. Both are on my laptop – I don’t know if one out of two would suffice…
Below, I’ve reproduced both in case one or the other goes offline.

Tips from LinLap.com

In /etc/default/grub, add acpi_backlight=vendor at the end to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. Next, run update-grub (given all the problems with UEFI and having 3 bootmanagers on the system now, that’s a scary step for me).

After rebooting, this will remove the acpi_video0 from /sys/class/backlight/ leaving you just with intel_backlight and toshiba. Upon resuming with these settings the screen would be completely black with no means of making it brighter. To fix this one needs to create and add the following to /etc/pm/sleep.d/restore_brightness:

#!/bin/bash
case "$1" in
   suspend|hibernate)
      #do nothing
   ;;
   resume|thaw)
      echo 7 > /sys/class/backlight/toshiba/brightness
   ;;
   *)
      exit 1
   ;;
esac
exit 0

chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/restore_brightness

That’s it from LinLap.

Bug workaround

Create the file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/80-backlight.conf as:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel Graphics"
    Driver "intel"
    Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
    Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight" # use your backlight that works here
    BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

That’s the workaround. Both are on my system, and the brightness controls work.

I’ve just upgraded my desktop from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to Ubuntu 13.10. I didn’t think I would – the machine started out on Ubuntu 6.10….

However, I am since almost a week (or should I write “weak”? ;-) the proud owner of a Samsung Galaxy Note III!

…

Frankly, I still don’t know why.
Having said that, I do want to be able to interface with this fancy new piece of equipment. Turns out that that is a pain in Ubuntu 12.04. And it works out of the box in Ubuntus from 13.04 on – but support for Ubuntu 13.04 stops after this month (i.e., in 2 days). Support for 12.10 will continue for another 3 months though (ain’t that weird).

So, up to the newest version! Annoyances:

• No virtual desktops
• All sorts of shopping results in the Dash

Thankfully, there are fixes as well:

• Go to Appearance > Behavior and toggle “Enable virtual desktops”
  Start CompizConfigSettingsManager (ccsm), go to General > General Options > Desktop size and set it to your liking.
  (answers from StackExchange)
• Open the Dash, click Filter Preferences, scroll down to Sources and disable everything except for “Applications”.
  Source of this solution.

With this, you have your trusty old Ubuntu system back under your control (don’t forget to run svn upgrade on your repos, it’s necessary), and it does interface with the Galaxy Note out of the box :)

Edit after upgrading the machine at work: Hmms, that stuff with the lenses took some more effort.
From FixUbuntu.com comes the ultimate script for preventing online connections. I’ve pasted it below. Most salient features:

• gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Lenses remote-content-search none
  This one-line wonder should kill any remote search.
• echo -e "\n127.0.0.1 productsearch.ubuntu.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
  This one-line wonder prevents any connections to ubuntu’s productsearch servers.

With this, you can search from the Dash (press windows key) without any online results popping up. I prefer that – if I want online results, I’ll use the online search, thankyouverymuch.

The full script:

#!/bin/bash
 
# Figure out the version of Ubuntu that you're running
V=`/usr/bin/lsb_release -rs`
 
# The privacy problems started with 12.10, so earlier versions should do nothing
if [ $V \< 12.10 ]; then
   echo "Good news! Your version of Ubuntu doesn't invade your privacy."
 else
   # Turn off "Remote Search", so search terms in Dash don't get sent to the internet
   gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Lenses remote-content-search none
  
   # If you're using earlier than 13.10, uninstall unity-lens-shopping
   if [ $V \< 13.10 ]; then
     sudo apt-get remove -y unity-lens-shopping
  
   # If you're using a later version, disable remote scopes
   else
     gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Lenses disabled-scopes \
       "['more_suggestions-amazon.scope', 'more_suggestions-u1ms.scope',
       'more_suggestions-populartracks.scope', 'music-musicstore.scope',
       'more_suggestions-ebay.scope', 'more_suggestions-ubuntushop.scope',
       'more_suggestions-skimlinks.scope']"
   fi;
  
   # Block connections to Ubuntu's ad server, just in case
   if ! grep -q productsearch.ubuntu.com /etc/hosts; then
     echo -e "\n127.0.0.1 productsearch.ubuntu.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts >/dev/null
  fi
 
  echo "All done. Enjoy your privacy."
fi